Daily Archives: 28 July 2026

Denying Visas

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When a person, whether private or a government official, applies for a visa to come into the United States, the fact of his application clearly means he has not entered our nation; he’s still outside of it.

That brings up Chief Judge (DC District) James Boasberg’s ruling regarding the administration’s denial of visas to foreign officials and other foreign nationals considered responsible for or complicit in suppressing American free speech.

Boasberg ruled that the administration’s reason constituted viewpoint discrimination and so was a First Amendment violation of the applicants’ free speech rights. He dressed up his opinion with this:

The policy [to deny visas to those considered responsible for or complicit in suppressing American free speech], at its core, does not burden all speech about platforms, all research into content moderation, or all advocacy about online harms. It presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify.

The problem with Boasberg’s position is that those folks, being outside our nation, have no US constitutional (or any statutory) rights whatsoever. His argument is, thus, nothing more than a cynically offered non sequitur.

Boasberg’s rationalization is all too typical of the hysterically anti-Trump bias in his rulings.

“Socialism’s Slippery Definitions”

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The subheadline makes it plain:

The hard left is whatever it needs to be at the moment.

That’s certainly the case for the Left and for far too many others. The even plainer fact, though, is that there’s nothing slippery about American English dictionary and textbooks written in American English definitions of socialism. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production—government ownership of an economy’s businesses—from which flows government determination of what to produce, allocation of that output, and determination of the wages involved. All because, hold socialists, government knows better than any of us how to determine what to produce, how to allocate that output, and how to determine the wages involved.

All of the rest, those slippery definitions, are simply taken from the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary. Those slippery definitions, too, are little more than a variety of labels used to obscure. Democratic socialism, social democracy, even communism (itself misused in such discussions) are used only to create artificial definitions, as Matthew Hennessey noted in his article at the link, to suit the moment.

It’s unfortunate that our education systems, up through graduate school, fail to make clear which of those competing definitions is the accurate one.

It’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our economy and so to our national security, that one of our political parties actively and enthusiastically trades on those false definitions of the Newspeak Dictionary in its own push to inflict socialism, that government control of the engines of our economy, on our nation.