The answer to the question above is “Yes.” Some are evil, some are stupid, some are evil AND stupid, and some fall into the “what” category. There exist people on earth who are just plain evil, who will destroy other people's lives for their own personal gain. That describes the Democratic Party leadership. They are pure evil. However, many of their followers are just stupid. Others of their followers are…what? Let me explain.
Some Democrats are simply evil. As noted, such people do exist and always have. We don’t help the world by denying their existence and trying to find some “good” in them. On the transgender issue, for example, there are three kinds of people in the Democratic Party. There's the Democratic Party leadership, who I am convinced knows that a man cannot be a woman; Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are not stupid. But they support transgenderism; they support the destruction of countless human lives purely for political motives. That is nothing but evil.
Then there are Democrats who are just stupid. I hate using that word; it sounds ugly, but it’s simply the truth. People exist who actually believe a man can become a woman simply by saying he is. Stupid is the only word for that. Now, some Democrats are stupid AND evil. A mother who believes in transgenderism, who actually believes that her child is of the wrong sex and thus gives the child puberty blockers or a gender-change operation, is not just stupid; she's also evil for what she's doing to her child. So, you can be both stupid and evil. Not all stupid people are evil, but some of them are.
The “what” Democrats. There are many, many people in America, both Democrats and Republicans, who are not “political junkies” and who really just don't care one way or another. They don’t especially feel affected by politics, they are busy with their lives, they are apathetic to anything that doesn’t directly involve them—and they are obviously not intelligent enough to recognize indirect influences on their lives. They don't care what somebody else does. It’s totally immaterial to them.
How do we correct this? Evil, stupidity, and apathy have significant effects on society, and the evil of Democratic Party leadership and the stupidity and apathy of so many of the party’s members have almost destroyed the nation. What is to be done here?
Education has to be one of the major concerns because nearly all of what we are is a product of education. What we (think we) know is what we have been taught. We believe what we have been taught. And the current “zeitgeist” of America has, for too long, been directed by Leftist forces (schools and media especially). The belief in “man-made climate change,” for example, is not because the issue has been studied and conclusions drawn based on credible evidence. Most people believe in climate change because they've been told that most people believe in it. And so, they should accept climate change because that's what the zeitgeist of the times says.
The ”what” among Democrats might be the biggest challenge we face. Frankly, most people don't take the time and aren't inclined to do the study necessary to draw proper conclusions based upon solid evidence, thus building their lives on facts and truth. They simply accept the zeitgeist, and that, as noted, has been Leftist in America for too long. So, most of them vote Democrat.
A little more on this. A country’s “zeitgeist”-- the spirit of the time, the general trend of thought, feeling, or tastes characteristic of a particular period—is incredibly influential. People absorb what is around them in schools, media, and friends from a thousand sources. Most people do that, producing the “zeitgeist” of the age—climate change. Too many people either don’t have the time or care enough to do the research necessary to find out the truth. They accept the “zeitgeist.” Hence, the current Democratic Party.
Many of these individuals become the “don't bother me with the facts; my mind is already made up” crowd. My sister is like that. She is a lovely person, as sweet as anyone can be. She knows I write for Townhall, but she never reads any of my articles because her mind is already closed with her leftist beliefs, and she doesn’t want her belief system disturbed by truth. She does little “evil,” but she votes for evil people. And for that, she is very culpable. That describes countless people in the country.
America as a whole, our current “zeitgeist,” has rejected divine guidance for an “every man does that which is right in his own eyes” “live and let live” philosophy. Any nation that follows that path is going in the wrong direction. America's biggest problems are not political, and politics or politicians will not solve them. America's problem is moral, its rejection of divine guidance. And until that is corrected, the country will continue to drift away from the truth and down a path to destruction.
If a person starts with the wrong premise, he’ll always have the wrong conclusions, regardless of how “intelligent” he might be. “The fear of the Lord is the BEGINNING of knowledge.” If people don't start with that premise, they will always end up with the wrong answers. If I'm in Dallas and want to go to Los Angeles, if I head north, I won’t arrive in LA because I'm going in the wrong direction.
Many so-called “intelligent” people do just that. Their IQs may be very high, but they've begun with the wrong premise, and thus, they will forever reach the wrong conclusions.
