The GOP’s white supremacy problem

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

There are 48 days until the midterm elections, and not a lot is going well for Republicans. Aside from rising oil and gas prices, the worst news over the weekend was from a Texas statewide candidate who made the mistake of saying the quiet part out loud.

Bo French, candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner (despite the name, the office is a powerful one that regulates the oil industry), posted an angry rant on the platform formerly known as Twitter about University of Texas students who had the temerity to not look enough like Heritage Texans. (You can see the picture on the original tweet here.) Most people saw ecstatic football fans celebrating UT’s win over Ohio State. Bo French saw an outrage.

This picture is a Rorschach test. What do you see? Screenshot from Bo French.

In his words, French lamented, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

The apparent problem was that the students in the picture were too brown, because there was no other obvious issue. The happy Longhorn fans in the photo look to be mostly of Indian or South Asian descent. To French, that’s a problem.

Lest you give French the benefit of the doubt, he explained further in a subsequent tweet, “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

So here’s the problem with French’s take in case you haven’t figured it out yet. We live in a multicultural nation, the proverbial melting pot of cultures. It’s impossible to tell if someone is an American or a foreigner by looking at them. A great many native-born Americans have skin colors of varying shades of brown. They don’t look like Bo French, but they are still Americans.

There are no degrees of citizenship. A new citizen who was naturalized yesterday is just as American as a native-born American whose parents came over on the Mayflower. That’s the American way.

Further, under Texas law, Texas students in the top five percent of their classes are guaranteed admission to UT. The odds are good that, not only are the students in the picture Americans and Texans, but they were probably among the top students from Texas schools. That is called a meritocracy, and it’s something Republicans used to favor.

French is rightfully getting dragged online for his comments, and it seems that these tweets were only the tip of the iceberg. Other problematic- let’s just say the word: “racist” - tweets have also emerged, including one from last month that says, “Muslims shouldn’t be allowed....in the United States Period.”

Tweets like these show the fallacy in the claim that Republicans only oppose illegal immigration. There is no evidence that any of the UT students were here illegally. French attacked them fore merely looking “foreign.” He would disallow all Muslim immigration based on religion, First Amendment be damned.

The interesting thing is the silence from Republicans. Quite a few online accounts are defending and agreeing with French, but most Republicans are staying silent. Ken Paxton denounced generic racism in a tweet that attacked James Talarico rather than addressing the elephant in the room.

Credit where credit is due, Erick Erickson is one of the few voices on the right that I’ve heard denouncing French and his defenders, calling out the talk of “Heritage Texans,” i.e. white Texans,as racist, and even calling French a “racist dumbass” in a memorable tweet. I’d be surprised if French and his ilk aren’t just as unhappy about Hispanic Texans as they are Indian ones, even though Texas’ Hispanic heritage is older than its Anglo one.

And that brings me to my next point. Ironically, Erickson was calling out the propensity of Republican staffers to be Nazi sympathizers just before Frenchgate broke.

The most recent such story involves the political director for Ohio Republican Senator John Husted, who used a picture of Waffen SS soldiers as his Facebook profile picture. This was not the only recent case of Republicans with a thing for Nazis. Just a few days ago, a staffer for Rep. Eric Pratt (R-Minn.) was fired after posting pro-Hitler and antisemitic content on social media. In Georgia, Rep. Mike Collins had an intern and PAC staffer who posted Nazi and KKK images and content, as well as a son-in-law who made white nationalist posts.

Going back further, there is even more. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have posted Nazi slogans and references. American flags with swastikas were found in several Republican congressional offices. A leaked group chat of Young Republican leaders was filled with racist and antisemitic comments. Going back to Trump’s first term, the Unite The Right rally that led to rioting in Charlottesville was filled with alt right and neo-Nazi figures like Nick Fuentes and Steve Bannon, yet the broader Republican movement accepted these people as conservatives.

And speaking of Charlottesville, as I was finishing this piece, I saw that Marshall Rawson, a Republican candidate for the Florida House, had been identified as having marched with a pro-secession, neo-confederate group at Unite the Right.

Partisans will dismiss these red flags as isolated occurrences, but there’s a lot of smoke here. I recall an aphorism from military history that, “Once is a coincidence, twice is happenstance, and three times is enemy action.”

The Republican Party has a serious problem with racism.

Honestly, I’m surprised at how blatantly racist the party has become. A few years ago, when I was a Republican, the talk was about equality without favoritism. There seems to be none of that talk anymore.

I grew up in the South, and have lived most of my life here. I’ve seen a lot of change, most of it for the better. There are fewer racial differences than when I was young. Friend groups cross the color barrier. Multiethnic children are common and accepted. I can remember when all this wasn’t the case.

But there was latent racism hiding beneath the surface. Hatred and suspicion of people who are different is still common, although I doubt most people who hold these views consider themselves racist. I think that the Republican stoking of fears about immigrants has played a major role in bringing such attitudes back to the surface.

Republicans had a chance with their inroads into minority groups in 2024, but they are blowing it. If the mass deportations, restrictions on legal immigration to near zero, and the suspicion of anyone who looks “foreign” weren’t enough to sour minority voters on Republican candidates, overt hostility and racism likely will be.

The damage being done now to the Republican brand is going to be a longterm problem for the party. The GOP is an increasingly white party in a country that is increasingly nonwhite. That demographic change is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just change.

Republicans should be aware that the white electorate is not getting any bigger. They can’t successfully run on racist subtexts forever. At some point, the scales will tip and the GOP will become a permanent minority party representing a demographic minority. Even in Texas, non-Hispanic whites are already only 39 percent of the population.

The growth of America’s nonwhite population is not something that Republicans can deport their way out of.

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