There’s been a blowup today over a Republican politician becoming too explicit with the racism. I wrote about it at UnHerd.
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.”
Read the rest here.
Interestingly, this has caused some blowback from the right, with Republican politicians in Texas denouncing French. Here’s a funny one.
This is not a paywall. The rest of this article is available to free subscribers of the newsletter. Just leave your email below to continue reading.
This post is sponsored by Mechanize. AI alignment is perhaps the most important issue of our time, and if you’re interested in being part of that effort, Mechanize is hiring software engineers at a base salary of $300K-$400K/year, plus substantial bonuses. They also have openings for other positions, including Recruiter ($200K). Here is their website, and you can apply here.
So I'm an 2nd gen Indian American (meaning American born Indian immigrant parents) and the sheer ignorance on this topic, even more than the racism, is astounding.
First of all, these are almost all 2nd gen Indian Americans as well and there is a lot of them at UT Austin because of this: UT is the top school in the state, there are a lot of 2nd gen Indians in Texas who are smart and get good grades, and affirmative action is gone. Large schools also have Ethnic frats and social bubbles so this is just one part of the student section.
2nd, I'm actually pretty anti-H1B precisely because I believe that very smart and capable 2nd gen Asians and Indians are the most affected. Ive seen many of my smart friends struggle in the job market because they have to compete with H1Bs who will get kicked out of the country and will accept lower pay.
You know why the racists are so triggered by the multicolored UT students? UT is the flagship public university in Texas and requires the best grades to get into.
The problem with folks like Cornyn who condemn overt racism is that folks who sounded like him managed to keep the riffraff out of elite institutions for decades on end without any explicit racism. Hmmm.
Last time I checked 70% of US senators were white men.
BTW, I noticed that women of any type were undercounted in the UT crowd.