Call it evil, call it stupid, call it…whatever you want. But we’d better get back on the right path.
After
three nooses were found in a bush in Evanston, Illinois, two children
were vilified as racist. A family was driven out of their home. Now,
over two years later, the parents reveal the truth.
(Photo by Lyndon French for The Free Press, illustration by The Free Press)
There
are some years people would like wiped from history—and who can blame
them? Who can blame the newly sober for pretending now that the excesses
of progressive reign from 2018 to 2024 never happened? Who can blame
them for thinking those who were canceled, even wrongly canceled, still
probably deserved it a little bit? It’s important to just move on and
forget, to stop nitpicking. It was mostly right. Because if an entire
wealthy, elite college town became convinced, let’s say, that white
middle schoolers hung nooses to intimidate black teachers and students,
if those children were smeared by the leaders of the school and the
community, if protests were organized, and if a family had to leave
town, there must have been at least a kernel of truth. It’s too
destabilizing if it was entirely a lie. It’s too threatening.
In
the proper telling of those years of progressive rage, there were no
real victims at all. But of course there were victims. Here for the
first time, parents of a boy from Evanston, Illinois, who were caught in
a national maelstrom speak to Frannie Block about what happened when a
conspiracy against their son became too big to fail. —Nellie Bowles
“Every Friday the 13th, I’m reminded of it.”
Mike
Klotz is not a superstitious man. But he acknowledges that the event
that turned his life upside down happened on the unluckiest day of the
year.
It
was May 2022, a cool and overcast spring morning in Evanston, Illinois.
Klotz can’t recall his 12-year-old son leaving the house—it was just a
normal day—but he said the sixth grader would have walked, as usual, to
Haven Middle School, accompanied by his 13-year-old brother.
According
to staff members who were in the building that day, the atmosphere at
Haven was tense—a group of students was staging a protest about the
transfer of a few popular teachers.
But things were often tense at Haven, a school notorious for its violence, and where nearly 30 percent
of students are considered low income. One teacher who worked there at
the time—but has since left—told me that he “didn’t feel safe in the
building.” He constantly feared “verbal and physical assault,” and “knew
if something had happened to me, I wouldn’t be protected by the
district.”
“We wouldn’t walk the hallways in between class periods because it was unsafe,” he told me. “That’s how bad it was.”
Klotz
himself had spent two and a half years working as a special education
teacher at Haven, but he said he resigned in early January 2022 because
he no longer felt safe as a teacher there. But his own kids had to keep
attending this school, he said, “because we really didn’t have much of a
choice.” It’s not like they could have afforded private school, if
they’d even wanted to send their kids somewhere else. “We are a
household of public servants and moved to Evanston for the schools,” he
told me.
Then
came that Friday the 13th. By lunchtime, what had begun as a peaceful
protest devolved into what one teacher described to me as “an absolute
mob scene.” Inside the school, seventh and eighth graders were running
through the hallways, slamming locker doors shut, and chanting “Fuck
Latting,” referring to Haven’s principal, Christopher Latting. Someone
called the police.
Klotz’s son wasn’t involved in any of this. He was outside, in the schoolyard, with the rest of the sixth grade.
“He
went and checked in on his friend. That’s all he’s guilty of,” said
Mike Klotz, the father of the 12-year-old boy who was placed on
administrative absence. (Lyndon French for The Free Press)
But
what happened in the schoolyard over the next several minutes would
disrupt his family, subject them to a witch hunt, and ultimately force
them to move out of town, Klotz told me.
Here’s how he tells the story:
First,
a sixth grader—an 11-year-old friend of Klotz’s son—pulled three jump
ropes out of a recess bin and started tying them in knots.
He
started fashioning them into nooses. He made three. Another child saw
that he seemed upset, so he ran up to Klotz’s son and asked him to come
speak to his friend. Klotz’s son crossed the yard to ask the boy what he
was doing—and checked if he was okay.
The
two friends spoke a little. Then the child who made the nooses hung
them on a small, shrub-like tree, and the two boys ran off to another
part of the yard, leaving the ropes hanging a few feet off the ground.
It wasn’t long until a parent caught sight of them—and immediately
alerted the police.
