About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.

At the time, I worried this was going to become a much bigger problem. That the fear of AI “cheating” would create a culture that actively punished good writing and pushed students toward mediocrity. I was hoping I’d be wrong about that.

Turns out… I was not wrong.

Dadland Maye, a writing instructor who has taught at many universities, has published a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education documenting exactly how this has played out across his classrooms—and it’s even worse than what I described. Because the AI detection regime hasn’t just pushed students to write worse. It has actively pushed students who never used AI to start using it.

This fall, a student told me she began using generative AI only after learning that stylistic features such as em dashes were rumored to trigger AI detectors. To protect herself from being flagged, she started running her writing through AI tools to see how it would register.

A student who was writing her own work, with her own words, started using AI tools defensively—not to cheat, but to make sure her own writing wouldn’t be accused of cheating. The tool designed to prevent AI use became the reason she started using AI.

This is the Cobra Effect in its purest form. The British colonial government in India offered a bounty for dead cobras to reduce the cobra population. People started breeding cobras to collect the bounty. When the government scrapped the program, the breeders released their now-worthless cobras, making the problem worse than before. AI detection tools are our cobra bounty. They were supposed to reduce AI use. Instead, they’re incentivizing it.

And this goes well beyond one student’s experience. Maye describes a pattern spreading across his classrooms:

One student, a native English speaker, had long been praised for writing above grade level. This semester, a transfer to a new college brought a new concern. Professors unfamiliar with her work would have no way of knowing that her confident voice had been earned. She turned to Google Gemini with a pointed inquiry about what raises red flags for college instructors. That inquiry opened a door. She learned how prompts shape outputs, when certain sentence patterns attract scrutiny, and ways in which stylistic confidence trigger doubt. The tool became a way to supplement coursework and clarify difficult material. Still, the practice felt wrong. “I feel like I’m cheating,” she told me, although the impulse that led her there had been defensive.

A student praised for years for being an exceptional writer now feels like a cheater because she had to learn how AI detection works in order to protect herself from being falsely accused. The surveillance apparatus has turned writing talent into a liability.

Then there’s this:

After being accused of using AI in a different course, another student came to me. The accusation was unfounded, yet the paper went ungraded. What followed unsettled me. “I feel like I have to stay abreast of the technology that placed me in that situation,” the student said, “so I can protect myself from it.” Protection took the form of immersion. Multiple AI subscriptions. Careful study of how detection works. A fluency in tools the student had never planned to use. The experience ended with a decision. Other professors would not be informed. “I don’t believe they will view me favorably.”

The false accusation resulted in the student subscribing to multiple AI services and studying how the detection systems work. Not because they wanted to cheat, but because they felt they had no other option for self-defense. And then they decided to keep quiet about it, because telling professors about their AI literacy would only invite more suspicion.

Look, I get it: some students are absolutely using AI to cheat, and that’s a real issue educators have to deal with. But the detection-first approach has created an incentive structure that’s almost perfectly backwards. Students who don’t use AI are punished for writing too well. Students who are falsely accused learn that the only defense is to become fluent in the very tools they’re accused of using. And the students savvy enough to actually cheat? They’re the ones best equipped to game the detectors. The tools aren’t catching the cheaters—they’re radicalizing the honest kids.

As Maye explains, this dynamic is especially brutal at open-access institutions like CUNY, where students already face enormous pressures:

At CUNY, many students work 20 to 40 hours a week. Many are multilingual. They encounter a different AI policy in nearly every course. When one professor bans AI entirely and another encourages its use, students learn to stay quiet rather than risk a misstep. The burden of inconsistency falls on them, and it takes a concrete form: time, revision, and self-surveillance. One student described spending hours rephrasing sentences that detectors flagged as AI-generated even though every word was original. “I revise and revise,” the student said. “It takes too much time.”

Just like my kid and the school-provided AI checker, Maye’s student spent a bunch of wasted time “revising” to avoid being flagged.

Students spending hours rewriting their own original work—work that they wrote—because an algorithm decided it sounded too much like a machine. That’s time taken away from studying, working, caring for family, or, you know, actually learning to write better.

Learning to revise is a key part of learning to write. But revisions should be done to serve the intent of the writing. Not to appease a sketchy bot checker.

What Maye articulates so well is that the damage here goes beyond false positives and wasted time. The deeper problem is what these tools teach students about writing:

Detection tools communicate, even when instructors do not, that writing is a performance to be managed rather than a practice to be developed. Students learn that style can count against them, and that fluency invites suspicion.

We are teaching an entire generation of students that the goal of writing is to sound sufficiently unremarkable! Not to express an original thought, develop an argument, find your voice, or communicate with clarity and power—but to produce text bland enough that a statistical model doesn’t flag it.

The word “devoid” is too risky. Em dashes are suspicious. Confident prose is a red flag.

My kid’s Harrison Bergeron experience was, in retrospect, a perfect preview of all of this. Vonnegut warned about a society that forces everyone down to the lowest common denominator by handicapping anyone who shows ability. And here we are, with AI detection tools functioning as the Handicapper General of student writing, punishing fluency, penalizing vocabulary, and training students to sound as mediocre as possible to avoid triggering an algorithm that can’t even tell the difference between a thoughtful essay and a ChatGPT output.

Maye eventually did the only sensible thing: he stopped playing the game.

