Submission Statement: Conservatives have always insisted that they are not racist. When Leftists accuse them of harboring prejudices, the response used to be that liberals were smearing them over political disagreements. Often, this has been true. Someone could, for example, oppose affirmative action based on the principle of color blindness.
For certain sections of the Right, that posture is becoming harder to maintain. This is plainly demonstrated by the rise of Bo French, the GOP nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission. Today, he posted a picture of the audience at a University of Texas football game, captioning it: “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
This time, however, South Asians didn’t even need to be doing anything that marked them as different. Their existence was enough to offend a Republican politician who is likely to hold statewide office in a few months. French isn’t alone. Ron DeSantis has criticized the H-1B program, while explicitly pointing to the large number of Indian beneficiaries — as if that alone is enough to condemn the program. That is, despite the broad consensus among economists that high-skilled immigration benefits the country.
Performative racism has become key to Republican identity. Before, there was always some plausible deniability. “No, it’s not that I don’t like Mexicans, I just want people to come here legally,” they might say. Or: “Most Muslims are fine people, but I worry that in large numbers they might have trouble assimilating into American culture.”
Now, the mask has come off. Increasingly, the conservative movement is relying on genetics and blood to distinguish who belongs to the national community, without even the bare pretense of appealing to higher principles — or even utilitarian reasoning based on the national interest. That can be seen in the Trump administration’s war on skilled professionals coming from abroad. Some of the most energetic supporters of the Republican Party appear increasingly willing to reject the idea that non-whites can be fully American. Until the cancer of open racism is excised from modern conservatism, the GOP itself must be considered a fundamental threat to American institutions and ideals.
Posted by DifficultBarber6969
5 Comments
Racism. Next question.
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The truly remarkable thing about this is how the Democratic Party often gets painted with the takes of every rando rose Twitter person with 15 followers while conversely the takes of **an actual GOP candidate and former county party commissioner** are not being implicated to Abbott et al.
Somehow Bo French is less an avatar of the psyche of the Republican Party than SocialismRoxAbolishPolice🌹 on Twitter is of the Democratic Party.
I hope Bo’s comments drag Abbott (and more likely) Paxton down on voting day, but this should be at least an immediate -15% support at a bare minimum.
It was such an over-the-top racist statement that Karl Rove publicly declared he’d be voting for the democratically elected
I think Republican politicians are spending an increasing amount of time on X, where the replies to any post are filled to the brim with anonymous accounts spewing some of the most insanely racist stuff you can imagine. And because Republicans like to spend time on X (as opposed to the other sites), they’re oversampling on the racism that’s coming people who either don’t vote, can’t vote, or aren’t even real people.
So I don’t think the average Republican voter is as racist as Bo French is, but I think it’s also an important opportunity to look at how the broader conservative media ecosystem has evolved since 2016. It’s much more open about its racism, and it’s making no effort to expand the party outside of white Christians.
Paradoxically, they’re creating the anti-white, anti-Christian culture they’re so afraid of, and they have nobody to blame but themselves.