The week that Mahmoud Khalil became a political prisoner of the Trump regime, I was teaching Shakespeare’s King Lear. On Saturday, March 8, as his wife watched, anonymous federal agents  abducted Khalil from the lobby of his apartment building. For 36 hours, not even his lawyer could locate him.

On Monday, March 10, I shoved my battered copy of Stephen Orgel’s edition of Lear into my pocket and took the subway one stop north from my office at 116th St. to our newer Manhattanville campus. The Columbia and Barnard chapters of the American Association of University Professors had organized a press conference to condemn the Trump White House’s detention of Khalil and their announcement, just the day before, that $400 million in federal grants to Columbia would be cut.

The thing about teaching a first-year literature seminar, like I do in Columbia’s Core Curriculum, is that it habituates you to a mode of reading that always looks to find purchase on the world around you and your students: Whatever book you are reading in a given week becomes the lens for everything you experience, and whatever you are experiencing cracks open a new facet of the book. As I stood with dozens of colleagues behind the professors, community members, and rabbis who took turns condemning Khalil’s detention and the assault on universities in the cynical name of Jewish safety, new facets of Lear swam into view.

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By now, everyone has heard Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, struggle on NPR to name something specific that Khalil is accused of. What may be less clear to outsiders is how thoroughly the groundwork for the attempted deportation of Khalil has been laid over the last year by anti-Palestinian and anti-protest activists who have, on social media and in private group chats, perfected the art of doxing and denouncing anyone they deem associated with protest. Such actors have taken credit for Khalil’s detention and, in the days since, issued new lists of noncitizen Columbians they want Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deport.

Standing beside my colleagues, the obscenity of this detention and the political gambit around it swirling in my mind, I thought of an element of Lear I had discussed with colleagues days before: the play’s secondary plot that follows not the aging Lear, betrayed by ungrateful and conniving daughters, but the Earl of Gloucester and his two sons, Edgar and Edmund. The structure of this plot is biblical: There is Edgar, the good son, and Edmund, born out of wedlock and secretly wicked, who plots to claim his brother’s inheritance by turning their father against him. Somehow, Edmund turns a loving father against a loving son; with only a forged letter and a staged confrontation, he convinces Edgar to flee, then uses his flight as proof that he had been plotting against Gloucester.

When we read Lear, I ask my students to think about what it would take to get them to believe the worst about someone. Is it easier if they look different from you? If they are from a certain background? If you already know—or think—you disagree with them or don’t like them for other reasons? Watching people around the country believe the worst and most baseless claims about my friend Khalil, I thought over and over of Shakespeare’s interest in this question. And I thought of all the work that anti-Palestinian culture in this country has invested, for decades, in preparing people of all kinds, but especially my fellow Jews, to believe the worst of any Palestinian or Arab.

Lear, too, is deceived about his children. Apparently a doddering old king, Lear is an attractive figure to pin allegories on. In years past, classes were quick to identify him with Trump, an aging autocrat presiding over the machinations of his villainous children. What I saw more clearly this year is the way Lear is less a villain than a fool (as his own Fool tries to remind him). Thinking only of his legacy and satisfaction in retirement, he stages a ritual in which his daughters are to profess their love for him and be rewarded with part of the kingdom as a dowry. This time around, for me, Lear was Joe Biden and his people in the 2024 election, putting the legacy over any kind of political message or values that might have connected with the electorate. Sometimes all that’s needed for cynicism and tyranny to take hold is for those in power to choose not to see the threat.

But where the cruel daughters Goneril and Regan misrepresent themselves, it is Edmund’s slander of his brother that stays with me. Few of us who share commitments for Palestinian liberation have a taste for playing the “perfect victim” game. People who espouse violence, firebrands, and rabble-rousers—well, they have rights too. But it is simply true that Khalil is known on campus as a man of peace, a mediator, and a spokesman, someone who has preached an inclusive vision of liberation and social change. Khalil was targeted precisely because of the work he does and the way he represents the student movement. His presence exposes the lies of the anti-Palestinian and anti-protest movement that has fueled Trump’s all-out war on universities.