Three
hours later, at 5:08 p.m., every family with a child in Evanston/Skokie
School District 65—which contains 18 schools—got an email from
then-superintendent Devon Horton, a well-known pioneer of “antiracist” education. The subject line read: “Haven Student Sit-in & Hate Crime.”
In
the email, Horton stated that parents had “reported finding three
nooses hanging from trees” on the grounds of Haven, and wrote:
“This
is a hate crime and a deliberate and specific incidence of an outwardly
racist act. It resounds with a tone of hate and hurt that will impact
members of our entire community, namely Black and African American
students, staff, and families who have experienced generations of harm.”
Horton
also wrote that “institutionalized racism has been used in the past to
intimidate and discourage minority leaders.” Horton didn’t reference
specific minority leaders, but both he and Principal Latting are black.
Both men declined to respond to multiple requests for comment on this
story. In an email to The Free Press, Latting
wrote: “That time was profoundly traumatic for me, the students, staff,
and the entire Haven community. As such, I am not in a place to revisit
or discuss those experiences, even informally.”
A representative from District 65 told The Free Press via
email that “Our belief is that the initial statement was intended to
explicitly name the deeply rooted harm of overt, racist symbolism and to
ensure that it was crystal clear that hate, in any form, will not be
tolerated in our school district.”
When
Klotz read the email that Friday evening, his 12-year-old son was on
his way to scout camp for the night. He had no idea his boy had
witnessed the alleged hate crime, but he remembers thinking the email
had jumped to conclusions in a way that seemed “reckless.” In Illinois, a
hate crime is a felony, with a minimum of one year in prison.
His wife, Melissa Klotz, told me her first thought when she read the email was: “What actually
happened? Because, when anything happened at that school or in that
district, you would always only get a partial story that may not be
true.”
The next morning Mike Klotz got a call. It was the father of his son’s friend—the one who’d tied the nooses, and he said: My son was involved, and so was yours. (The Free Press
is withholding the names of both boys to protect their privacy. The
family of the other boy declined to participate in this story.)
After
his son got home from camp that Sunday, Klotz asked him what had
happened. The 12-year-old said he had asked if his friend was okay, and
watched him hang the ropes in a tree. “I did not take his word for it,”
Klotz told me. “I asked around. Two or three other people”—teachers,
parents—“told me the exact same story.”
The Klotzes had been ready to accept that their son had done something
wrong. But after learning the full story from others on Sunday, he felt
the opposite. “I was damn proud of him,” Klotz told me. “He went and
checked in on his friend. That’s all he’s guilty of. We should all be so
lucky to have a friend like that.”
Even
so, over the weekend, Klotz also started seeing other Haven parents on
Facebook speculating about the “hate crime”—and the identities of the
children who’d committed it. Although Klotz didn’t see his child’s name
mentioned, he was worried enough to keep both of his sons home from
school on Monday.
That
evening, Haven parents got another email, this time from Principal
Latting, who wrote that in response to “the hate crime,” the school
would be bringing in “equity consultants” to “help the Haven community
process and share their truth about the events that occurred on Friday,”
and to enable “productive and necessary conversations around racial
equity.”
One
educator told me that the following week in class, teachers were
instructed to give children time to discuss their feelings. During one
session, the teacher said she asked her sixth-grade class if they knew
what nooses symbolize. “Only two of the students had any knowledge of
the fact that nooses had any kind of racialized meaning,” she said.
“Every single other student thought that a noose symbolized and
represented suicide.”
Devon Horton is the former superintendent of Evanston/Skokie School District 65. (Photo by Prince Williams/WireImage)
Klotz
told me it’s not until eighth grade that Haven teaches kids about
nooses being a symbol of America’s racist past. “And how do I know that,
you’re wondering?” he asked me. “I taught the class.”
On
Thursday night, Klotz received another email from the principal. This
one was addressed only to him. Latting informed Klotz that his
12-year-old was being placed on “administrative absence”—effective
immediately—because he had been “present during the incident which
occurred last Friday, May 13.”
I asked the Klotzes if they were concerned, at that moment, that their son may have been complicit in a hate crime.
“I
know my son,” said Melissa. “I know that he is not a perfect angel, and
every kid can make mistakes. But I also know how he’s grown up, and the
friends he’s had over time, and the neighborhood that we lived in—and
my kid doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. There’s no way that could
have been what happened.”
