After days of thinking about the possibility that AI might kill all of humanity, it’s almost a relief to be able to write about a lighter topic — like how the xenophobic Right is threatening to tear my country apart.
Who is Bo French? No one of much consequence. He’s a mostly failed Texan politician — the heir to an oil company, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who alienated his business partners, who lost two Republican primaries for the Texas House of Representatives before finally becoming the chair of a county-level party chapter. He finally got his first political success this year, when he won a narrow primary victory and became the GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner. He currently trails his Democratic opponent in the polls.
Bo French isn’t that important, but this week he set off a national firestorm when he tweeted the above photo of a bunch of Indian kids celebrating University of Texas football at a Longhorns game, along with some alarmist anti-Indian rhetoric:
It was hardly a surprise that French tweeted something like this. He’s tweeted plenty of stuff along the same lines in the past. Here are two famous examples:
He’s also repeatedly called for the deportation of 100 million people; since there are only 50 million foreign-born people living in the United States, this means French was either getting his numbers wrong, or (more likely) calling for deporting tens of millions of American citizens. Reading his tweets, it’s not hard to imagine which citizens he’d choose for deportation.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that French’s race-war ideology has taken over the GOP. Plenty of Texas Republicans, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Jared Patterson,
