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"Racist" is a word we should use sparingly, but there are moments that require it.
Our government now welcomes white South Africans as refugees while we're revoking the legal status of non-white refugees.
What's going on:
Afghan refugees who are in the U.S. legally under the TPS (Temporary Protected Status) program had their status revoked.
These refugees are here because they helped the U.S., putting their own lives at risk, and are enemies of the Taliban, which now controls Afghanistan.
They will be forced to return to Afghanistan where their lives will be endangered.
Since 2015, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have been displaced due to human rights violations and economic collapse, the largest ever displacement in the Americas.
Of those 8 million, about 700,000 Venezuelans received or were in the process of seeking TPS status, which has now been revoked.
On March 16, the Trump administration sent 238 Venezuelan migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador, claiming they were members of Tren de Aragua gang and the president had authority under the Alien Enemies Act, which he can only use in time of war.
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The gang membership claims are dubious. For just one example, Andry Hernandez Romero, a makeup artist, fled Venezuela where his life was in danger because he is gay. He went through the proper legal process to seek asylum. When he arrived for his appointment at the legal border crossing in San Diego, he was taken into custody and sent to the torture prison.
U.S. intelligence concluded in a Feb. 26 document that the Tren De Aragua gang was not committing crimes in the U.S. at the direction of the Venezuelan government.
Yesterday, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired the two top intelligence official who oversaw that report.
This week, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau greeted 59 white South African refugees as they arrived at the airport. When asked why these refugees are allowed while others are being deported, Landau claimed the white refugees "could be assimilated easily into our country."
President Donald Trump claims the new policy is due to a "white genocide" in South Africa, a canard promoted by neo-Nazis and Trump ally Elon Musk.
One of those white refugees has many antisemitic posts on his X profiles even as the Trump administration announced it would screen social media accounts of non-citizens for antisemitic activity.
"They happen to be white," Trump helpfully added.
Each of these bullet points by itself does not tell a story of racism, but in seeing them together, we get the full picture.
In much of our media coverage and discourse, I've noticed a reluctance to succinctly call these policies racist. The accusation is between the lines, with a wink and a nod. We use words that hint at racism without using the word racism.
By and large, I think this reluctance to use the word "racism" is mostly healthy. There have been times when we've been too quick to use the racist label, which does much damage in the cause of fighting racism. But we should balance that healthy reluctance with the need to plainly speak the clear truth when the times require it. This is one of those times.
Pastors: Check out J29 Coalition!
The J29 Coalition is a network of theologically conservative pastors seeking to disciple the American Evangelical church in kingdom-shaped politics.
If you’re a pastor, follow the J29 substack and podcast, and sign up for the next J29 Cohort. If you’re not a pastor, please share this information with pastors you know.
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To learn more about how J29 Coalition got started read the first substack post below.
What Else Is Going On
Christianity Today: “The Gospel Comes for a Neo-Nazi
Pastor Caleb Campbell, J29 Director and AVC Board Member, shared some of his story with Christianity Today.
One night in high school, I showed up to a house party with some classmates. In the chaos of people mingling and dancing, I spotted a group of tough-looking guys in the corner.
Many of them had their heads shaved. They wore Doc Marten boots and red or white suspenders. It was a local neo-Nazi skinhead crew.
At that time, I was an angsty teenager who didn’t have many friends. I knew the men in the corner were powerful, and they called each other brothers. What’s more, they saw me standing nearby and invited me over, saying, “Hey, bro, come here. Have a beer.” I felt a thrill at being seen and chosen and eagerly took up their offer.
Study: “Taking it Personally: How Christian Nationalism Helps Fuel the Republican Outrage Machine”
Abstract
Recent US elections saw a rise in the prominence of culture war issues centering around questions of how to address contentious issues including race and history. These debates were often marked by criticism from dominant groups who vocally resisted suggestions that their group could be implicated in wrongdoing. Using data from the 2021 General Social Survey, this paper seeks to understand why conservative Christians are more sensitive to interpreting criticism of their religious group as a personal criticism. It forwards two mechanisms by which this takes place: 1) members fuse their identity with that of their social group, and 2) members have an expectation that their religious group should be held in high esteem. I find that religious commitment and Christian nationalism are strong predictors of interpreting group criticisms as personal attacks. More specifically, I find that, when mapping Christian Nationalism against other identifiers such as race, religious tradition, religious commitment, partisan identity, and ideological identity I find that perceptions of group criticism as a personal attack are predominantly a feature of White, devout, Protestant, and conservative Americans. This paper contributes to understanding the impact of Christian Nationalism in shaping public debate about history and education and its utilization by the Republican Party’s outrage machine.
The Dispatch: “Don’t Call This Conservatism: Much of American ‘conservatism’ today doesn’t deserve the label.”
Is the “New Right” conservative?
If you spend any time following the most vocal defenders of Donald Trump or various populist causes generally, some version of this question may have occurred to you. If you find yourself listening to defenders of a supposedly extreme right-wing Republican president’s signature policies, and then wondering aloud, “Wait, I thought conservatives were in favor of free markets?” you have an idea of what I am getting at. If you’re perplexed by the way many on the right celebrate and lionize a rogue’s gallery of libertines, scapegraces, sybarites, caitiffs, roues, abusers, and cads, you might wonder why you didn’t get the memo explaining that the right no longer cares about “moral rearmament,” or “family values.”
In short, if you’re a lifelong conservative, you might be struggling with the question of whether “the right” is where you belong. If being a principled defender of the constitutional order, limited government, free markets, traditional values, and an America-led world still makes you a conservative, are you still on “the right” when the loudest voices on the right reject most or all of those positions?
The Atlantic: “The Darker Design Behind Trump’s $400 Million Plane”
Trump is far from the first member of his circle to benefit from Qatar’s largesse. From 2019 to 2020, the authoritarian petrostate paid $115,000 a month to now–Attorney General Pam Bondi and her firm to lobby on its behalf. She has reportedly signed off on the legality of the country’s lavish gift to her boss. FBI Director Kash Patel was also paid by Qatar before assuming his current position. A member of the Qatari royal family invested $50 million in the pro-Trump conservative media network Newsmax, whose leaders reportedly pressed staff to soften coverage of the country. And Donald Trump Jr. is speaking next week at the Qatar Economic Forum, in Doha, on the subject of “Monetizing MAGA.” (That language has since been scrubbed from the forum’s site.)
Affection for Qatari cash is a bipartisan affair. Qatar funded Representative Ilhan Omar’s trip to the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and gave $1 million to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was still serving as U.S. secretary of state. Such influence campaigns extend beyond the United States. In November 2022, Eva Kaili, a socialist politician and the then–vice president of the European Parliament, publicly extolled the virtues of Qatar, calling the country “a frontrunner in labour rights” and “good neighbours and partners.” “The World Cup in Qatar is proof, actually, of how sports diplomacy can achieve a historical transformation,” she said, and chided the Gulf state’s critics: “They accuse everyone that talks to [Qatar] of corruption.” Weeks later, Belgian police arrested Kaili as part of an investigation into bribery by Qatar and found bags of cash in her residence and her father’s hotel room. Qatar also allegedly bribed FIFA officials for the rights to the World Cup in the first place.
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