In a letter to the attorney general and the secretaries of the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, the groups said that the overnent had revived the practice of “ideological exclusion” during the past eight years. As a result, they wrote, dozens of prominent intellectuals were barred from assuming teaching posts at U.S. universities, fulfilling speaking engagements with U.S. audiences or attending academic conferences. Many of those barred were critics of U.S. foreign policy.
The practice of ideological exclusion dates to the Cold War, when the United States used the ideological exclusion provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act to bar, among others, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, Italian playwright Dario Fo, British novelist Doris Lessing and Canadian writer and environmentalist Farley Mowat.