Midway through the semester, I stopped requiring students to disclose their AI use. My syllabi had asked for transparency, yet the expectation had become incoherent. The boundary between using AI and navigating the internet had blurred beyond recognition. Asking students to document every encounter with the technology would have turned writing into an accounting exercise. I shifted my approach. I told students they could use AI for research and outlining, while drafting had to remain their own. I taught them how to prompt responsibly and how to recognize when a tool began replacing their thinking.

Rather than taking a “guilt-first” approach, he took one that dealt with reality and focused on what would actually be best for the learning environment: teach students to use the tools appropriately, not as a shortcut, and don’t start from a position of suspicion.

The atmosphere in my classroom changed. Students approached me after class to ask how to use these tools well. One wanted to know how to prompt for research without copying output. Another asked how to tell when a summary drifted too far from its source. These conversations were pedagogical in nature. They became possible only after AI use stopped functioning as a disclosure problem and began functioning as a subject of instruction.

Once the surveillance regime was lifted, students could actually learn. They asked genuine questions about how to use tools effectively and ethically. They engaged with the technology as a subject worth understanding rather than a minefield to navigate. The teacher-student relationship shifted from adversarial to educational, which is, you know, kind of the whole point of school.

That line Maye uses: “these conversations were pedagogical in nature” keeps sticking in my brain. The fear of AI undermining teaching made it impossible to teach. Getting past that fear brought back the pedagogy. Incredible.

This piece should be required reading for every educator thinking that “catching” students using AI is the most important thing.

As Maye discovered through painful experience, the answer is to stop treating AI as a policing problem and start treating it as an educational one. Teach students how to write. Teach them how to think critically about AI tools. Teach them when those tools are helpful, when they’re harmful, and when they’re a crutch. And for the love of all that is good, stop deploying detection tools that punish good writers and push everyone toward a bland, algorithmic mean.

We are, quite literally, limiting our students’ writing to satisfy a machine that can’t tell the difference. Vonnegut would have had a field day.

We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy Anthropic for the sin of having modest ethical guidelines around its AI technology.

The short version: Anthropic said it didn’t want its AI making autonomous kill decisions without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by declaring the company a supply chain risk—a designation designed for foreign adversaries, not San Francisco companies with ethics policies—and ordering every federal agency to purge Anthropic’s technology. Now Anthropic is back at the negotiating table with the same people who just tried to kill it.

On Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a new statement about “where things stand” with the Defense Department. And it is… something. It reads like what happens when a serious person at a serious company has to write a serious document in an environment that has gone completely insane—and the result is a press release that, under any previous administration, would have been recognized as deeply alarming corporate groveling, but which now just kind of… slides into the news cycle as another Thursday.

The statement is titled “Where things stand with the Department of War.” Not the Department of Defense. The Department of War. Yes, Trump and Hegseth have spent hundreds of millions of dollars renaming the Defense Department, but it’s not up to them. It’s up to Congress. According to the law, it’s still the Department of Defense, and anyone using the name Department of War is clearly sucking up to the administration. It’s all theater.

Amodei uses the fictitious name throughout his statement. Every single reference. “Department of War.” This is a company that six days ago was being praised for standing on principle, and its CEO can’t even bring himself to use the department’s legal name because the administration insists upon everyone using the cosplay version. Before you even get to the substance, the document has already bent the knee. He’s negotiating with people who branded him a national security threat, and he opens by adopting their preferred terminology like a hostage reading a prepared script.

From there, the statement proceeds through a series of passages that are individually rational and collectively dystopian. Take this section:

I would like to reiterate that we had been having productive conversations with the Department of War over the last several days, both about ways we could serve the Department that adhere to our two narrow exceptions, and ways for us to ensure a smooth transition if that is not possible. As we wrote on Thursday, we are very proud of the work we have done together with the Department, supporting frontline warfighters with applications such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

“We are very proud of the work we have done together with the Department”—the department that is currently trying to destroy the company over a contractual dispute. The department whose secretary called Anthropic’s stance “a master class in arrogance and betrayal” and “a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives.” The department that declared Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security—again, a designation designed for hostile foreign infiltration of military systems, not for a San Francisco company that said “maybe a human should be in the loop before the robot decides to kill someone.”

And here’s Dario, proudly listing all the ways Anthropic has served these same people. “Supporting frontline warfighters.” This is the language of a Pentagon press release. Six days. It took six days to go from “we have principles about autonomous weapons” to “we are very proud of supporting frontline warfighters with cyber operations.”

This may be a rational decision from a company trying to stave off a ridiculous fight, but the real story is that they feel the need to act this way.

Then there’s the apology. Earlier this week, an internal Amodei memo leaked in which he described OpenAI’s rushed Pentagon deal as “safety theater” and “straight up lies,” and noted that the key difference between the two companies’ positions was that OpenAI “cared about placating employees” while Anthropic “actually cared about preventing abuses.” It was blunt. It was competitive. It also appeared to be accurate—OpenAI subsequently rewrote its contract to address many of the concerns Amodei identified.

But accuracy is apparently a liability now:

I also want to apologize directly for a post internal to the company that was leaked to the press yesterday. Anthropic did not leak this post nor direct anyone else to do so—it is not in our interest to escalate this situation. That particular post was written within a few hours of the President’s Truth Social post announcing Anthropic would be removed from all federal systems, the Secretary of War’s X post announcing the supply chain risk designation, and the announcement of a deal between the Pentagon and OpenAI, which even OpenAI later characterized as confusing. It was a difficult day for the company, and I apologize for the tone of the post. It does not reflect my careful or considered views. It was also written six days ago, and is an out-of-date assessment of the current situation.

