I know we live in an era where lots of people are PROUD to be anti-intellectual, but this is next-level idiocy right here. A woman was on an American Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse on Thursday night, and while she was waiting for it to take off, she noticed the guy next to her was scribbling some language she didn’t recognize in a notebook.
Oh, and he had dark curly hair and dark skin.
So she immediately thought it was ARABIC, and he was writing a TERRORIST CODE. Then she pretended she was sick, and got up to tell a flight attendant. So they called in the police, who escorted the guy off the plane to question him.
Turns out he was a 40-year-old economics professor from the University of Pennsylvania named Guido Menzio who was writing MATH EQUATIONS. And he’s Italian, not Middle Eastern.
It’s only a 40-minute flight, but it was delayed more than two hours while he was being questioned. Guido was obviously allowed to fly, but the woman never came back.
Guido says he was, “treated respectfully throughout” but he blamed the whole thing on, “an epidemic of paranoia.”
