“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?

Throughout my lifetime, American politicians of both parties have been outspoken in defending the right of people to speak their minds, regardless of their positions.

Echoing the quote often misattributed to Voltaire — “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — elected officials from Lincoln to Goldwater to Reagan have pointed to our First Amendment rights of free speech as a bedrock of the American ethos.

A strong nation that believes in its principles isn’t afraid of criticism. If anything, the embrace of dissent is the steel in the spine of our nation. As the First Amendment to our Constitution says:

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

Yet now we have officials who are examining the writings of people flying into the United States and using those writings — when critical of Trump or his friends — to harass travelers or even deny them entry into the country.

Alistair Kitchen is a 33-year-old Australian writer who spent six years in New York at Columbia University getting his Master's 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.”

Kitchen told The Guardian that he’s frankly “terrified of retribution and reprisal from the US government” for speaking to the newspaper about his experience at the Los Angeles airport: It’s probably safe to assume that he’s not the only non-citizen who’s undergone this Orwellian experience; he may just be the only one brave enough to have spoken to the press about it.

This seems to fit a growing pattern.

Hasan Piker, an American who was born here, was detained for several hours when flying home into the United States this May. As The New York Times noted of the blogger and podcaster who has over 4 million followers on YouTube and Twitch:

“Hasan Piker, a popular Turkish American online streamer, said he was stopped and questioned for hours about his political beliefs by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after flying back to the United States from overseas on Sunday.”

He told the Times: “They straight-up tried to get something out of me that I think they could use to basically detain me permanently.”

Amer Maklid is an American-born attorney who represented one of the University of Michigan students protesting Israeli policy in Gaza. He was similarly detained when flying into Detroit with his wife and kids following an April vacation in the Dominican Republic.

NPR reported that when Makled tried to pass through customs, one of the agents called for assistance from the “Tactical Terrorism Response Team.” Makled told a reporter for the news network:

“My heart fell into my stomach at that point, I was so concerned and worried.”

He was released after 90 minutes of interrogation, but the question remains: when did American law enforcement officers become the thought police?

Recently Republican Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair, was the lead author of a letter titled “Free Speech is Foundational to America” expressing horror at the possibility that our government would be monitoring or trying to regulate political speech. She noted, correctly:

“The answer to speech that we disagree with should always be more speech.”

She added’: “Our founding fathers and mothers enshrined the First Amendment to protect against government officials abusing their positions of power and public trust to try to silence the voices of those with whom they disagree.”

In that, she was essentially echoing Republican President Abraham Lincoln, who famously said:

“The right to say wise things necessarily implies the right to say foolish things. The answer to foolish speech is wise speech and not force. The Republic is founded upon the faith that if the American people are permitted freely to hear foolish and wise speech, a majority will choose the wise. If that faith is not justified the Republic is based on sand.”

President Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address on January 11, 1989, noted how America’s embrace of free speech is one of the main things that drew others to us from all across the planet:

“Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the past.”

Even Mitch McConnell weighed in on the issue:

“Americans from all walks of life understand how extraordinarily special the First Amendment is. Like the Founders, they know that the free exchange of ideas and the ability to criticize their government are necessary for our democracy to survive. …

“It really doesn’t matter who you are or whether what you’re saying is popular. These rights do not exist to protect what’s popular; they exist precisely to protect what isn’t. ... Because the moment we allow ourselves to believe that some people stand outside the free-speech protections of the First Amendment, we’re all in trouble.”

Apparently, as McConnell noted, “we’re all in trouble.” Or damn close to it.

Franz Kafka’s opening line from The Trial could just as easily describe what’s happening in Trump’s America today:

“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

Travelers are being stopped at our borders — not for criminal acts, but for the crime of speaking out. A blog post criticizing Trump. A tweet expressing solidarity with Palestinian students. A comment on Facebook about fascism.

That’s all it takes now to be interrogated, turned around, and blacklisted. This isn’t national security, it’s ideological cleansing. It’s the Thought Police with badges and DHS lanyards.

Kafka also wrote: “It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”

But don’t mistake Trump’s and Noem’s stupidity for harmlessness. When agents of the state are combing through speech to decide who gets to enter the country, it’s not just foreigners who should be alarmed. It’s every one of us.

This is how authoritarianism creeps in: not with tanks, but with men in uniform who tell you that your words are a threat. That your conscience makes you into a suspect. That the border is now a checkpoint for loyalty to the king.

-Thom Hartmann

If we still believe in liberty, this can’t be allowed to stand. Silence is not safety: it’s surrender.

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