Surveillance, silence, deportation. The empire rolls on.

Friends,

A U.S. immigration judge just made it official: Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student and permanent U.S. resident, can be deported for speaking out against genocide.

We have reached the stage where a lawful resident, married to a U.S. citizen with a child due to be born any day, can be disappeared for exercising his First Amendment rights. 

No charges. No crime. Just a political opinion the government didn’t like.

A truly dark day, but let’s be honest, this is not an aberration – it’s a culmination.

It’s the outcome of every compromise masked as pragmatism. Every civil liberty traded for “security.” Every time Democrats and Republicans stood side-by-side to build a surveillance state and told us it was for our own good.

For decades, both parties have poured billions into a surveillance regime that treats Muslims as enemies of the state. 

Democrats helped create ICE. They passed the PATRIOT Act. They expanded predictive policing, government spying, and no-fly lists. They voted for endless war.

Trump may wield the sword today, but Democrats built the forge.

Mahmoud’s case lays bare a political system built to criminalize dissent and dehumanize the marginalized. 

The same forces that disappeared him have disappeared others before—through torture sites, indefinite detention, black sites, and proxy wars.

From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Gaza, this government has shown again and again how easily it abandons any pretense of democratic values when power is on the line.

I’m running with the Green Party because I will not make common cause with a blood-soaked duopoly that sells surveillance as safety, bombs as freedom, and war crimes as peacekeeping. 

I will not pretend that deporting dissenters is anything but tyranny in a tailored suit. We don’t need more lies dressed up as law—we need a political revolution rooted in truth.

And we need California—with the power of the fifth-largest economy on Earth—to act like it.

We have the infrastructure, the people power, and the cultural reach to mobilize a genuine political revolution. One that doesn’t just resist the empire’s violence—but builds something better in its place.

If you believe Mahmoud should be free—if you believe we all must be free—chip in now. Let’s build a government that answers to people, not fear.

Peace and Power, 

Dr. Butch Ware