The Problem Isn’t Whether The JD Vance Meme Story Is True—It’s That It’s So Believable After Everything The Trump Regime Has Done

Much of what we've written about regarding the Trump regime's nonsensical and ridiculous immigration policies have focused on how they're grabbing people off the streets, or disappearing them to random foreign gulags without due process. But we've also talked about the absolute insanity of US immigration policy as it pertains to foreigners traveling to the US on visas. And the most telling thing about recent stories involving tourists being denied entry to the US? Nobody's surprised by them anymore-even when they involve utterly ridiculous reasons like having a satirical meme on your phone.

We've mentioned how the US is now scanning the social media of anyone who wants to visit, and it's leading to plenty of ridiculous stories that seem likely to cause plenty of foreign tourists to just stay the fuck away.

In the past two weeks, two such stories have made a fair bit of news. First, Aussie writer and former Columbia student Alistair Kitchen told a story of flying from Melbourne to Los Angeles (for a layover before traveling on to New York to visit friends) where he was detained for 12 hours, pressured into revealing his phone contents, and then being shipped back to Australia... because way back when, he had written an article about Palestinian protests at Columbia.

He wrote about the ordeal in the New Yorker, and there are plenty of crazy bits, with the CBP people demanding he unlock a folder on his phone and then scrolling through his dick pics with him being perhaps the craziest part:

He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I'd deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I'd kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this-the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.

That fear was confirmed. 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.

Come to America! Land of the free! Where we detain you for no reason at the border to yell at you about your reporting (free press!), force you to reveal your secrets (no general warrants!), and gleefully scroll through your dick pics together (cruel and unusual).

As Kitchen notes, they had planned to block him from entering all along. While he had done a cursory cleanup" of his social media before flying to the US, they apparently already had everything they needed.

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.

Then began the first interview." The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. 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. (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.)

Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me the information" about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I worked with."

Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn't work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.

That story got some attention, but not nearly the global attention that the story of a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who had a somewhat similar experience. In his telling, he was denied entry due to a JD Vance meme on his mobile phone.

Mikkelsen claims that immigration officials stopped him for questioning and quizzed him about drug trafficking, terrorist plots, and right-wing extremism," all of which he said was totally without reason." He says he was placed in a holding cell.

They took me to a room with several armed guards, where I had to hand over my shoes, mobile phone, and backpack," he told Nordlys.

Next, Mikkelsen claims that officials threatened to imprison him or fine him $5,000 if he did not grant them access to his phone, so he did. He said that is when agents found a meme on his device that showed the vice president's face-digitally altered to make him chubbier, bald, and cartoonish-that became popular after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Oval Office in February. He claimed they also signaled disapproval to a photo of him with a homemade wooden pipe.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security has denied that he was denied entry for the meme, saying it was actually because he had admitted to past drug use (apparently he admitted to having marijuana twice: once in New Mexico and once in Germany, though he pointed out it was legal in both places - though in New Mexico while it's legal at the state level, it's still (stupidly) illegal at the federal level):

That said, the meme (which had already gone semi-viral back in February) suddenly started appearing all over the place, with plenty of people (especially across Europe) using the meme and Mikkelsen's story to mock both JD Vance and American immigration/visa policies.

It even went all the way up to the Irish legislature, where a politician, Ivana Bacik, held up the meme of JD Vance during questions on legislation.

Here's the thing that should terrify anyone who gives a shit about America's global reputation: when told that a tourist was denied entry over a JD Vance meme, nobody's first reaction was that's obviously fake." Instead, people across the globe nodded and thought yeah, that tracks." The fact that this story is completely believable is a damning indictment of where US immigration policy has gone. That's not the kind of shit the US is supposed to do, and there's no way that this isn't damaging US tourism as these stories spread far and wide.

The thing is, as absurd as it is that Mikkelsen was turned away for either the meme or smoking a little pot, as with the Australian writer, Kitchen, the truly horrifying bit was in how they treated Mikkelsen. Lots of people are laughing about the JD Vance meme bit, but nothing Mikkelsen did could possibly deserve this kind of treatment.

He alleges that he was then strip-searched, fingerprinted, had blood samples taken, and was held for five hours before being put on a flight back to Norway.

Strip searched? Blood samples? What the fuck?

Whether Mikkelsen was actually bounced for the meme or the pot is beside the point. The real story is that when the world hears American border agents detained a tourist over a satirical image of the Vice President," their response isn't disbelief-it's dark laughter and relief that they're not planning any trips to the US anytime soon.

That's not the brand of a free society. That's the brand of an authoritarian state where mocking the leadership gets you disappeared. And if that doesn't embarrass the shit out of anyone with even a passing familiarity with what America used to claim to stand for, then we're already further gone than these stories suggest.