Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the chance to sit down with four of our five county commissioners, who were all generous with their time. My thanks to Dane Scalise, Stephanie Walker, Rob Zapple, and LeAnn Pierce. (Chairman Bill Rivenbark, who bailed on our candidates’ forum last year, has since apparently decided to freeze out the media. I obviously think that’s a mistake, but I’ll say our door is always open.)
We unpacked what the recent revaluation means for residents: property values are up on average over 60% — but that doesn’t mean tax bills will increase that much. What you pay in taxes (or, the impact on your lease rate if you are, like me, a renter) will be determined by where the county sets its tax rate, and how close to ‘revenue neutral’ the county gets — meaning, basically, how much your actual tax bill will increase.
I’m still hearing frustration, and even anger, over the county’s 2021 budget cycle; officials insisted the tax rate had gone down (which it had), but it hadn’t gone down enough to cushion that year’s revaluation. Long story short, property bills went up.
This year, we’re trying to get ahead of the reval conversation and give residents a reasonable expectation of what could happen when the budget is finalized at the end of June.
We also wanted to give commissioners a chance to lay out some of what they would each like to see in terms of investments — that is, putting your money where their mouth is when it comes to education, public safety, public transportation, affordable housing, and more. And, of course, an equivalent chance to talk about where they’d like to see the county’s budget reined in.
Next month, we’ll have a recap of where things stand. But if you want to take a deep dive into what each commissioner is thinking when it comes to the budget, here’s your chance:
Letters to the Editor
We welcome letters to the editor’s desk on any topic. Our ideal length is around 400 words or less, but if they need to be a little longer, that’s fine. We reserve the right to edit or add context when necessary. We ask that submissions come with your name and where you live (no street address necessary, just your neighborhood, town, city, etc.). Criticisms are welcome, but we ask you to try to keep it civil.
Send your letter to BSchachtman@whqr.org — or by mail, if you're old school, to WHQR Public Media 254 N. Front Street, Suite 300, Wilmington, NC 28401.
This week's letter comes from Wilmington resident David Braga:
The recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a student participant in the Columbia University protests against what has been internationally recognized as a genocide in Gaza, and his subsequent imprisonment in Louisiana, all without any formal criminal charges, should fill any American with fear. Regardless of your position on Palestine — I won’t waste words arguing why genocide is bad — or even your position on the political spectrum, if you engage with it at all, the fact that a young man could be arrested by DHS and sent to an ICE detention facility over his participation in a mass protest is a staggering assault on free speech.
Khalil has still not been formally charged with any kind of crime, yet remains detained. His green card — which guarantees him the constitutional protections of any American citizen — has been “cancelled” because his affiliation and participation in the Pro-Palestine movement was deemed “pro-terrorist.” He has been imprisoned not because he broke a law, but because he publicly espoused views contrary to the taste of either political party. Indeed, the “opposition” party, which centered their failed presidential campaign on the idea that Trump is a fascist, seems to be missing in action at precisely the moment his administration commits its most overtly fascist act; a whopping 14 Congressional Democrats signed a letter to homeland security secretary and noted dog-executioner Kristi Noem, demanding Khalil’s release. Perhaps because of his nationality, or cause, the rest expect that no one will really care if Mahmoud Khalil is whisked away. They, apparently, are not too concerned.
But they should be, and so should you. Wilmington has seen a tremendous outpouring of support for the Palestinian people and their struggle for freedom. City Council has ignored the call to take up a ceasefire resolution, but citizens from across the county, and across different ages and races and religions have come together to continue demanding they do what is right. I’ve spoken at City Council twice on their behalf, and listened to speakers making the counter argument. I disagree with them, but certainly I do not believe they should be jailed for having a view I disagree vehemently with. Are you comfortable with the idea that people you might know could suddenly vanish because of their beliefs?
The gap between green-card and citizenship by birth is more narrow than you think, and not something we should let nine unelected judges interpret. As a college instructor in Wilmington and Jacksonville, I have students with a diverse panel of views and lifestyles — but no matter whether I agree with them or not, I cannot imagine my horror if they suddenly found themselves imprisoned without charge for demonstrating on behalf of their beliefs.
Even if Palestinian liberation is not your issue, it’s easy to see how a precedent is being set here. One doesn’t have to stretch their imagination very far to remember the Black Lives Matter protests being called “illegal” and funded by “outside agitators.” What happens next time mass protest erupts over police violence? What happens when you protest the next administration, regardless of its party or platform? Whether you like it or not, Mahmoud Khalil’s fight is all of our fight, and a fight to maintain the very soul of what it means to be American.
