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Tucker Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?

Senator Ted Cruz: I don't know the population.

Brooke Gladstone: Tucker Carlson confronting Texas Senator Ted Cruz on warring with Iran. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Tucker really took it to him.

Tucker Carlson: You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?

Senator Ted Cruz: How many people live in Iran?

Tucker Carlson: 92 million.

Senator Ted Cruz: Okay.

Tucker Carlson: How could you not know that?

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger, and on this week's show, the MAGA hawks and America First crowd are feuding in public over US intervention in Iran.

??Speaker: The funny thing about a big ideological conflict happening in the Republican Party is that on many issues, Trump is not ideological. Trump is genuinely up for grabs on a lot of foreign policy issues.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, student journalists are facing a new kind of scrutiny, like this Columbia grad.

??Student: An Australian writer says he was refused entry to the United States after being interrogated about articles he'd penned on recent university protests.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last Saturday, Trump looked a bit glum at his, I mean, the army's birthday parade. The soldiers weren't in tight formation. They smiled and waved, but with sparse crowds and very high humidity, military.com noted that the mood was shaped by a strange quiet.

Benjamin Alvarez Gruber: The organizers were expecting around 200,000 people. That's definitely not the case.

??Speaker: Newsmax is reporting 10,000 people showed up for this thing.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Wolff, author of the 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, told The Daily Beast that he'd heard the president later reamed out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the parade's mildly festive tone. Wolff suggested that the problem was maybe it wasn't quite North Korean enough.

Michael Wolff: It didn't send the message that he apparently wanted, which is that he was the commander in chief of this menacing enterprise.

Brooke Gladstone: Anyway, the president clearly wasn't happy.

Harry Enten: I think the simple word here is hurt.

Brooke Gladstone: That's CNN data analyst Harry Enten, the day before the parade, talking not about Trump's feelings, but his poll numbers.

Harry Enten: You can see it right here. We have two new polls: Quinnipiac University, AP/NORC, minus 12 to minus 16. How about AP/NORC? Minus 16 to minus 21. Awful, awful, awful. The worst for Donald Trump in this term so far. He is very much way, way, way underwater, at least in these two polls.

Brooke Gladstone: On immigration specifically, a drop of six points in the last two weeks.

Harry Enten: The only thing that's happened over the last two weeks is obviously Donald Trump's ramped-up immigration hawkish agenda, and at least at this particular point, the American people are saying, "No, we do not like that," and they have turned against the president on his core strength issue of immigration. He is now underwater on the issue that has been strongest for him

Brooke Gladstone: The estimated 5 million that filled the streets of 2,000 towns and cities in opposition, a historic number rallying under the banner No Kings, what a gut punch for a guy who cares so much about the numbers, but hey, now we got a war on. Maybe, and better still, it's far away. We won't see that play out in our streets. The way is clear for the president to seize the narrative and make it his own once he figures out what that is.

Trouble is, we have so much of our own violence right here, right in our faces, which is a little less susceptible to spin, but the stalwarts will go down trying. If you're to believe MAGA, the left is fundamentally more violent than the right. When Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered last weekend and two others were shot, here's what Don Jr. had to say about the shooter.

Donald Trump Jr.: Everyone talks about Minnesota, but they don't talk about the guy seems to be a leftist.

Alex Jones: You walk into someplace and you see a bowl of fruit from 20 feet away, you go, that's fake.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Alex Jones, notorious for labeling the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary a hoax. When it comes to murder, he prefers to doubt what he sees.

Alex Jones: It looks real, but you just your mind knows because it knows the look. This thing smells of some type of sophisticated operation.

Brooke Gladstone: The accused shooter turned out to be a Trump supporter and a fan of The Alex Jones Show on InfoWars. Studies have found that although political violence is on the rise overall, the left goes in for property damage. Murders are more the province of the right, as Elon Musk learned by way of his own AI chatbot Grok.

Josh Greene: A user on X asked whether right-wing political violence or left-wing political violence is more prevalent in this country. Grok unapologetically said right-wing political violence is way more prevalent. Elon says major fail as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media working on it.

Brooke Gladstone: When challenged, Grok only quoted more studies and stuck to its guns. Speaking of guns, rates of gun death in some US states are comparable to conflict zones. For instance, the Commonwealth Fund found that the rate of firearms deaths in Mississippi is nearly twice that of Haiti, a nation impoverished and struggling with gang violence. Leaving that aside and leaving Minnesota, where MAGA mouthpieces tried to pin lefties for the two political murders committed by a Trump supporter, we go next to LA, where the National Guard and some marines were tasked with confronting largely peaceful protesters opposing the administration's snatch and grab of immigrants without due process.

