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Great! American visa policy should be based on the principle that visa or permanent residency approvals are intended to further the interests of Americans and the United States. Removing people whose presence does not advance those goals should be normal and routine. Admittedly, I'm aware of the argument that this sort of thing just serves the interests of a particular ethnic group of Middle Eastern descent, rather than those of the United States more generally. Ultimately, I see the general principle as more important. Let's agree on this before fighting among ourselves over who exactly ought to profit the most from this way of doing things!
Keren Yarhi-Milo, the current dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. Do you think she is “advancing American interests”?
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I think you're missing the point which is that this violates her first amendment right to freedom of speech.
No, it doesn't.
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Something I can't identify sticks in my craw. I think it's the "interests of Americans and the United States" bit.
Like, what even is that? Who could possibly agree on what it is? I think by your definition we'd be deporting (non-citizen) supporters of Israel too.
Frankly, I thought coming to the US and saying whatever hot garbage you wanted to say was part of the allure. I am finding it impossible to see this issue as something that we can somehow carve out from the broader mission of liberty. I think people are just mad they can't punch college students in the face for being wankers.
Why is speech the problem anyway? Isn't the actual problem that there is criminality--vandalism, attacks, things that clearly counter school policies. Why not focus on that?
If you mean that in the United States, there should be no consequences of any kind for saying whatever you prefer to say, then I definitely disagree!
Then I would ask what is your vision of the first amendment? What principle(s) underline how we enforce it? What limitations are acceptable and how do we determine when a line has been crossed?
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The problem isn't just speech, although that is part of it. It's also the fragmented culture and supercharged social media algorithms that allow bad-faith actors to exploit our free speech norms that undermine the society that protects them in the first place. It's a constant stress test for free speech. It's not really a healthy culture anymore. It's hyper-partisan factions or individuals, often times anti-Western ones, operating freely within a cultural bubble that was designed for good-faith debate and disagreement without totally trashing our society. We do not maintain that bubble anymore. We either need to get back to maintaining that bubble by enforcing a double standard against foreign, anti-Western dissenters, or we can slide toward some form of soft authoritarianism just to keep the wheels on. We are trying both it seems:
• The Dems and the left played their totalitarianism-light method by policing speech and suppressing right leaning ideas to achieve a more egalitarian one-size fits all environment, aka equity.
• The Republicans and the right are more keen on re-establishing and applying a double standard when it comes to Westerners and Western ideals in general. They're especially this way when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
I believe both societal trajectories are authoritarian, except one prioritizes the well being of its people while the other prioritizes an idea that ultimately suppresses its people. I prefer the double standard method. It's imperfect, but it establishes a national identity and what is and is not accepted on a cultural level. I do find it highly irritating though that this double standard is applied selectively for one ethnic group and one country that isn't this one.
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We're reading a news article. One from the New York Times no less. Who's to say that there wasn't criminality at the root of this case?
The New York Times and SecureSignals, who are selecting what you see here, did not focus on that because it doesn't make a good story.
EDIT: She was charged with "obstructing governmental administration", so there was some criminality here. It was very likely against school policies, but I'm not sure if that's enough to count next to vandalism or attacks.
I was speaking broadly. The criminality is what bothers people, not the speech.
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It was not or would not be in any way illegal to deport Chung or (for example) Mohammed Khalil, but if it had been, then yes, we ought to amend the law rather than wilfully ignoring it!
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The ideal degree of lawfulness may be neither "not at all" nor "unconditionally".
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Taking that to the logical conclusion, we shouldn't be able to deport immigrants for anything whatsoever, since that would be unequal treatment that is analogous to treating the Devil unequally.
The Devil must be punished not for being the Devil, but for the crimes he's committed that break the law.
Note that illegal immigrants have already broken the law and are usually the group that is the target of deportation, not legal immigrants.
The quote doesn't really address the question of if the degree of punishment can or should differ between categorically different individuals. One could argue that the law should treat everyone equally, but in reality punishment for law is different depending on the individual e.g. children vs adults. Similarly, a citizen and a permanent resident are not equivalent, and a citizen and an illegal immigrant even less so.
