Posted on May 19, 2023

Poland Bans Me — Again!

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, May 19, 2023

Jared Taylor turned back at border without explanation.

This video is available on Rumble, BitChute, and Odysee.

In last week’s video, I said I was leaving for a week of talks and meetings in Europe — if, that is, the Europeans let me in. You see, back in 2019, when I landed in Zurich airport to change planes for Stockholm, Swiss immigration control told me I was not allowed into any country in the entire 27-member Schengen Zone. They said I was banned for three years from all the blue countries on this map.

The Swiss said this was by order of Poland, although the Poles never told me I was banned and certainly not why. I was escorted onto the next plane home.

It’s now 2023, more than three years later, so I assumed I was fit for Europe, but no. At that same Zurich airport, immigration control marched me into a windowless room and told me that Poland had extended the ban for two more years. The Poles never told me about that, either. The Swiss said the only information in the computer was the date of the two-year extension of the ban. No reason given. I was bounced once again.

My passport bears the scars. This stamp dated 29th of March, 2019, was from the first time. It has four straight lines drawn by hand around the square box, and the indication “H.” I don’t know what “H” stands for.

Well, now I have two of these stamps. This one is dated 12th of May, 2023, with another “H.” Together, maybe they stand for “Ha, ha.”

It’s not nice to have a stamp like this in your passport. If you go to a non-Schengen country, border control sees the thing and asks, “Why did Schengen kick you out?” It doesn’t believe you when you say you don’t know, even if that’s the gospel truth. Now, I’ve got another black eye in my passport. It’ll be like walking into a police station with two shiners.

But seriously, what is going on? I really want to know, because I never had any contact with Polish law enforcement, and the first time around, the Poles never responded to repeated requests — some in Polish — for an explanation. I can only guess, but in 2018, I gave a talk to a Polish group called All-Polish Youth.

It’s goal, to quote from its own sources, is to “to raise Polish youth in a Catholic and patriotic spirit.” That, of course, means that liberals call it “far-right” and “extremist,” but it is a very religious group, never involved in anything illegal. After my talk, All-Polish Youth gave me this nice mug, which I have to this day.

At the time of the first ban, my contacts thought — they’re not sure — that someone may have been spying for the police on All-Polish Youth, and was disappointed that there’s nothing juicy to report.

Credit: Lithium1989, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

He then must have tried to win Brownie points with the police by claiming that this Jared Taylor guy was a violent bomb-thrower. But that’s just a theory. No one seems to know, and the Poles aren’t telling. On this trip I did learn from the Swiss that my original three-year ban went into effect in September 2018. That’s the month I gave that talk to the Catholic youth group.

Well, silly me, I assumed that a three-year ban would end after three years. During that time, I obviously didn’t set foot in Poland. I didn’t even tell a Polish joke. But someone decided that keeping me that three years weren’t enough, and tacked two more years onto my sentence. And didn’t tell me. Obviously, this is outrageous.

I now have some friends in Europe trying to look into what happened, and one expert tells me that a ban of this kind is usually issued against someone who has committed a serious crime in Poland, been arrested, and deported.

As you may know, the 27-member Schengen Group has dismantled border controls within the area. Once you’re in one country, you can go to any other without showing your passport.

So, if I were some kind of menace to Poland, the only way it could keep me out is to ban me from the entire area. It would be like the American state of Virginia deciding that some Japanese or Argentine was no good, and banning him from the entire United States. Without telling him.

If Poland had done something like this to a gay rights activist or a black-power advocate or a militant nudist, there would be outrage. The US State Department would be indignant. But not for me. After the first ban, I told the State Department that an allied nation was mistreating me and not even telling me why. I asked for help. You know what the department said? This was a decision of a foreign government, and it could do nothing. If only I had been a black, dope-smoking, lesbian basketball player, I suspect the State Department would have thought of something it could do.

Anyone who has followed my work knows I talk seriously about serious questions. If free speech means anything, it means being able to say things some people don’t want to hear. For whatever reason, Poland has badly failed any obligations it may have had to a free exchange of ideas and to the basic duty of government transparency. If the Czech Republic had done this, I might even call my treatment Kafkaesque.

This time, too, I will appeal to my own government. I’m not optimistic about the result.