If we know one thing, it’s that under the watchful eyes of Donald Trump and Secretary Pete “Obliterated” Hegseth and their Little Bunker Busters That (Almost) Could, all wars are hereby forever ended, thank you for your attention to this matter, as soon as all these motherfuckers will please stop shooting at each other, PIPER NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Trump VERY TOUCHY About His Little Bunker Busters’ Inability To Penetrate
Also, the Homeland is now safe, because of Trump’s Stephen Miller ICE Gestapo Baby-Trafficking Mommy-Kidnapping Deportation Machine. That’ll teach immigrants to come here illegally and raise three honorable Marines who fight to defend this country!
There was one final step, though, to keep us all protected, and it was to eliminate memes like the one above, and this one below, which really hurt JD Vance’s feelings.
Perhaps this one?
OK, they’re hurtful, OK? And when Americans are sharing memes like those or like this one
Or this one
Or these
Yes, when Americans share memes like these, it is very HURTS JD VANCE’S FEELINGS, which distracts the vice president from his very important job of setting up Bluesky accounts to troll people and immediately becoming the most blocked person on the app, and his other very important job of standing next to people with power and waiting for them to go take a shit so he can advance to his next step in life, by “merit.”
Anyway, the point is that the JD Vance memes are a national security threat, just like, according to Stephen Miller, people whose skin is darker than the shade of “long-dead translucent” he sports are a national security threat. But don’t worry, because the patriotic Americans at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) got ‘em!
No literally, they found the memes. They were on this guy’s phone. And they said GO BACK TO NORWAY, HURTFUL MEMES!
The general story goes like this: Mads Mikkelsen, a 21-year-old traveler from Norway — yes that is really his name — says he was detained at the Newark airport, for God knows what ostensible reason. “I felt prejudiced, suspected, and simply humiliated even then, in front of many other people at the airport. They took me to a room with several armed guards, where I had to hand over my shoes, mobile phone, and backpack,” said Mikkelsen.
“They asked direct questions about drug smuggling, terrorist plans and right-wing extremism, completely without reason. They demanded full information about everyone I was going to meet in the US, including name, address, phone number, and what they did for work,” said Mikkelsen.
And then, after threatening him with fines if he didn’t give them the password of his phone, they found the meme at the very top of this post, of Old Baldy McCouchfucky McAllegedly. Also a picture of Mikkelsen holding a wooden pipe. The very serious officers were reportedly concerned about both pictures.
At which point they STRIP-SEARCHED HIM, TOOK BLOOD SAMPLES, AND SENT HIM BACK TO NORWAY.
You know, like goddamned normal people with real jobs do.
Now here’s the thing: CBP says we’re all being crazy, and that Mikkelsen was denied entry into the United States because of “admitted drug use.” Do they clarify this? Are they saying he was doing drugs right then? Are they talking about that picture of a pipe on his phone, because buddy, let us tell you how many Americans have smoked on the pipe at some point historically! Also let us tell you how many travelers are a threat because they have smoked on the pipe at some point historically! (If CBP doesn’t have a calculator handy, the answers to the two previous sentences are “LOL” and “you fucking dorks.”)
Yeah fuck off.
Now back to the JD Vance meme that upset the border people so much, which was already so popular it was on the phones of Norwegian travelers named Mads Mikkelsen. Because of this little incident, and because of something called the Streisand Effect, that meme is now the most famous meme in the world. It was held up in Ireland’s Dáil today by Labour leader Ivana Bacik. God’s very angels are posting it on all the bulletin boards in Heaven as reminders not to let that guy in. Reminder, it looks like this:
At least one tweet has suggested that if that meme denies you entry to the United States, you may lift the curse by subsequently posting a different one:
Seems like science to us!
Anyway, it’s everywhere, the entire internet is sharing it all over again. Mission accomplished, nerds!
Now, do you notice how we gave literally zero credence to CBP’s statement that “SHUT UP, WE DID NOT DENY THAT TOTALLY NORMAL NORWEGIAN GUY ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES BECAUSE OF A JD VANCE MEME, IT’S NOT LIKE WE’RE WEIRD OR SOMETHING,” and their insistence they instead denied him entry because “drugs”?
That is because every Trump administration official at all times should be assumed to be lying, number one.
Also number two, Mikkelsen has responded to CBP and Homeland Security’s denials, and his response is oh fuck off. He said he told the agents truthfully that he’d done the devil reefer, in Germany and New Mexico, where it was legal, and it didn’t seem like any big deal in the interview.
Then, he says, after he was denied entry to the US, he got a written explanation, which was completely full of shit and wrong information, like that he had a Spanish passport and that he had a pipe with him. He’s never been to Spain, he says, and nope, no pipe except the one in that picture they found. The form said he was coming to the US to visit family, and again that’s a nope. It was all just completely bullshit.
Here’s what Mikkelsen thinks happened here:
Mikkelsen believes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has a deportation quota, and that he may have been randomly selected.
