America used to fire the world’s imagination – but now the cultural conversation is being silenced | Van Badham

Not only are TV-watching, book-reading, show-going, music-listening travellers declining to visit the US, we have started to cease to imagine it

This week, fresh data revealed the United States has seen its biggest drop in Australian tourists since Covid. It's hardly surprising. Innocent people are being snatched by authorities from American streets. Citizens of foreign countries are being stopped, shackled and detained. The EU is now sending its emissaries with burner phones, lest personal social media posts critical of President Trump be discovered by border agents and ... who knows what happens next? Forcible relocation to a Salvadorian supermax prison, seemingly without chance of release, is suddenly not out of the question.

It all seems like something from Hollywood dystopia; the V series, maybe. Or Escape from New York. It's pretty much the plot line of the first season of Andor - which I strongly recommend that everyone watch before the Trump regime clocks what that show is advising and it vanishes faster than a copy of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl from an American high school library.