There comes a point in observing any public commentator when you have to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. For Irami Osei-Frimpong, that point has long passed. What started as occasional questionable takes has devolved into a pattern of deeply problematic rhetoric that demands attention and accountability. His latest video, titled “Stop Listening to Elite Refugees! (Cuban, Venezuelan, Ukrainian, Iranian, and more)” represents yet another step in what appears to be a disturbing ideological trajectory, one that has seen him go from someone who once offered meaningful commentary on issues affecting people of color to someone spouting talking points that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from the very white supremacists he ostensibly opposes.
Let me be clear from the outset because this needs to be said. This isn’t about having personal beef with Irami Osei-Frimpong. This isn’t about some petty internet drama or clout chasing. This is about consistently calling out dangerous rhetoric when I see it, regardless of who it comes from. The fact that Osei-Frimpong happens to be the source of this rhetoric doesn’t make me happy. If anything, it makes the situation more disappointing because at one point, his commentary actually meant something. But disappointment doesn’t exempt anyone from accountability, and the stakes are too high to stay silent when someone with a platform begins trafficking in ideas that actively harm vulnerable communities.
The concept of “elite refugees” that Osei-Frimpong pushes in his latest video is fundamentally xenophobic propaganda dressed up in pseudo-intellectual language. It’s the kind of rhetoric you’d expect from someone like Tim Black, and frankly, it makes you wonder if that’s exactly where this talking point originated. The entire framing betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, or perhaps more cynically, a willful misrepresentation of what refugees actually are and the power dynamics at play in global migration. There is no such thing as an “elite refugee” because the very nature of being a refugee strips people of elite status. The term itself is an oxymoron designed to manufacture resentment against some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
Let’s break down why this framing is so insidious. Refugees, by definition, are people fleeing their home countries due to persecution, war, violence, or other circumstances that make remaining there impossible or life-threatening. They are leaving behind everything they know, their homes, their extended families, their cultural context, their professional networks, often with nothing more than what they can carry. The country they’re fleeing to holds all the power in that relationship. They control whether these people get to enter, whether they get to stay, what rights and protections they receive, whether they can work, where they can live, and fundamentally, whether they get to survive in any meaningful way. Refugees don’t have power. They have desperation and hope, which are not the same thing as power no matter how much someone might want to conflate the two.
The framing of certain refugees as “elite” suggests that these individuals somehow maintain their privilege and power even in displacement, that they’re manipulating systems or exerting undue influence. This is xenophobic bullshit of the highest order. What Osei-Frimpong is doing, whether he realizes it or not, is creating a hierarchy of deserving and undeserving refugees, suggesting that some refugees are actually secret power brokers who need to be viewed with suspicion rather than compassion. This kind of rhetoric has historically been used to justify turning away people fleeing genuine persecution, to manufacture consent for cruel immigration policies, and to redirect legitimate anger about inequality away from actual power structures and toward vulnerable scapegoats.
Here’s what makes this even more grotesque. Many of the countries that people flee from, including the ones Osei-Frimpong specifically mentions in his video title like Cuba, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Iran, are dealing with instability and violence that has been directly caused or significantly exacerbated by Western imperialism. The United States and its allies have spent decades bombing, sanctioning, staging coups, and otherwise destabilizing regions around the world, creating the very conditions that force people to flee. Then, when those people show up at our borders seeking safety, commentators like Osei-Frimpong want to cast them as suspicious actors with hidden agendas rather than acknowledging them as human beings dealing with the consequences of policies enacted by the very countries they’re fleeing to. It’s a level of cruel irony that would be darkly comedic if it weren’t so harmful.
To call this rhetoric anything less than what it is would be doing a disservice to clarity and honesty. This is Nazi-adjacent talking point territory. The idea that there are secret elite foreigners manipulating systems and wielding hidden influence is straight out of the fascist playbook. It’s the same conspiratorial thinking that has fueled pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide throughout history. The specific targets might change, the specific groups being scapegoated might shift based on the political moment, but the underlying logic remains the same. Find a vulnerable population, suggest they’re actually pulling strings behind the scenes, manufacture resentment against them, and redirect legitimate grievances away from actual systems of power. It’s propaganda one-oh-one, and it’s disturbing to see someone who supposedly cares about justice for communities of color engaging in it.
But this isn’t Osei-Frimpong’s first rodeo with deeply problematic takes. In fact, this latest video about “elite refugees” exists in a clear pattern that demands we look at his trajectory as a whole. Most notably, and I’m going to keep bringing this up because it deserves to be brought up repeatedly until it’s properly addressed, Irami Osei-Frimpong called Nick Fuentes the white Fred Hampton. Let that sink in for a moment. Nick Fuentes, the openly white nationalist, Holocaust-denying, misogynistic groyper movement leader, was compared favorably to Fred Hampton, the revolutionary Black Panther leader who was assassinated by the FBI for his work organizing communities of color and building multiracial coalitions against oppression. The comparison is so obscene, so ahistorical, so fundamentally wrong on every conceivable level that it should have been a career-ending statement.