Khalil is also an easy target because he has always had the courage to do his advocacy work unmasked and unafraid for his name to be known. In a climate where any advocate for Palestine or the rights of protesters whose name becomes known can expect to be targeted and attacked (I speak from firsthand experience), Khalil took on the role of speaking to not just the university administration but the world.

On April 24, a CNN crew visiting campus connected Khalil in real time to Wolf Blitzer in the studio. “What do you say to Jewish students who feel unsafe on campus?” asked Blitzer, repeating the only question anyone in the mainstream media wanted to ask of the encampment. Here is how CNN reported his response:

“I would say that the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians and the Jewish people are intertwined. They go hand in hand. Anti-Semitism and any form of racism has no place on campus and in this movement,” Khalil said, noting that some members of Columbia’s encampment are Jewish and held Passover seders earlier this week, led by Jewish Voices for Peace.

“They are an integral part of this movement,” Khalil said of the organization.

Any journalist who has repeated charges about Khalil’s activities or his commitments without checking this public record is less interested in facts than they are in scandal. Every elected official who, like New York Senator Chuck Schumer, issues a statement defending the constitutional right to abhorrent speech has only affirmed the lie that there is anything in Khalil’s word or deeds to abhor, and only enables this campaign of slander against him. Exactly which of the above sentiments do you abhor, senator?

I take the attack on Khalil personally not only for its indecency but because I have stood beside him—literally. A recent story in our campus newspaper about Khalil’s detention is illustrated by a photograph of the two of us addressing press in April of last year, after police officers had removed peaceful protesters from an enclosed lawn on campus.

Speaking on the courthouse steps two weeks ago after the first hearing in Khalil’s case, I struggled to contain my anger. For someone who was a senior in high school on September 11, 2001, whose adult life was shaped by a political regime of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, I find it existentially exhausting to see that same playbook trotted out once more. But more than that, the anti-Palestinian racism on which this smear campaign thrives offends my Jewish commitments. The basic logic of those attacking Khalil, and those indulging or repeating those attacks, is that every Palestinian must harbor some inherent anti-Jewish sentiment—that regardless of their words or deeds, to be Palestinian is somehow to be ontologically anti-Jewish.

This fallacy trades in some of the same false equivalences of pro-Israel ideology that have dogged us for a year and a half (and longer)—that calling for Palestinian liberation is calling for the destruction of Israel or the deaths of Jews, or that naming Palestine or Palestinians, or simply existing in public while Palestinian, is somehow antisemitic. Biden and Kamala Harris could barely muster the word “Palestinian,” unsurprising in a political climate where those who publicly acknowledge the existence of Palestinians or draw attention to their plight can expect to be accused of antisemitism (Donald Trump, by contrast, used it as a slur against Chuck Schumer, in the course of asserting his own right to determine who is and is not authentically Jewish.)

Of course, another great lie of this persecution campaign is that of violence. Anti-protest voices claim that campus protests were themselves violent. (By far the worst violence around an encampment was the West Bank–style assault on UCLA’s orderly encampment by pro-Israel extremists, against whom activists there filed suit this past week.) Anti-Palestinian activists sometimes claim every protest calling for Palestinian liberation is calling for violence, revealing only a myopic belief in ethnic cleansing as the only path to safety or liberation. Worst of all is another dusty old post-9/11 trope: the hand-waving charge of “material support for terrorism” against any disapproved speech—a claim I am sure few leveling it believe, but which seems to offer them the promise of brutal retribution if they can make loudly enough or to the right audience.

One of the problems with bullshit, as the philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined it, is that because the people who deal in bullshit definitionally don’t care whether it’s true, it becomes difficult or impossible to contest it on the basis of facts. Did Khalil lead violent protests, commit violence, or advocate violence? Assuredly not, but it’s almost pointless to argue this given that the people making the claim are less interested in making true assertions than in what kind of outcome they can secure with the assertions they make.