***
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” the saying goes.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall penned the eminently quotable line in The Friends of Voltaire. Hall wrote the work, along with a biography of Voltaire, under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre (but was later published under her own name). Writing over a hundred years after Voltaire’s death, Hall was trying to encapsulate Voltaire’s attitude to free speech – a founding pillar of Western liberalism. Given that we’re still quoting Hall, or misattributing her words to Voltaire himself, I’d say she did a damn good job.
The details of the Mahmoud Khalil story — it’s not a case, per se, because there are no criminal charges — are still emerging. But it appears right now that Khalil, who has been taken from New York to Louisiana to be detained, is facing deportation because, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, he has been deemed “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.” Leavitt alleged Khalil made Jewish students at Columbia feel unsafe and distributed pro-Hamas propaganda.
It is a common (and sloppy) rhetorical move in the Israeli-Palestinian debate to conflate being pro-Palestinian with pro-Hamas. They are not the same thing, although there are certainly people who are both (likewise, while there is overlap between being pro-Israeli and embracing hardline, Ben Gvir-style ultranationalism, the two are not synonymous).
But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume Khalil was fanatically pro-Hamas. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote this week, he’d still be on solid constitutional ground:
The administration is wielding this standard — deportation for people whose activities could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” — to arrest and detain an individual graduate student. In explaining how he met this standard, the administration did not allege Khalil committed a crime. But it did explicitly cite the content of his speech, characterizing it as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” Protesting government policy is protected by the First Amendment, as is rhetorical support for a terrorist group (if not directly coordinated with it, which the government has not alleged here).
FIRE is hardly a left-leaning bastion of wokeness, but they’ve gone hard on the issue. As they have pointed out, along with NPR and other media outlets, Khalil’s green card affords him the protections of the Constitution — including criticizing the United States.
I’m not a Constitutional scholar, but as I understand it, that right dates back to the 1945 Bridges v. Wixon Supreme Court case. The case centered around an immigrant who became a labor organizer and was accused of being a Communist. The court ruled that as a legal resident, he was entitled to the freedom of the press.
Now, there’s speech and then there’s material support for a terrorist organization. And certainly there have been concerns about how much the state will muddy the waters between the two. Personal liberty advocates were understandably concerned about the illiberal potential of the PATRIOT Act under the Bush administration, and its extensions — including warrantless wiretapping — under the Obama administration.
It’s notable that many free speech enthusiasts on X have been fairly quiet about Khalil’s detention, or have vociferously supported it.
One might think this would be a good chance for someone like Ben Shapiro to test the courage of his convictions on free speech. But, instead, he posted a video entitled “Why Pro-Hamas Student Mahmoud Khalil SHOULD Be Deported,” (with “should” in all-caps so you know he’s serious). Relying heavily on footage of Leavitt, Shapiro argues that if Khalil had been handing out flyers supporting the KKK he would have been deported, and without anyone “batting an eye.” Shapiro apparently forgot the ACLU has defended neo-Nazis and other loathsome groups, and in fact maintains a whole webpage dedicated to “defending speech we hate.”
And that’s the point: disagreeing — even hating — what Khalil said on Columbia's campus is not the acid test here.
It’s not that Voltaire — or John Stuart Mill, or James Madison — were free-speech absolutists. There are limits to expression in the liberal tradition – the question is where we set them, but also how even-handedly we defend free speech, regardless of how we feel about it, whether the speaker is on ‘our team,’ or if the words make us uncomfortable.
I’ll leave you with this, from Jodi Rudoren, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Jewish news outlet The Forward:
I do not support Khalil’s call for Columbia to divest from Israel, nor his defense of student protesters who disrupted an Israeli professor’s class [...] But I definitely worry about the impact that Khalil’s arrest last weekend by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is already having on our precious, rare, tradition of free speech, especially on campus.
*
A housekeeping note here: Braga’s reference to Kristi Noem comes not from some salacious rumor mill but from a section in her autobiography where she describes killing her 14-month-old dog Cricket (and then an unnamed goat, which she apparently wounded and had return to her pickup truck to reload before she could “finish the job.”)
I debated whether this particular swipe at Noem was too far (we do ask folks to be civil, after all). But then I considered what National Review senior political correspondent Jim Geraghty wrote about Noem last May when she was on the campaign trail, facing a backlash to her dog-killing anecdote:
The problem here is either A) Noem is not all that sharp or B) Noem thought that this anecdote would make her look tough and resolute to Trump as he contemplated his running-mate options, completely miscalculated, and is now desperately flailing for some sort of exculpatory counternarrative.
I suppose it’s unfair to ask people to be more fair to conservative politicians than the National Review.
