One of the South African refugees President Donald Trump welcomed to the United States has a controversial social media history that includes brazenly antisemitic content.
Earlier this week, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau personally met a group of 59 Afrikaners as they arrived at Dulles International Airport. Afrikaners are the white descendants of predominantly Dutch settlers — along with a sizable number of Germans and French Huguenots — who first came to South Africa in the 17th century.
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“When you have quality seeds,” said Landau, “you can put them in foreign soil and they will blossom, they will bloom.”
The swift processing for these white refugees, along with the tax dollars spent on a State Department-chartered flight and other accommodations, drew criticism and accusations of racism because of the significantly different treatment afforded to refugees from other countries.
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The spotlight on the Afrikaner refugees revealed one person in particular who has been very outspoken on his social media accounts.
Charl Kleinhaus, 46, told The New York Times he had a farm in Limpopo, South Africa and had signed up for the refugee program “for safety reasons,” intending to move to Buffalo, New York. Kleinhaus was also interviewed by Reuters, He “said his life was threatened and people tried to claim his property as their own,” but the reporters were “unable to verify his account.”
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Kleinhaus is a staunch supporter of Trump, sharing some of the idealized AI-created content popular among the MAGA internet denizens, as well as other posts praising Teslas and guns and bashing vaccines and the “woke mind virus.”
“But most importantly,” reported The Bulwark, “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.’”
That would seem to put Kleinhaus crosswise with the Trump administration, which has cited antisemitism as a justification for its crackdown on Harvard and other colleges, along with targeting international students to revoke their student visas and seek to deport them, like Rümeysa Öztürk.
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The Bulwark identified several other tweets in which Kleinhaus complained about Jews “attacking” or “spitting on” Christians, and sent him a message over LinkedIn asking him to confirm this was his account. Kleinhaus did confirm it was his account but declined to comment further. A Facebook page that appears to belong to him has been locked by the user.
Last and Sommer noted in their commentary that Kleinhaus was entitled to his First Amendment rights — yes, even as an immigrant despite claims by Stephen Miller and others to the contrary — and to have his claim for refugee status “adjudicated fairly.”
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“Maybe the difference is that Kleinhaus is ostentatiously Christian—his feed is full of retweeted Bible verses, Christian exhortations, and memes of Trump walking with angels,” wrote Last and Sommer. “Or maybe the difference is that he’s white. Who can say. It’s a mystery!”
The issue was broader than Kleinhaus, they concluded. This was the Trump administration admitting that their claims about fighting antisemitism were “all just cover for getting rid of, you know, the wrong kind of people.”
* Original Article:
White South African ‘Refugee’ Brought to U.S. by Trump Says ‘Jews Are Untrustworthy’ and ‘Dangerous’