Inhospitable

 Saw a post (actually a re-post) from a friend of mine yesterday in which someone named Mike Rothschild asked a very good question on the Magic X Twitter Thingy, and I wish I had an answer for it.

Or rather, an answer that's different from the obvious one.

The question Mr. Rothschild asks, see, alludes to the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games, both of which are scheduled to happen on American soil. Mr. Rothschild wonders what would possess any international athletes or fans from other countries to come to America for either, given that America is not really America anymore but some fear-and-loathing hellscape dreamed up by a delusional old man and his grasping billionaire henchmen.

Or to put it another way: We ain't exactly down these days with holding up lamps for the huddled masses. 

More likely the lamps are torches and come with a side of pitchforks, standard accessories for a mob driven buggy by the paranoid fantasies of the delusional old man. This is hardly an un-blazed path in our beloved nation, sadly; the arc of our history might eventually bend toward justice, but it has also bent far too often toward bigotry, ignorance and plain old jackbooted thuggery.

And so lately we've been revoking visas and green cards and disappearing their holders until hell won't have it -- do not pass go; do not collect due process. This is not happening, mind you, because the holders are all hardened criminals threatening your family and mine. Mostly they're tourists and students who came here from overseas to become doctors, scientists, researchers and the like, and who wound up being abducted in broad daylight, shoved into unmarked vans by masked men and shipped off to some gulag in El Salvador or the American south.

Their crime: Expressing opinions that displeased the delusional old man and his Regime. 

Or having the wrong tattoo. Or the wrong surname. Or signing the wrong editorial. You know, all the things that will get you in trouble in a (cough, cough) freedom-loving nation.

Still, it's gotten bad enough in this (cough, cough) freedom-loving nation that some foreign governments are warning their citizenry to stay away from us, because, well, you don't know if you'll come back. There's perhaps a bit of over-the-top performance art in these warnings, but then again perhaps not.

Which gets us back to Mr. Rothschild's question: Why would any foreign athlete or visitor want to come to a place that's become so demonstrably inhospitable to foreigners? 

The aforementioned obvious answer is they wouldn't. In fact, how many of the participants might just to decide to boycott the World Cup or Olympics altogether? 

"Oh, that's just silly, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "We've not gone so far down the paranoia rabbit hole that we'd whisk some Iranian wrestler or Venezuelan fencer off to Stalag 17 for waving his country's flag in a threatening manner. It would create a huge international incident, for one thing."

Fair point.

On the other hand, this assumes the delusional old man would behave rationally, a bet not even Vegas would take at this point. Besides, why would you think the old man and the rest of his America First crowd would care about an international incident? What in anything they've done these past ten weeks suggests they'd give a damn about what anyone else in the world thought? 

Detain some other country's athlete or fan? Why not?

If they don't like it, let 'em eat tariffs.