Mike
Klotz said his initial reaction to the email was “anger”—which came
from “a place of helplessness, that we couldn’t seem to improve the
situation at all.” He was speaking regularly to the family of the boy
who’d tied the ropes, and learned that he had also been put on
administrative absence from school. All the two families could do was
wait for police to complete their investigation.
It took six weeks. In the meantime, both kids missed the rest of sixth grade.
During
this time, the Klotz family said they were terrified that their son’s
involvement in the case would become public knowledge. Melissa described
how she felt at the time about the actions the school could take:
“They’re going to send our name to the entire community and try to
present that narrative that we are these awful racist people.”
At
the time, she was a town planner with over a decade of experience
working for the local authority in Evanston, but her career suddenly
felt fragile. “Am I going to lose my job? Am I going to get attacked? Are my kids going to get attacked?” she wondered. “It made us feel so unsafe.”
This
article is the first time the Klotzes have been publicly identified as
the parents of one of the two children involved in the incident.
Speaking exclusively to The Free Press, the couple
said they thought long and hard about whether they wanted to waive
their anonymity. They said they are doing so because they believe the
school falsely presented their son as racist—and never corrected that
narrative when evidence showed it wasn’t true. Even after police
concluded that no hate crime occurred, they said the school never
apologized.
While
a misunderstanding over a noose at a middle school back in 2022 may
seem like a small matter, the incident mushroomed into something much
larger: a symbol of the ideologically fueled hysteria that swept America
in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, with adults publicly
condemning two children, on social media and in school board meetings,
of being “future Klan leaders” with “murderous values,” who were guilty
of “an act of racial terrorizing.”
Mike Klotz told me the town’s reaction to the event was so extreme, “We had to fucking move because of it.”
The police completed their investigation on June 22, after the school year had finished, according to a police statement
that same day. The “nooses,” police concluded in their report, weren’t a
symbol of racial hatred, but were likely “a cry for help.”
The final, 33-page police report detailing the authorities’ investigation —which Klotz showed to The Free Press
after it was made available via a Freedom of Information Act
request—states that the boy responsible for putting the ropes in the
trees “has some very serious mental health issues and has tied knots
previously as a soothing technique.”
According
to the report, police spoke to a Haven student who said she watched a
boy “place the rope over a tree, and put the noose around his neck for
approximately 1 to 2 minutes.” She said the boy had a “look on his face”
that was “serious,” and he “appeared as though he did not want to be
there.” She told police other students there were worried he might “harm
himself,” but added: “The tree the rope was placed over was not big
enough to hold his weight.”
Two
days after the incident, the father of the 11-year-old accused hate
criminal told a Haven staffer that “his son was in the midst of a mental
health crisis when this incident occurred,” according to the report.
Three
hours after the Evanston Police Department issued its public statement
on June 22, Superintendent Horton sent an email to every parent in the
district acknowledging that law enforcement did not consider the noose
incident a hate crime. And yet, he wrote, the school district would
continue to investigate and, if necessary, punish the students involved.
“The
actions and motive of the involved juvenile did not meet the legal,
statutory elements of a hate crime,” Horton admitted in the email. But,
he wrote, “The district will move forward with its own internal
investigation to determine the appropriate level of interventions, both
disciplinary and restorative.”
He
added: “We fully recognize the harm of these actions on our community,
especially for our Black students, staff, families, and residents.”
Horton wasn’t the only person in Evanston who seemed to reject the police’s findings.
A
member of the “District 65 Parents & Guardians” Facebook group
demanded that the family involved “be outed so the citizens of this town
know who the terrorists are.”
Another
insisted that community members “call them out on their white privilege
and racist behavior.” Someone said the parents of the young suspect
ought to be sued.
One of the many posts about the noose incident that appeared on the Facebook page “District 65 Parents & Guardians.”
When
I reached Commander Ryan Glew, the public information officer of the
Evanston Police Department, over the phone, he reiterated the findings
of the report. And when I asked why the incident is still widely assumed
to be a hate crime, he said: “People are going to act off the
information they’ve been given.” But it’s the job of the police
department, he added, to ask: “What are the facts? What’s the entire
incident?”
