{"id":21470,"date":"2025-03-31T15:13:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-31T19:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21470"},"modified":"2025-03-31T22:02:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T02:02:36","slug":"first-they-came-for-the-op-ed-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/31\/first-they-came-for-the-op-ed-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, March 31, 2025, Mises Institute<\/p>\n

On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk\u2014who was wearing a hajib\u2014is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University.<\/p>\n

She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal prison system. The Trump administration ignored a federal court order and took Ozturk from Massachusetts to Louisiana federal detention facilities.<\/p>\n

But the Trump administration knew Ozturk had criticized the government of Israel a year earlier, enough to seal her doom according to the latest iron-fisted political correctness dictates. She co-authored one piece for the<\/a> Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university\u2019s refusal to divest from Israel despite \u201ccredible accusations of\u2026. indiscriminate slaughter\u00a0of Palestinian civilians and plausible\u00a0genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson justified the takedown: \u201cDHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for\u00a0visa issuance<\/a> to be terminated.\u201d Ozturk never mentioned Hamas in her op-ed. Ozturk has not been linked to any campus protests at Tufts or elsewhere. The feds have failed to reveal any evidence Ozturk supports Hamas. She simply co-wrote an opinion piece. As the New York Post<\/em> noted on Friday, DHS \u201calleged that Ozturk was a supporter of Hamas but has yet to provide any evidence<\/a> to that effect.\u201d On Friday evening, federal judge Denise Casper blocked the Trump administration from deporting Ozturk and<\/a> ordered the administration to respond by Tuesday to Ozturk\u2019s legal challenge (now aided by the ACLU) to her detention.<\/p>\n

The video of the arrest spurred tidal waves of online cheering. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the case while traveling in Guyana, he justified revoking Ozturk\u2019s visa:<\/p>\n

\n

If you apply for a visa\u2026 and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings, and cause chaos\u2014we\u2019re not giving you that visa.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Rubio added: \u201cIt\u2019s crazy\u2014stupid, even\u2014for any country to let people in who say, \u2018I\u2019m going to your universities to riot, take over libraries, and harass people.\u2019 We gave you a visa to study and earn a degree\u2014not to become a social activist tearing up our campuses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rubio promised: \u201cEvery time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is criticizing a foreign government now considered proof of lunacy in the White House? Does the Trump administration consider op-eds to be a weapon of mass destruction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The First Amendment doesn\u2019t specify that it only applies to people that the White House approves. Former ICE Chief of Staff, Deborah Fleischaker, slammed the targeting of Ozturk as \u201ca First Amendment violation. ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the\u00a0basis of enforcement action<\/a>. That\u2019s not why you enforce.\u201d<\/p>\n

Has the Trump administration gone full Nixon barely two months after the inauguration?<\/strong> In 1973, Nixon White House aide, Tom Charles Huston, lamented in congressional testimony the tendency of the FBI \u201cto move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid\u00a0with the picket sign<\/a> to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Nixon administration\u2019s systemic paranoia led it to launch preemptive attacks on its suspected opposition<\/strong>, from secretly searching psychiatrists\u2019 ofAshcfices to bugging the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate. Nixon\u2019s landslide victory in 1972 did not save him from the exposure of the cover-up of White House crimes.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration is demanding that universities provide the feds with details on the\u00a0 \u201cnational origin\/ethnicity\/shared<\/a> ancestry\u201d of students who were involved in protests that were allegedly antisemitic. Is the Trump administration going to require colleges to conduct DNA tests to determine the precise amount of Arabic, Turkish, or Iranian pedigree of suspects? Lawyers suggested that the \u201clist was meant as a tip sheet that the administration might use to target or deport foreign students who participated in protests,\u201d according to the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>. One lawyer predicted a \u201cwitch hunt\u201d would result from such lists.<\/p>\n

Trump policymakers have a simple solution to end the protests: prohibit some universities \u201cfrom having any foreign students if it decides too many are \u2018pro-Hamas,\u2019\u201d according to senior\u00a0Justice<\/a> and State Department officials. One senior Justice Department official told\u00a0Axios<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

What you\u2019re going to see in the not-too-distant future is the universities that we can show that we\u2019re not doing anything to stop these demonstrations in support of Hamas \u2014 or encouraged enrollment by activists \u2014\u00a0 we can stop approving student visas for them, and they can no longer admit [any] foreign students.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

American history demonstrates that persecution that starts with foreigners often snowballs into targeting American citizens<\/strong>. Three months after the 9\/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed in congressional testimony: \u201cTo those who scare peace-loving people\u00a0with phantoms of lost liberty<\/a>, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and\u2026give ammunition to America\u2019s enemies.\u201d In other words, critics were traitors\u2014regardless of how many civil liberties Ashcroft actually destroyed. And the definition of pernicious speech continually expanded. In 2004, former New York City Police\u00a0Commissioner Bernie Kerik<\/a>, stumping for President George W. Bush\u2019s reelection campaign, told audiences: \u201cPolitical criticism is our enemy\u2019s best friend.\u201d<\/p>\n

To subvert freedom of speech after 9\/11, it wasn\u2019t necessary for the feds to formally nullify the First Amendment<\/strong>. One of the nation\u2019s most prominent pundits, Michael Kinsley, admitted in 2002 that he had been listening to his \u201cinner Ashcroft\u201d: \u201cAs a writer and editor, I have been censoring myself and others quite a bit since September 11.\u201d Kinsley conceded that sometimes it was \u201csimple cowardice\u201d that sparked the censorship. I experienced plenty of such\u00a0cowardice from editors after 9\/11<\/a> and long beyond.<\/p>\n

The Ozturk case provides an opportunity to clarify the meaning of free speech in American life.<\/strong> \u00a0Five years ago, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, some progressive prosecutors acted as if looting and burning were simply free speech on amphetamines. \u00a0The legal impunity that protestors received helped spur widespread carnage and billions of dollars of property damage.<\/p>\n

Few Americans would object to deporting foreign students who destroy property or physically assault other people. But Ozturk was merely guilty of using words that are detested by the current administration. Are Trump\u2019s policymakers using the same \u201cguilt by association\u201d standard the Biden administration used to persecute anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021? Biden\u2019s Justice Department acted like anyone who merely \u201cparaded without a permit\u201d near the Capitol that day was guilty of insurrection and deserved a harsh prison sentence. Is any criticism of Israeli policy\u00a0 now the legal and moral equivalent of insurrection?<\/p>\n

More than 30 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter on Thursday to Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding information on the case in which the video \u201clooked like a kidnapping<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0But what if the Trump administration believes itself entitled to kidnap anyone who espouses an idea it disapproves? And what will be the next opinion to sanctify broad daylight federal kidnappings?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers by James Bovard, March 31, 2025, Mises Institute On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk\u2014who was wearing a hajib\u2014is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University. She was abducted and vanished into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7915,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,1291,4510,4507,292,4508,1654,4512,4509,245,4504,4506,4511,708,4505,291],"class_list":["post-21470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ashcroft","tag-dhs","tag-fleischaker","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hajib","tag-ice","tag-kristi-noem","tag-marco-rubio","tag-nixon","tag-ozturk","tag-palestinian","tag-tm-charles-huston","tag-trump","tag-tufts","tag-watergate"],"yoast_head":"\nFirst They Came for the Op-Ed Writers - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Trump administration targeting of op-ed writers is a very bad omen\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/31\/first-they-came-for-the-op-ed-writers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21470"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21472,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21470\/revisions\/21472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}