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Love it or leave it, but woke.
This weekend, The University of Texas played The Ohio State University in Austin, TX. A screen shot went viral on Twitter showing a crowd of Indian students celebrating the victory.
"Heritage Americans", the dissident right, the Woke Reich, or whatever you want to call them went crazy, pointing out the massive demographic changes in Texas that are happening. This is true. Anyone who has been to Texas knows whites are a minority here in any medium sized and larger city. The changes have been stunning and within 30 years, it is unrecognizable.
Critics rightfully pointed out that they were pretty much just being racist. You talk about integration, and here are immigrants and children of immigrants celebrating a victory in football wearing cowboy hats. What is more American than that? You clearly just don't like Indian people.
An Indian politician said that this is what Texas is. If you don't like it, LEAVE! There is some truth to this. This is what Texas is now, but historically the South Asian population has been tiny. This is a very recent development. Is 20 years all it takes for Texas to become something new? If you are 30 and above, you probably grew up with almost no Indians. Now this is what Texas is and you have to leave if you don't like the changes?
This reminds me of the UK. Pre-Windrush, the UK was 99.9% white. As recently as 1991, it was 95% white. Now though, if you complain, you are going against British values. For thousands of years, the UK was essentially 100% white. Within a few generations, it is a multi-cultural country and if you don't like that, LEAVE! We are not a white society, and actually never were. I could go on and on, but with the exception of Reform, that is the general consensus now.
Back to Texas. It's crazy how quickly this can happen. Mass migration can happen and within one generation, this is seen as the new default and any complaints about this are seen as against the new values. Of course, the biggest gatekeepers of this isn't the left. They really have no control over their outgroup other than canceling people and social pressure, but if you don't care what they think, what can they really do? The center-right has also rushed to condemn people criticizing the massive demographic replacement in Texas. People like Dan Crenshaw rushed to condemn the racism and call out this anti-Indian racism and essentially sided with the left, who hates them. They have essentially said the same thing as the left and that these aren't Texas values to be racist. So basically, love it or leave it, but woke. If you don't like the new Texas, leave.
But where will they go? You basically have to live in a state like Texas for access to the best jobs. schools, dating, etc. It's insane to me how fast we can accept something new that is unprecedented as the new normal without considering the consequences. Only weirdos and disagreeable people point this out, and by the time people start to see the consequences, it will be too late (assuming there are negative consequences, which should be obvious is my POV).
I am reminded of this time I was in Milk Beach with my buddies (mostly 20-something white guys). We ran into a couple of dudes, one Indian and one Chinese, clearly international students, role playing some shonen anime battle. They looked fun, we invited them for drinks, had a genuinely memorable night, traded socials, and went our separate ways. Now I really dislike our universities treating international students as a revenue strategy while soft pedaling the difference between temporary study and permanent immigration. I also dislike what large scale, rapid demographic change has done to the character of cities like Melbourne over the last fifteen years. That being said, yes, those two can stay and I hope they do. But I suspect Bo French and his fans would expect the sight of them to horrify and disgust us instead.
See, every so often a clip or a headline goes viral and lights up the ethnonationalist corners of the right. Usually an immigrant crime story. This time it is a group of Indians at a football game, maybe a dozen young men who look like one friend group cheering for their college football team. Odds are most of them were born and raised there, international students are not exactly known for caring about American football.
There is a coherent standard for assimilation that even white liberals would be willing to defend. People who come here, or whose parents did, must leave behind third world honour culture practices and obey the local law. Chuck your arranged marriage bullshit, lose the caste system, and do not bring sharia law. A reasonable standard that actually tracks social trust and compatibility.
But then the bar takes a rather arbitrary turn. It becomes “don’t speak Hindi in public,” then “don’t worship your monkey god too visibly,” then “don’t cluster in the same majors”. Now it's "don't hang out in ethnic circles, stop existing as a noticeably Indian social presence at all, but of course I have zero intentions of actually including you".
The problem though is that the average "Heritage American" will never support this White America project. Even Republicans have been calling out Bo French’s tweet, which is a useful pulse on how far outside the actual Overton window the maximally groyper right winger sits. There is a hard limit on what can be achieved through ordinary democratic politics. The people who talk as if American-born citizens from disfavoured groups are essentially foreign are not describing the median of the coalition they claim to represent. They are describing a vanguard preference that most of their putative ingroup will never actually enforce. No amount of shrieking "these people are not Americans" will move the needle in that direction.
Isn't Asian American TFR, which includes South Asians in America, the lowest of all races? H1b is a pipedream now, fewer new arrivals and you can safely expect the demographics to self-correct in another generation or two.
Bo French is also much much more moderate than the online groyper right, and he's still way to the hardline right end of the republican party.
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