Fred Hampton dedicated his life to fighting systems of oppression and building solidarity across racial lines to challenge power structures that kept people trapped in poverty and disenfranchisement. He was murdered by the state specifically because his message was effective and his organizing was successfully building the kind of power that threatened those who benefited from maintaining inequality. Nick Fuentes is a fascist who openly advocates for white supremacy, who jokes about the Holocaust, who has called for women to lose the right to vote, and who has built a movement predicated on hatred and exclusion. To compare these two figures is to fundamentally misunderstand or misrepresent everything both of them stood for. It’s not an intellectual provocation or an interesting thought experiment. It’s dangerous historical revisionism that serves to normalize and legitimize fascism.
The question that naturally arises is why someone would make such a comparison. What possible motivation could exist for trying to cast Nick Fuentes in the mold of a revolutionary hero to communities of color? The most charitable interpretation is that Osei-Frimpong is so far up his own intellectual rear end that he’s lost any connection to material reality and is just throwing out provocative statements for attention without thinking through their implications. The less charitable but perhaps more accurate interpretation is that this is an attempt to make Nick Fuentes more palatable to communities of color, to suggest that his brand of white nationalism somehow offers something of value, to normalize and mainstream a figure who should be universally condemned. And who would have reason to do that except someone who is sympathetic to the ideology Fuentes represents?
This brings me to what might be considered a hot take, but one that I think is increasingly justified by the evidence of Osei-Frimpong’s own words and actions. At this point, based on the pattern of rhetoric we’ve seen, I’m convinced that Irami Osei-Frimpong is either a Nazi or Nazi-adjacent, and I don’t say that lightly. This isn’t name-calling or hyperbole. This is pattern recognition based on consistently observing someone traffic in fascist talking points, defend or elevate fascist figures, and deploy rhetorical strategies designed to normalize xenophobia and white supremacy. The Nick Fuentes comment in twenty twenty-five, the “elite refugees” video in twenty twenty-six, and who knows what comes next. This is a trajectory, and it’s heading in a clear direction.
I don’t know what happened to Irami Osei-Frimpong. There was a time when his commentary on issues affecting people of color seemed genuine and valuable. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. Maybe it was a grift all along and the mask is just slipping. Maybe he got radicalized by spending too much time in certain corners of the internet. Maybe he’s dealing with personal issues that are affecting his judgment. Honestly, the why matters less than the what at this point. What matters is that right now, in the present moment, he is saying things that align with white supremacist ideology and that’s what needs to be addressed.
The comparison to Kanye isn’t perfect but there are parallels worth noting. Here’s someone who at one point had credibility and a platform based on their work within Black communities, who has increasingly gone off the rails into problematic territory, who seems to have developed a concerning fascination with figures and ideologies that are fundamentally opposed to the liberation and wellbeing of people of color. Kanye’s public embrace of Trump, his antisemitic comments, his bizarre defenses of obviously racist figures, all of that represents a kind of ideological collapse that we might be witnessing in real time with Osei-Frimpong as well. And yeah, given the pattern of rhetoric, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if Osei-Frimpong harbors sympathies for actual historical Nazis, including that infamous Austrian painter whose name doesn’t need to be repeated here but whose ideology continues to poison discourse nearly a century later.
Now, some people might try to dismiss this critique by suggesting that there’s something inappropriate about me, as someone who isn’t Black, calling out Osei-Frimpong’s rhetoric. They might frame it as overstepping or as white saviorism or as racist in itself. But let me be abundantly clear about why that framing is wrong and why silence would actually be the more racist option. White supremacy is upheld and perpetuated by people across all racial backgrounds. People of color can and do sometimes advance white supremacist talking points, whether out of internalized racism, opportunism, confusion, or genuine ideological commitment. When that happens, especially when it happens from someone with a platform who claims to speak on issues affecting communities of color, calling it out isn’t racist. What would be racist is seeing blatant white supremacist rhetoric and choosing to ignore it because of the racial identity of the person saying it.
This is actually where people who benefit from white supremacy have a particular responsibility. If you recognize white supremacist rhetoric and you benefit from the systems it upholds, and you choose to stay silent about it, you are actively participating in the normalization of that rhetoric. Silence is complicity, especially when you have any kind of platform or voice that could be used to challenge harmful narratives. This isn’t about speaking over people of color or claiming to know better than communities that are directly impacted by these issues. This is about recognizing when someone is spreading poison, regardless of who they are, and refusing to let it go unchallenged.