He is apologizing for the tone of an accurate description of events because the accurate description made the people trying to destroy his company unhappy. He notes it was “a difficult day for the company”—the day the President of the United States directed every federal agency to cease using your technology and the Defense Secretary branded you a threat to national security. Yeah, I’d call that a difficult day. And on that difficult day, Amodei accurately described what was happening, and now he has to say sorry for it because the accurate description “does not reflect my careful or considered views.”

Translation: the careful and considered view is that you don’t say true things out loud when the administration is watching and deeply focused on punishing you.

And then we arrive at the closing:

Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters and national security experts are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations. Anthropic will provide our models to the Department of War and national security community, at nominal cost and with continuing support from our engineers, for as long as is necessary to make that transition, and for as long as we are permitted to do so.

Anthropic is offering to provide its AI models to the military at nominal cost—essentially a discount—while simultaneously preparing to challenge the supply chain risk designation in court. The company is saying: “We believe your action against us is illegal, we will fight it in court, and also here’s our technology at a steep discount, please don’t hurt us anymore.”

And the framing: “Our most important priority right now is making sure that our warfighters… are not deprived of important tools in the middle of major combat operations.” This is Anthropic fully adopting Hegseth’s rhetoric—the exact framing that was used to justify the attack on them in the first place. Hegseth’s entire argument was that Anthropic’s ethical guidelines were depriving “warfighters” of critical tools. And now Anthropic is echoing that language as though it were their own concern all along. The “warfighters” language is especially rich given that this administration keeps tap dancing around the question of whether we’re actually “at war” with Iran—apparently we have warfighters who aren’t fighting a war.

The statement closes with what might be the single most remarkable sentence:

Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences. We both are committed to advancing US national security and defending the American people, and agree on the urgency of applying AI across the government. All our future decisions will flow from that shared premise.

Remember, this company was founded by people who left OpenAI specifically because they thought AI safety was being treated as an afterthought. Their entire brand, their entire reason for existing, was the proposition that there are some things AI should not be used for without significant guardrails. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences” is the kind of sentence you write when survival has replaced principle as the operating framework.

Every individual decision in this statement is probably the rational play. Using the administration’s preferred name costs nothing. Apologizing for the memo reduces friction. “Warfighter” language signals alignment. These are survival tactics, and they’re being deployed by someone who appears to have no good options.

That’s the actual horror. This is what the “good” decisions look like in an authoritarian world.

Under any previous administration—Democrat or Republican—a company telling the Defense Department “we’d prefer our AI not make autonomous kill decisions without human oversight” would have been a mostly unremarkable negotiating position. It might have been a deal breaker for that particular contract. The two sides might have parted ways. What would not have happened is the Secretary of Defense going on social media to accuse the company of “betrayal” and “duplicity,” the President directing all federal agencies to stop using the company’s products, and the company’s CEO subsequently having to write a public groveling statement apologizing for having accurately described the situation while pledging free labor to the government that attacked him.

And every AI company watching this—every tech company of any kind—is absorbing the lesson. Tell the administration “no” on even the most modest ethical point, and this is what follows: a week of chaos, a supply chain risk designation, your CEO apologizing for telling the truth, and a press release pledging your technology to the military at cost while you simultaneously sue to stay alive.

As I wrote last year, authoritarian systems are fundamentally incompatible with innovation. They produce exactly this kind of environment—one where the rational move for a company is to grovel in public while fighting in court, to adopt the language of the people attacking you, and to apologize for having been right. The AI bros who supported Trump because Biden’s AI plan involved some annoying paperwork should take a long look at this statement and ask themselves whether this is the “pro-innovation” environment they were promised.

Because right now, the most “pro-innovation” thing happening in American AI is a hostage note written in business casual—and everyone pretending it’s just a press release.

In a stunning White House appearance that should alarm anyone who cares about constitutional rights, democracy, the rule of law or anything of the sort, Donald Trump and Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele openly defied a Supreme Court order while discussing plans to expand El Salvador’s notorious detention system to imprison US citizens without due process. The meeting, which came just days after Trump admitted the US could retrieve Abrego Garcia from unlawful detention in El Salvador, devolved into the two leaders joking about imprisoning anyone while promoting a chilling vision of “liberation through incarceration.”

We had just posted our last article about how Donald Trump has admitted he could order Abrego Garcia returned to the US (as the Supreme Court has directly instructed the Trump admin to do) before meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. We wondered if reporters would ask both Bukele and Trump about this, and they did. The answers are beyond stupid.

When a reporter asked Trump about his earlier comments saying that if the Supreme Court said to return Garcia to the US, Trump scolded the reporter:

Why don’t you just say, ‘isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you just say that? Why do yo go over and over and that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You know you have no credibility.

Literally, all the reporter did was ask him about his on-the-record comments from three days ago.

As for the specific question about returning Garcia, Trump passed the question (after also mocking the news station the reporter worked for) to Attorney General Pam Bondi who was there:

Bondi responded with a series of false claims about both Garcia and what the Supreme Court actually ordered. Let’s break down each lie.

First, Bondi claimed:

First, and foremost, he was illegally in our country. He had been illegally in our country. And in 2019 two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country. Right now, it was a paperwork… it was additional paperwork had needed to be done.

This is demonstrably false. As the Fourth Circuit noted with regards to Garcia, not only has the government presented no evidence that Garcia is a member of MS-13, but they actually abandoned this claim in court.