Neither the city nor the state asked for help because despite what the president and his people were saying, the city was neither burning nor a trash heap, and the nation's third largest police department had it under control. Nevertheless, at an LA press conference, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was duly condemning California's governor as incompetent and socialist when Senator Alex Padilla interrupted with a question, one that he never asked because he was swiftly pushed, shoved, forced to the ground, handcuffed and frog-marched down a hall by ICE, which for him raised more questions like--

Senator Alex Padilla: Am I being arrested here? What will a city already on edge from being militarized think when they see their United States senator being handcuffed just for trying to ask a question? What will my wife think? What will our boys think?

Brad Lander: You don't have the authority to arrest US citizens. You don't have the authority to arrest US citizens. You don't have-- I'm not obstructing. I'm standing right here in the hallway. I asked to see the judicial warrant. By asking for a judicial warrant?

Brooke Gladstone: Speaker B: That was New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander this week, who'd been escorting an immigrant to and from immigration court to keep him from being snatched by ICE, lying in wait for whoever emerged. DHS says Lander was arrested for assaulting law enforcement. We all saw a tape of his arrest. There wasn't any assault, but that's the new narrative. It's why masked men with no visible identification can beat people, stuff them into cars, drive them who knows where, and still be deemed victims.

Will Cain: The quote, "No Secret Police Act" would ban local, state, and federal law enforcement from covering their faces when interacting with the public.

Brooke Gladstone: Fox News host Will Cain, reacting to a proposed California bill.

Will Cain: Officers would also have to wear identifying information on them, like name tags. It's hard to believe this is real, especially in an environment where ICE agents have been doxxed and had their lives threatened.

Brooke Gladstone: ICE's acting director Todd Lyons told The Washington Post's Philip Bump that officers covered their faces for their own safety because "ICE officers have seen a staggering 413% increase in assaults against them." Given the bogus assault charge against Lander or the equally spurious threat supposedly posed by Alex Padilla, floated by officials before downgrading his crime to disrespect, "What constitutes an assault," Bump asked.

ICE froze him out. As always, Bump did some expert digging. First, he noted that it was telling that ICE used a percentage. A 413% increase could mean that assaults rose from, say, 200 last year to 1,026 this year, or that they went from 8 to 41. That's a big difference, especially if some of those assaults were of the Lander variety. I urge you to check out Bump's column on this, but the TLDR is that he went deep and turned up nothing to support the ICE claim that showing their faces would endanger them, except perhaps legally. For this president, ducking accountability, starting with not disclosing his tax documents to January 6, through the firing of all those inspectors general and beyond, and beyond is something of a brand, one that he graciously lends to his minions, but he does not extend special favors to all the forces he commands.

President Donald J. Trump: Thank you to the greatest, fiercest, and bravest fighting force ever to stride the face of this earth, the United States Army. Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: He loves his troops, but not enough to help keep their families together.

Adrian Clouatre: You know, I gave up, people thought the best years of your life, your college years. I went and spent that in the military. At the very least, I would like to be able to keep my wife.

Brooke Gladstone: ICE agents in New Orleans detained Paola Clouatre, the wife of a Marine veteran. They have a one-year-old and a nine-week-old baby.

Micah Loewinger: She is now being detained at Richwood Correctional Facility in Monroe. Adrian says he drives the three and a half hours twice a week so the kids can visit with their mother and the baby can nurse.

Brooke Gladstone: The War Horse, a nonprofit newsroom that covers the impact of military service reported on Shirly Guardado, wife Sergeant Ayssac Correa, based at the 103rd Quartermaster Company outside of Houston. ICE knew that she was Honduran and undocumented. She checked in with them regularly. One day in March, she got a strange call when she was at work from men who identified themselves as public safety officers. She was asked to come out to the parking lot. When she got close enough, they grabbed and handcuffed her, told her they were ICE, and she was deported. Her husband, with their 10-month-old baby didn't hear from her for three days. War Horse says there are an estimated 80,000 undocumented spouses or parents of military members living in the US, many have stories like Shirly's. Of course, not just them.

??Reporter: A seven-year-old boy, crying out to his father, who'd just been taken into custody by ICE agents at a car wash in Los Angeles.

??Reporter: A 50-year-old Yolanda crying out to her children, "They're going to take me, they're going to take me," as agents arrested her outside her home in El Monte Monday.

Yolanda: I just feel alone. I feel lost.

??Reporter: Her 21-year-old daughter, Citlali, unable to walk since she was diagnosed with cancer of the cartilage of her leg bone.

Yolanda: Without her, I don't know how we get treatment.

??Reporter: The Trump administration deported three US citizen to Honduras, including a four-year-boy, who is actively receiving treatment for a rare form of stage IV cancer.

