What Bullshit? Speech that we don’t like? Free speech isn’t for the speach we like. It’s for the speech we think should be illegal. I get it that we let millions into the country under Biden. Enough of them turned out to be trouble that we regret that choice. Next, you can yank the immigrant out of the old country. Good luck scrubbing the old country’s baggage from their soul. Culture sticks like tar—generational grudges, tribal beefs, the kind of hate that doesn’t fade with a green card. Last the whole fantasy that we can solve an immigrant’s troubles by gifting him our first world culture and lifestyle? Kinda dumb.
The immigrants that are here and trouble should go. I get that. It’s a different demand that bugs me. Rubio and the State Department demanded that H-1B and H-4 visa holders make their social media public. I asked Grok about the deets on the recent State Department decision on visa holders and their social media and it said:
U.S. State Department Imposes Visa Bans on Religious Freedom Violators, Targets Nigeria Persecution
The part that really lit the fuse? The State Department quietly dropped a bombshell this week that’s got Big Tech and the open-borders crowd sweating: starting December 15, 2025, every single H-1B and H-4 visa applicant (that’s the skilled-worker program Indians and Chinese companies hoover up by the tens of thousands) has to flip all their social media profiles to “public” so consular officers can scroll through years of posts, likes, and DMs like it’s a national-security Tinder swipe. Oh, and there’s a special red flag for anyone who’s ever worked in “misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance, or online safety” – basically, if you’ve ever been a trust-and-safety drone at Meta, Google, or any censorship shop, good luck getting that visa stamp.
“There Outa Be a Law! So we made one. Marco Rubio’s State Department declared that starting December 15, 2025, every single H-1B and H-4 visa applicant has to flip all their social media profiles to “public” so consular officers can scroll through years of posts, likes, and DMs like it’s a national-security Tinder swipe.
But, “This bullshit should be illegal!” Ok. Again, what bullshit should be illegal? Speech we don’t like? I have a problem with that. Big one. Because the State Department this week, drops two “laws” that claim “transparency!” while building a backdoor for the exact censorship creep we fear. Call it the Trump Doctrine of Digital Purity Tests: one aimed at Nigerian machete-wielders (fair play), the other at every coder from Bangalore dreaming of Silicon Valley (hello, dystopia).
A Cada Ley, Su Trampa
Fatta la legge, trovato l’inganno — the second the social-media visa rule drops, the fake accounts and data-scrubbers are already in business. Watch what happens December 15th:
- Half the H-1B applicants will just create brand-new, squeaky-clean “visa profiles” with zero history and hand those over.
- The other half will pay some Bangalore or Shenzhen kid $200 to nuke ten years of posts, likes, and group memberships.
- The really cautious ones will go full analog: lock everything private, dare the consulate to prove it ever existed, and claim “I don’t use social media” with a straight face while their real accounts live on under cousin Rajesh’s login.
The State Department thinks it’s forcing transparency. In reality it just created a brand-new cottage industry of digital janitors, fake accounts, and VPN tricks. Same thing that happened when they demanded social-media handles on DS-160 forms in 2019: applicants shrugged, made burner Instagram pages named “JohnSmith_Professional_1987,” posted three stock photos of mountains, and called it a day.
Cheating is Cheaper
People obey because the pain of compliance is still cheaper than the pain of defiance. The moment scrubbing ten years of Instagram likes, hiring a data-eraser in Hyderabad, or just lying on the DS-160 feels less humiliating than opening your digital underwear drawer to some consular officer in Chennai then compliance evaporates overnight.
It’s the same reason speed limits work until the cop leaves, taxes get paid until the audit risk drops, and mask mandates lasted about six weeks past the first $20 fine that never came. Human nature is a cost-benefit calculator wearing a human suit. So when the State Department turns a visa interview into a proctology exam of your old tweets, they’re not increasing compliance; they’re just moving the tipping point. And the second the pain of playing along exceeds the pain of faking it, deleting it, or flipping the bird from behind a VPN, millions of smart, rule-averse people will do exactly that.
Congratulations, bureaucrats: you just turned “follow the law” into a sucker’s bet. Every dumb regulation dies with a quiet collective shrug and a thousand workarounds. Five gold stars for your brilliance.
Behind the Looking Glass
The Citadel, 2125, Fern Loomis—Speech itself is now illegal. In Ulyth’s latest batch of decrees is this missive:
The Citadel, under the sovereign authority of Lord Vexton Ulyth, issues the following proclamation:
- Speech is hereby declared unlawful.
- All utterances, written or spoken, are prohibited.
- Silence shall be the sole medium of civic order.
Lord Ulyth has reviewed the recent measures abroad requiring visa holders to expose their social media for inspection. He has judged such efforts insufficient. In his words: “Bunch of pikers. They didn’t go far enough. All speech should be regulated. Full stop.”
Accordingly, the Citadel advances beyond half-measures. Regulation is not enough; prohibition is absolute. The age of ungoverned words has ended. The Citadel now enters the era of disciplined quiet.
Loomis continues, “folks, bless Ulyth’s heart. He believes every problem can be solved by law. I may not make it through this broadcast without being arrested. While I wait for the cops, let me get this out—once the law gets absurd enough it’s easier to ignore than comply with it. That’s where we are. KPUFR has always been a thorn in the side of the Citadel and our dear leader Vexton. We are not silent and will not cease broadcasting because of this ban. Come arrest me, Vexton. I dare you.