Finally, I turn to the Government’s assertion that the public interest favors a stay because Abrego Garicia is a “prominent” member of MS-13 and is therefore “no longer eligible for withholding relief.” …. Whatever the merits of the 2019 determination of the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) regarding Abrego Garcia’s connection to MS-13, the Government presented “[n]o evidence” to the district court to “connect[] Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.” … Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court. … The balance of equities must tip in the movant’s favor based on the record before the issuing court. An unsupported — and then abandoned — assertion that Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang, does not tip the scales in favor of removal in violation of this Administration’s own withholding order

The Fourth Circuit further noted:

Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”

But Bondi wasn’t done with the lies. She also claimed:

That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if El Salvador wants to return… this is international matters, foreign affairs… if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning: provide a plane.

That’s false. As we noted earlier today, the Supreme Court’s ruling directly says that the administration should “facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” For Bondi to claim this means that if El Salvador “wants” to send him back they can send a plane is simply untrue.

A reporter then asked Bukele the same question, leading to an even dumber response:

Bukele: Are you suggesting I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle… how can I return him to the United States? Like… I smuggle him into the United States, what would you do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.

Reporter: But you could release him in El Salvador?

Bukele: Yeah, but I’m not going to release him. I mean I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists in our country. I mean we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere and you want us to go back, releasing criminals, so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? No. [Laughs] That’s not going to happen.

Trump: [points to reporters] Well, they would love to have criminals released into our country. They would love it. They’re sick. [Points to reporters again] These are sick people.

Again, all of this is nonsense. Garcia is not a terrorist or a criminal. Again, the Fourth Circuit ruling made that clear. Second, there’s no “smuggling” involved. Literally seconds before this exchange, Bondi claimed (incorrectly as a matter of law) that the only thing the Supreme Court ordered them to do was to send a plane if Bukele agreed to release Garcia. So, literally the whole repetitive thing about “smuggling a terrorist into the US” is wrong on both key points: it’s not a terrorist and it wouldn’t be smuggling.

Bukele’s tangent about the “murder capital of the world” is also nonsense. Again, no one has said that Garcia has murdered anyone. Or that he’s violent. Or a criminal. Indeed, the US government had admitted that he’s lived a non-violent, non-criminal life in the US for many years.

All of this is framing basic due process rights as a threat to public safety, a rhetorical trick that autocrats have used throughout history to justify extrajudicial detention. No one should be falling for it here.

As for Trump saying the US media would love it if criminals were released into the US, I should remind you that the person who did the biggest mass release of criminals into the US was Donald Trump when he pardoned all of the convicted January 6th Capitol insurrectionists.

So, let’s be clear about this, because what happened in the White House today is absolute bullshit. The Supreme Court ordered the US government to see what could be done about getting Garcia back, acknowledging (as the US government had originally done, though they’re now trying to retcon in something else) that the government was forbidden by law from sending Garcia to El Salvador.

The US government has a contract with El Salvador that explicitly calls out that the US gets the “decision” on those prisoners’ “disposition.” Thus, the US can easily tell El Salvador to send Garcia back. Garcia’s false claims about “smuggling a terrorist” into the US are unrelated to the issue at hand. Both of them are lying in pursuit of building modern concentration and torture camps.

But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities:

When reporters later pressed him on this point, Trump didn’t back down. Instead, he openly endorsed the idea of sending US citizens to Salvadoran torture hellholes:

Trump’s sudden concern about “criminals that rape women” rings particularly hollow coming from someone who famously boasted about sexually assaulting women and who was found liable for sexual assault. But the exchange got even more chilling when Bukele introduced his Orwellian concept of “liberation through imprisonment,” which had Trump practically giddy with excitement.

Bukele: Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we liberated millions.

Trump [leaning in and looking excited]: That’s very good!

[Everyone laughs]

Trump: Who gave him that line? You think I can use it? [Laughs]

Bukele: In fact, Mr. President, you have 350 million to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. [shrugs] That’s just the way it works.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what we witnessed today: A foreign dictator stood in the White House and openly suggested that the path to “liberating” 350 million Americans requires imprisoning those deemed problematic — with the obvious implication (given how things have gone so far) being that this should happen without charges, without trials, without due process. And the President of the United States not only agreed, but was enthusiastic about adopting this framework of authoritarian repression.

If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.

On April 7, the U.S. Supreme Court took a few minutes off from its hobby of enabling a former game-show host armed with nuclear weapons to deny Joe Morford’s petition for certiorari. That’s too bad, because it means there will be no oral argument in which the justices discuss things like the angle at which a banana has been taped to a wall.

As you may recall, Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan created a piece for a Miami art fair in 2019 that consisted of a real banana duct-taped to a blank wall. Entitled “Comedian,” the work was accompanied by “a certificate of authenticity with detailed diagrams and instructions for its proper display.” According to the report, the work was intended to convey a sense of “absurdity.” It did that, although arguably it wasn’t the work itself so much as the fact that somebody paid $120,000 for it.

In fact, two people paid $120,000 for it—Cattelan created a “limited edition” of three—and then somebody paid $150,000 for the third. That’s $390,000 for three bananas (for which he paid 25 cents each) and three pieces of duct tape.

I’m not blaming Cattelan in any way for this. The more I read about Cattelan’s work, the more I like him. Because it is completely ridiculous:

• In 1992, he started the Oblomov Foundation, which offered grants to artists who would promise not to create or show any art for a year. (Oblomov is a Russian novel in which the title character never does anything useful. “In the first 50 pages,” Wikipedia notes, “he only manages to move from his bed to a chair.”)

