One Citizenship to Rule Them All: Elon Musk, Viktor Orbán, and the Great White Grift

When the algorithm says “yes” to refugees, as long as they’re white and vote right

Welcome to another episode of What Fresh Hell Is This?, starring Elon Musk as the enabler, Viktor Orbán as the fascist throwback, and Donald Trump as the guy who still thinks South Africa is part of “the West.”

Let’s start with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who seems to think he’s starring in a Tolkien reboot titled The Lord of the Demographics. In his latest performance, Orbán warns us that migrants, cue ominous music, come first with their bodies, then their papers, and then, heaven forbid, their votes. It’s not “integration,” he says, it’s “substitution.” He claims the left is engineering Europe’s downfall “one citizenship at a time,” like George Soros is out here knitting passports in a Hungarian basement.

And lest you think this is just one irrelevant authoritarian howling into the abyss, his message was amplified, algorithmically and enthusiastically, across X (formerly Twitter), where Elon Musk has reinvented “free speech” to mean “let the fascists speak first and pin their posts.”

Which brings us to Trump, who, not to be outdone, is taking a proactive approach to migration: only the white kind. CBS News reports that the Trump administration will soon welcome the “first group of White South African refugees,” because evidently, the poem on the Statue of Liberty now reads, “Give me your tired, your poor, your Boer farmers yearning to vote Republican.”

It's a curious thing, this refugee sympathy. When brown-skinned asylum seekers arrive at the border fleeing actual cartels, war, or famine, they’re smeared as terrorists and disease vectors. But when white South Africans arrive, citing disputed land reform policies, suddenly it’s “Come on in, comrade. We’ve got a gated community with your name on it.”

Of course, this all plays into the same tired white nationalist fan fiction: the fantasy that Western civilization is under siege from multiculturalism, and that a shadowy liberal cabal is orchestrating the “replacement” of “real” citizens. It’s lazy, it’s racist, and it’s very on brand for a political movement that thinks The Camp of the Saints should be required reading.

And while we’re here, let’s not ignore the tech-bro elephant in the room. Elon Musk has turned X into a breeding ground for ethnonationalist content, pushing narratives like these to the top of people’s feeds under the guise of “engagement.” Because nothing says innovation like laundering 1930s ideology through a 2025 algorithm.

So here we are: Orbán wants to save Christian Europe from the fictional brown menace. Trump wants to be the Underground Railroad for white settlers. And Elon Musk, self-appointed “free speech absolutist,” wants to make sure the rest of us can’t look away.