The responsibility to call out white supremacy wherever it appears falls on everyone, but it falls especially heavily on those of us who benefit from white supremacy whether we want to or not. We have friends, loved ones, community members who are people of color, whose lives and safety are directly impacted when xenophobic rhetoric gets normalized, when comparisons between revolutionary leaders and fascists go unchallenged, when the idea of “elite refugees” gets to circulate without pushback. If we care about those people, if we genuinely want to see a more just world, then we can’t afford to be selective about when we speak up based on who’s doing the harm.
Look, I understand that my platform might not be the biggest. I’m not claiming to be some major influencer or thought leader. But any platform, regardless of size, comes with responsibility. If you have the ability to reach people, if you have a voice that others might hear, then you have an obligation to use that voice when you see harm being done. To do anything less would be a disservice to the values I claim to hold and to the people I claim to care about. So yes, I’m going to keep talking about this. I’m going to keep bringing up the Nick Fuentes comment even if people are tired of hearing about it, because dangerous statements don’t become less dangerous just because time passes or because people would prefer to move on.
What makes Osei-Frimpong particularly insidious is the veneer of intellectualism and progressive credibility he maintains. He can pull all the sophistry tricks in the book to claim he’s not racist, not a Nazi, not a bigot. He can frame his arguments in academic language, cite obscure theorists, present himself as someone engaging in difficult conversations that others are too afraid to have. But don’t fall for that bullshit. Fascism has always known how to dress itself up in respectable clothing. White supremacy has always been able to find articulate advocates who can make hatred sound like reason. The content of the ideas matters more than the packaging they come in, and the content of Osei-Frimpong’s recent output has been consistently aligned with xenophobic, white supremacist talking points.
This is dangerous not just because of the direct harm these ideas cause when they circulate, but because of who they’re coming from. When someone with perceived credibility in spaces focused on racial justice starts spouting fascist rhetoric, it provides cover for that rhetoric in spaces where it might otherwise be immediately rejected. It creates confusion, makes people second-guess their own instincts about what constitutes racism and xenophobia, and ultimately makes it easier for these ideas to gain traction. It’s concern-trolling and ideological trojan horsing, whether intentional or not, and the effect is to move the Overton window in a direction that makes vulnerable communities less safe.
No one should trust or take seriously someone who demonstrates this pattern of rhetoric. It doesn’t matter what valuable things they might have said in the past. It doesn’t matter if they occasionally still say something worthwhile in the present. When someone shows you who they are through consistent patterns of behavior and speech, believe them. When someone compares a Nazi to Fred Hampton, when someone creates fearmongering narratives about “elite refugees,” when someone consistently seems to find themselves aligned with white supremacist talking points, that tells you something important about where they stand and whether their commentary deserves any platform or credibility.
The frustrating thing is that more people aren’t talking about this. Maybe it’s because Osei-Frimpong isn’t quite famous enough to warrant widespread attention. Maybe it’s because people are exhausted by the constant need to call out bad actors and would prefer to focus their energy elsewhere. Maybe it’s because the particular spaces he operates in have their own dynamics that make it difficult to challenge someone who presents themselves as being on the right side of things. Whatever the reason, the relative silence around his increasingly problematic output is itself concerning, because it suggests that these ideas can circulate without adequate pushback in certain corners of the discourse.
So fine, if it has to be me saying this, then it’s going to be me. I’ll keep talking about this shit because it’s important. Because ideas have consequences and rhetoric shapes reality and when someone with a platform spreads xenophobic propaganda or tries to rehabilitate fascists, that creates real harm for real people. Because I have friends I care about who are people of color, and I refuse to watch someone spread rhetoric that endangers them without saying anything. Because any platform, no matter how small, comes with the responsibility to challenge harmful narratives when you encounter them.
Irami Osei-Frimpong has shown through his own words and actions that he is not someone who should be trusted on issues of justice, immigration, race, or really anything else. His trajectory from someone who once offered meaningful commentary to someone who now sounds increasingly like the fascists he supposedly opposes is complete. Whether he’s actively malicious or just catastrophically misguided almost doesn’t matter at this point. The effect is the same either way. His rhetoric provides aid and comfort to white supremacy, normalizes xenophobia, and makes communities of color less safe. That’s the bottom line, and that’s why this needs to be said clearly and repeatedly until enough people hear it that his dangerous influence is properly mitigated.
The work of building a more just world requires us to be honest about threats to that justice, even when those threats come from unexpected places or people who once seemed to be allies. It requires us to prioritize the safety and dignity of the most vulnerable over our comfort or our desire to avoid conflict. It requires us to recognize patterns, call them what they are, and refuse to let harmful rhetoric circulate unchallenged. Irami Osei-Frimpong’s increasingly fascistic commentary represents exactly the kind of threat that demands this kind of honest, unflinching response, and the fact that he wraps it in intellectual pretense makes it more rather than less important to clearly name what he’s doing and why it’s unacceptable.