• One of Cattelan’s “best-known sculptures,” La Nona Ora (1999), is a wax figure of Pope John Paul II being hit by a meteor.

• Cattelan “previously used duct tape suspension” for A Perfect Day (also 1999), in which he duct-taped a local art dealer to a gallery wall.

• L.O.V.E. (2011) is an 11-meter-high sculpture of a middle finger aimed at the Milan stock market.

• Then there was 2016’s America, a fully functioning toilet made out of solid gold. This was originally installed in one of the Guggenheim’s regular bathrooms, where an estimated 100,000 people used it. It was later stolen while on loan to a UK museum. The thieves were found and convicted, but they are thought to have melted America down and sold it.

Again, Cattelan created three examples of Comedian in 2019 and sold all three. But it’d be more accurate to say he sold the right to re-create Comedian, because after all, something made with a real banana won’t last forever. In fact, the original didn’t even last through the 2019 art show. Another artist took the banana out of the artwork and ate it, describing this act as a piece of performance art he called Hungry Artist. He wasn’t prosecuted, probably because it’s hard to say whether he did any damage. (They just replaced the banana.) Another instance of Comedian, or maybe the same one, who knows, was similarly eaten in April 2023.

And in November 2024, at a time when national insanity was on the rise generally, a “Trump-linked” crypto bro bought an instance of Comedian for $6.2 million, apparently in real money. He then ate the banana onstage, saying that, like many crypto assets, “the real value is the concept itself.” And, also like many crypto assets, in a matter of hours it had turned into worthless poop.

That brings us to Joe Morford, an artist who sued Cattelan in 2020 for copyright infringement. In 2001, Morford created the work Banana and Orange, which consists of one example of each fruit taped to a wall. When Cattelan duct-taped his banana to a wall, Morford alleged, he had unfairly copied Morford’s work. Last June, Judge Robert Scola, Jr., granted summary judgment for Cattelan. “[T]he Court must resolve here,” he wrote, “whether it can find that one artist’s banana duct-taped to a wall is, in fact, an infringement upon another’s, or whether such an issue must be decided by a jury.” He ended up sparing the potential jurors.

Here’s the law (summarized from the opinion). Winning a copyright-infringement claim requires proving (1) ownership of a valid copyright and (2) “copying of constitutent elements of the work that are original.” The court assumed #1 for the sake of argument. To prove copying, a plaintiff has to show the defendant “actually used” the copyrighted work and that the copied elements are “protected expression.” Actual use can be proven indirectly, by proving the defendant had access to the copyrighted work and that there are “probative similarities.” But, importantly here, copyright protects only “the particular expression of an idea,” not the idea itself.

Cattelan did not dispute that the two works had “probative similarities,” and “[g]iven that both works are bananas duct-taped to walls, the Court sees no need to belabor this point.” But it didn’t matter. Morford had no direct evidence of actual use, and his only evidence that Cattelan “had access” to Banana and Orange was that a few pictures of it are on the internet. But courts have held “mere presence on the internet” isn’t enough, so that alone showed Morford couldn’t prove his claim. (Cattelan swore he’d never seen it.)

The court went on, though, to find that although there were obvious “similarities,” the works weren’t similar enough. That analysis is too complicated to lay out here, but is worth reading precisely because it is a complicated analysis of two pieces of fruit duct-taped to a wall. Morford’s basic problems were these: (1) he “cannot claim a copyright in the idea of affixing a banana to a vertical plane using duct tape,” and (2) he “cannot claim a copyright in bananas or duct tape.” There were potentially protectible elements, most importantly “the banana’s placement at a slight angle, with the banana stalk on the left side pointing up.” But this was not enough. There are only two sides (left or right) for the stalk to be on, the court pointed out, and “only so many angles at which a banana can be placed on a wall….” To say this made a difference would essentially mean that one could “copyright the idea of duct-taping a banana to a wall,” a step the court was unwilling to take.

In 2024, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed. Morford, of course, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review. He represented himself on appeal, and either he had some help or he is a pretty good lawyer (for a conceptual artist). The petition is less formal than one might expect from a professional lawyer (“Yeah, it’s just a stupid banana taped to a wall,” he conceded), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Sadly, as noted the Court denied his petition earlier this week. Does it have better things to do right now? Unfortunately, yes.

       

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The U.S. government just demonstrated exactly why due process matters. In what should be a shocking admission, the Trump administration revealed in court that it had made a bit of an oopsie (they call it an “administrative error”) — one that resulted in trafficking a Maryland father with protected legal status to a Salvadoran prison. Their response to this horrific mistake? Not contrition or attempts to fix it, but rather an argument that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction to help bring him back.

This is what happens when you replace due process with authoritarian expediency. And it’s exactly what the MAGA movement is deliberately pushing for, as evidenced by Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, who sneered at the very concept of due process during an ABC interview last week:

“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?”

In making this argument, Homan inadvertently reveals himself to be embracing the same twisted logic as those he claims to be fighting: criminals who feel that the ends justify any means, that due process is an inconvenient obstacle rather than a fundamental safeguard of justice. It’s the kind of thinking that leads directly to “administrative errors” that destroy innocent lives.