Even
after police concluded no hate crime had been committed, the office of
Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx went on to punish the troubled sixth
grader who tied the knots in the schoolyard, charging him
with disorderly conduct. In Illinois, Glew said, “disorderly conduct”
is defined as “acting in a way that disturbs others.” In the case of the
incident at Haven, he explained, “individuals that had witnessed this,
or were aware of it, felt alarmed and threatened.”
Glew
told me the child who tied the nooses was referred to juvenile court,
which ultimately concluded the incident would not be “treated as a
criminal matter.”
Meanwhile,
the Klotzes realized that in Evanston, the narrative was set in stone.
Mike Klotz said an apology is “the only thing I really even want.” But
one teacher, who has worked in the district for 15 years, told me that
in order for that to happen, “Somebody would have to acknowledge they
were wrong.”
A
spokesperson from the district did not answer a question about whether
the students should be given an apology for what happened, although she
acknowledged that “This incident caused significant and longstanding
harm to the individuals directly and indirectly involved, to the overall
school community, and to residents across Evanston/Skokie.”
“Since
this incident,” the spokesperson added, “our district has reflected on
our crisis response efforts in various situations to enhance and improve
upon them. This includes increased and proactive coordination and
communication with our local first responders, including the Evanston
Police Department.”
Evanston
lies on the shore of Lake Michigan, about 12 miles north of downtown
Chicago. Home to Northwestern University, the leafy college town is
known for its cute coffee shops and well-kept homes, occupied by
professors and professionals. With an average house price of $475,000, even “median-income” families are priced out of living here.
But
Evanston is cut in half by a railroad track that runs along the lake’s
western edge—from Chicago to Milwaukee and beyond. And on the west side
of the track, you can find reminders of the city’s uncomfortable
history. Haven Middle School sits right in the middle of this divide, an
institution for both the city’s wealthy and poor.
For
much of the 20th century, until the 1960s, most realtors in Evanston
practiced “racial zoning,” refusing to rent or sell homes in the more
prosperous parts of the city to non-white buyers. The black community
was effectively confined to the insalubrious 5th Ward—an industrial
district that is home to the city dump.
Despite—or
perhaps because of—Evanston’s racist past, the city has swung to the
opposite extreme in the last decade or so, implementing some of the most
progressive racial policies in the nation. In 2021, for example, the
city became the first in the country to pass a reparations law,
offering housing grants to black families to make up for the
discriminatory practices of the past. Locals argue that the law doesn’t
go far enough, and that the money should instead “go directly in the
hands of” black residents.
“We
got a bunch of violence going on at this school, and now all of a
sudden this happened, and nobody talked anything about any of those
things ever again. It was hate crime, hate crime, hate crime, hate
crime.” —Mike Klotz
But
these attempts to right historic wrongs have done little to redress
problems that ordinary Evanstonians face, one teacher at Haven Middle
School told me. “Everybody’s so focused on race,” she said, “instead of
figuring out how to work with people to improve what’s going on.”
According
to Klotz, after Superintendent Horton sent out the first email about
the hate crime, parents immediately forgot that the school had been the
scene of a riot earlier that day, as students protested the transfer of
teachers, leading to chaos in the halls and students leaving the
building without permission. “We got a bunch of violence going on at
this school, and now all of a sudden this happened, and nobody talked
anything about any of those things ever again,” he said. “It was hate
crime, hate crime, hate crime, hate crime.”
One
former Haven teacher who has worked in the district for over a decade
agreed with that. “It is a better story,” she said, “the idea that the
community still has so much growing to do, and there’s still so much
racism.”
Indeed,
a few days after the “hate crime” incident, the Chicago-based advocacy
group Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change invited locals to gather
outside the school “to show children they are not alone.” A flyer for
the protest was posted to the “District 65 Parents & Guardians”
Facebook group.
About a dozen protesters showed up
at Haven on May 23, 10 days after the incident, and stood directly
outside the entrance as students walked into the building to start the
school day, chanting into a megaphone. “We stand here today to say we want an immediate investigation, and we want to know the transparency of that investigation,” said Tyrone Muhammad,
the group’s executive director. After a couple of days of this,
Principal Latting sent an email to all parents at Haven, telling them
the school would “support the rights” of the group who were “peacefully
protesting following the hateful and racist hanging of three nooses on
school property on May 13.”
