The Attack on Somalis is Hate Politics

Right-Wing Terror Descends on Minnesota

At 2 pm, I’ll be going live with Max Read for our biweekly chat, so stay tuned for that.

I also wrote a piece about New York’s underground poker scene for The Financial Times, in case that interests you.

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Ask yourself: If someone were actively trying to incite a pogrom against Minnesota’s Somali community, what would they do differently than Trump and his allies are doing now? And, if the government were controlled by David Duke, would it behave any differently?

Don’t lie to yourself that this is just about the fraud investigation. That’s cover: A way to help the normies sleep at night. Trump is bashing the entire ethnic community, calling them “garbage,” and menacing them as a group. It’s now combined with state repression: ICE has descended on Minneapolis. A U.S. citizen was “wrongfully” detained by ICE agents for looking Somali. He was forced to his knees and put in a chokehold before being taken to a Federal facility. He said officers refused to look at his Real ID. He was released after agents finally allowed him to show his passport. Again, don’t lie to yourself: this wasn’t an accident. “Mistakes” like this one do the dirty work. The point is to terrorize this community. To make them feel unwelcome. To say to them, “You’re not Americans, and you’ll never be.”

We can see very clearly now what a white nationalist policy looks like: a combination of legitimate law enforcement moves, like the investigation into the Feeding our Future fraud, the incitement of online hate, and the weaponization of immigration enforcement. This is a variation on the dual state model: you have the “normative state,” which appears to be applying the law regularly, and the “prerogative state,” which, as Ernst Fraenkel wrote, “exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees.” The agitators and propagandists who orbit the regime in official and semi-official roles are integral to whipping up these hysterias. Conservative demagogue Chris Rufo has played a key part in this, claiming that the Somali community has introduced only “piracy culture” to the United States. He’s also used the auspices of the “respectable” City Journal to try to draw a connection between the ethnic fraud case and funding for terrorism, for which there is no actual evidence. Of course, it’s been pointed out to him that anyone with an Italian surname should hesitate before casting entire ethnic groups as inherently criminal. But he’s completely shameless.

Also shameless is his simultaneous crying about the chaos and filth that now typifies the right-wing infosphere. He tweeted yesterday:

The Right’s media apparatus is how the Right teaches its followers how to think, and it’s currently getting consumed by conspiracy, psychodrama, and tabloid conflicts. If left unchecked, it will turn the audience into the equivalent of a Third World click farm.

He’s also complained in the past about the antisemitism issue on the right.

This is all pretty rich coming from a guy who perpetuated the “Haitians eating cats” hoax. But in brief, this is the position of the neocon right: some racism is okay, just not against white ethnic groups. It’s not an accident that this is coming in the wake of the antisemitism scandal. The right is trying to pick another, safer target for racial hate that they think Americans will mind less than picking on Jews. They tried it with Zohran. That backfired because he’s just not scary enough, and even Trump realized it wasn’t gonna work. Of course, this approach is morally indefensible and logically absurd. You can’t libel entire ethnicities and then cry about decaying standards. You are the lower standard, you cheap thug. And just because there are cheaper thugs out there doesn’t make you any less of one.

Back in 2022, in a piece for this newsletter called “The Emerging Tech-Lash,” I sketched what this political environment might look like:

An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters. In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation. Just memes, nonsense, idiotic enthusiasms and fads, etc.

I think that holds up pretty well, especially when you consider the role of the Manhattan Institute—Rufo’s paymaster—in the whole sordid affair.