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Bob Marley and SOCA is annoying after 3 hours though.

Australia's deportation of the unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic creates serious dangers. Also: we produced shows this week on 1/6 and the new sedition charges.

Glenn Greenwald

I wanted to share with subscribers here several items of potential interest:

1) Today at 1:00 pm EST, I will host a live episode of our System Update video program on my Rumble channel to discuss Australia’s deportation of the unvaccinated tennis star Novak Djokovic. Whether Djokovic is permitted to play in a major tennis event may itself not be of great significance to many, but the principles and values upheld in order to deport him, as well as the overwhelmingly positive reaction to his deportation both in Australia and the West generally, provide a vivid and disturbing window into the politics of COVID, vaccine mandates, and state authority almost two full years into this pandemic.

On Wednesday, I interviewed the American tennis player Tennys Sandgren who — like Djokovic — has chosen to be unvaccinated but, in contrast to Djokovic, decided he would not attempt to travel to or play in Australia. Sandgren was very articulate and insightful in explaining why he was willing to endure the career-threatening loss of not playing in Australia in order to stand on his principled opposition to vaccine mandates. That interview can be seen here, and — as we do for all of our System Update videos on Rumble — we will have a transcript up later today for subscribers only.

Note that the Australian government, in deporting Djokovic, did not contend that he posed a threat to the public health due to a risk of transmitting COVID. The opposite is true: the government acknowledged that he qualified for a legal exemption from the vaccine requirement to enter the country given that he just contracted COVID as reflected by a December 16 positive test, followed by a negative test on December 22, and therefore has high levels of natural immunity. That is why he received a legal visa to enter Australia despite being unvaccinated. The proffered justification from Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, who cancelled his visa and ordered him deported, was that Djokovic’s statements in April, 2020 implied that he was skeptical of vaccines, and the presence of someone in Australia who is viewed as an “icon” of personal choice would foster social disruption and “excite” anti-vaccine sentiments.

In other words, the principle just embraced by the Australian government and upheld by its judicial system (whose hands were largely tied due to the virtually absolute power vested in the government) is that anyone who has ever expressed any skepticism over vaccines in general, or the COVID vaccine in particular, can and should be denied entrance to the country and be prevented from pursuing their livelihood — even though the government admits they pose no threat to the public health by transmitting the virus to others. Immigration lawyers and civil liberties activists in the country are warning of the grave dangers posed to everyone from this precedent, and I will examine all of the implications of this decision today at 1:00 pm EST on Rumble.