Anti-Indian hate is somehow intensifying. Earlier this week, a tweet showed up in my feed from the University of Texas in which a girl of South Asian descent was talking about her experience as a student. It was a completely mundane social media message. The post had nothing to do with my normal interests, yet the moment I saw it, I understood why it was going viral. The tweet ended up getting deleted due to the backlash to showing a young Indian woman simply existing. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth posts a mundane picture with the Indian minister of defense, and this makes the chuds seethe with rage, asking him why he is standing with America’s enemies. And in a last-minute instance of trying to mobilize the haters, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner just announced that companies that use H-1B visas will no longer be eligible for certain grants.
I’m increasingly obsessed with this topic, and think that it deserves a lot more coverage than it’s getting. The combination of the degree of vitriol expressed toward Indians and how little rational justification there is for it should lead you to index heavily on what is happening. I previously wrote that the hate we are seeing comes down to Indians having dark skin while being bad at sports. This theory holds up, but we need a bit more psychology to explain why things have gone this far. Traditional American prejudices against groups like blacks, Hispanics, and Jews now seem mild and marginal compared to the constant unbridled hate directed toward Indians who are not doing anything wrong.
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As a general matter, the greatest hatreds are often based in insecurity. But rightists don’t envy Indians for their dark skin and lack of athletic prowess. They may be somewhat jealous of their socioeconomic success, but from that perspective there are a lot of groups they could be getting angry at. Moreover, my experience is that elites oriented toward nationalism or MAGA are just as opposed to immigration from India as the chuds, which a story of envy doesn’t explain. That said, it may be the case that the chuds are jealous, and right-wing intellectuals do their normal thing where they try to come up with respectable-sounding rationalizations for what people in their coalition believe.
So is skin tone, poor athletic ability, and envy of success enough to explain everything? Perhaps. But I think that there’s an additional factor here, and it gets to the heart of the intellectual and moral failures of American conservatism.
The left has for over half a century now regularly accused the right of being motivated by racism and bigotry. Sometimes this has been fair, sometimes not. But the controversy surrounding each particular issue was always something you could debate. Conservatives could answer each charge of bigotry and still sound reasonable.
“No, it’s not that we don’t like Mexicans. But the rule of law is important and we must have an orderly system.”