It’s Not a Dog Whistle If Everyone Can Hear It

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Sometimes just a few news items over a couple of days can capture an entire zeitgeist. Here are several that caught my eye this week: The Supreme Court is poised to weaken or destroy one of the last remaining pillars of the Voting Rights Act. A group of Young Republicans exchanged texts in which they casually dropped the N-word, called Black people “monkeys” and “the watermelon people,” and said “I love Hitler.” The Trump administration is considering turning the American refugee system into one that prioritizes “English speakers, white South Africans and Europeans who oppose migration.” Rounding things out, Border Patrol circulated a video with an anti-Semitic slur, and a congressional staffer appeared in a video meeting with a swastika-defaced U.S. flag behind him.

These stories are not directly connected. The Court, for example, has been working to weaken the VRA for almost 15 years (or longer, in the case of Chief Justice John Roberts personally). But as an important late-20th-century work of philosophy noted, “There’s this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything.” Together, these developments show a powerful tide of racism in American life, lifting up white people at the expense of all others.

And plenty of indirect connections link the various stories. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign of racial grievance enabled him to shift the Court rightward with three new appointments. Trump himself has a long history of bigoted remarks, yet he has seized on bigoted comments by Black South Africans to justify inviting white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States. The ability to use offensive language without social sanction is a core appeal of the MAGA movement for some supporters. In January, an attendee at a Trump-inauguration party told New York’s Brock Colyar that “he wanted the freedom to say ‘faggot’ and ‘retarded.’”

Trump’s attacks on “political correctness” were couched in defenses of free speech, but anyone paying attention has noticed Trump’s longtime hostility toward the concept spanning many years, and his policies have demonstrated plainly that he has no interest in the First Amendment itself. In recent weeks, his administration pressured ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, and Trump said that negative coverage about him was “really illegal.” As Philip Klein writes in National Review, an organ of the more genteel (though not necessarily racially enlightened) old right, the Young Republicans chat shows that “to a portion of the young right, the actual substance of what provocateurs have been saying has been worth celebrating—not just their right to say it.”

Apparently these budding politicians were wise enough to know they couldn’t (yet) say these things publicly. Their most prominent defender has been Vice President J. D. Vance, who described the members of the group chat as “kids” and “young boys.” This is nonsense: These were politically active people, mostly in their mid-to-late 20s. (Vance himself is a good counterpoint. By his late 20s, he’d served in Iraq and was at Yale Law School, where his own leaked emails showed genuine nuance and thoughtfulness.)

Vance also argued that they were just telling edgy jokes privately. This might be more reassuring if not for the fact that the same people and the same views are making their way into the halls and policies of the government in which Vance serves. Nate Hochman, a rising conservative political figure who was a National Review writer, was canned from Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign after posting a video with a Nazi symbol; he once praised the self-identified Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Now Hochman has resurfaced working for Missouri U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, who is delivering ethnonationalist speeches.

Paul Ingrassia, another young right-winger who runs in anti-Semitic circles, is nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel, which oversees government personnel practices (Ingrassia has been accused of sexual harassment; he denies wrongdoing). Kingsley Wilson became a Pentagon spokesperson after creating a long trail of anti-Semitic claims. And then there’s the video, reposted and then deleted from the Border Patrol Instagram account earlier this week, that painstakingly edited in a snippet of a Michael Jackson song that goes, “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me / Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it.

This attitude at ICE (echoing previous postings) extends from the broader immigration agenda of creating a whiter, more right-wing American populace. The administration wants to reduce not just illegal immigration but legal immigration, and is conducting mass deportations, along with Supreme Court–sanctioned racial profiling, yet it also sees refugee policy as a way to bring in politically like-minded individuals. As The New York Times reports, this might include members of the far-right political party Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

On the surface, it might seem ironic for the U.S. to try to attract migrants who it says are being persecuted at home for opposing migration, but in fact there is no discrepancy—only agreement about which kinds of people are desirable: white, Christian ones. This also makes a mockery of the point of refugee programs, implying that the challenges facing right-leaning Germans are worse than those of the people Trump has sought to exclude who are in what he sees as “shithole countries.”

Bringing in migrants with right-wing views is a funhouse-mirror version of the “Great Replacement” theory that prominent MAGA figures have adopted, which holds that the left is seeking to bring in Black and brown people to dilute white political power. A flood of AfD members or Afrikaners would help Republicans, but they have other ways of reducing the power of liberals and nonwhite voters. Section 2 of the VRA provides for the creation of majority-minority districts, to ensure Black representation. Black voters in the South are heavily Democratic, but in Louisiana (33 percent Black), Mississippi (38 percent Black), and Alabama (27 percent Black), Democrats might be shut out of the House entirely, effectively disenfranchising these voters in Congress and presidential races. (The election analyst Nate Cohn, writing in the Times, calculates that if the justices get rid of Section 2, Republicans could gain nine seats in the House.)

When Roberts wrote the majority decision in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which defanged Section 5 of the VRA, he paid lip service to the law’s importance in remedying historical racism, but he dismissed the need for anything like it in the modern era. “Our country has changed,” he declared, with self-satisfaction. The headlines this week, however, beg to differ.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Donald Trump announced that he will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest for a second round of talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. The development comes a day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to visit the White House.
A federal judge in Chicago said that she will require federal agents involved in “Operation Midway Blitz” to wear body cameras during immigration enforcement and interactions with protesters, expanding an earlier temporary restraining order that limited the use of tear gas and required officer ID. The judge expressed concern that her initial restrictions were being ignored, citing examples of ICE throwing tear gas without previous notice despite her directive.
The former national security adviser John Bolton has been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly mishandling classified information. His indictment follows recent charges against James Comey and Letitia James, marking the third case in weeks involving figures who have clashed with Trump.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Jake Lundberg on the Atlantic writer who previewed an unmoored America more than a century ago.

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Evening Read

photo illustration of people reaching out from a phone — Illustration by Juanjo Gasull

The Great Friendship Flattening

By Julie Beck

When my phone does its little mating calls of pings and buzzes, it could be bringing me updates from people I love, or showing me alerts I never asked for from corporations hungry for my attention. When I pull it out, content and communication appear in similar forms—notifications, social-media posts, vertical video—and they blur together. As interactions with loved ones converge with all the other kinds of media on smartphones, Samuel Hardman Taylor, a professor who studies social media at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me, “our relationships are becoming a part of that consumption behavior.” When the phone becomes more of an entertainment hub, using it for social interaction can feel more optional. And picking my loved ones out of the never-ending stream of stuff on my phone requires extra effort.

Read the full article.