??Reporter: According to the polls, a majority of Americans hate these stories about families torn apart. There's no question that President Trump, Don Jr., Vance, and his friends in Congress and at Fox don't care about that, and in fact, actively enjoy distressing their critics, but not all are so easily dismissed.

Joe Rogan: If you got here, and you've integrated into our society, yes, maybe you shouldn't have snuck in, but you did it, and you're not breaking any laws. You're a hard working person. Those people need a path to citizenship, man.

Brooke Gladstone: Oops. Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan: Because if you don't, then they're just preyed upon by people that will take advantage of the fact that they're undocumented and not pay them what they're legally supposed to pay them, and not give them benefits if they're legally supposed to have benefits, and they can't say anything because they're worried that immigration is going to get called on them. These people are in this constant state of anxiety, and then they hear about the ICE raids, like at Home Depot. Like, what the Fuck.

Brooke Gladstone: When you've lost, Joe Rogan, you've lost. Who the hell knows?

Elissa Slotkin A: Have you given the order to be able to shoot at unarmed protesters in any way? I'm just asking the question. Don't laugh.

Brooke Gladstone: I'll just end with Elissa Slotkin in a hearing this week with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: What evidence do you have that an order like that has ever been given.

Senator Elissa Slotkin: It is based on Donald Trump giving that order to your predecessor, to a Republican secretary of defense, who I give a lot of credit to, because he didn't accept the order. He was asked to shoot at their legs. He wrote that in his book. That's not hearsay. Have you given the order? Have you given the order that they can use lethal force against. I want the answer to be no. Please tell me it's no. Have you given the order?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: Senator, I'd be careful what you read in books, and believing it, except for the Bible.

Senator Elissa Slotkin: Oh my God.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Iran and Israel have been trading missiles ever since Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu initiated his war against Iran last week. Was the US involved in the initial attack? Will the US be involved going forward? Who can say? The president could, but he won't. At least for now.

Karoline Leavitt: I have a message directly from the president, and I quote, "Based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe the president hasn't yet made up his mind because he has people in each ear whispering opposing messages. On his right hawkish shoulder, he has Fox News host Mark Levin and others trying to persuade him that regime change in Iran should be his legacy.

Mark Levin: That’s not a warmonger, that’s a peacemaker. That is a man who's going to make sure this generation and future generations are protected from nuclear missiles coming out of the Middle East.

Brooke Gladstone: On his left isolationist shoulder, a group that includes his son and the vice president and Tucker Carlson. Here's the former Fox host embarrassing Texas Senator Ted Cruz on his show this week.

Tucker Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?

Senator Ted Cruz: I don't know the population.

Tucker Carlson: At all?

Senator Ted Cruz: No, I don't know the population.

Tucker Carlson: You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?

Senator Ted Cruz: How many people live in Iran?

Tucker Carlson: 92 million.

Senator Ted Cruz: Okay.

Tucker Carlson: How could you not know that?

Senator Ted Cruz: I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.”

Tucker Carlson: Well, it's kind of relevant because you're calling for the overthrow of the government.

Senator Ted Cruz: Why is it relevant whether it's 90 million or 80 million or 100 million? Why is that relevant?

Tucker Carlson: Well, because, if you don't know anything about the country--

Senator Ted Cruz: I didn't say I don't know anything about the country.

Tucker Carlson: Okay, what's the ethnic mix of Iran?

Senator Ted Cruz: They are Persians and predominantly Shia.

Tucker Carlson: What percent?

Senator Ted Cruz: Okay, this is cute. Okay.

Tucker Carlson: No, no, it's not even— You don't know anything about Iran. Actually, the country--

Senator Ted Cruz: Okay, I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran, who says--[crosstalk]

Tucker Carlson: You're a senator who's calling for the overthrow of the government, and you don't know anything about the country.

Andrew Prokop: What's happening now is a return to a real tension that has long existed on the right between the isolationists and the interventionists.

Brooke Gladstone: Andrew Prokop, senior politics correspondent at Vox, says that this particular divide goes all the way back to the '30s and '40s when non-interventionists were dead set against the US entering a second European conflict.

Andrew Prokop: The most prominent use of America First before Trump was probably the America First Committee. Its spokesman was Charles Lindbergh, and they argued vociferously against America joining World War II. Lindbergh gave an infamous speech saying that the Jews were among those who were plotting to ensnare America into war.

Charles Lindbergh: If any of these groups, the British, the Jewish, or the administration, stops agitating for war, I believe there will be little danger of our involvement.

Andrew Prokop: Of course, what happened was the Pearl Harbor attack, and that basically just put the hawks on top. It proved in the eyes of many that if the US withdraws from the world, we're going to pay the price for it. We're going to get attacked, and that continued in the Cold War with the effort to fight against communism. We saw a brief resurgence of isolationism in the '90s after the fall of the USSR, and questions from figures like Pat Buchanan about what is the US still doing abroad? We've defeated communism. Why can't we just go home again?

