As of this week, America has helped some 70,000 Afghans evacuate the country after a U.S.-enabled Taliban takeover put their lives at risk. Of that number, an estimated 2,000 are believed to have entered the U.S., with another 800 or so to follow. Those people have gone through a stringent vetting process—one that involves “biometric and biographic security screenings,” a senior official in Joe Biden’s administration said this week. But of course, if you ask conservative media stars, none of this is nearly enough.
At this point, Fox News hosts have done enough white-replacement fearmongering to make their reaction to an influx of refugees almost predictable. And sure enough, those on the right have warned that the U.S. will be “invaded” by “millions” of Afghans who will “probably [end up] in your neighborhood.” But some have gone even further, positing not only that American suburbia will be under siege, but that Biden is all but inviting terrorist attacks on his own soil.
“I just don’t trust the Biden administration to vet these guys,” Fox News host Jesse Watters remarked this week. “The border’s wide open, and now there is a Taliban-linked Afghan evacuee they just flagged in France. Oops, he got through. And then there was an ISIS-linked guy that got flagged in Doha—oops, he got through.” He concluded that accepting people into the country who are fleeing for their lives is “going to blow back up in our faces” after the withdrawal ends. “Quite literally, probably, blow up in our faces,” added Watters’s colleague Tomi Lahren. “We’re gonna also enter into a time again where we have to be worried about terrorism. During the Trump administration, that was largely squashed… We’ve got a president who doesn’t take this seriously.”
Tucker Carlson, who spent the last few days claiming that the U.S. is “being stolen from American citizens as we watch” and falsely blaming the nationwide “housing crisis” on “the biggest influx of refugees in American history,” pushed a similar flavor of nativism on his Wednesday night program. “It might be good to…pause on letting in new Americans, pause on changing our society completely,” he said. “Now is exactly not the moment to accelerate the change to bewildering levels, because we will pay the price for it at some point––that’s guaranteed.” Last week Laura Ingraham questioned whether it’s “really [America’s] responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan.” Congressional Republicans have parroted similar lines, with Rep. Matt Rosendale saying that there is no “excuse to flood our country with refugees from Afghanistan.”
Over at Newsmax, Steve Cortes did his best to revive the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to address the present-day crisis. “Is the mass migration of Afghan men to America really a good idea? Good for your wife, your daughter?” said the Trump campaign adviser turned host. “The left will call us racist for opposing any amount of migration at all since they believe in open borders. But we have to be brave enough to put up with their ridiculous aspersions. And brave enough to discuss cultural differences that matter.” Last week Cortes called for a zero-tolerance policy against allowing Afghans to enter the U.S., regardless of whether they’d worked with American troops. “Not one Afghan should be coming to America. They should stay in [their] region,” he wrote.
So far the political fallout from the Afghanistan withdrawal is uncertain. Some Republican groups are already weaponizing the chaos that has engulfed Kabul—most recently when a dozen U.S. troops were reportedly killed by two ISIS bombings on Thursday—to take shots at Biden politically; Donald Trump himself called the pullout “a great stain on the reputation of our country” at a recent rally. Democrats, however, seem convinced that kitchen-table issues will remain the most pressing for voters as the repercussions from COVID continue to sweep the country. The goal of Carlson, Watters, and others, of course, is to jump on the bandwagon with Republican groups—to motivate their viewers politically by filling them with fear and paranoia, stirring up a voting class to carry on their ignoble work.
— How the U.S. Abandoned Women in Afghanistan
— Billionaire Leon Black Flew a Russian Model to Meet Jeffrey Epstein
— Inside the Fury and Fantasy of Donald Trump’s Florida
— How Rudy Giuliani Went From 9/11’s Hallowed Mayor to 2021’s Haunted Ghoul
— How One New Jersey Town Became a Magnet for the Media Elite
— Is Ron DeSantis’s Fox News Obsession Backfiring on Florida?
— Congress Will Soon Get Its Hands on Possible Evidence of Trump’s Many Alleged Crimes
— How the “Ground Zero Mosque” Meltdown Set the Table for Trump
— From the Archive: Into the Valley of Death
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.