Dare Declined
Vexton Ulyth is many things troublesome. One of them is not stupid. A familiar aphorism, “pick your battles.” A battle with Loomis and KPUFR has few upsides for Ulyth. She is one of the more equal animals in his barn. She is also smart enough not to rub his nose in a farce like “speech is illegal.”
The usual scolds fired up on social media lining up along tribal lines. Dear Leader Vexton loyalists quoted St. Benedict, “I said, I will guard my ways, that I may not sin with my tongue. I have set a guard to my mouth. I was dumb and was humbled, and kept silence even from good things.” They also cited James 3:6 KJV, “And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.“
The rest of the Citadel, then across the street at Ashby Market, this phrase went viral, “Legge inganno.” People continued to talk. And repeated stories about the week when the fog chose to sit over Berkeley. Dear Leader Vexton wrote numerous proclamations declaring that he is the sole authority over the Citadel. He declared that the weather shall be sunny and seventy-two degrees.
And God Said, “Meh.”
The week of his proclamation the weather delivered partly cloudy weather with lows around 41°F and highs hovering near 60°F. The fog sat over the city enjoying the smells coming from favorite restaurants. Ulyth holed up in his castle in a funk. The weather was supposed to comply. He was a god. So God supposed to behave. About that . . .
He who governs least governs best. Vexton’s proclamation quickly became a joke. Leaders are in fact, the weakest, least privileged in any society, enterprise or orgnization. They rule at the consent of the governed. Plenty in history thought they were invincible and ruled a dynasty that would last a thousand years. Then . . . lost their head, literally.
Today’s death isn’t literal. It is social and reputational. People stop listening to a leader. He or she finds themselves shouting into the abyss and it replying with, “whatever.” Ulyth bitterly refuses this fate. The weather blows where it will no matter how much Ulyth thunders at it.
MYOB
America’s own house is on fire in a dozen places (homeless vets sleeping under bridges, kids in failing schools, fentanyl pouring across the border, cities that look like war zones). Why the hell are we playing global hall monitor for Nigerian Christians when we can’t even keep our own streets safe?
Here’s the cold answer the administration gives: ignoring the slaughter in Nigeria isn’t charity; it’s national-security malpractice. When entire villages get wiped out and 5-7 million people get displaced, you don’t just get sad headlines; you get new breeding grounds for ISIS-West Africa and Boko Haram, who then export fighters, weapons, and refugees across the Sahel and eventually toward Europe and here. We learned the hard way in Syria and Libya: let a genocide simmer and you pay for it later in body bags and billions. Nigeria’s also our fourth-largest source of crude oil; if the country fractures along religious lines, gas hits six bucks a gallon again and the same people yelling “America First” will be screaming at the pump.
None of that fixes Detroit or the trailer parks in Appalachia today. The visa bans cost us almost nothing (no troops, no treasure) and lets Marco Rubio and Trump wave the “defender of Christians” flag for the evangelical base without spending a dime that could’ve gone to border walls or VA hospitals. It’s the cheapest foreign-policy win imaginable, which is exactly why they did it instead of the hard, expensive stuff you and I both wish they’d prioritize.
WORDS ARE VIOLENCE! Wait. Uhm . . . SILENCE IS VIOLENCE!
Fiction has a habit of becoming true. Ulyth’s ban on speech became a farce. The State Department’s demand that visa holders open their social media to the public is unenforcible. It is ripe for being gamed. From where I sit it is a Vexton Ulyth move. It is a rule written that makes sense to the elites collecting paychecks from Uncle Sam and in practice, is feckless. The conflicting claims that words are violence and silence is violence are equally foolish.
Words are not violence. Full stop.
A punch is violence. A machete to the throat of a Nigerian pastor praying in his church is violence. Rape, kidnapping, arson, genocide; those are deeds that leave bodies in the dirt and widows screaming. Words, no matter how vile, how “triggering,” how blasphemous, or how much some blue-check hall monitor insists they “literally kill people,” are just vibrations in the air or pixels on a screen. Conflating the two is the coward’s way of winning an argument without ever having to prove actual harm.
The sleight of hand is always the same:
- “Words are violence” → therefore we can use real violence (fists, deplatforming, visa denials, prison) against the speaker and call it self-defense.
- “Silence is violence” → therefore you’re not allowed to stay neutral; pick a side or we’ll treat you like an accomplice and ruin your life.
Both slogans are linguistic malware designed to smuggle authoritarianism in under the banner of compassion. They invert reality so thoroughly that the people actually swinging machetes get described as “voiceless” while someone calling them savages on X is branded the real terrorist.
Deeds kill. Words offend. Offense is not injury, and pretending otherwise is how every decent society starts eating itself. If we ever forget that distinction, we deserve the tyranny that follows.
Pick a Bullshit Day
Today, MAGA and the Trump Administration get to restrict the behavior of visa holders on social media. Or try. IMHO, the response will be to enrich data janitors. At the far end of this slippery slope is Vexton Ulyth and his Citadel where just uttering words is illegal. Crazy, right? Yes. But I suggest it to point out the well-meaning joke that demanding visa holders make their social media public will be. We won’t get better behavior. We’ll get good people interpreting our rules as instructions on how to cheat.