To Hell With Assimilation

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, September 14, 2026

 

How racist can a party’s voters be if they’re willing to nominate a guy named “Vivek Ramaswamy” to be governor of Ohio?

 

How prejudiced can its leaders be if they’re comfortable placing Harmeet Dhillon, a native of Chandigarh, India, in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division?

 

And how bigoted can its establishment be if, as seems inevitable, it intends to fall in line in 2028 behind a man married to an Indian American woman, with whom he has four half-Indian children?

 

It isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, particularly those of Indian descent. But it is true that the modern Republican Party relies to a considerable degree on voters who hate nonwhites—particularly those of Indian descent.

 

In fact, after five years of watching J.D. Vance’s political star ascend, that’s the only argument I’ve come up with for wanting him to be president. It’s gratifying to imagine chuds like Bo French having to cope with the reality of first lady Usha Vance:

 

 

French’s career illustrates the extent to which racism has and hasn’t gone mainstream in the Republican coalition. By political standards he’s a nobody, a former GOP county leader in Texas who’s never held public office. Last year, after he posted a poll on Twitter asking whether Jews or Muslims are a greater threat to America, even the state’s very Trumpy lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, denounced him. He doesn’t represent the average Republican’s opinion. (I think.)

 

However.

 

French managed to overcome opposition from Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott to win a GOP primary for railroad commissioner (which regulates Texas’ oil and gas industries) this year despite—or because of?—a history of posting dreck like the tweet above. In July, Texas Monthly ran through some of his lowlights as a Very Online postliberal in the age of Trump:

 

He’s called for 100 million people—nearly a third of the American population—to be deported, and for two nonwhite Texas House members to be stripped of their citizenship and removed from the country. He wants some Native Americans—“third world savages”—to be kicked out of America too. French says Texas needs to “ban Islam” and “round up every Muslim” for deportation. Last week he told his followers it was “time to go round up all the Chinese and send them packing!” McCarthyism and the Christian Crusades, he argues, didn’t go far enough. And this week he referred to America’s “not in labor force” population—an economic term for nonworkers that includes retirees, students, and those with serious handicaps—as “low IQ parasites.”

 

He’s also called on the United States to become “Rhodesia” before it becomes Zimbabwe, which is as straightforward as one can be in declaring oneself a white nationalist without using the term. None of it was enough to derail his campaign. On the contrary, per the New York Times, French “demonized Muslims and immigrants” repeatedly en route to winning his primary—again, for railroad commissioner, a position that has zippo to do with the culture wars.

 

If it isn’t true that the modern Republican Party hates nonwhites, it is nonetheless true that the modern Republican Party will nominate someone for statewide office who hates nonwhites and who makes no bones about it.

 

French’s tweet complaining about Indian American students in the stands at this weekend’s University of Texas football game was denounced by other Republicans with varying degrees of indignation. The strongest criticism came from state lawmakers—and from John Cornyn, who was ousted by his party in this spring’s Senate primary. “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized?” the senator wrote, pointing to French’s post. “This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.”

 

Other officials with more to lose by antagonizing GOP voters than the retiring Cornyn were cautious, though. “That is not my message,” Abbott, who’s up for reelection in November, said of the post in a statement before pivoting to a vague call for unity and reminding readers that he froze H-1B visas for immigrants at Texas universities.

 

As for the man who beat Cornyn in his primary, Ken Paxton piped up to trollishly declare that he condemns racism “in all its forms”—and named his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, as the real racist on the ballot this fall. He didn’t even mention French’s tweet in his comments, which figures: It would have been awkward for Paxton to condemn an outspoken white nationalist whom he actually endorsed months ago.

 

Why did a post by an obscure-for-now Texas politician get so much attention from his own party?

 

Assimilation.

 

One reason was the sheer churlishness of it.

 

Bad enough that French would begrudge nonwhite students a moment of joy, much worse that he chose a joyous moment in which most of the rest of the state was also luxuriating. The Longhorns came back from 20 points down on Saturday night to defeat top-ranked Ohio State; the average Texan celebrating that win will look at the photo and find the students more relatable than French’s reaction to them.

 

There’s also a glaring incongruity between the right’s traditional support for meritocracy and French’s apparent preference for reverse affirmative action.

