The context: He smoked weed in California, where it's legal, years ago.
This guy isn't a drug trafficker. He's not doing meth or heroin, never did. He smoked weed, in a legal state (as millions of Americans do on a daily basis).
Then he made the critical mistake of handing over his phone to be searched, rather than flying home (!), upon which advanced creepy software (probably developed and funded by some of this very crowd) flagged this 'federal crime' of smoking weed while in Cali.
So yes, the meme is a red herring, but it's distracting from a thing that's still incredibly fucked up.
It's still a demented justification to turn someone away from the country. "You can come here, buy weed in a majority of states, and face no fear of repercussions... Until you try and come back in". That's nutty. It's batshit.
And, the real reason he was brought in - as brought up by the Immi officers - was that he was doing journalism at one of the anti-genocide protests.
> > it's not practical or moral to have foreign partisans participating in our politics that way.
That would be called 'freedom of assembly', which is a universal human right (see Article 20 of the UNDHR). Highly moral, most practical, and widely recognized as such.
Sorry. No. The idea that you have a right of assembly in a foreign country is completely absurd. I don't know which line of thinking convinced you otherwise but any country that actually chooses to allow that can't exist for very long.
The context: He smoked weed in California, where it's legal, years ago.
This guy isn't a drug trafficker. He's not doing meth or heroin, never did. He smoked weed, in a legal state (as millions of Americans do on a daily basis).
Then he made the critical mistake of handing over his phone to be searched, rather than flying home (!), upon which advanced creepy software (probably developed and funded by some of this very crowd) flagged this 'federal crime' of smoking weed while in Cali.
So yes, the meme is a red herring, but it's distracting from a thing that's still incredibly fucked up.