Haven Middle School in Evanston, Illinois. (Lyndon French for The Free Press)
On
May 23, 2022, while police were still conducting their investigation,
the Evanston school board held a regular public meeting where community
members and activists piled in to demand “accountability.” The entire
four-hour-long meeting was recorded.
In
the video, it’s hard to see how large the audience is, but a steady
stream of people flowed into the room for about half an hour—including
at least eight members of Ex-Cons for Community and Social
Change—wearing matching all-black pants, boots, and crewneck
sweatshirts.
Almost
everyone visible in the video—the entire board and members of the
community—is wearing masks, occasionally taking them off to speak. After
a land acknowledgment and a few agenda items, the conversation soon
turns to the supposed hate crime.
Horton
is the first to speak. He says, “I sit here with armed security 24
hours a day because of our efforts to fight—” he then pauses, looking
down at his notes, before continuing with a slight quiver in his voice:
“That’s not healthy for anyone.” He then calls the reactions to the
noose incident, and to his work on “equity,” as “outright racist,” as
the crowd erupts in applause and collective cheers.
Five
board members then give talks, each one drawing the same conclusion.
One board member, Soo La Kim—who is also the assistant dean of graduate
programs at Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies—says the
students involved in the noose incident “translated the subtext of
anti-black adult discourse into the text of profanity-laced chants and
an act of racial terrorizing.”
“By
the way,” Kim continues, “the suggestion circulating that perhaps these
were not in fact nooses representing lynching but lassos or something
else is offensive on multiple levels. That kind of denial—in the face of
facts, context, and history—is gaslighting of the worst kind.”
Another
member, Elisabeth Lindsay-Ryan, who also works as a professional
diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, says: “I’m hoping that
since our children have chosen to use nooses—a symbol of white
terrorism, white supremacy, and murder—in their advocacy, that at least
some of you will finally listen and reflect on the ways you are
participating in this pattern.”
Afterward, board member Anya Tanyavutti chimes in, saying the district’s students are being taught “murderous values.”
Board member Marquise Weatherspoon then says she always intended to use her school board seat “to speak on what is the obvious.”
“And
the obvious is . . . this community is racist; it’s harmful; and it is
hurtful to all of us. And our children are not safe here.”
None of the board members cited in this piece returned emails from The Free Press seeking comment.
As
the school board meeting raged, Klotz stayed at home. That same year,
he had planned to run for a seat on the board, but after he saw the
district’s response to the nooses, he concluded, “It’s too fucked up
here. One person cannot make a difference.”
Even
now, he said he can’t bring himself to watch the recording of the
meeting, especially as he saw how the outrage spread into the community.
On June 10, Klotz saw a post in the District 65 Parents & Guardians
Facebook group: “VVhite Evanston you are raising something worse than
future Kl@n leaders.”
This schoolyard bush, currently without leaves, is where a boy placed three nooses. (Lyndon French for The Free Press)
After the police report came out
on June 22, 2022, another wrote: “We know who you are. No, really we
know who you are. . . . You’re a bigot that’s raising terrorists,
terrorists that are skilled at tying nooses for stealing the lives of
Black people in a long gruesome, hands on murder.”
The
Klotzes were terrified the community would come after them. “In a
socially progressive town such as Evanston, to be accused of something
like that is like a death sentence, a social death sentence,” said Mike.
Though
the Klotzes have never been publicly connected to the “hate crime,”
local parents noticed that their son had stopped attending school.
Melissa told me that people at work figured out her son had been
involved in the incident. “It ruined my reputation in the city,” she
said. “I had relationships in the city that just completely went down
the drain because of it.”
Melissa
told me she sees herself as an “extremely liberal person” who wants to
live where she works, and “be a part of the community, and be useful and
helpful to that community.” She told me she and her husband had dreamed
of moving to Evanston because it “is a beautiful place and a very
diverse place, and it literally just checks all of those boxes.”
But after experiencing so much online rancor, they put their dream home up for sale in the summer of 2022.
Months
later, the Klotz family moved to Lincolnwood, Illinois, about six miles
down the road from Evanston. It was close enough that Melissa could
still commute to her job in the town, but far enough that their kids
could go to a new school district.