Pat Buchanan: Our troops are the one that fought in Korea. Our troops are the ones fought and died in Vietnam. And we defended you and we paid the cost of that. Now you got more money than we do, and you got more troops than we do, and you got more people than we do. It is time for Europe to begin to take full responsibility and to pay the cost of their own defense.

Andrew Prokop: Then, of course, at the beginning of the 21st century, 9/11 cemented the dominance of the hawks under George W. Bush, proving again in the eyes of many Republicans that we have to fight them over there or else they'll fight us over here. Of course, the pendulum swum back again as the Iraq war started to go badly and the war on terror was viewed increasingly recently as a failure. A notable turning point was when Donald Trump first ran for president, and he started saying those things.

President Donald J. Trump: The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right? We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world.

Andrew Prokop: In Trump's first term, he opened the door for this conversation. He himself started using the term America First as a way to challenge the the Bush-era GOP establishment, but the vast majority of the Republican staffer class, foreign policy experts, and also still the base were still inclined towards this hawkish worldview and maximum pressure on Iran, more confrontation of China, even on Russia, where Trump notably was friendlier, nicer to Vladimir Putin, his actual first-term policy was still quite hawkish, but really the isolationist part of the Republican Party coalition started to organize a little more to make their case a bit better in public.

A leader emerged of that faction, and it was Fox News host Tucker Carlson. When Trump assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, in 2020, Carlson used his program to warn that neocons were plotting to take America to war with Iran again, and that he urged Trump not to follow their counsel.

Brooke Gladstone: I think that Carlson felt most strongly about Putin.

Micah Loewinger: Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe. Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?

Brooke Gladstone: Basically, he was saying that Putin doesn't hold a candle to the enemy within, which I guess are the Democrats.

Andrew Prokop: Yes, and that is another aspect of this America First idea that, like, we need to focus on the terrible disasters at home, but the really important thing that happened between Trump 1 and Trump 2 was that Tucker made two very important allies. One of them was Donald Trump Jr., who was not very influential on the first Trump administration, but after January 6, after Jared and Ivanka stepped back, he took a really central role in plotting the 2024 campaign. It turned out that he really shared Tucker's worldview on foreign policy, very hostile and skeptical of neocons, forever wars, and all that. Then the third person in this power trio was JD Vance. The full scale invasion of Ukraine happened in February 2022, and Carlson said, this is not our fight, and Vance said that, too, and so did Don Jr.

Brooke Gladstone: Where, judging from Trump's actions and his statements, does he stand?

Andrew Prokop: The funny thing about a big ideological conflict happening in the Republican Party is that on many issues, Trump is not ideological. He has instincts, he has long held beliefs, but they're not a coherent ideology that guides his worldview. What pulls him in the America First direction, I think, is that he does have this worry about wars that go badly. If he thinks the war will go well and be a smashing success, I think he's totally open to supporting it. That's, of course, what we saw with his initial skepticism about Israel's attack on Iran to this more fulsome embrace in recent days, as it seems to have been militarily successful for Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: Yet, the isolationists are divided on Israel.

Andrew Prokop: Yes, there is one group of isolationists who are pretty critical of Israel generally, or at least skeptical of American alignment with Israel, worries that it doesn't help us. That's something that Tucker Carlson told me when I interviewed him. He says, how does supporting Israel's war in Gaza help us? Then others, like Don Jr., JD Vance said, we're fully supportive of Israel's war in Gaza. They've got to do what they gotta do, but Iran was a different question, because Iran means a potential US military involvement in a much bigger war.

Don Jr. and Tucker and JD Vance were all skeptical about this push for war with Iran, which basically started as soon as Trump began his second term. Initially, it seemed like they had won Trump over. There was a report from The New York Times that in March or April, Trump had waved off a planned strike by Israel on Iran.

Brooke Gladstone: You suggest that China is really the big kahuna that overshadows all of these other conflicts, and is a point of contention between the hawks and the America Firsters.

Andrew Prokop: Yes. If you compare policy and views of China during Obama's first term to now, it's night and day, like it's just a belief that we're in or near a new cold war with China. Their influence has to be checked and counterbalanced in Asia. The America Firsters, they have no love for China. They support the trade war. They're generally protectionist. They want to move US manufacturing back home. One thing they are more skeptical of are these overseas military commitments or potential commitments in Asia. They worry about Taiwan.

Brooke Gladstone: They don't like alliances because they're too costly.

Andrew Prokop: In their view, they risk dragging the US into war. When I interviewed Carlson, he said, what would be the big deal if China took Taiwan? I don't really see why this is worth threatening World War III over. Biden went further than many recent presidents by saying the US would defend Taiwan. Trump, notably has not repeated what Biden said, and he retreats to this ambiguous position.