But this isn't talking about a criminal thing. Congress has the right to set immigration policy and has vested discretion in the Executive on who to admit and whether to revoke that admission.
It seems punitive, sure, and maybe it is in practice, but "we have a choice which foreigners we award visas" is the the same as "we punish those we don't select".
I'm not sure what your point is. By "this" are you referring to the quote or to Chung's situation? Does the justification for deportation not have any basis on law and crime, and if there isn't is there no attempt to make it so?
Same in what aspect? If I give Kid A a candy for acing his test but don't give Kid B anything because he failed it, is that punishing Kid B?
"This" here refers to the status of non-citizens. It's not a criminal matter.
I think you are confusing "law" more generally with a subset of it which is "criminal law". And in this case, the law is not criminal in nature, and it vests in the Executive discretion to award and revoke different statuses within the US according to certain processes, none of which involve a criminal trial (like, with charges and a jury). Some of it involves different kinds of judicial review (a good thing).
Okay, I see your point. So you are just clarifying that the act of revoking a visa or permanent residency status is not a matter of criminal law.
But if a non-citizen commits a crime, and as a result gets deported due to the crime, is that not in a way punishment for committing said crime? An additional punishment granted to a non-citizen that would not be granted to a citizen?
Conceptually I absolutely don’t think about it that way, I think a non-citizen commits a crime and they get whatever the actual penalty is such as jail time. In addition, committing a crime makes them no longer admissible within the United States, and as a civil matter they have to leave.
Of course, if they then don’t leave when they were mandated to that is an additional criminal immigration offense.
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Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?
Yes, I view this as being an acceptable consequence of the policy I support.
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Sure, if you could find any. And if the Democrats got into a deporting-immigrants mood. And they had publicized their views enough. And...
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I don't think this particular type of argument is very convincing given the number of years of abuse of due process, misuse of government agencies, NGOs, the cathedral, etc etc by the woke and the left.
The left has been doing more or less this kind of thing for years (just not this specific thing because they care less about deportation).
It's just asking for unilateral disarmament at this point and worse - at a time when the winner of the war is starting to change just a bit.
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It's an asymmetric weapon; campus protests, and especially administration-tolerated or -supported campus protests, tend very much to the left.
Who said this weapon only works on campus protesters?
Well, it only works for protesters who protest in areas where the police and/or the prosecutors are instructed to be friendly to them.
Essentially, this means Blues can protest anywhere they want under this sort of ruleset, because they dont want to protest in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. Because Red voting in cities has been expelled by paramilitaries and general crime they dont have political power in those areas, despite being essential for the survival thereof.
Have a little imagination. People post all kinds of things under their real names online these days.
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How far can it stretch before it stops being "this weapon", and shifts to being a different one? If the standard is "...her[/his] presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda.", then campus protesters (or rally organizers, or similar) are pretty much the only valid targets.
The right-wing base doesn't generally shout their opinions from a soapbox in the same way, and therefore isn't as vulnerable to this.
Other than, you know, that one time in DC. And that one time in Charlottesville. And if they own a pickup truck, the bumper stickers and flags. Or the T Shirts. And the rallies.
If the most right-wing examples you can think of literally contain more left-wingers than right- (such as Charlottesville, if you include counter-protesters), then I'm comfortable calling them less vulnerable.
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Those mostly weren't foreigners and thus would not be affected by this particular weapon.
The asymmetric weapons the left had were already quite sufficient to deal with the DC and Charlottesville people.
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I think that "hindering a policy agenda of an administration" could be applied much more broadly than that.
For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.
At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process. In the past, the US was able to attract the very best immigrants. If a highly qualified immigrant is willing to forgo political expression as a condition of their residency they might as well immigrate to China -- getting deported from there as a Westerner is likely less of an ordeal than getting deported from the US is.
Yes, with the caveat is that if the reason for kicking them out is activity that would be protected under the First Amendment, the Secretary of State would have to personally approve each deportation. This is statute law; Trump isn't making stuff up here. It appears this was involved for Khalil; it doesn't look like it for Chung since they're accusing her of criminal activity, the details of which presumably they'll have to give when this gets to court. Again, deporting aliens who commit crimes is legal by statute.
