Leopards Ate My Face

it wasn’t liberals warning them

This attitude consistently surprises me because it isn’t some complex, nuanced topic that takes years of study to understand. The racism has been about as obvious as possible since long before Trump. Don’t try and tell me how smart you are when you’re just discovering that, huh, the Republican Party doesn’t seem to like brown people.

How do you tell someone the country they’ve loved for 50 years is harboring a growing faction that wishes he’d never come?

I think these three words in this sentence says a lot about the author. My guess is they felt that America didn't really have a racist population or felt it was small? When in reality it's always been quite large but mostly quite. Where now this population doesn't need to whisper anymore and they are seeing it for the first time.

Yeah they didn't really hide the racism inherent in their anti-immigrant demagoguery.

"But then a few days ago...."

What, you crawled out from under a rock?

Stop associating Trump with the working class. MAGA is a petite bourgeois movement. Workers don't go for Trump because they're racists, they go for Trump because their boss likes Trump and they're a little politically backward, and that's for a whole host of cultural and institutional reasons.

One thing that is interesting to me is how small business owners or like mid-upper management types will take on all these worker affectations like trucks, country music, cowboy hats, etc. but don't get it twisted, one exploits and the other is exploited, and the worker who needs their boss to survive, aspires to be like him. And their boss has huge trump flags everywhere, signs in their yard, and he seems like someone just like me!

Whaaaaaat? You mean the bigotry and vitriol of the GOP isn't limited to Mexicans, Hatians, Chinese, Guatemalans, Columbians, Cubans, Women, Gays, Transsexuals, Liberals, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Athiests, Americans wanting affordable healthcare, Americans wanting a living wage, Americans wanting affordable housing, Americans wanting renewable clean energy, Americans wanting a clean environment, immigrants, healthcare workers fighting a global pandemic, journalists, hecklers, and generally anybody who does not vote Republican?

Please add any groups that I forgot.

My life is filled with immigrants from India and Nigeria and Lebanon and the Dominican Republic—many of whom are definitionally the “working class”—who voted for Trump.

Another word for those people is "Idiots". Trumps base lives off racism. Anyone who did not understand this from the start basically deserves being hit by it. This includes both the idiots who did vote for Trump as well as the idiots who did not care to vote. I'm really sorry for all the other people who will fall victims of this political desaster, though.

A good many of the “H1-Bs” from India are Modi supporters and by extension also supported Trump.

How do you tell someone the country they’ve loved for 50 years is harboring a growing faction that wishes he’d never come?

"The guy you voted for doesn't like you because of where you came from"

People who think politics is some kind of sports fandom are dumb and annoying.

MAGA is founded on racism.

It's pretty unfortunate that so many humans are so stupid that they have to suffer before learning obvious lessons. The unfortunate part being that people with regularly functioning brains have to go along for the shit ride with them.

My grandfather voted for Trump three times. Now, part of that movement is calling immigrants like him ‘filthy.’

that "part" has always been there, other "parts" of that movement just chose to fucking ignore it for decades upon decades

Vivek fucks up recently so the racism against Indians surges, and now this person finally can't ignore it any more. "Oh wow they don't just hate Mexicans, Muslims, Haitians, illegal immigrants, and so on, they hate people like ME too?" And she's so deeply affected that she... doesn't say anything about it to her Trump voting family members for risk of upsetting them. You're a day late and a dollar short, lady. Or a decade late, a decade full of telling people who were warning you the whole time that they're wrong.

Do we just have to wait for the infighting to swallow up all of the token "good ones" one by one then try to pick up the pieces afterwards?

I’ve often thought about that moment—the unnecessary injection of racial anxiety into my otherwise normal school day—when I think about the irony of progressive identity politics. My parents, both born in India but educated in America, would laugh about their well-intentioned but misguided friends who, in their eagerness to ward off the idea of “otherness,” ended up contributing to it.

So the people who knew the country well enough to see what was coming told you what was coming. You ignored them, your parents laughed at them.

But then a few days ago, I opened X to see my feed populated with anti-Indian vitriol—calling the country where my parents were born “filthy” and its people “filthy and undesirable.” Some condemned these comments but many others agreed, and still others criticized the critics for crying racism. But I could see it for what it was: raw bigotry.

Huh.

But now, we must all reckon with an ugly part of the MAGA agenda they did not realize existed.

Everyone who's head wasn't buried in the sand or laughing about "the irony of progressive politics" realized they existed.

And so, if Trump’s win is a revolutionary moment for MAGA, the people who voted for the revolution need to define which MAGA they believe in. Does “making America great again” revive the ideals of this country—or the grievances of a group of “native-born” Americans? If MAGA chooses the latter, those on the left who were dismissed as hysterical for crying racism will be vindicated in the worst way.

Whew, still not getting it I see. MAGA has made that choice already, and it hasn't moved one bit during the time MAGA has existed.

I didn’t want to fracture that pride with the news of an ugly turn in our country’s politics. How do you tell someone the country they’ve loved for 50 years is harboring a growing faction that wishes he’d never come?

I think you can only tell them to pay attention next time and not laugh at those trying to give you a clue.

Damn, it's only January and my schadenfreude gland is already getting fatigued.

I understand not listening to liberals. I try not to listen to them whenever possible, but Trump is obviously worse than them, in essentially every way.

It's like people have this natural tendency to support whoever stands in opposition to the people they don't like, regardless of whether or not they are any better. Like people think, "hmm, I don't really like liberals, and this Trump fella says he doesn't like liberals either, therefore he must be good." You can't do a little more critical thinking thank that?

Her turning point:

But then a few days ago, I opened X to see my feed populated with anti-Indian vitriol—calling the country where my parents were born “filthy” and its people “filthy and undesirable.” Some condemned these comments but many others agreed, and still others criticized the critics for crying racism. But I could see it for what it was: raw bigotry.

Same old story:

My life is filled with immigrants from India and Nigeria and Lebanon and the Dominican Republic—many of whom are definitionally the “working class”—who voted for Trump. They are family members and neighbors, cafe owners who greet me by name, doctors, cleaning ladies, the mailman, my Cape Verdean babysitter-turned-friend of many years. All of them opposed illegal immigration while defending Trump from critics: “He’s not anti-legal immigration, he’s anti-illegal immigration,” they’d said. “I’m pro-legal immigration—make it easier to do it the lawful way,” they’d say.

I will never understand how people can't see it's thinly veiled racism when it comes from the GOP.

How brave. Going out and broadcasting to the world just how dense you are.