When Taiwan comes up, the first thing on his mind is often economics and trade. He often complains that--

Brooke Gladstone: They took our chips.

Andrew Prokop: That's right. He doesn't feel particularly personally attached to or invested in defending Taiwan. John Bolton tells a story about how in Trump's first term, Trump would often stand next to the Resolute desk and hold a pencil and say, Taiwan is as big as this pencil point and China's as big as the desk. Why are we going to defend the smaller and weaker country against this gigantic, more powerful, and important country?

Brooke Gladstone: I think it's become increasingly clear that the coverage of Trump's foreign policy is murky and inconsistent, because his ideas and allegiances are murky and inconsistent. He doesn't love Ukraine. He doesn't want to be blamed, though, for a Ukrainian defeat. Israel's attack on Iran this week likely required at least his tacit blessing, but he's been all over the map on that. The bulk of the tariff war has been lobbed at China, but Trump said Wednesday morning, Andrew's social relationship is excellent, in all caps. Andrew, you got a decoder ring for this.

Andrew Prokop: In some ways, the infighting between the Hawks and the America Firsters is so intense because Trump is genuinely up for grabs on a lot of foreign policy issues and can go either way, depending on what happened last week or who's talked to him last. One key way that he differs from the America Firsters is that they really want to withdraw from the global stage, but Trump does not. He loves the spotlight. He's choosing to be involved in all of these efforts to strike deals, trade deals, but also peace deals in Russia and Ukraine. He wants, it's believed, a big, beautiful deal with China at some point, just went to the Middle East and made a bunch of deals with Gulf nations. The risk is when he feels that he's not getting his way in these talks, he does get tempted towards provocation, aggression. That's kind of what we just saw play out in Iran.

Brooke Gladstone: You're suggesting that the lodestar that guides Trump's decisions is whether at best the outcome will lead to his unfairly withheld Nobel Prize, or that at least he doesn't look like a sucker. Other experts have said he has fear of missing out.

Andrew Prokop: The FOMO doctrine.

Brooke Gladstone: Right.

Andrew Prokop: He wants to look like a winner, and if withdrawing makes him look like a loser, he wouldn't want to do that. He supported withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, but when he saw how it went for Biden, he, of course, jumped all over it, and said, it was a disaster. Would never have happened that way over me. He is willing to favor either faction, depending on what he thinks will make him look good. I think a Nobel Peace Prize is something that people have said that he would like to get. I don't know if that's a very plausible outcome. Now the hawks are telling him that you could be remembered as the person who ended Iran's nuclear ambitions for good. All you have to do is authorize the US entry into this war and the use of these huge bunker buster bombs on the mountain-clad enrichment facility of Fordow.

Brooke Gladstone: Didn't the prominent far-right talk radio host Mark Levin go actively to Trump to convince him to go to war?

Mark Levin: An Islamo-Nazi regime with a nuclear warhead, intercontinental missiles that have threatened to assassinate the President of the United States. Gee, and we have morons, fools running around the country. This isn't MAGA. This isn't what I voted for.

Andrew Prokop: Fox News, the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, Mark Levin, I think most of the traditional conservative media establishment is urging Trump to join this war with Iran. Then on the other side, you have the podcast sphere, younger and newer MAGA Trump supporters who have really come to believe that the forever wars and Middle East conflicts are not something the US should get involved with. Some of them are very disappointed.

Brooke Gladstone: You can sympathize with that, I guess.

Andrew Prokop: It really just comes down to if Trump does enter this war, how does it go? Because if it goes well or if he can present it as going well, then it's going to be a pretty serious blow for these America Firsters. Tucker will look like Chicken Little already. Trump says somebody should tell kooky Tucker Carlson that Iran cannot be permitted to have a nuclear weapon. If we do get involved and it doesn't go well, on the other hand, then you might see a swing back to the America Firsters in prominence and influence again if it's viewed as, oh well, the hawks got us into another war and now Americans are getting killed, and there's no exit strategy, and what are we going to do about it? That will be remembered for some time to come.

Brooke Gladstone: Andrew, thank you so much.

Andrew Prokop: Thanks so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Fox.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

??Student: An Australian writer says he was refused entry to the United States after being interrogated about his views on the Israel-Gaza War.

??Speaker: Alistair Kitchen was travelling to the US Last week to visit friends. When he arrived in Los Angeles International Airport, he says he was pulled from the line at customs and questioned about articles he had written on the Columbia University pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus last year when he was studying at the university.

Alistair Kitchen: He sat me down, and he said to me, "Look, we both know why you're here."