The entire point of the rule of law in a civilized society is that we’re better than that. We provide due process precisely because it’s the only way to ensure we don’t punish innocent people. If Homan and his department were actually doing their jobs properly, due process wouldn’t be an obstacle — it would be an opportunity to demonstrate the legitimacy of their actions through proper legal channels.

Instead, we have this fucking mess:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

That’s one hell of an “administrative error.”

Let’s be crystal clear: this wasn’t a “deportation” — deportation requires due process. This was human trafficking, plain and simple. A U.S. resident with legal protection was grabbed by government agents and forcibly transferred to a foreign labor camp.

What stands out in the court filing is the government’s cavalier attitude in the filing. They admit, with bureaucratic sterility, that they trafficked a man they knew had legal protection:

On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error

The normal response to discovering you’ve made a catastrophic error that has imprisoned an innocent person in another country would be to fix it immediately. Instead, the government’s response is essentially “ah well, nothing we can do!” They actually argue that because they’ve already illegally trafficked him to a slave labor camp in El Salvador, U.S. courts have no power to help:

Here, Plaintiffs seek review of the legality of the Executive’s restraint of and removal of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, leading to his present detention there…. (alleging Defendants “decided to deport Plaintiff Abrego Garcia without following the law”). Plaintiffs make it clear that the ultimate relief they seek is his return to the United States to live at liberty with his family… (alleging irreparable harm from separation from his family and asking “the Court to immediately order Defendants to take all steps reasonably available to them, proportionate to the gravity of the ongoing harm, to return Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to the United States.”) Because Plaintiffs seek Abrego Garcia’s release from allegedly unlawful detention on the grounds that it was effected illegally, they make a core habeas claim, and they must therefore bring it exclusively in habeas.

But there is no jurisdiction in habeas. Plaintiffs admit—as they must—that the United States does not have custody over Abrego Garcia. They acknowledge that there may be “difficult questions of redressability” in this case, reflecting their recognition that Defendants do not have “the power to produce” Abrego Garcia from CECOT in El Salvador. … But even more, they concede that Abrego Garcia is not in Defendants’ custody. Id. (asking the Court to order Defendants to “request that the government of El Salvador return Plaintiff to Defendants’ custody”). Despite their allegations of continued payment for Abrego Garcia’s detention, Plaintiffs do not argue that the United States can exercise its will over a foreign sovereign. The most they ask for is a court order that the United States entreat—or even cajole—a close ally in its fight against transnational cartels. This is not “custody” to which the great writ may run. This Court therefore lacks jurisdiction.

The government’s argument is essentially: “Yes, we illegally trafficked someone we knew we shouldn’t have touched, but since we’ve already done it and he’s in a foreign prison, U.S. courts are powerless to help.” While the DOJ’s jurisdictional argument may be technically correct under current law, the implications are horrifying.

This is precisely why due process exists in the first place.

It’s not just some bureaucratic inconvenience — it’s a vital safeguard against exactly this kind of nightmare scenario. Without due process protections, government agents can make “administrative errors” that result in trafficking innocent people to foreign prisons, then shrug and say “oops, nothing we can do!” when the mistake is discovered. And, before long, those “administrative errors” become convenient ways to get rid of anyone the powers that be dislike.

A few weeks ago, law professor Steve Vladeck wrote an important piece about why we have due process, noting that it is the main thing that “separates democratic legal systems from … less democratic legal systems.” In that piece, he responded to people telling him (a la Homan) that it was fine to remove gang members from the US without due process since they were so bad.

Against that backdrop, there’s just no good argument for refusing to provide comparable process to accused members of TdA before removing them from the country. I say this not because, contra some of my Twitter fans and e-mail correspondents, I support TdA and want to keep “rapists and murderers” at large in the United States. Rather, I say this because that kind of process is how any of us can have confidence that the folks being packed onto airplanes and whisked off to El Salvador are Venezuelan citizens and members of TdA—as opposed to U.S. citizens; political dissidents; or others whom the Trump administration would just as soon be rid of. Indeed, one need not believe that the government is acting maliciously to believe that errors will be made.

Vladeck wrote that warning just a week and a half ago — well before the DOJ’s admission of this “administrative error.” But this case isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of an emerging pattern that demonstrates exactly why his concerns about due process are so vital.

Consider the growing list of victims: There’s Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist. There’s Neri Alvarado, a bakery worker. Neither had any gang connections. Their “crimes”? Having tattoos. In Alvarado’s case, it was a tattoo promoting autism awareness. This is what passes for “evidence” of gang activity when you dispense with due process.

These aren’t isolated incidents. The flood of similar cases reveals a systematic dismantling of due process. Take Jerce Reyes Barrios, detailed in the New Yorker piece linked above:

Jerce Reyes Barrios, a thirty-six-year-old soccer player and youth coach, fled Venezuela last year after marching in anti-government protests. His immigration file cites two grounds for suspicion: a gesture he made while posing for a photo that was posted to social media and a tattoo of a crown on top of a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios.” His lawyer, Linette Tobin, worked with his family to secure documents from the police in Venezuela to show that he hadn’t committed any crimes. They also tracked down Barrios’s tattoo artist. “He wanted a tattoo related to soccer,” the artist said in a legal declaration. “We searched on the internet and the ball with a crown caught our attention to represent the king of soccer, and he liked the idea.”

The same article quotes a Tren de Aragua expert confirming that the gang “does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification” — yet tattoos remain the government’s primary “evidence” for trafficking people to foreign prisons. This is what happens when due process is replaced with prejudice and paranoia: innocent gestures become evidence of crimes, and basic fact-checking is discarded as an inconvenient obstacle.