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Due process for being revoked also hinges on due process that does revoke, or deny, being honored and not undermined or circumvented willfully or publicly. Otherwise, there is no due process- there is only the binding commitments by those who are able to get away with not honoring commitments against those expected to be bound by them.
If you want a demos to be publicly on board with, say, refugee acceptance, then you need refugee criteria that are not transparently redefined and gamed to facilitate acceptance of people beyond the original concept of refugees. Similarly, if you want there to be public expectation of a judicial review of immigration cases, then there needs to be a basis for there to be an expectation of timely resolution and that migrants won't simply be let go and disappear into the interior. Absent a basis for public trust that the system would work properly, there is likely to be little political traction over concerns that the system won't work properly in other ways. It may be true, but it was already true.
This is not, to be clear, an endorsement. It is, however, an observation.
What we are seeing is a consequence of policy tools that can benefit a nation greatly being changed in ways that destroy public trust and legitimacy in said tools, often because said tools were used for partisan advantage or even abuse. The partisan utilization of said tools, often at the public advocacy of members of those very institutions due to ideological capture overriding professionalism, has led them to no longer being seen as great benefits for the nation as much as benefits to the partisans at the expense of their opponents. That things can benefit the partisans and the country alike has become outweighed by the desire to defy partisan impositions and the who-whom distinction of who has the power to get away with it.
This applies to other beneficial things as well. I think higher education is a good thing. But if you want cross-partisan support of public universities that employ talented foreign professors, then you need to maintain cross-partisan support. This is harder when public universities take open and consistently partisan stances on public issues and their own employment / admission processes. It becomes even harder when said partisans attempt to overtly and covertly circumvent unambiguous legal prohibitions to their partisan preferences. The demonstrated interest in such cases is not 'let's prioritize the public interest'- it is the preservation of partisan interest.
As partisan prioritization prevails, appeals to the broader nation grow weaker. 'Think of the good to the nation from tourism,' for example, will often fall flat if it comes a few years after tourist-centers were attempting to organize boycotts of other parts of the nation over ideological differences.
It might be 'beneficial' to have high public trust in public institutions, but trust does not follow the benefit of having trust. Trust follows from the actions. The more partisan the actions, the more partisan the trust, and thus subject to revocation / reversal with partisan changes.
Yes, this does mean things will get worse before they get better. This is an observation, not an endorsement. But it will not avoid getting worse / get better faster to simply respect an imposed a partisan preference system... particularly when the partisan coalition in question is not a social majority, but has/had conflated institutional capture with social persuasion.
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This is the hard core of the debate. It's the same with treaties: on the one hand, how do you make a binding commitment when your government potentially switches between factions every four years? On the other hand, how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?
How fair is it that Biden or Starmer or Boris Johnson can import 600k immigrants in a program that has a guaranteed citizenship at the end of it and then say, "Har har, it benefits the nation that we can make binding commitments about permanent residence, suck it."
Don't get me wrong, your point is legitimate, which is what makes it complicated. I will go so far to say that I think it is a genuine flaw in democracy as a system, which only survived as long as it did because power was firmly reserved to an elite who tended to agree, and who were careful about issues of genuine contention.
With legislative supermajorities. If you can get 51% agreement on something, good for you, but there's no reason to expect that to bind others once a slight shift of political winds leaves you at 49%. But if you can get 60% (or 67%?)? That might be something worth hanging on to for longer, if it's not so soundly refuted that support drops to 40% (or 33%).
Why? If you have supermajority agreement on something, you don’t need a special mechanism to protect it - no government has attempted to legalise murder or indentured servitude for small children.
If you don’t, if it falls beneath 50%, why should the fact that 60% of people thought policy X was a good idea 10 years ago prevent it from being dropped when those people change their minds?
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The justification doesn't require it only apply to campus protesters, though. One could easily imagine a Dem deporting Jordan Peterson and other non-citizens for "interfering with foreign policy"
Deporting Jordan Peterson would be a lot less harsh than what happened to him. But yes, Democrats could do something with it; it's an asymmetric weapon but not an utterly one-sided one.
