Hayek's insight could be the Rosetta Stone for understanding the Trump administration's zealotry for assailing freedom of speech.

On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk, who was wearing a hijab, was a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University. Ozturk didn't know what was happening when she was first grabbed and later said she thought she might be killed.

She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal detention system. She was put in leg shackles and had a chain placed around her waist. She was frog marched out like a terrorist kingpin.

A federal judge speedily ordered the Trump administration not to remove Ozturk from New England. But Trump administration officials ignored that court order and hustled Ozturk from Massachusetts to federal detention facilities in Louisiana.

Criticizing Israel

Almost a year before she was seized on the streets near Boston, Ozturk had coauthored an op-ed piece for the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university's refusal to divest from Israel despite "credible accusations of … indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide."

That was all it took to nullify the formal student visa that the U.S. government had previously approved for Ozturk. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson justified seizing the 30-year-old graduate student: "DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated." Ozturk never mentioned Hamas in her op-ed. Ozturk has not been linked to any campus protests at Tufts or elsewhere. She simply cowrote an opinion piece. As the New York Post noted shortly after her arrest, DHS "alleged that Ozturk was a supporter of Hamas but has yet to provide any evidence to that effect."