??Speaker: Alistair Kitchen, speaking on the Project, in Australian news show this week.

Alistair Kitchen: I said, "I didn't know why we were here," and he said, "It's because of the posts you wrote about the student protests at Columbia University.

??Writer: What exactly did you write?

Alistair Kitchen: I wrote honestly about what I saw. No instances of anti-Semitism, which the Trump administration was very keen to claim was rife.

??Speaker: This comes at a time when countless foreign students have been targeted for political speech, including Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil, detained for his pro-Palestinian activism, and Rumeysa Öztürk, released last month.

The White House said it revoked her visa because of a pro-Palestinian op-ed she wrote last year in the student newspaper. Following Öztürk's arrest in March, Milan Singh, the outgoing opinion editor at the Yale Daily News, the campus newspaper, wrote in a column that he had received several emails from international students and alumni asking to have their op-eds removed and archived, "because they were afraid that federal immigration authorities would use their writings as a pretext for deportation or revoking their visas."

Mike Hiestand: These requests for takedowns were really more requests for basic survival.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Hiestand is senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, a non-profit press rights organization which offers guidance to school news outlets.

Mike Hiestand: We saw a significant uptick in calls to our legal hotline around the time that Mahmoud Khalil was arrested at Columbia University. There's certainly nothing over the 34 years that I've been here that compares to anything like this.

Micah Loewinger: Then there are the threats from school administrations. Before graduating from Barnard College, Georgia Dillane was part of the team of student journalists at WKCR, the Columbia radio station, which provided extraordinary on-the-ground live coverage of the police raid on Hamilton Hall, that campus building briefly occupied by pro-Palestinian demonstrators last April.

Demonstrator: Georgia, Georgia, can I go to you? What I can see right now is that more NYPD are crawling into Hamilton on this ladder contraption. This is just the viewpoint we're seeing from 114th and Amsterdam.

Micah Loewinger: This past March, Georgia was anchoring a live broadcast on WKCR when her team learned that students had staged another pro-Palestinian protest, this time at a Barnard Library.

Georgia Dillane: At 2:00 PM, we'll be giving another update, but as of now, a sit-in is taking place on the first floor of Milstein on Barnard's campus.

Micah Loewinger: A few weeks later, Georgia received an email from Barnard administrators asking her to share information that she had about the sit-in.

Georgia Dillane: On the day of that sit-in, I was doing reporting for WKCR, but I was never on campus. I was entirely in the station, which is like across the street, like quite far away.

Micah Loewinger: As she told the Columbia Journalism Review, she was concerned that she might be asked to provide information about sources or violate other journalistic ethics, and when she refused to meet with Barnard investigators, she got another email.

Georgia Dillane: They were accusing me as if I had participated in the protest, and they were accusing me of trespassing and vandalism, and these other accusations that were totally unfounded. To not comply would mean to not participate in graduation.

Micah Loewinger: Barnard ended up retracting that disciplinary conduct meeting just hours before it was scheduled. According to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review from May, other student reporters at WKCR and the Columbia Daily Spectator who covered a recent on campus protest were caught up in investigations by Barnard and Columbia. Both schools told CJR that they did not intentionally target student journalists and ultimately lifted their suspensions.

Georgia Dillane: We have no evidence to say that they're like literally trying to suspend student journalists or discipline us. I think it just reveals like a really gross way that the administration handles discipline and that end up affecting student journalism. For a school that platforms the freedom of press, they house the Pulitzer School, they really like flaunt this thing about journalism. It really makes me question their commitment to those things.

Micah Loewinger: Barnard declined to comment on Georgia Delaine's story, but in a written statement told us that the school "respects and supports a robust student press." Columbia told us that it also "strongly believes in the value of a vibrant and independent student press." Head to onthemedia.org to read their full statements.

I want to bring you one more account from this exceptionally challenging moment for student media. The story of an on-campus publication that found itself in an existential battle with school administrators.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I had never gone into university with the plan of becoming a journalist, which really kind of like makes my recent misadventures all the more interesting for me.

Micah Loewinger: This is Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, a rising junior at University of Texas at Dallas. His student journalism career began the first day of his freshman year when he picked up a copy of The Mercury, the campus newspaper.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: It was this investigative exposé on the front page, talking about a cat torturer who worked in one of the departments at the university. This man had been torturing the cats of his partner at the time as some form of psychological abuse. That, to me, stood out that we had student journalists who were going out of their way to find something like this, and put together a really good piece. That, to me, was kind of like, oh, okay, I could do something like that on campus.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio began spending his free time at The Mercury, first as a reporter, then a news editor, and by the end of his freshman year, spring 2024, editor-in-chief, a wildly rapid rise for a first-year student.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: May 1st was my first day as editor-in-chief. It was also the first day UTD had an encampment. By this point, we'd already seen over 80 other encampments form across the United States. We kind of had an understanding of like, oh, this is generally how it happens.