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I'm personally willing to bite the bullet and say that I think foreign nationals should generally avoid making themselves part of American politics.
Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.
(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)
Well, so don’t go to big protests when you’re not a citizen, problem solved. It’s not even a permanent thing, just until you are granted us citizenship. It’s not asking them to take sides, to the contrary, it’s asking them to not take sides. Which I think is reasonable because you’re not a citizen, can’t vote and have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.
But they kinda do have a stake, no?
If the green-card holders and legal residents (who have never needed to fear deportation for speech acts--to the best of my knowledge) knew Trump was going to go after them, then they would have a very real stake in the outcome of the political process.
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I would argue that foreigners have very much a stake in the political process -- they are the ones getting deported, or bombed for that matter. Having no say is different from having no stake.
Also, I do not think that "don't go to big protests" makes a good Schelling fence. There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny. So what you end up with is that foreigners in the US should behave like people in China. Only it is even worse because with the CCP you at least know beforehand what will likely piss them off, and you can only guess if the next administration will kick you out for having owned a cybertruck, or a bluesky account or being a member of the German AfD or whatever.
If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.
Which administration was it who jailed an American citizen (to the applause of the Serious People Who Worry About Such Things) for sending out a "text to vote" meme? A Man for All Seasons was quoted elsethread; the fact is, the laws have ALREADY been knocked down, and now the Devil has turned tail.
False statements of fact have always enjoyed reduced 1st amendment protection. Black-letter law says that deliberately sharing false information about voting procedures is a crime. There is no "it was a meme" exception in the law, and there shouldn't be.
This was a fairly simple case of "Don't do the crime if you won't do the time."
Free speech doesn't protect YOU PEOPLE because of reasons, but it's a terrible precedent if YOUR GUY does something that impacts OUR free speech. Heard it before. But, as I said, the Devil has now turned tail.
Black letter law -- constitutional, thus higher than the one used -- says "Congress shall make no law ...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". There's no exception for "sharing false information about voting procedures" in there, nor should there be. This is exactly a case of someone being convicted for a tweet the regime found to be Not Funny.
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Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers. They were entirely open about this, see “The Emerging Democratic Majority” or Tony Blair’s staffer remarking that the purpose of their immigration policy was to render British conservatism “irrelevant and out of date”.
I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.
At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.
If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?
If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?
(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)
I hear both sides out, then answer the case on its merits.
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7:4 seems pretty solid
That rate is the same as Hispanics, but unlike Hispanics the rates for Asians haven't budged:
No movement for decades reads as solid to me. Asians are more solidly Democrat than any race but Black. They are the second-most Democrat race.
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In both cases, I would express sympathy and deflect, unless there were strong cofounding factors. I wouldn't feel like it was my place to say more.
If I were asked, specifically, for my opinion then I would give it but I don't think this can be applied to the nation except perhaps for elections.
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I thought they are? Perhaps not as ridiculously overwhelmingly left as, say, African-Americans, but still solidly left.
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Does “making themselves part of American politics” mean “engaging in any visible form of political expression whatsoever”?
We can nitpick on what we mean by “visible”, but at the end of the day, that’s really not a high bar to meet. The only visible form of political expression I ever engaged in was anonymous posting on SSC/TheMotte. Most of my friends don’t do even that.
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I'm not sure exactly where the line is, but I think it stops well short of organizing building occupations like Mahmoud did. I don't really care what their cause is, foreigners that organize the occupation of university buildings should be deported.
At this time, it's not clear what exactly this girl did; it seems likely to be much closer to any reasonable line than the Mahmoud example. The administration testing where the line is does concern me.
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I entirely agree with this, but these people aren't being deported on behalf of the interests of the United States, they are being deported on behalf of the interests of Israel and the Jewish lobby. If you remember, it was only a few years ago mass riots and protests were permitted - under the Trump administration - against White Amerikkka. But once it's Israel being criticized it's an entirely different story.
