David Bohm was a brilliant physicist. In the latter part of World War II, when he was just a graduate student, his PhD supervisor, J. Robert Oppenheimer hired him to help build America’s first atomic (nuclear) bomb. Bohm was so brilliant and his contributions to the bomb project so valuable that his work was immediately classified.
Bohm was prohibited from using his own insights to write his PhD dissertation. Oppenheimer was his Chair and was able to get Bohm his PhD by vouching for the caliber of Bohm’s work without a paper. One would think that Bohm, with this pedigree, would have some degree of what today is called “privilege” as opposed to what the law provides as “rights” protecting Bohm. No such luck.
In 1950 Bohm worked with Einstein at Princeton. Being intellectually curious as well as in search not only of the laws of nature but principles for existence, Bohm had earlier joined a “trade union” and briefly some communist groups. Bohm’s bomb work, and his earlier communist associations though now over, brought Bohm to the attention of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunting for so-called “unAmerican activities.”
Called to testify, Bohm asserted his constitutional “Bill of Rights” supreme law protections and refused to name anyone McCarthy could investigate. In other words, Bohm refused to “fink.” Despite those supposed rights, to remain silent, to be presumed innocent, or under the first amendment to have “freedom of speech” or “to associate,” Bohm was arrested.
As a result of mere suspicion arising from exercise of rights under the so-called “supreme law,” Bohm was suspended from his job at Princeton, became unemployable in the United States under McCarthy’s MAGA-like neo-fascism, and took a job in Brazil.
Like MAGA proposes and is doing, Bohm’s passport was confiscated and he was forced to apply for Brazilian citizenship, after which he went to England and had a long career there as a professor of physics. In 1986, McCarthyism having passed into the garbage dump of history, Bohm was able to win back his American citizenship following a long legal battle with the US government.
Bohm’s story is instructive as we experience MAGA McCarthy-like attacks on rights, such as in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the attack on “birthright citizenship” under the 14th Amendment, and the unrelenting assaults on the Constitution and the rights it supposedly “guarantees” not only American citizens, but all people dealing with the US government. As Bohm learned, such rights are ephemeral at best when witch hunting insanity strikes.
If a renowned scientist who helped America build the bomb can be stripped of his rights, his passport, his citizenship, what makes you think you are immune? George W. Bush in his assault on international law, called the Geneva Conventions “quaint,” enabling Don Trump to treat domestic law, even the Constitution, as similarly nugatory. The War on Terrorism, like the War on Drugs, was always a War on the Bill of Rights and thus a War on the Rule of Law and a war against, not for, America. Never doubt it: many of those temporarily granted government power by election detest your rights; those rights limit their power and they lust for more power, a lust only quieted by turning them out of office.
Joe Biden quipped that if “you wanted to fight the US government, you needed a nuclear weapon.” In theory David Bohm could have had a nuclear weapon, but he lost his fight before he won it. As the fever of witch hunting burned out in America, McCarthy’s terror trials faded, and Americans rose in the 1960s. We challenged America’s illegal wars, demanded civil rights and the right to vote, boycotted businesses that profited from destruction of the nation’s principles, marched in the streets, surrounded the White House, and expressed “people power.” We significantly restored the rule of law, much hated by would-be kings and McCarthy-like petty tyrants.
You may not want to acknowledge it, but your rights are dependent on the rights of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card-holding man lawfully in America with a pregnant American citizen wife, shorn from his family and disappeared into a for-profit Louisiana prison. This is because no one has rights unless everyone has rights.
America failed to defend David Bohm’s rights and the nation embarrassed itself before the world while Bohm proceeded to endure, to contribute to science and to ultimately beat the United States itself, all without a nuclear bomb, armed solely with his rights. Bohm was able to do this in part because the people rose in the 1960s and refused to bend the knee to the elites and the rulers who disdained the law and the rights of the people as “quaint.”
The law does not come down from the sky and protect you: the law is the hearts and minds of the people rising up from the streets in righteous demand against all enemies foreign and domestic. It is the age-old cry, “Let my people go!” For we are the people.
Should Mahmoud Khalil not prevail, that is precedent for you, your kids, and grandkids to be stripped of the rights many Americans suffered, bled, and even died to win.
Trump calls those heroes “suckers” and “losers.” That is an insult that is beyond redemption. Should he get on his knees and crawl for miles through broken glass proclaiming “mea culpa, mea culpa,” Mr. Trump can never be forgiven for his grotesque sacrilege — his slander against the very principles of the nation and the heroes who gave all to win them. And you, if you do not stand tall resisting every assault on the rights of anyone, you, too are blackened by association with Mr. Trump’s obscenity and abomination.
I write this on March 14, 2025, while many US Veterans march on Washington DC in defense of their oaths, in defense of their honor and that of their comrades, in defense of America.
Presidents come and presidents go; Joe McCarthys rise and fall. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…..” That is what defines an American patriot or hero, in war or peace, like Desmond Doss in war or David Bohm in peace. Fidelity to the principles of the nation, and refusal to bend the knee to any trumped up, jacked up, bloviating liar who seeks to destroy those principles is the mark of the American patriot.
For without those principles America itself will fade into the dustbin of history. Your fathers and mothers, your long-gone ancestors, fought and won against monstrous evil in the past to win your rights; surely you can stand now against the trembling bone-spur weakling purporting to be authorized to chainsaw away the nation’s principles. Rise, join the innumerable ranks of the ghosts of patriots and brothers and sisters in arms, and those who march today, who refuse Kings and Empires and march together, invincible in their right, to succor “freedom and justice for all.”