Brian Beutler has a good post today about the right’s deployment of the “South African refugees” to stimulate their base. He thinks it might be a bridge too far:
Republicans presumably believe they’ve found a winning issue by importing white South Africans to the U.S. on the flimsy pretext that they’re refugees, and offering them a shortcut to citizenship. They don’t view the backdrop of a mass federal dragnet targeting (mostly) Latin American immigrants and foreign Muslim students as some embarrassing hypocrisy. The double standard is the point. Democrats will go to bat for the brown ones, but not the white ones. Some progressive activist somewhere might even make hostile comments about whiteness. Trumpists can transform this into online propaganda aimed at white independents and swing voters, and ride it to higher poll numbers.
That’s the cynical underpinning of their gambit.
I think they’ve miscalculated. Casual onlookers might have missed the part where the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, donned a tie honoring apartheid South Africa, and asserted that white Afrikaners would “assimilate” more easily than Afghan refugees and other non-whites.
But I suspect most people will still see a racist double standard, and most of them will disapprove. I suspect many of the disapprovers will view it as a revelatory expression of Republican values, and reject it. And that’s before we get to the part where MAGA influencers ditch the pretext and announce that the move is driven by their own hatred of non-whites.
This happens over and over again. They believed rounding up tattooed brown men and flying them to a concentration camp in shackles would be a big political winner, but it quickly ignited backlash—both against the subversion of due process and the cruelty to immigrants—and turned into the biggest rule-of-law test of the second Trump presidency.
I think he’s probably right? But I do worry that the firehose of atrocities may be numbing all of us to the horror a little bit. I hope not.
If this blatant, racists double standard doesn’t make people see these people for what they are I’m not sure what would.
Mr. Kleinhaus was part of this initial tranche of 59 Afrikaners. He has two thumbs, a Twitter account, and a lot of opinions.
Most of his opinions are garden-variety MAGA. Despite being a South African citizen, about half of Kleinhaus’s tweets are about the greatness of Donald Trump; how awesome Teslas are; and the woke mind virus (he’s against it).1
But there’s also some . . . other stuff.
In one case, Kleinhaus advocated for physical assault on an American citizen. Retweeting a story about a guy who had been given a citation for his part in a road-rage incident with another driver, Kleinhaus wrote, “He needs a beating urgently!” (Kleinhaus was upset because the other driver involved in the incident was driving a Tesla.)
But most importantly, Kleinhaus has also posted about Jews and Israel in the kind of way that might get someone who wasn’t a white South African deported—calling Jews “untrustworthy” and “dangerous.”
In April 2023, Kleinhaus responded to video of Christians scuffling with Israeli police on the way to the Church of the Nativity by saying Jews are naturally “untrustworthy.”
Five days after the October 7th attack, Kleinhaus posted a link to another video, hosted by a Facebook account called “Israel Is a Terrorist State,” that showed clashes between Christians and Israeli police. Kleinhaus wrote: “Jews attacking Christians!”