Did you read the rest of my comment? Let's agree on the absolute bare minimum first, then improve things from there.
I mean putting a disclaimer that you are going to ignore the obvious valid counter to your argument doesn't really work.
College campuses have been riddled with death to America and racism towards whites for ages. It's not until they start shouting death to Israel that the government takes action. It's clearly has nothing to do with furthering American interests and we should point this out.
My point, to be clear, is that that isn't a counter-argument. But please do feel free to point that out; it doesn't offend me at all.
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They've been shouting "death to Israel" for a while too; elite colleges being anti-zionist and "anti-colonial" isn't some new development.
Moreover, the anti-white attitudes haven't recently coalesced into the types of encampments, campus takeovers, and outright militancy that the recent Gaza demonstrations have. Do you really think that the folks in the Trump administration would have refused to go after Columbia if it had "just" been anti-white or anti-Christian encampments and campus takeovers? They're pulling funding from schools for permitting single transgender athletes to compete outside their biological sex; I'm pretty sure they'd jump at the chance to take any plausible reason to strike at the universities.
Relatedly, Texas A&M had its chancellor replaced with a partisan republican, very plausibly over drag queensz
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Humiliating leftists for anti-Jewish bigotry stings and leaves them dumbfounded. Whereas doing this for anti-white bigotry gets them all riled up to rally against "white supremacy".
In other words lets defend the interests of AIPAC and the ADL while allowing free speech for attacking white people. Funny how cancel culture was so problematic for republicans until it went against AIPAC interests.
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... Yes? I said I agree with you on the general principle we should revoke visas or permanent residency, IMO even revoke citizenship, of people who subvert the United States on behalf of foreign interests. So now we can move on to that question, right, after acknowledging we agree on the principle?
How exactly does protesting the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Gaza threaten the United States?
Why should Americans care about the cycle of violence in the Middle East? Their lives are of no relevance to those who reject banal Christian platitudes about the brotherhood of man or the universal value of human life, which I know you don’t share. Dispense with the fake tears for the Arabs; if they were being killed by someone other than the Jews you wouldn’t care at all for their suffering, even performatively.
Americans should care about it because they've been taught that national socialists declaring themselves the master race and committing genocide is bad, actually, and both their personal and political will ought to be bent/pulled forcibly toward the end of preventing such an occurrence. Seems to me that per the national mythos Americans ought to be ferociously outraged about people who believe themselves to be "god's chosen" ethnically cleansing their hated neighbors for Lebensraum.
The person I’m replying to thinks that mythos is perhaps the greatest fraud and/or mistake of the 20th century.
All of this rhetorical tap-dancing of course boiling down to the idea that SS believes that Zionists ought to be held to account for their vicious criticism of post-Weimar German behavior and their simultaneous total embrace of it while you believe they should never answer to anyone for anything.
No, all of this is rhetorical tap-dancing around the fact that he cries fake tears for Arabs while dreaming of a white Israel that guards against his enemies more zealously than Israel does. Almost all dissident right criticism of Israeli conduct in Gaza is envy, it's that it's "unfair". It's not principled criticism of settler colonialism (see their views on Rhodesia and South Africa).
This is a monumentally dumb argument. It's the literal inverse to "white nationalists can't complain about immigration because they immigrated to non-white territories en masse and took many of them over". If someone says mass immigration of Europeans to Rhodesia was good, but mass immigration of Somalis to Sweden is bad, should they be similarly "held to account"? 'Nooo, you can't possibly justify settlers fighting a war against barbarians who want to rape and kill them unless you ALSO justify them being expropriated and slaughtered in the land where they previously lived for a thousand years, which also led many of the survivors to flee to that very place'. Don't think so.
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They're of no relevance until an Arab enraged at unconditional American support for their enemies flies a plane into a building, kills over a thousand Americans and provokes a multi-decade forever war
The Anglo-American presence in and involvement with the house of Saud predates Israel.
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The US oil and global trade interests are going to keep us involved in the region and they’re going to do so in a way that angers the most terrorist-y Muslims. That can’t actually be stopped.
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That was because of US presence in Saudi Arabia.
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