– As a person traveling alone, I was chosen and sent back.
Ta-da. Stephen Miller is constipated all over the White House demanding ICE raid Home Depots to steal humans. Mikkelsen’s theory would go along with that — that ICE better be sending a certain number of people home who are trying to get in to the US! And border agents are just maybe totally fucking phoning in the fulfillment of that edict.
We said there were two reasons so far that we didn’t believe CBP: 1) they’re liars and 2) Mikkelsen says they’re full of shit.
The third is that we have seen this “drugs” excuse from Trump’s weird creeper border enforcers very recently.
Please read the account of Australian reporter Alistair Kitchen in The New Yorker if you haven’t, because there’s a lot of similar stupid that went on there.
In that case, when Kitchen flew from Melbourne to Los Angeles, the CBP officer was forthright about why he was yanked aside immediately upon deplaning: “It’s because of what you wrote online about the protests at Columbia University.”
Because FIRST AMENDMENT and FREE PRESS are ILLEGAL in the LAND OF THE FREE!
(The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)
Yuh huh, sure, fuckin’ liars.
But yes, Kitchen had written about the Columbia protests on his Substack while he was there working on his MFA. He wrote things about them to literally hundreds of readers, as he told Chris Hayes the other night on MSNBC. (He also took his posts down before the trip, out of an abundance of precaution. Yes, again, he took down his Substack posts about the Columbia protests, which had been read by literally hundreds of people, far in advance of that day’s meeting. But the US government had already read them! Because that’s an important job!)
To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently.
You know what? While we are absolutely certain that Alistair Kitchen or any random fucking person anywhere probably has more and better insights into foreign affairs than, say, Secretary Shitfaced or JD Vance or Donald Trump, this is all really fucking weird.
So they interrogated him on the people he “worked with” (other Australian Substackers maybe?) and on Bibi’s opportunities for growth, all the usual conversations you have in Customs. They took his phone.
Here’s how the border officer made the whole thing even weirder, as if that’s possible. After Kitchen explained in extremely pragmatic terms how he felt about the Israel/Palestine conflict, the officer scampered away to download his phone, and after a long time came back and demanded Kitchen unlock the “Hidden” folder of his personal pics.
Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.
Just what the fuck is wrong with this administration and with these fucking goons?
In the end, after another officer said, “God, dude, what do you have on your phone? This normally takes five minutes,” which Kitchen interpreted as another attempt at intimidation, the original officer came back, excited that he had found the bullshit reason they were going to use for not letting him into the US. Surprise, it was drugs.
Long block quote because fuuuuuuuuuck:
When Martinez finally came out, he was bouncing toward me excitedly, like a kid with a lollipop. He said that they had found evidence of drug use on my phone. Did I realize that I had failed to acknowledge a history of drug use on my ESTA?
I moved, in seconds, from a desire to be amiable to a desire not to be found lying. In the gray zone between the arrival gate and passport control you are beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. You have fewer protections than a criminal metres away, inside the border. People with legal standing are much harder, it turns out, to abuse. In the C.B.P. interrogation room, I had not quite fallen to the level of statelessness, but I had fallen below the criminal.
Were I not fatigued from a long flight and from a long interrogation, and were I not stressed and scared, I would have recalled that my phone does not have clear evidence of drug use. A better version of me, the version I like to think I am, would have called bullshit on this bluff. But at that moment I could not account for every single one of the four thousand-odd photos on my phone. I imagined photographs that do not exist, messages that do not exist, proving that I was some sort of drug kingpin. So I admitted that I had done drugs in the past—in other countries as well as in the U.S., where I had bought THC gummies at a dispensary in New York.
Marijuana is legal in New York, but it is not legal federally, and so it seems that, in the eyes of C.B.P., I had broken federal law for purchasing legal weed in New York, and then perhaps again by failing to declare it on my ESTA. Martinez, who seemed now to be bubbling over with excitement, went back to his supervisor to, in his words, “pitch this.” When he came back, he told me I would be put on the next flight back to Australia.
Stephen Miller quota achieved!
Then they manhandled him in a back room — “Martinez made sure that I carried no weaponry between my penis and my scrotum,” OK, Martinez you fuckin’ perv — and took his shoelaces and his drawstring and … Kitchen’s detention continued! There was even an attempt at a second interview, after he was already being deported, after he had been sexually violated more than once by CBP, after everything.
And it was insane. But they found in the second interview that Martinez had fucked up his own note-taking about the interview. Finally they sent Kitchen back to Australia.
Just read the whole thing.
Point is: These stories are fucking sick and horrifying and a testament to why no decent human being would ever want to visit this once-great nation’s shores again as long as the MAGA fascists are in power. Obviously. How can we pretend to be a nation anyone would aspire to visit, much less move to?
But also, how are we supposed to pretend our fascists are serious people? How are we supposed to look at the world with a straight face?
It’s only going to get more clownfucking stupid and embarrassing from here, we reckon.
OPEN THREAD.
[Nordlys / New Yorker]
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