By P.K Balachandran/Daily Mirror
Colombo, January 21: Indians were sharply attacked on the American social media platform X after it was known that President-elect Donald Trump would be appointing people of Indian origin to key positions in his administration. The appointment of Sriram Krishnan as his AI advisor, and Vivek Ramaswamy as an aide to Elon Musk in the governance reform programme, was the immediate trigger to subject Indians and other brown immigrants to a torrent of abuse on X.
The abusers, who were far-right supporters of Trump, were dead opposed the H1B visa programme that funnels into the US technically qualified immigrants, mostly from India.
The Washington-based think tank, Center for the Study of Organised Hate (CSOH), released a report that analysed the surge of anti-Indian posts on X. It reviewed 128 posts with the highest viewership between December 22 and January 3. The study described the posts as “organised, systematic hatred, fanned by powerful actors” and as a sign of the dominance of White supremacist ideology on X.
These posts amassed a total of 138.54 million views by January 3, with 36 posts exceeding one million views each. Among the 128 sampled posts, the most viewed post, with 17.4 million views, was shared by the account @leonardaisfunE. It featured a video of a White man mimicking Indian street food vendors, with the comment that it was “the funniest shit” she had seen all year. 35 posts said Indians are dirty and unhygienic, while 25 focused on public defecation, cow dung, and cow urine in portrayals of Indians.
The hate campaign began after a far-right Trump supporter, Laura Loomer, targeted Indian-Americans on X following the appointment of Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on Artificial Intelligence to the incoming Trump administration. The situation escalated when former Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy criticised American culture for allegedly “failing to produce enough skilled tech workers.” The Whites took this as an insult to the eugenically “superior” While race.
The intriguing thing is that X’s owner Elon Musk, a Trump ally, is a supporter of the H1B visa program, having been a beneficiary himself. Musk had taken Vivek Ramaswamy as his colleague on Trump’s governance reform project. Trump himself is in favour of immigration of skilled people through H1B visas. Attacks on X taking place despite Trump and Musk, shows that White supremacist ideology is emerging as a very powerful factor in the US.
For Political Gain
In a paper published in www.americanprogress.org in 2020, Simon Clark, Senior Fellow for National Security and International Policy at the Centre for American Progress, says that the idea now is to inflame grievances for political ends.
“The attempt is to build a notion of an embattled White majority which has to defend its power by all means available. These notions, once the preserve of fringe white nationalist groups, have increasingly infiltrated the mainstream of American political and cultural discussion, with poisonous results,” Clark observes.
During the 2024 campaign trail, Trump repeatedly disowned the notorious “Project 2025”, a conservative blueprint for a second Republican administration organized by the far-right Heritage Foundation and written by at least 144 people who worked for the Trump administration or his campaign. But now that the election is over, Trump has taken the mask off, and has nominated several architects of Project 2025 to key roles in his administration.
Those in are: Russ Vought (Office of Management and Budget) who had said: “There will be mass layoffs and firings, particularly at some of the agencies that we don’t even think should exist.” Stephen Miller (Homeland Security Advisor), Karoline Leavitt (White House Press Secretary), Brendan Carr (Chair of Federal Communication Commission), and Tom Homan, the “Border Czar.”
Stephen Miller had advocated the “great replacement theory” which is based on fears of White genocide through immigration. He has linked immigrants with crime, glorified the American Confederacy which fought President Lincoln in the 19 th.Century, and promoted the genocidal book, The Camp of the Saints.
Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, centres around an invasion of Indian refugees on the French coast. In his tale, French society and the military lost their nerve and did not massacre the migrants as they landed on French shores, which led to a total collapse of Western civilization.
Concepts of White supremacy were at the heart of the defence of slavery and central to the “Lost Cause” myth that justified segregation after the fall of the Confederacy to the Unionist forces led by President Lincoln. These were at the heart of the racist rules of the 1924 Immigration Act, which kept Asian immigrants out.
US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (1841-1935) had said that humans could be improved through selective breeding of populations. He also propagated the idea that immigrants bring crime and disorder.
Limited Appeal
However, Clark points out that as per an opinion poll done by PEW, American attitudes toward racial integration and immigration have become more open among liberals and conservatives alike. Two-thirds of Americans said that “openness to people from all over the world is essential for America as a nation.”
In such a changing landscape, old-fashioned racist and xenophobic appeals are unlikely to be politically successful beyond a small fringe. But the propagandists of racism have developed subtler approaches to stoking fear and hatred for political ends, Cark says. To do so, they have repackaged racist traditions in language and forms that could more easily enter mainstream political discourse.
Derek Black, a former White nationalist leader, points out that White nationalists and supremacists know that their cause is not widely popular and that they are losing the battles of ideas and demography. This reality pushes them to try to smuggle their ideas into mainstream dialogue by exploiting and co-opting fellow-travellers from abroad, like Matteo Salvini, the federal secretary of the Italian Northern League party and former deputy prime minister, and Victor Orbán of Hungary.
French author and far-right activist Renaud Camus coined the phrase “le grand remplacement” in a 2011 book to argue that Muslim immigration to France was a form of genocide against the country’s native population that required drastic action in response. This concept echoed the ideas of early 20th-century American eugenicists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.
Mass murderers who are inspired by White nationalism, from Anders Breivik in Norway and Dylann Roof in South Carolina to the Christchurch killer in New Zealand, echo Camus’ catchphrases in their writings. The vagueness of these catchphrases allows murderously minded individuals to apply the idea against anyone they may see as an outsider, including Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos, African Americans, Jews, and left-wing Norwegian activists, Black points out.
Most politicians know that being directly associated with White nationalism harms their reputation, and therefore, use dog whistles, or euphemisms, to appeal to White nationalist supporters without alienating more moderate ones. Others have swapped their dog whistles for louder noisemakers. President-elect Trump is perhaps the most notable example of a politician who uses the overt approach, Black says.
Rising Islamophobia
In 2017, with the stroke of a pen, the President Trump banned Syrian refugees from the US indefinitely, and prevented anyone (including refugees) from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days. The order demonised the vulnerable – those who had fled torturers, warlords and dictators – and those who simply wanted to be with their families, Amnesty International said. However, after being temporarily stopped multiple times, the US Supreme Court overturned a block on the devastating ban.
Fear of Sharia
This general trend toward Islamophobia, manifested in President Trump’s Muslim ban exists in combination with an even more extreme conspiracy theory: that there is a secret plan to impose Sharia in the United States, Black says.
David Yerushalmi, of the American Freedom Law Center, and “ACT! for America” have promoted that fear with remarkable success; Texas and Arkansas have enacted model legislation promoted by these groups.
Since 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Centre has catalogued 201 anti-Sharia bills in various states that have stigmatized Islam as a danger to America.
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