Journalists are getting really weird about the first Republican woman of color to run for president
Tiana Lowe
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Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations and the 116th governor of South Carolina, has finally launched her long-expected bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Cue the weird obsession about her very existence as a non-white conservative, not from the alt-right, but rather from the ostensibly progressive political press corps.
In a piece titled “Nikki Haley’s complicated racial dance,” six separate bylined POLITICO reporters (yeah) called out Haley, who was born in America to two Indian immigrants, for “reportedly list[ing] her race as ‘white’ on her voter registration card, three years before she entered into elective politics. (Haley has never publicly addressed her reasons for doing so.)”
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The piece goes on to accuse Haley of “a willingness to embrace some of the dog whistles deployed by the current Republican Party.” The one “dog whistle” cited is Haley’s critique of Sen. Raphael Warnock’s “weak[ness] on border security” while stumping for Herschel Walker. Note that Herschel Walker is black, so the idea of racial “dog whistles” in that race is ridiculous.
Taxpayer-funded NPR published its own ditty about the “politics of race” in the Punjabi-American’s campaign, commenting on her passing mention of her own identity in her campaign launch video.
“Haley is the first woman of color to be a major candidate for the Republican nomination, and she acknowledges her difference … and then immediately blasts Democrats as racially divisive, referencing the 1619 Project and progressive lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” NPR writes.
The implication here, of course, is that Haley’s embrace of her identity — in the video, Haley says her mother told her, “Your job is not to focus on the differences, but the similarities” — means she is supposed to embrace that divisive and fictitious 1619 Project, as well as a self-described socialist. Why? Just because AOC happens to be another “brown” girl?
NBC published an entire “News” piece citing random Indian-Americans who — shocker! — disagreed with a woman who, by coincidence, is also Indian-American.
“I think I speak for a whole lot of people in saying that Nikki Haley’s values are not the values of the Indian American community,” said a tweet included by NBC. “She is a deeply cynical and unkind person. Her candidacy is not the kind of representation we should celebrate.”
The kicker? The author of said tweet is a Democratic activist who worked for Hillary Clinton’s last failed presidential bid.
The worst offender may be a contributor at the Washington Post, who chalks up Haley’s entire career of shattering glass ceilings in a former slave state and around the world to the “stereotype” that “Asian Americans have been able to overcome racism through cultural values like hard work and perseverance, and that their success proves that America is a colorblind meritocracy.”
“This is a myth that ignores Asian Americans’ socioeconomic diversity, defends existing structures of inequality and has been used as a wedge between Asians and other people of color,” the piece goes on. “Nonetheless, many Asian Americans and others continue to embrace it.”
Yes, clearly, there is only one conclusion: Nikki Haley is the real racist here.
The media’s double standard here is par for the course. When Donald Trump first ran for president, the media blasted the Republican as a “bad father” and insinuated that his immigrant wife was once a prostitute. In contrast, when Kamala Harris rose to national prominence with her 2020 gambit, the press bent over backwards to laud the future Vice President for “making history” with her “big, blended family.”
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Recall that back in 2008, Barack Obama, of all people, made a thinly veiled swipe at the media for turning its fire on the then-16-year-old Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. And in 2016, we got a fun preview of the racial handwringing to come for Haley, as the press parroted left-wing activist claims that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were race traitors, and white reporters like Mark Halperin demanded that Cruz speak Spanish on air.
Haley doesn’t have to use her uniquely American dream to prove a point because the woke-racist media are doing it for her. If “intersectionality” means that a conservative woman of color will be savaged by so-called “progressives” for all three aspects of her identity, that pretty much sums up the treatment she’s gotten so far.