When confronted with these facts, the response from MAGA leadership has been to double down on authoritarianism while attacking anyone who dares to question their methods. Take White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s revealing freakout of a response to reporter Andrew Feinberg when he simply asked about due process safeguards against mistaken identification:

“You can get classified by simply having certain symbols in your tattoos and wearing certain streetwear brands—that alone is enough to get someone classified as TdA and sent to El Salvador,” Feinberg said. 

“That’s not true, actually, Andrew,” Leavitt snapped. Feinberg insisted he was simply reading from court documents filed by the government. 

“No, according to Department of Homeland Security and the agents—have you talked to the agents who have been putting their lives on the line to detain these foreign terrorists who have been terrorizing our communities?” Leavitt asked. 

“I–I’m not denying that—” Feinberg said, but Leavitt continued.

“TdA is a vicious gang that has taken the lives of American women, and our agents on the front lines take up deporting these people with the utmost seriousness, and there is a litany of criteria that they use to ensure that these individuals qualify as foreign terrorists, and to ensure, to ensure that they qualify for deportation,” she said. 

“And shame on you, and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals who have—this is a vicious gang, Andrew! This is a vicious gang that has taken the lives of American women!”

“I’m not trying to cover for anyone,” Feinberg insisted, but Leavitt continued to attack Feinberg for even asking about the documents, once again unable to account for the government she purports to represent.

“And you said yourself there are eight criteria on that document! And you are questioning the credibility of these agents who are putting their life on the line to protect your life, and the life of everybody in this group and the life of everybody across the country? And their credibility should be questioned? They finally have a president who is allowing them to do their jobs, and God bless them for doing it,” Leavitt fumed.

The performative outrage is telling. If there truly is a “litany of criteria” that “ensure” proper identification of gang members, as Leavitt claims, then providing due process should be trivially easy. The government could simply present its evidence in court, where it would stand up to basic scrutiny. Their aggressive resistance to any kind of oversight suggests they know their “evidence” won’t withstand examination.

The historical parallels are impossible to ignore. In his piece, Vladeck highlights Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson’s prescient 1952 warning about due process:

[T]he Nazi regime in Germany installed a system of ‘protective custody’ by which the arrested could claim no judicial or other hearing process, and as a result the concentration camps were populated with victims of summary executive detention for secret reasons. . . . There are other differences, to be sure, between authoritarian procedure and common law, but differences in the process of administration make all the difference between a reign of terror and one of law. Quite unconsciously, I am sure, the Government’s theory of custody for ‘safekeeping’ without disclosure to the victim of charges, evidence, informers or reasons, even in an administrative proceeding, has unmistakable overtones of the ‘protective custody’ of the Nazis more than of any detaining procedure known to the common law. Such a practice, once established with the best of intentions, will drift into oppression of the disadvantaged in this country as surely as it has elsewhere.

Seven decades later, Jackson’s warning reads like a prophecy fulfilled. We now have a MAGA movement explicitly embracing the exact authoritarian tactics he feared: disappearing people through “administrative” mechanisms, trafficking them to offshore camps without due process, then declaring any “errors” in the process irreversible. The parallels to the “protective custody” system he described are not subtle.

The dangerous implications of this mindset are perfectly captured by MAGA Rep. Victoria Spartz, who recently declared at a town hall that:

“There is no due process if you come here illegally because you violated the law. Period! You violated the law, you are not entitled to due process.”

This statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of both law and logic that would be merely laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. Follow her “logic” to its inevitable conclusion: if merely being accused of breaking a law strips you of due process rights, then there is no rule of law at all. Under this framework, government agents need only accuse someone of a crime to justify trafficking them to a foreign prison camp. No evidence required. No hearing needed. Just an accusation.

This isn’t just wrong — it’s an explicit endorsement of exactly the kind of authoritarian system that Justice Jackson warned would “drift into oppression.” It creates a perfect circular logic: you lose your right to due process because you’re accused of a crime, and you have no way to challenge that accusation because you’ve lost your right to due process.

This is inhumane. It is unconscionably evil.

I tend to hate calling anyone’s actions “evil” as that’s a strong charge that feels loaded. But at some point you have to call it out for what it is. It is pure evil.

And just to confirm what kind of inhumane evil this all leads to, when confronted about the case of Abrego Garcia — who, again, the administration admits it wasn’t supposed to remove — Vice President JD Vance just flat out lied and claimed (falsely) that the court documents say he was a “convicted MS-13 gang member.”

It’s quite something for JD Vance to accuse others of not reading the court document when it becomes clear that it is he who did not read the court document. Nowhere does it say he was a convicted MS-13 gang member, and the DOJ’s own filing admits that he had a legal right to be here. Even the replies to Vance’s tweet include a number of MAGA supporters asking why Vance is just making shit up.

The mask is slipping so badly that even reliable MAGA cheerleaders are recoiling in horror. Joe Rogan has admitted that the human trafficking program is “horrific.” Even Rod Dreher — who loved authoritarianism so much he literally moved to Hungary to live under an authoritarian leader — is saying “whoa, dude, too far.”

This is the line that due process draws: between a government bound by law and one ruled by whim, between justice and terror, between civilization and barbarism. When Trump, Homan, Leavitt, and Spartz argue against due process, they aren’t just attacking a legal principle — they’re attacking the very foundation of the rule of law itself.

