After days of thinking about the possibility that AI might kill all of humanity, it’s almost a relief to be able to write about a lighter topic — like how the xenophobic Right is threatening to tear my country apart.
Who is Bo French? No one of much consequence. He’s a mostly failed Texan politician — the heir to an oil company, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who alienated his business partners, who lost two Republican primaries for the Texas House of Representatives before finally becoming the chair of a county-level party chapter. He finally got his first political success this year, when he won a narrow primary victory and became the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner. He currently trails his Democratic opponent in the polls.
Bo French isn’t that important, but this week he set off a national firestorm when he tweeted the above photo of a bunch of Indian kids celebrating University of Texas football at a Longhorns game, along with some alarmist anti-Indian rhetoric:
It was hardly a surprise that French tweeted something like this. He’s tweeted plenty of stuff along the same lines in the past. Here are two famous examples:
He’s also repeatedly called for the deportation of 100 million people; since there are only 50 million foreign-born people living in the United States, this means French was either getting his numbers wrong, or (more likely) calling for deporting tens of millions of American citizens. Reading his tweets, it’s not hard to imagine which citizens he’d choose for deportation.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that French’s race-war ideology has taken over the GOP. Plenty of Texas Republicans, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Jared Patterson, Representative Lacey Hull, and others publicly denounced his tweet. Karl Rove declared that he’d vote for the Democrat over French. Governor Greg Abbott, who has endorsed French despite his history of similar tweets, was milder in his criticism, but still affirmed the fundamental Texan-ness of the football fans in the picture:
“That is not my message,” Abbott said. “A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams.”
“The way we win the state is the same way we win football games,” Abbott added. “We unite under the brand of Texas.”
But despite these official condemnations, it’s easy to tell which way the wind is blowing among the GOP base. All of the Republican tweets denouncing French were heavily attacked on X. Rightist journalists, activists, and even a few GOP politicians poured out of the woodwork to support French and affirm his message. Here are a few examples:
French himself, who had been pressured to delete his poll about Jews and Muslims last year, now felt encouraged enough to double down on his anti-Indian tweet.
I can’t tell you whether the New Right — represented by French and his supporters in the right-wing media — will prevail over the Republican establishment. But watching the movement go after a bunch of Texas college football fans tells us something important about the New Right as a movement.
What it tells us is that if you’re a nonwhite immigrant, or the child of nonwhite immigrants, it doesn’t matter what you do — the New Right will still view you as an enemy and as an invader.
It doesn’t matter whether you or your parents came to this country legally. How many times have we heard rightists shout “Illegal vs. legal!!” in response to anyone who defends immigration? Many regular Americans care about “illegal vs. legal”, but the New Right does not. Everyone in that UT photo either came to America legally, or was born to parents who came here legally. It didn’t matter to Bo French, or the people who defended him.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re high-skilled or low-skilled. How many times have we heard rightists complain that immigrants come to America because they want welfare benefits? And yet everyone in the UT photo is going to spend their lifetime paying taxes to support native-born Americans on Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security Disability. Indian Americans in general are the highest-earning group in the country, and those who go to a good college like the University of Texas are going to beat that average.
That matters to many regular voters, but it doesn’t matter at all to the New Right. Yes, they’ll shout about poor (nonwhite) immigrants on welfare. But when they encounter nonwhite immigrant groups who make lots of money, they suddenly pivot to accusing those groups of stealing their jobs and their spots in colleges. There’s just no way to win.
It also doesn’t matter whether you assimilate or not. Yes, if you speak a foreign language or build a Hindu temple or wear traditional Indian clothing, the New Right will scream their heads off about it. “Alien invaders!!”, they’ll cry. But if you put on a University of Texas sweater and go to football games, they’ll still scream “Alien invaders!!” when they see you in a photo. It’s who you are that bothers them, not what you do.
Nor does it matter whether your entire ethnic group is well-behaved. Indian Americans are incarcerated at only 25% of the rate of non-Hispanic White Americans. And basically none of the people in the photo that frightened Bo French will ever go to jail. That probably matters to some voters, but not to the New Right.
In fact, it doesn’t even matter if you vote Republican. As a matter of fact, Donald Trump won a pretty solid victory among Asian people in Texas (which includes Indians):
It’s not clear whether Bo French and his fellow New Rightists are even aware of this fact, but what is clear is that it didn’t matter to them at all.1
This is why there is no pro-immigration argument that will ever sway members of the New Right. You can give them research showing that high-skilled immigrants raise employment and wages for native-born Americans, and they’ll either disbelieve it or (usually) ignore it. You can talk about Nobel-winning scientists and Operation Paperclip all you want, and it won’t make a dent. You can cite statistics about immigrant entrepreneurship and job creation, you can talk about how Satya Nadella saved Microsoft and Sanjay Mehrotra is the reason why America still has a presence in the memory industry. They will counter with some fabricated anecdote about how their friend got fired from their company because Indians came in and only hired other Indians.2
So why am I even talking about this? If the New Right can never be persuaded to stop thinking of brown faces as invaders, then why discuss this topic at all?
Well, two reasons, actually. First, it helps us more clearly understand the New Right as a movement — how they think and what they want. Most importantly, they see the world in terms of collective zero-sum competition between groups.
To the New Right, if Indians get into the University of Texas, it means that White people must have been “replaced” at that university — or at American universities in general. Bo French himself tweeted that the presence of Indian students at American universities is evidence that “they hate white Americans and prioritize everyone else”. They do not even consider the possibility that the Indian kids got in because of individual merit. If an Indian American succeeds, that represents not the success of that singular individual, but a win for Team Indian in general.
