You must be THIS brown to claim that you've experienced racism

Otherwise, STFU, you poseur.

I don’t about Nikki Haley or anything she’s experience. Like any Republican, she’s an insincere hypocrite who’s heavily invested in being an ideological shape-shifter. From what I’ve seen, she has no core beliefs except for whatever it might take to get her elected.

That’s not a core belief, that’s adopting whatever talking points have played well with focus groups. It’s what you do when you stick your finger up in the air to determine which way the wind is blowing. And it’s what you do to pass yourself off as White instead of honoring your heritage. Then again, that’s what Republicans do- play to White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals. And Nikki Haley has built her political career on being something she’s not.

It goes against the conventional wisdom to suggest that anybody could give Donald Trump a run for his money in the Republican primary. After all, what more do Republican voters want if not a deranged, demented criminal white supremacist authoritarian with self-esteem issues and pretty obvious brain damage who resents and hates the same people they do? He’s a reflection of them in some ways, and also they really think he’s as rich as he says.

But the way they’re acting toward Nikki Haley, Trump’s sole remaining primary opponent, you might think they’re polling neck-and-neck. As it is, the final Suffolk University/NBC10 Boston/Boston Globe tracking poll before today’s New Hampshire state primary has them at 60-38. That would be a blowout win, except for Trump was supposed to win this thing 95 to nothing while sending Ron DeSantis’s underpants up the flagpole.

Ron DeSatan’s underpants were run up the flagpole, all right. Mr. “Never Back Down” backed down on Sunday, having finally realized that the math would never end up in his favor.

Of course, there was also the reality that being a wannabe fascist dictator with the personality of a crab pot and the retail political skills of Hannibal Lecter wasn’t going to get him anywhere near the GOP nomination.

Ah, but I digress. This isn’t about Ron DeSatan, who’s term-limited as Governor of Floriduh and will almost certainly not be a member of Trump’s Cabinet if Orange Jesus is elected in November.

No, this is about MAGA Nation freaking out over the mere possibility that Nikki Haley could somehow come from well back in the pack to kick their orange hero’s ample ass.

Yeah, it probably won’t happen, but just the thought of it is giving people like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham an itchy and scratchy feeling in very intimate and inconvenient places. I don’t know about you, but I’m loving every minute of this.

[T]hey’re freaking. Tucker Carlson is on his public access Unabomber she-shed Twitter show warning of “the threat” of Nikki Haley. And since racism is pretty much all these MAGA pigfucks know with any consistency, they’re being super-racist.

Yeah, when you’re not smart or prepared enough (or you’re too damned lazy) to grapple with Haley on the issues, racism’s a pretty good fallback option, no?

Well…no; but what else are lazy, pseudo-intellectual, Conservative, MAGA meatheads to do on short notice?

Laura Ingraham is pretty sure Nikki Haley, who is Indian-American, is faking memories of all the times in her childhood she experienced racism.

She explained last night that, now that Ron DeSantis has acknowledged his place as a loser and dropped out, Nikki Haley is this bitch who “thinks she’s smarter than both of them.” (She didn’t call her a bitch, the trademark scoffing tone in her voice did.) She said Haley thinks she’s stronger than everybody else, and that she’s not a victim, “except when she plays one on TV.” That’s when she played the clip of Haley talking about experiencing racism in the South as a child, being “teased every day for being brown.”

Ingraham is a White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual, which, of course, means that she’s an unquestioned expert on what is and isn’t racism. So when she says that Nikki Haley is faking memories of experiencing racism…well, she’s the acknowledged expert, yeah?

I do find it interesting that Haley on plays the racism card when it serves her interest. The rest of the time she’s heavily invested in trying to act as if she’s also a White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual.

If it sounds like she’s trying to have her cake and eat it, too… and I’ll leave that up to my gentle reader to draw their own conclusions on that count.

Is the GOP race over…or just beginning?

While Haley appears not to have won the New Hampshire primary tonight, it’s but one primary of many to come. The question, of course, in this media-driven ‘What’s the next big thing?’ moment is whether Nikki Haley has the momentum and the money to continue playing out the string. Can she continue to gather momentum and overcome the power of Orange Jesus’ babbling rants and racist followers? Or will she, no matter what she does or how well she does it, remain the second-place dog destined to be looking at Trump’s ass for the rest of the race?

That’s not a pleasant view to contemplate….

Making things more difficult for Haley is that she’s trying to win over an über-racist MAGA nation that hates anyone and anything not White, Conservative, Christian, Cisgender, and Heterosexual. And no, four out of five is NOT good enough, especially when the one missing quality is White.

Laura Ingraham laid down the law:

“I'm sure there were slights and insults, but it all kind of sounds very convenient and a little bit odd. And frankly, it sounds like something a liberal would say. But it's something that the so-called moderates might actually like to hear because remember the hashtagging of BLM during the Floyd riots, the same “I'm a fiscal conservative, not a social conservative," the billionaire types who happily virtue signal about DEI and nod silently when others talk about structural racism because they think it makes them seem less greedy and more groovy.”

Yes, how convenient that Nikki Haley remembers experiencing racism as a child right now, especially as she tries to dig herself out of the hole she created for herself when she said the US has never been a racist country, or before that when she forgot to mention slavery as a factor in the damn Civil War.

But those are a different story, albeit related. Those are a story about how even an Indian-American woman in today’s MAGA fascist Republican Party must toe the white line, reassuring them that they aren’t racist, while going along with their masturbatory Lost Cause fantasies about their granddaddies fightin’ that war for states’ rights. (To have slaves.)