Their vision of America is one where government agents can disappear anyone they want based on nothing more than an accusation, where “administrative errors” are features rather than bugs, and where the mere act of questioning their actions is treated as treason. They’ve made it crystal clear that they don’t believe in due process, the rule of law, or any coherent moral philosophy beyond raw power used to inflict suffering on those they deem unworthy of basic human dignity.

This isn’t just un-American. It’s a deliberate embrace of the exact authoritarian evil that America was supposed to resist.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and green card holder, was an active participant in a political movement on his campus. The political movement called for the university to divest from arms companies and from a state deemed by the International Court of Justice to plausibly be committing genocide. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. His role in the movement was that of negotiator and mediator with the school’s administration — that is, engaging in speech.

But Khalil is Palestinian, and the movement in question is for Palestinian freedom and against Israel’s eliminationist assault on Gaza. So, as of Saturday night, Khalil, a legal permanent resident, is being held without charge at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detention center. His attorney and his wife — a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant — were unable to find Khalil in the sprawling ICE carceral system for over 24 hours.

On Saturday night, Department of Homeland Security agents descended on Khalil’s apartment, a Columbia University-owned property near the school’s Manhattan campus. Khalil called his attorney, Amy Greer, who spoke with the agents on the phone. First, they reportedly said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke the graduate’s student visa. The attorney told them that Khalil has a green card, which Khalil’s wife produced as proof. Then, according to reports, the agent told Greer that they were revoking Khalil’s green card. The agents threatened Khalil’s pregnant wife with arrest too, and then took her husband away.

“We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported,” wrote U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X on Sunday, linking to The Associated Press’s coverage of Khalil’s arrest.

There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation.

It is all the more vile that Khalil has been targeted for engaging in protected protest activity calling for an end to the U.S.-backed slaughter of his people. The Trump administration has consistently framed all pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist activists as Hamas supporters. It is worth stressing, though, that even if a protester did express support or sympathy for Hamas in a public speech, or on social media (and I’m not saying Khalil did), such expression is also protected by the First Amendment, a protection extended to citizens and noncitizens alike. This is settled constitutional law: The Supreme Court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson in 1989, for example, reaffirmed the principle that the First Amendment protects even the most controversial and provocative forms of speech. 

Some of the only activity not protected by the First Amendment in this regard is material support for a group designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the government. What counts as “material support” has a strict legal standard — even expressing support or sympathy for a foreign terrorist organization is not included in that standard.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Zeteo’s Prem Thakker that Khalil was arrested because he “led activities aligned to Hamas.” The claim is yet another outrageous affront to First Amendment protections, which robustly include political speech and a whole host of protest activities.

Khalil has not been charged with material support for terrorism, nor any other crime. Under law, green cards cannot be summarily revoked; grounds for removal require criminal convictions for specific crimes including assault or theft, or proof of visa fraud. Green card holders facing removal are, under law, given the chance to appeal. They are not simply removed. I repeat “under law,” because Khalil’s case threatens to make that very designation irrelevant.

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The Trump administration has made a series of threats to revoke the visas of students and others involved in Palestine solidarity protests, which it consistently describes as “pro-Hamas.” Following on from President Joe Biden’s administration, Trump’s regime is committed to the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, as a way to demonize — and criminalize — criticism of Israel. In a fact sheet accompanying the president’s executive order mendaciously titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” Trump threatened to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”

While still a senator, Rubio recommended the use of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the secretary of state the power to revoke visas from foreigners deemed to be a threat. The very same law was used to enact racist immigrant quotas, and as a red scare weapon to deport or refuse entry to leftists like Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, among others. The law has been amended numerous times since, in efforts to limit its authoritarian and racist uses. With the 1990 Immigration Act, for example, Congress prohibited as grounds for excluding immigrants from the U.S. “advocacy or publication of communist or other subversive views or materials.” Stated plainly: It’s illegal under congressional statute and the Constitution to remove someone from the country due to political speech.

Rubio’s own comments show he seeks to revive the Immigration and Nationality Act’s most harmful form. Just one week after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Rubio invoked the law in a Fox News interview as grounds for deporting pro-Palestine protesters, and posted on X: “Cancel the visa of every foreign national out there supporting Hamas and get them out of America.” Now Rubio is secretary of state and committing in words and deeds to his illegal deportation agenda.

There’s little use in simply pointing to the law, even the Constitution, to oppose these authoritarians. Republicans are well versed in forging new legal realities through force and violence. Legal protections cannot be assumed; they need fighting for, or they simply will not hold. Establishment Democrats and institutions like Columbia University have helped bring us to this grim watershed moment. Every institution that treated support for Palestinian lives and condemnation of Israel’s genocidal war as antisemitic and terroristic laid the ground for Trump’s wholesale attack on basic speech rights.

Palestine solidarity activists and anti-colonial thinkers have long made clear that a government willing to prosecute a genocidal war abroad, as the U.S. has, has no problem enacting exclusionary, discriminatory violence at home. This is not new; these are the inherent contradictions of a purported democracy engaged in colonial domination. It should not take the illegal detention of another Palestinian to expose this, but here we are.

“This is unacceptable. Deporting legal residents solely for expressing their political opinions is a violation of free speech rights,” wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “Who’s next? Citizens?”

For those of you with any investment in the protection of basic rights and legal protections — in the defense of any shred of democracy against authoritarian rule — the fight to free Khalil and maintain his legal status is your fight too.

The post If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead appeared first on The Intercept.