 

“State law requires that Texas high school students ranked at the top of their class—in the top 5 percent for the 2027-28 school year—be automatically admitted to the University of Texas at Austin, and that they compose up to 75 percent of the class,” the Times noted in its story on French’s post. International students are a mere 10 percent of the student body by comparison. In all probability, the kids in the photo are Texans born and raised who made the cut because they excelled academically. French couldn’t care less, I assume. For him, a brownie’s a brownie.

 

By far the most common response on social media to his tweet, though, was to point out that the “foreign”-looking students in the photo are doing precisely what Republicans have always asked immigrants to do. They’re assimilating. Nothing is more quintessentially American than getting decked out in your school’s gear and going berserk at a college football game. The kid in the foreground of the photo is wearing a cowboy hat, for cripes sake. All that’s missing is one of them firing off a six-shooter in celebration.

 

You want Them to assimilate? Congratulations. They’ve assimilated.

 

Not only have they assimilated into American culture, but increasingly they’ve assimilated into the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s gains with nonwhite voters were probably the difference between victory and defeat in 2024; among Indian Americans specifically, he improved from 22 percent of the vote in 2020 to 31 percent four years later. “Our culture is very conservative,” an Indian American candidate for local office in Frisco, Texas, told the The Texas Tribune earlier this year. “Fiscally, heavily conservative, and culturally, we focus on education, family values, small businesses, less government. I think a lot of Indians are waking up to this, realizing we’re conservative too.”

 

In a conservative party, a guy like that would have no issue. But in a party led by postliberals, whose activist vanguard is postliberal, and whose next generation is likely to be postliberal, he has a big problem. Namely: Postliberals don’t care about assimilation.

 

It’s not that they don’t believe assimilation is possible. (I think.) If you told French that the students in the photo grew up in Texas and like all the same things that white kids their age like, I imagine he’d nod and say, “And?”

 

For postliberals, assimilation is a non sequitur, an inclusion-minded solution to a problem that can only be solved by exclusion.

 

Tribes.

 

The point of postliberalism isn’t to make sure that immigrants and their descendants adopt the civic and cultural preferences that Americans have traditionally held. How could it be when postliberals themselves don’t share many of those preferences: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy rather than right-wing autocracy, and so on? The point of postliberalism is to secure the political and cultural dominance of one’s racial/religious tribe.

 

The problem with nonwhite kids at UT isn’t that they’re failing to assimilate or are unassimilable. The problem is that they’re nonwhite, and therefore their personal and professional success threatens the long-term dominance of white Christians.

 

That’s where the nonsense about “Heritage Americans” comes from. It’s a postliberal bid to establish a hierarchy for the United States that would preemptively exclude rival tribes from accruing the sort of prestige that strivers in this country have historically aimed for. That hierarchy also helps explain why MAGA chuds have singled out Indian Americans for special venom among nonwhite groups, a phenomenon that’s common enough to have attracted attention from prominent right-wingers of Indian descent like Dhillon and Dinesh D’Souza.

 

Indian Americans aren’t caricatured the way immigrants from Latin American usually are, as gangsters and welfare leeches whose cheap labor undercuts blue-collar wages. The opposite: The core populist grievance against them is that they’re too successful, stereotypically high achievers who do well in school and go on to lucrative professional careers. The anger about granting H-1B visas to Indian tech engineers isn’t that they’re going to come to America and start defecating in the streets; it’s that they’re going to outwork and outcompete many American students for what should, supposedly, be “their” jobs. Indian Americans aren’t a potential underclass, they’re a potential overclass.

 

An aggressively anti-intellectual political movement dislikes a demographic broadly seen as intellectual. Go figure.

 

The nature of prejudice against Indian Americans is similar to antisemitism but with the “foreign” quotient dialed up a few notches due to their skin color and Americans finding Hinduism more exotic than Judaism. One local GOP chairman captured the ambivalence toward a “model minority” perfectly in an interview with Politico when he described the challenge Ramaswamy is facing in Ohio: “Most of us, the only time we’ve ever been in a room with someone of color like him was when you went to see your doctor.”

 

Postliberals abhor the “melting pot” because it threatens to dissolve the tribal hierarchy they’re desperate to construct to preserve their traditional dominance. A stark example: In its reporting on local hostility to Indian Americans in Frisco, where that group now accounts for 19 percent of the population, the Tribune noted that “a clip of Boy Scouts leading the Pledge of Allegiance before a Frisco City Council meeting went viral, attracting thousands of reposts, many with hateful language, because the boys were Indian.”