Just
before Thanksgiving, I visited the Klotzes at their Lincolnwood home,
where they’ve now lived for two and a half years. Approaching the front
door, I was greeted by a Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobblehead proudly
displayed on the stoop. Klotz—tall and bald with a long, shaggy beard
and sleeves of colorful tattoos—told me he has always considered himself
a “hardcore liberal.” But even he believes that progressive politics in
his old town “have gone completely cuckoo.”
“I’ve lost faith in everything. Now I just assume all people are bad people, unless they can prove otherwise.” —Melissa Klotz
Last
fall, Melissa quit her job as an Evanston town planner, but she said
she still experiences severe paranoia every time she goes back to
Evanston for work as a consultant. Whenever she interacts with people in
the city, she asks herself: Do I tell this whole story to
this person, and are they going to believe me? Or are they going to
think I’m a horrible, racist person?
Melissa
told me that what happened to her son completely changed her
perspective on life. She said she’s now cynical about politics, and
she’ll never vote again.
“I’ve lost faith in everything,” she said. “Now I just assume all people are bad people, unless they can prove otherwise.”
False
alarms over hate crimes seem to have become increasingly common in
American life. There was the time, in August 2017, when a group of black
sorority sisters at the University of Mississippi discovered a banana peel in a tree and saw it as racist “symbolism,” which led to the cancellation of a campus event—even though it latertranspired the peel had been discarded by a student who said he couldn’t find a trash can.
Then, last summer, in a case
that has eerie parallels to the controversy in Evanston, a mentally
unwell teen at a Missouri high school hung a noose in a school bathroom,
which the community immediately assumed was a hate crime. But school
officials later said the kid who hung the noose “was in a crisis” and
that the crime was not “a racially motivated incident.”
Immigration law was never meant to run through federal district courts—and that’s no accident. Congress explicitly stripped district courts of jurisdiction over immigration cases because, quite frankly, federal judges have no business making ad hoc immigration policy from the bench. Yet, time and again, activist attorneys have tried to drag immigration disputes into district court, knowing full well it’s a legal avenue Congress closed for a reason.
As Mahmoud Khalil’s case winds its way through the courts, it’s time to confront why Congress shut district courts out of immigration law—and why their recent defiance marks a troubling breach of that boundary.
Congress Shut the Door—Activists Keep Picking the Lock
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), Congress established that immigration cases are to be handled through the administrative process—first before an immigration judge, then before the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), and finally in the federal circuit courts. District courts? Nowhere in that hierarchy.
Why? Because allowing district judges—who may have no expertise in immigration law—to rule on deportation cases creates a fractured, inconsistent, and politicized mess. Congress recognized this and enacted sweeping reforms, most notably the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, which explicitly removed district court jurisdiction over deportation orders. The entire purpose of these reforms was to stop what we are seeing today: activist attorneys venue-shopping for a friendly district judge who will override federal immigration enforcement.
And yet, here we are.
Habeas Corpus: A Procedural Battering Ram Against Immigration Law
One of the primary tools activist lawyers use to circumvent jurisdictional limits is the writ of habeas corpus. In theory, habeas is a safeguard against unlawful detention by the state. In practice, in the immigration context, it’s been weaponized to stall—and even thwart—lawful deportations by dragging cases into district court, where sympathetic judges often rule far beyond their statutory authority.
Traditionally, habeas corpus was reserved for extreme cases: when someone is held without charges, detained beyond the expiration of a lawful sentence, or imprisoned by a court that lacked jurisdiction in the first place. It’s a shield against tyrannical imprisonment—not a sandbox for relitigating lawful deportation orders. Yet, in today’s immigration context, habeas actions are being stretched far beyond that historic purpose. Simply disagreeing with the executive branch’s enforcement priorities—or facing removal after due process—is enough to trigger a habeas claim and grind the system to a halt.
This is precisely what happened in Mahmoud Khalil's case. His attorneys filed for habeas relief not because of unlawful detention but because it gave them an opening to get a district judge to intervene in a case outside that court’s jurisdiction. It’s a legal shell game: keep moving the pieces until they land before the right judge.