??Speaker: We started to very, very suddenly see law enforcement amass.

??Speaker: Police, SWAT, heavily armed.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Over 60 police officers, all in riot gear, some of them holding batons, some of them holding rifles. They had a vehicle that had a mounted tear gas launcher on top. We spotted sniper rifles posted on top of the student union building, facing off against peaceful students who were at that point, eating food after having finished a prayer in their peaceful encampment.

??Student: This encampment being broken up by police.

??Student: We saw them kind of tossing tents over.

??Student: This person right here is screaming. He's being taken away.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We thought that's kind of insane. We have just seen the most violent event in campus history. We took some time to just discuss what we were going to do with this.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio and his team at The Mercury began work on a special edition of the paper, devoted to explaining what and how this had all transpired, featuring a timeline of events, various editorials, and some new reporting featuring interviews with some of the 21 who had been arrested that day.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Thousands of people, alumni, faculty, students, have all signed petitions saying that they are furious with what has happened. We reached out repeatedly to various departments of the university. Every time we asked, why was this done? We weren't even graced with a PR response of just like we're doing what's best for the university. It was just full silence.

Micah Loewinger: On May 20th, they began handing out their special issue.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Speaker A: The front page of the special issue was this big, dramatic juxtaposition photo at the very top of the front page. On one side, you have all of the students waving their flags. On the other side, you have police and riot gear, coming in against the students.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. In the middle of the cover, we see in big bold letters--students speak, admin silences.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Yes, and then underneath that, we have the words welcome to you UTD, because we're going to be giving this out at freshman orientations. Underneath the fold, we had a scatter of blood spots. People were injured that day. People were also raising hands, covered in blood that we had photos of, and it just says, for more information, contact President Benson, the president of UTD at the time. Then we put his email and contact information that are provided by the school.

Micah Loewinger: You designed this cover in this special issue with the express intent of handing it out at orientation.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: You had to have known that this was going to provoke the administration. It's kind of a big fat FU to them.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: No, we fully expected that they would be upset with it. We'd spoke to the Student Press Law Center in advance. We spoke to members of the Society of Professional Journalists to make sure everything is legally checked. We've done everything we ought to be doing as journalists.

Micah Loewinger: How did the school ultimately respond to it?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: They demoted our advisor two days after the issue was published. He told me that my head was next on the chopping block, based off of the conversation he was at, because the school was very upset with how they were portrayed.

Micah Loewinger: A day later, Gregorio and some of the other editors from The Mercury were called into a meeting with Jenni Huffenberger, the Senior Director of Marketing for the Student Affairs Department at UT Dallas.

Jenni Huffenberger: The latest issue obviously has gotten the attention of administration.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio secretly taped this meeting and has since shared the audio with OTM.

Jenni Huffenberger: I need you guys to understand that the approach on this issue was incredibly flawed. What I see here is wall-to-wall activism, and that really is journalistic malpractice. There's opinion that is just, just saturating this content.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We asked her what was journalistic malpractice, and she did not elaborate.

Mike Hiestand: Journalism malpractice is a comment way too far. It was nothing like that.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Hiestand, again, from the Student Press Law Center, one of the organizations that reviewed The Mercury special issue before it went out.

Mike Hiestand: I think the students were frustrated, and I think they were simply voicing their frustration and that of their classmates. That's what journalism sometimes is.

Micah Loewinger: Jenni Huffenberger did not respond to multiple requests for comment. After the meeting, the school hired a new advisor for The Mercury, a woman named Lydia Lum. The students were initially optimistic after they saw her resume because she'd worked in journalism for over 20 years, but by the end of the summer, Gregorio was back in the hot seat.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: She tells us that unless we start doing prior review, unless we start giving her access to all of our material and letting her into every single one of our meetings, we wouldn't be allowed to travel to conferences anymore because she wouldn't be able to make a proper business decision about that. In that meeting, I told Lydia that so long as I was editor-in-chief, we would not be doing prior review or any other form of censorship.

Mike Hiestand: Gregorio was absolutely right to say that this is not something that we are going to tolerate.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Hiestand from the Student Press Law Center.