Almost immediately after Lear hands his kingdom to his ungrateful daughters, they conspire to deprive him of his remaining privilege, including the retinue of knights he brings when he stays in their castles. The first step is for Goneril to spin a fantasy that Lear and his knights pose some kind of violent threat of revolution: “He may enguard his dotage with their pow’rs / And hold our lives in mercy,” she insists, without evidence (translation: “he might threaten us”); “Well, you may fear too far,” responds her husband, Albany, weakly. Regan, a few scenes later, amplifies the charge of violence, declaring that if Goneril restricted Lear’s entourage, she must have had some real fear for her safety: “If, sir, perchance / She have restrained the riots of your followers, / ’Tis on such ground, and to such wholesome end, / As clears her from all blame.” Fear and allegations of violence without evidence, and the fact of repression justifying further repression—I could hardly ignore the comparison.

But that very phenomenon, by which the things that obsess or traumatize us affect how we see everything, is also examined in Lear. Wandering unhoused over the stormy moors, Lear comes across another vagabond—the disguised Edgar. Recognizing another unfortunate, but seeing only a mirror for himself, he asks, “Didst thou give all to thy daughters? And art thou come to this?” This line has long been one that catches my students up, and it’s never more important than in this year: Even as Lear understands what his daughters have done to him, and what he has done to himself, his ability to truly see other people contracts and falters. Instead, another person is a reflection of his own concern, and other people’s troubles become illegible unless they can be made to reflect his own. It is a powerful lesson for our students learning to see both themselves and each other.

The challenge of achieving self-knowledge is threaded through our spring reading list, from Augustine’s Confessions through Montaigne’s Essays to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Morrison’s Song of Solomon, but this moment in Lear—the finally comprehending king who sees only his own suffering reflected in that of another—is the axis around which it resolves. Rereading those texts again last week, I thought of the different factions of student activists and protesters who have clashed in part around their fundamentally different understandings of the same situation, unable to see the other side as they see themselves.

As tyranny takes hold in Lear, lies and deceit become the defining mode of politics, and those cynically charged with violence resort eagerly to it themselves. Regan and Goneril goad Regan’s husband Cornwall to put out Gloucester’s eyes in a shocking paroxysm of onstage violence. It’s hard to know whom to have more contempt for at this moment, Regan for encouraging the mutilation or Cornwall for letting himself be manipulated into it.

Perhaps the greatest lie that led directly to Khalil’s disappearance and detention is the claim that Columbia and other universities are afflicted by pervasive cultures of antisemitism. Our own trustees affirmed this false narrative before Congress last fall, while our former president sold out individual faculty members by name. It’s a narrative many Jewish colleagues at Columbia have sought to both refute and expose the dangers of, to little avail.

A simpler analysis of the last year provides a more useful explanation of events. The harassment of Jewish students in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza and the equally upsetting harassment of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students are, together, the ugly byproducts of Hamas’s brutal slaughter in the name of Palestinian liberation and Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the name of Jewish safety. And that same war, funded by US tax dollars, is the root cause of the protests. As an academic, I would usually try to explain that we evaluate the relative merit of different analyses by looking at how completely they explain the evidence and predict future outcomes. I would point out that an analysis that sees only antisemitism in the entire anti-war and anti-apartheid movement continues to fail to explain the totality of the campus climate, while an analysis that sees both forms of prejudice as arising from the conflict, just as the protests do, does a better job of explaining the past year’s events and predicting new developments.

But, again, I have begun to despair that the loudest subscribers to this big lie are not so much interested in the truth of our campus climate as they are in the repression that can be achieved through the lie’s promulgation. When that repression falls on Palestinian students or anti-war activists for whom they already have contempt, it’s not a problem. When it falls on scientific and medical research unrelated to Palestine but in Trump’s political crosshairs regardless—as my colleagues and I predicted it would—some fumble for new explanations, like culture-war recriminations against the humanities that misunderstand the origin of the protests and advance the right’s anti-intellectual and anti-education agenda. A simpler explanation—that the current administration despises universities and has no real interest in Jewish well-being—might be in order.