And the New Right worldview sees any win for Team Indian — or Team Asian, or Team Hispanic, etc. — as a loss for Team White. Nowhere do they consider the possibility that the system might not be zero-sum. The fact that the number of freshmen admitted to UT grew from 15,000 in 2011 to 19,000 in 2021 means nothing to them. The historical fact that Italian and Jewish and Polish and Japanese Americans attained economic success sixty years ago without consigning WASP Americans to poverty is lost on them — as is every other example in which immigrant groups and existing groups succeeded in America side by side.
Crucially, this zero-sum assumption is why the New Right constantly shrinks their tent instead of expanding it. In principle, even if you see the world as a collective interaction between groups rather than individuals, that interaction doesn’t have to be zero-sum — you can have alliances between groups, for mutual benefit. The Christian conservatives of the 1970s and 1980s accepted Catholics, “white ethnics”, and some Jews into their coalition as “co-belligerents”, and won many battles as a result.
The New Right had a golden opportunity to do something similar after Trump’s victory in 2024. Hispanic and Asian voters (and even some Black voters) shifted strongly toward the Republicans, and toward Trump specifically. But instead of embracing that influx of new voters and building a big conservative tent to defeat wokeness and progressivism and the Democrats, they went all-in on race war.
Stephen Miller relied so heavily on racial profiling for his mass deportation efforts that many Hispanics felt that Trump had betrayed them. Muslim voters might have gone back to the GOP, but rightists made resistance to Muslim immigration a “civilizational” crusade. Jewish voters turned off by the antisemitism of the Left might have switched their allegiance to the GOP, but the New Right allowed Nazi apologetics to fester within their ranks.
Now it’s Indians’ turn to feel the sting of unprovoked rightist attacks. All those kids in Texas wanted to do was to cheer for their football team; instead, a political movement is calling for their ethnic cleansing simply because they showed up at the stadium. As a result, despite the best efforts of Republicans like Cornyn, the GOP is poised to mobilize and piss off a group of Americans who are just about as numerous as Jews — and who earn even more money.
It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity. If they ever managed to see off the Hispanics and the Asians, the rightists would start in on the Greeks and the Italians, and so on. There’s no victory in sight — only eternal conflict. These are not nation-builders; they are nation-dismantlers.
Coming to grips with the extremism and intransigence of the New Right also helps us understand what an unpopular fringe they really are. The New Right screams and shouts and acts very aggressive on X, but this aggression is just a way of concealing their numerical weakness. Most voters are not part of the New Right, and they don’t think that immigrants are invaders or that immigration is “replacement”. Most Americans say that immigration is a good thing as of today:
Essentially none of that 73% majority is going to be part of the New Right, and some portion of the 21% minority probably isn’t either. That means the New Right is a fringe movement — a very loud, very aggressive group of people who are adept at bullying regular Americans on certain social media platforms, but who ultimately lack the numbers to overcome the mainstream in a direct contest.
Just watch some of the reactions of the UT students who were targeted by Bo French and his racist social media hordes:
Consider how regular and non-alien those young people seem, compared to the screeching bigots attacking them on X for going to a football game. I guarantee you that the majority of regular, normal, non-internet-poisoned Americans will watch those videos and just want to say “Hook ‘em Horns”.3
That means that the immigration argument is winnable. A reasonable liberal position on immigration — one that respects the law, honors the democratic will of the people, and treats immigration as a privilege rather than a human right — has a good chance of winning over the majority of the country. The New Right can only succeed if they manage to divide and conquer the pro-immigration majority, as they did in 2024; immigration supporters should focus on making common cause with the persuadable center, in order to make sure 2024 isn’t repeated.
That means not treating all immigration skeptics the same. Republicans like John Cornyn, who like to see Indian American kids cheering for Texas football but who hate to see asylum seekers rewarded for illegally crossing the border, should not be lumped in with those who simply see any brown face and think “invader”. Xenophobes exist, and they are growing more powerful within the GOP, but not every Republican voter is a xenophobe, and not every restriction on immigration is xenophobic.
If Democrats understand and accept that fact, I think they will be able to turn the tide.4 Throughout America’s history, pro-immigration forces have won a lot more battles than they’ve lost, but it was never easy. It always required compromise, reassurance, moderation, and coalition-building. This is not the time for Democrats to respond to the maximalism of xenophobes like Bo French with maximalism of their own.
This also applies to the small and rather pitiful number of immigrants who go online and shout that immigration is “replacement” and “invasion”. It will not save them.
Not that anyone in the New Right actually cares about the research on this topic, but…It’s actually true that Indians, like basically every group in existence, do have some tendency to hire their co-ethnics, though whether this represents a bias is harder to say. What we do know is that Indians do it much less Vietnamese, Chinese, Mexican, South Korean, Filipino, Polish, or Russian people, but much more than Dominicans, Guatemalans, or Jamaicans.
And I say that as someone who grew up in College Station, Texas…
Indeed, the tide may already be turning; Trump is now underwater on the immigration issue:
But 52% to 47% is still a fairly slim margin; Dems can do better than this.
I have been saying since 2017 that Patriotism is just sitting there as a political label waiting to be appropriated by the centre-left
The hard left hate our history, the modern right hates the modern world and hate their country as it actually is
The centre left can just pick to the discarded banner of the patriotic party, all they need to do is bend down and pick it up, then take all the political benefit that comes from being seen as the patriotic party
Anyone who has a problem with people watching a football game has a problem with America
Nice piece Noah.