Mike Hiestand: At least within public colleges in America, not only is it unusual, it's illegal. We've got clear case law in the books that says that school officials do not have the right to insist on reading and approving copy before it's printed. That's the job of the editors.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We did agree with her that we would do more meetings with her. After our pitch meeting with staff, we would talk to her about every single pitch and what our general thoughts for it were, so that she was up to date on what the actual articles were. She said that was okay, but given that we were all fired a few weeks later, I guess it wasn't okay.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, so this is how it went down. First, Gregorio was informed that the school planned to remove him as editor-in-chief. When we requested an interview from UT Dallas, the university sent us a statement saying, "For clarification, the former editor was not removed for editorial content, but because he violated student media bylaws." In a memo written by Lydia Lum that she said justified your removal, she accused you of holding multiple student jobs. In addition to running the newspaper, you were a peer advisor in university housing, which is a role that provided monthly pay and free student housing. Is it true that you had two on-campus jobs at the same time?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I had two roles, but we had also double checked with Jenni if that was permissible, because the specific prohibition is you can't have two employee positions at UTD, just because they don't want to pay you like healthcare or compensation in any way by going over a 20-hour limit. However, Mercury editor-in-chief, housing peer advisor, neither of them are classified as official employee positions, and they're instead classified as stipend positions.

Micah Loewinger: Lydia Lum declined our interview request. If you want to read the entire memo justifying Gregorio's removal, his written rebuttal and UT Dallas's full statement, head to onthemedia.org Anyway, shortly after his hearing, Gregorio was fired, and so The Mercury staff voted to strike in protest.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: They had an opinion piece, which was just, this is the stance of The Mercury's entire team, and we're not going to write for The Mercury unless we are spoken to by the school, unless an effort is made to engage with us.

Micah Loewinger: Did the administration respond to the strike?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: They suspended all of The Mercury email accounts on day one of the strike. We come to the conclusion that, like, if they're not going to engage with us in good faith, we'll just make our own newspaper.

Micah Loewinger: In late September 2024, the former Mercury team launched a non-profit newspaper and website called The Retrograde. Get it? Mercury, Retrograde. They raised around $7,000 to get their printing and business operations off the ground. An average issue costs a bit more than $1,000 all in, and the UT Dallas student government has since passed a measure recognizing The Retrograde as the official paper on campus.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: We ended up getting a large outpouring of support. This is the first year where we have crossed over a million total views of our content.

Micah Loewinger: Based on visits to the website, The Retrograde is actually more successful than The Mercury?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: Why do you think that is?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: When the visa situation started to happen, that became our most viewed article ever. It had over 200,000 views alone, which for an article we had never seen before at The Mercury and at The Retrograde.

Micah Loewinger: What is left of The Mercury? Does it print? Are there new articles on the site, or is it just kind of a ghost paper?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: It is fully a ghost paper. On May 1st, they appointed a high schooler who has not stepped foot on the UTD campus as the next editor-in-chief. I'm not going to share details about her because I don't want to bully a freshman, but she doesn't have any staff, so we're not hopeful of a Mercury revival at the moment.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio and some of his team recently attended the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association Convention. He says he and other student journalists in the state are working in a flaming cauldron of chaos.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: It was just kind of like talking to people in the trenches of World War I. I spoke to people from the University of Houston student newspaper. They had just had their student government fully dissolved. We spoke to students from smaller universities across the state, community colleges who have their own newspapers, and those students talk about how their advisor gets actively intimidated by the university, saying, like, hey, we're a small at school, if we have to make budget cuts, you might be up next if your coverage is negative of us.

These students just fully don't cover protests that happen on their campuses. They don't cover ICE raids that happen on their campuses out of fear that they won't have a newspaper. SB 37 has been the talk of the town. Everyone is concerned with provisions that would make it so that there are things like political censors that review what professors teach, giving the Board of Regents power to establish curriculum. These are all things that students on the collegiate journalism level are really concerned about. We're in a cauldron because we're being boiled alive.

Micah Loewinger: Why then, given the obstacles that have been placed in your way, do you continue to do this work? Why do you think that student journalism at UT Dallas and beyond is worth all the trouble?

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: I think it's worth all the trouble because someone has to do it. Because once you stop doing journalism, people can just act with impunity. That, in my opinion, is the biggest dispute I have with the UTD administration. They want to act with impunity. If people are seeing headlines where it's like, UTD mass arrest, 21 people raid on preschool student encampment, things like that don't make the school look good. If there are photos of just the brutality of that day out on the internet, it doesn't make the school look good. If it were up to them, we wouldn't be here.

Micah Loewinger: Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez is a rising junior at UT Dallas and the editor-in-chief of The Retrograde, an independently run student newspaper. Gregorio, thanks so much.

Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez: Thanks for having me.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Flaming cauldron of chaos could describe the general state of journalism in this country right now. Actually, there are a lot of parallels between the university leaders who oversee student news outlets and the corporate structures atop much of the legacy media, which, in times of crisis, especially prioritize money and power over truth. The success of The Retrograde offers something of a lesson for professional journalists. We don't have to let ourselves be cooked alive in this old, broken system. We can if we really want to, climb out and start over again.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wong.

Brooke Gladstone: Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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