One by one, in Lear, good and upstanding figures of the king’s court are exiled, dispossessed, tortured, and killed. It becomes most urgent for the Regan-Goneril regime to target specifically those who aspire to be voices of conscience in such a climate. “I bid you hold,” pleads a loyal family servant as Cornwall blinds Gloucester. “A peasant stand up thus?” Regan snarls, and kills him.

“The students on this encampment are a gift to Columbia,” Khalil said last April, calmly. “We offer to give the university back its principles.” It’s no accident that a voice so straightforward and steadfast has been targeted for silencing.

My favorite thing about King Lear, as someone who is hardly an expert in Shakespeare but has taught it for years, is that it has neither villains and nor heroes. Edmund gives a classic and compelling “I’m a villain” speech, but his plan could not succeed without Gloucester’s gullibility. Regan and Goneril connive and instigate, but they would be powerless without the fecklessness and complicity of their ambitious but morally weak husbands Cornwall and Albany. Only this year did Lear snap into clarify for me as a political caution not about bad actors but about those who fail to stop them.

The hour grows late. The threat, I would think, is clearer than it has ever been. Not only are these terrible things—students being detained, universities being threatened—happening, but universities like mine seem unable to even say anything specific about them, let alone speak of resistance. My colleagues roll their eyes now when I quote Edgar: “The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” But it seems significant to me that we have passed through the phase of travesties and into the phase where travesty becomes impermissible to speak of.

Last week, as I finished writing this essay, news broke that the Columbia had announced a number of initiatives intended to respond to the White House’s demands regarding campus protests, student discipline, and “receivership”—a form of outside oversight reserved for dysfunctional departments—for the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Widely described with verbs like “concession,” “yield,” and “capitulation,” these measures are designed to allow Columbia to negotiate with the Trump administration over the $400 million in lost grants. Over the weekend, a Justice Department lawyer told The New York Times that despite the many initiatives announced, Columbia “has not cleaned up their act” and is “not even close to having those funds unfrozen.” An outside observer might have doubted an administration whose vice president has said that “universities are the enemy” was interested in good-faith negotiation, but I’m just a literature professor—what do I know?

The implications of the new measures are still unclear and have prompted distress among my colleagues, as has the uncertainty over what further measures may yet be offered or extracted, and whether federal funding will be preserved or restored. University communications to faculty and students, each of which immediately comes under media and political scrutiny, have become difficult to understand, as the university tries to speak to multiple audiences at once while avoiding commitments that would inflame any of them. The authors of these messages have my sympathy, but it seems that whatever public speech the university still has is constrained almost beyond the point of intelligibility.

As I watch Trump’s kidnappers and repo men circle my campus, carrying off our students and preparing to strip our institution for parts or remake us into Trump University, I find that after a decade and a half of teaching Lear, I have a new sense of the most chilling line in the play. I’m no longer most haunted by Cornwall’s “Out, vile jelly!” as he blinds Gloucester, or Edgar’s pathetic “Look up, my lord!” over the cooling corpse of the king.

Instead, I find myself dwelling on the end of Act I, Scene 4. Goneril has announced to her husband, Albany, the pretext on which she will dispossess and betray her father, spinning a fantasy of violent threat where none exists. Here, in this moment, the casus belli of looming catastrophe is made plain. Albany, with the power to check his wife’s plot, sees that something is wrong. But he hems and he haws: “Well, well,” he mutters, “th’ event,” meaning something like, “I guess we’ll see what happens.”

And so officials hem and haw. They couch lukewarm expressions of concern for Khalil in lies about him. Democratic senators—who unanimously approved Marco Rubio as secretary of state, only to watch him sign off on Khalil’s deportation—help Trump pass his budget and say nothing about his attacks on universities. And I find myself with the most contempt, the most disdain, and the most impatience, not for the Regans and Gonerils and Edmunds who put Trump in the White House and Mahmoud Khalil in a freezing cell, but for the Albanys who have the power to do something but wait to see how things turn out.