And it’s far from an isolated case. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently detained Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen and doctoral student at Georgetown University, for allegedly spreading Hamas propaganda online. Despite the national security implications, Suri’s attorneys ran the same habeas playbook—filing in district court to halt removal proceedings.
And it worked. Judge Patricia Giles issued an order barring ICE from deporting Suri, stating he “shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court issues a contrary order.”
More telling still was how Georgetown University chose to respond. A university spokesman told the BBC that Suri had been granted a visa “to continue his doctoral research on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan” and that the school was “not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity.”
It was the Sgt. Schultz defense—“I know nothing!”—from one of America’s top universities, willfully blind as a foreign national allegedly spread terrorist propaganda on their watch.
The Suri case illustrates how thoroughly district courts have been co-opted into the activist legal network’s strategy. They are no longer passive arbiters of law—they are now active participants in obstructing immigration enforcement through procedural end-runs around Congress’s jurisdictional framework.
And Congress anticipated this maneuver. Under the REAL ID Act of 2005, Congress explicitly barred district courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions in immigration cases. The statute states:
A petition for review filed with an appropriate court of appeals... shall be the sole and exclusive means for judicial review of an order of removal.
And further:
Judicial review of all questions of law and fact... including interpretation and application of constitutional and statutory provisions... shall be available only in judicial review of a final order... and shall be governed only by [8 U.S.C. § 1252].
Activist attorneys often argue that constitutional claims—such as alleged due process violations—should carve out an exception, allowing them to bypass the REAL ID Act and head straight to district court. But that’s a misread of the law. The statute is explicit: judicial review of “all questions of law or fact, including interpretation and application of constitutional... provisions” must go through the federal courts of appeals—not district courts.
The Supreme Court affirmed this in DHS v. Thuraissigiam (2020), holding that the REAL ID Act constitutionally channels all review of removal orders—including constitutional claims—into the appellate courts, not district courts. Constitutional claims are not a free pass to override immigration law—they’re part of the same streamlined judicial process Congress put in place.
These provisions were designed to prevent jurisdictional gamesmanship and ensure that deportation cases are handled consistently at the appellate level—not through scattered rulings by district judges with no immigration mandate.
The Danger of Letting District Judges Hijack Immigration Policy
This is a high-stakes power struggle over who controls immigration policy: Congress and the Executive Branch, or unelected district judges willing to override both.
There’s a reason immigration law isn’t entrusted to the whims of politically inclined district judges. If every deportation case could be hauled into district court, enforcement would grind to a halt. Congress deliberately vested immigration authority in Article II administrative officers, with a judicial review process that bypasses Article III district courts entirely.
Short-circuiting that framework is far more insidious than simple judicial overreach—it undermines democratic principles and dismantles the carefully structured system Congress created. The result? A patchwork of rulings from individual judges injecting personal ideology into national policy—well outside their constitutional role. And in many cases, those judges were appointed by political opponents of the very president charged with enforcing immigration law.
We’ve already seen the chaos this creates. Judges issue last-minute stays on deportations, override executive branch determinations, and, in some cases, outright block entire categories of enforcement actions. The Khalil and Suri cases are just the latest examples of activist lawfare aimed at undermining immigration law, not enforcing it.
Time for the Supreme Court to Body-Check the Lower Courts
The abuse of jurisdiction in immigration cases is a direct attack on Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate immigration—and a broader assault on the president’s ability to execute the law. Congress deliberately removed district courts from this process for a reason, and their creeping re-entry through habeas petitions threatens to undo decades of legal precedent and constitutional balance.
The Supreme Court must intervene decisively. It’s time for an extreme body check on rogue actions by certain district court judges who have taken it upon themselves to rewrite immigration policy from the bench. Congress built a streamlined process for immigration review through the appellate courts—not a revolving door for ideological litigation in district court.
If the Supreme Court fails to act and rein in the lower courts, the president will lose the ability to enforce the law, and Congress will effectively surrender its legislative authority. Immigration policy will no longer be governed by statute or national interest but—using a term fashionable in today’s lexicon—by oligarchs in black robes.
The judiciary must stay in its lane, or it will drive the rule of law off a cliff.
And with all due respect to the Chief Justice, the gravest threat to the judiciary’s legitimacy isn’t external pressure—it’s coming from inside the chambers of certain federal district courts.
