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Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, Shri Thanedar, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, Pramila Jayapal. They didn’t assimilate, they don’t want to assimilate, they want to change America. You say that Progressives want to change America too but this is fundamentally and obviously different from Bernie Sanders.
Ilhan Omar acts nothing like a typical Somali woman. She's educated a divorcee, totally independent of her husbands or any man and supports Gay marriage and trans rights. She's incredibly assimilated!
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Why do you say Abdul El-Sayed doesn't want to assimilate? Yes he wants to change America, but his wishes to change America are quite similar to those of like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, no?
His mother worked for a an Islamic group that fronts money to terrorists. His sister endorsed October 7. He’s offended that you would ask.
What is he assimilating to? He’s not assimilating to American Protestantism or rural country life. He’s not assimilating to exaggerated American patriotism. He’s not even assimilating to a leftwing American patois where it’s totally normal and expected to denounce your family over politics. If he’s assimilated to anything, it’s to an extremely thin global identity that makes no demands on anyone. He’s proud to be the children of immigrants. He’s most proud of the parts of himself that make him different from us.
Why wouldn’t he be? American liberalism makes extremely thin demands of anyone who might assimilate. It used to be that immigrants felt shameful of their immigrant past and suppressed anything that wouldn’t fit into the American mainstream. You hear stories of immigrants only speaking English at home, changing names, letting the old recipes and customs die out. Shame is a bad thing now and nobody wants that. Nobody asks that Abdul become less Egyptian. It would actually be bigoted if you asked.
It seems that the only requirements to be considered American are to speak English and to be living in the United States.
His name is Abdul. He’s proud of his family and that it’s not from America. You’re not allowed to ask if he likes Hamas like they do. His dad is an imam. He campaigns with immigrants like Hasan Piker who think America deserved 9/11. He believes that we should let more foreigners, like him, into America to make it better. And he’s just as American as you or me.
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