And so Nikki Haley finds herself having to spout absurdities like insisting that America was never a racist country. The woman was Governor of South Carolina…and she said with a straight face said that America was never a racist country? Did she spend her entire term on the infield at Darlington Motor Speedway with the beer-drinking Good ol’ boys and Rednecks? Did she never spend a moment in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston after Dylann Roof killed nine Black worshippers there?

What was she thinking? WAS she thinking?

OMG. WTF??? ROTFLMAO….

This line of reasoning reminds me of Bizarro World from the old Superman comic books, where everything was precisely the opposite of what it is here in this world. None of this makes any sense.

Man, my brain hurts….

As much as I dislike including large chunks of transcripts, I think this bit from Matt Walsh is instructive. Walsh, a “noted expert” on gender identity, “transgenderism,” racism, and other controversial subject of the day, says that Haley, even with two Indian parents, isn’t “Brown.”

And when Matt Walsh weighs in on a subject…it’s game, set, match, goodnight, game over…drive home safely, y’all

Of course, the flip side of the coin (this is where I come down) is that Walsh is a bloviating, self-important, blithering idiot who’s not half as smart as he thinks he is. The transcript will conclusively demonstrate that.

MATT WALSH: First of all, just to address the elephant in the room here, Nikki Haley is not really brown, or, at least, if she is brown, she's a very light shade of it. Technically, we're all shades of brown from a color spectrum perspective.

The elephant in the room is that Haley isn’t dark enough to trip the Ring doorbell in Matt Walsh’s soul.

WALSH: I've never seen a literal white person. Like, there are no people with skin pigment the same shade as a sheet of computer paper. So, if Nikki Haley's brown, she's only brown in the sense that any white person is brown.

All white lives are brown, says Walsh.

Is he about to announce a new fake documentary called “What Is Brown?” to go along with his last smash hit? Is that what’s happening here?

WALSH: I'm not doubting that Haley's family is really from India. They are. But the point is that if she doesn't tell you she's brown, you would never know.

They’re just from the white Southern Baptist part of India, he reckons.

WALSH: In fact, like most people, I didn't find out until this election cycle that Haley is Indian.

Every person who knows anything about American politics on a national scale is aware that Nikki Haley is Indian-American. Walsh is just telling us here what an ignorant, unqualified rube he is.

WALSH: And when I found out, like most people, I said, what? Nikki Haley isn't white? And I had to go check Wikipedia, and sure enough, like, oh, she's from — her family's from India. I had no idea. All that to say her stories of anti-brown persecution strain credulity from the start.

Because Matt Walsh had to look up on Wikipedia to find out Haley’s parents are from India, that’s why he doesn’t believe her.

WALSH: What I can say for sure, though, is that there is simply no way Nikki Haley was teased every day for being brown as she claims. I've never heard anyone being teased for being brown ever in my entire life. I'm sure it's happened at various points in American history, but the claim that she as someone who barely even qualifies as brown was teased on a daily basis her entire childhood because of her brownness is just impossible to believe. If it was true, I would say it's not the worst thing in the world. Like, every kid is gonna be teased for something. And if they choose your maybe very slightly darker skin tone as the subject of ridicule, that's not too terrible, all things considered. I mean, it's better than being called ugly or fat or a loser or whatever. Every kid gets picked on by someone for something. It's an unfortunate reality of growing up, especially in the school system. And none of it should be happening. No one should be getting teased because they have brown skin, if that's even happening. I don't even know what that would sound like. But, of all the things you could be teased for, I'm not sure why that would be any worse than any of the other horrible things that kids are saying to each other. 

Matt Walsh KNOWS in that big brain of his that there’s no way Nikki Haley could have been teased every day for being Brown, and so therefore she wasn’t.

You see…it’s SO much easier when you break it all down scientifically, isn’t it?

Sure, every kid gets picked on for something. Walsh probably got picked on for the neckbeard he was born with. Or maybe for being ugly, fat, and a 24/7/365 loser…but he’s ugly, fat, and a 24/7/365 loser with a radio show, so he gets to broadcast his opinions to the masses, which makes him feel important.

Even though he clearly doesn’t know fuck-all about what he’s vomiting forth so righteously.

What’s sick about all of this is it highlights how focused the GOP is on race, as if any of it matters. Republicans are so determined that their candidates must be White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals that anytime anyone comes along who falls outside those lines, all manner of pearl-clutching breaks out.

OMG, they’re…GASP!!!…not ONE OF US!!!

Because of that, Nikki Haley finds herself claiming that America has never been a racist country, a claim so patently absurd I’m surprised she didn’t spontaneously combust. She was the Governor of South Carolina, a state with one of the most contentious and brutal racial histories in this country.

YES, AMERICA IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN A RACIST COUNTRY. The GOP is and always has been a racist party. Come to think of it, the Democratic Party’s record isn’t stellar in this respect, either.

Beyond all of this, have you noticed what’s missing from this conversation? It should be pretty obvious- actual, honest-to-God issues. Of course, the Republicans are going to continue to wallow in bullshit, because they have no policies to offer. They have no plans to make America better- it’s all culture war all the time.

Orange Jesus is running to stay out of prison. Republicans in Congress only want to embarrass President Biden at every opportunity. Democrats, who are trying to get something done, have often been reduced to spectators at the GOP shitshow. And yet Republicans believe they deserve to be the ones in power come 1/20/25.

By all means, though, let’s keep discussing whether Nikki Haley is “Brown” enough to complain about having faced racism as a child.

And people wonder why I fear for the future of my country.

Send in the clown. There must be clowns….

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