What is wrong with our current “administrative state” to deserve this new call for deconstruction? Deconstruction entered literary theory in the 1970s as a rigorous tool for self-critique. This, however, is not Bannon’s idea of deconstruction. 

This is a time when we must heed the lessons of the Holocaust, revere the memories of Japanese-Americans, and venerate the integrity of the Judiciary. We must understand patriotism as the relentless defense of civil liberties and as an unyielding resistance to the normalization of discrimination, numbness, cynicism, and detachment.

Despite its divisive intent, the Muslim Ban has brought people from diverse ethnic, religious, and sexual backgrounds together to reject the hate lying behind this policy.  

“I am Muslim” is now an incomplete sentence, an utterance that must be finessed with a comma and another embedded sentence to mitigate the dismaying associations of the word “Muslim."