 

To a conservative, there’s no better example of America doing what America does best than a child of nonwhite immigrants becoming a Boy Scout. To a postliberal, there’s no greater provocation. The Boy Scouts are Americana in its purest form, like mom and apple pie, and Americana to a postliberal is defined by one race and one religion.

 

Silence.

 

It’s no wonder, then, that French’s tweet got so much attention. It sits right on the fault line between conservatives and postliberals, two groups united by Trumpism in an uneasy anti-left coalition that risks breaking apart once the president retires and his gravitational pull is no longer strong enough to hold them together.

 

It’s also no wonder that J.D. Vance continues to remain embarrassingly ambivalent about Israel and the extent to which he shares his friend Tucker Carlson’s worldview. Vance is in an odd spot, suspicious to conservatives because of his hostility to Reaganite economics and foreign policy and suspicious to postliberals because his own family is a racial “melting pot.” He’ll need both parts of that coalition to win in 2028, which requires him not to stray too far from the fault line himself. Sometimes he’s anti-bigot, at other times anti-anti.

 

And it’s no wonder that so many prominent Republicans chose silence this weekend in lieu of taking a position on French’s tweet.

 

The same thing happened when Texas Monthly profiled French’s habit of Jew-baiting his Democratic opponent for railroad commissioner, Jon Rosenthal, in July. The author of that story allegedly reached out to Abbott, Patrick, and Paxton as well as “numerous top French donors” for comment and got no response. Yesterday Rosenthal himself predicted that French’s post about the Texas football game would likewise draw mostly crickets from Republicans, and it did.

 

Among GOPers with a national profile, only Cornyn and Rep. Dan Crenshaw hit him hard. Coincidentally, both men lost their most recent primaries and will be out of politics soon, casualties of the right’s postliberal drift. Abbott may have spoken up only because he calculated that he stood slightly more to lose than to gain in his own reelection bid by biting his tongue: As a longtime incumbent, Republican partisans would likely let him slide for criticizing French very mildly—but Indian American swing voters might not have let him slide if he didn’t.

 

That’s what coalition management looks like in a party in which one faction wants immigrants to assimilate, another wants to expel nonwhite undesirables to preserve its own tribal preeminence, and a third has been conditioned to mindlessly view any reluctance among Republican leaders to behave ruthlessly as evidence of “weakness” regardless of the circumstances. It wasn’t just ardent postliberals whom Abbott risked alienating if he had criticized French harshly; it also would have annoyed that third group of rank-and-file partisan idiots who’ve spent 10 years under Trump being retrained to believe that any sort of moral squeamishness aimed at the far right is proof of furtive communist sympathies.

 

So, for most of the Republican establishment, the opportunity French’s tweet presented to weigh in on the great assimilation debate was one they were happy to decline. Why take a side and inevitably annoy one or more of those factions by doing so? When your coalition consists of Reaganites, racists, and nihilists, there’s no “sweet spot” on the question of what number of dark-skinned, foreign-looking kids attending American colleges is appropriate.

 

Besides, the right’s political class has also been reshaped morally in certain ways by the past decade. Sen. Susan Collins was asked recently why she hasn’t followed Liz Cheney’s lead, standing on civic principle in opposing Trump and letting the electoral chips fall where they may, and seemed perplexed by the question. What influence does Liz Cheney have anymore? Collins responded. She has no impact on anything.

 

That’s a fine, pithy explanation for the Republican silence around French’s post. The notion of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, as a service to the country, is as foreign to the GOP establishment as it is to its leader. If Collins doesn’t stand to benefit personally from making herself an enemy of autocracy—or of French-style postliberalism—then why should she stick her neck out?

 

It takes a long time, and many enablers, for a party to reach a point where attacking a fellow member for racism is politically riskier than the racism itself is, but here we are. “If the power of scandal goes away, then we’re left with a vicious cycle in which moral or legal wrongdoing doesn’t lead to consequences, which undermines trust in the government and public institutions, which in turn widens polarization and allows more corruption, abuse and lawbreaking,” the Times wrote this morning, presciently, in a piece about the death of shame in American politics. That’s 10 years of Trump, several years of French posts, in one sentence. The bill is coming due.