Border Agents or Thought Police? When Did Words become a Crime? -- Thom Hartmann

[erronis]

https://hartmannreport.com/p/border-agents-or-thought-police-when-039

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” — Benjamin Franklin

The Trump administration just refused to allow an Australian writer entry to America because he’d penned articles on his personal blog critical of the administration’s support for the Netanyahu government’s Gaza policies.

Whether you support or oppose those policies, this should shock every American.

George Orwell noted, in his novel 1984:

“The Thought Police are always watching. The only safe way was to think nothing, to know nothing, to believe nothing.”

Are we there yet?

. . .

Alistair Kitchen is a 33-year-old Australian writer who spent six years in New York at Columbia University getting his Masters Degree. His Substack blog, “Kitchen Counter,” explicitly called out the university and both Republican and Democratic politicians for approving of Trump arresting students based on their speech.

That, apparently, was enough of a crime to keep him out of the United States when he tried to enter the country recently for a two-week visit to friends in New York.

“Because I was a creative writing student, I took the opportunity to witness the protests and wrote about them in depth on my personal blog,” he told a reporter for The Guardian.

Concerned that his writings may offend the Trump administration, he deleted his comments before boarding the plane from Melbourne to Los Angeles, but it wasn’t enough. The hypervigilant officers, apparently worried that anybody who disagreed with Netanyahu or Trump represented a threat to America, caught him at the airport in LA, interrogated him for nine hours, and then deported him back to Oz.

“The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia.

He added:

“Clearly, they had technology in their system which linked those posts to my [visa] … a long time before I took them down. Because they knew all about the posts, and then interrogated me about the posts once I was there. … They had already prepared a file on me and already knew everything about me.”

. . .