The speed with which organized white nationalists in the US have started to completely freak out about “this Indian takeover of American politics” is staggering.
What’s that you say? You didn’t know Indians were running the show now? Silly. Right now, there are at least four — four! — people with Indian backgrounds in prominent positions in the national political life of the United States (pop.: 330+ million). Obviously Narendra Modi’s plans for a complete takeover of the US are in full swing.
The uptick in anti-Indian racism really got underway a few days ago, when the Republican National Convention designated JD Vance as its nominee for vice president. Vance, who was raised Evangelical, but converted to Catholicism in 2019, is married to and has three children with Usha Vance, who is a daughter of Indian immigrants. JD Vance’s desire to force pregnant people to carry to term under all circumstances, his hatred of LGBTQIA+ people, and his survival-of-the-fittest approach to economics are fine by white nationalists, but so help him if he should tinker with white people’s precious bodily fluids or fascists’ oddly uncomplicated understanding of how history, culture, and states work.
Exhibit A for this totally rational and not at all kooky or obsessive freakout is none other than Nick Fuentes. The night Vance was nominated, Fuentes fired off a series of posts on Telegram explaining to his minions just exactly what the problem with Vance is, and it boils down to a few predictable points: race, immigration, and — because these people can’t help themselves — Jews.
Fuentes began by attacking Vance’s speech at the recent National Conservative Conference in Washington, DC (sponsored by, among others, the eugenics-friendly Claremont Institute and Project 2025 creators the Heritage Foundation). He writes:
Vance says the continuity of our nation is established by the fact that we choose which immigrants come here at our discretion… so he is saying that so long as the massive nonwhite immigration is lawful, “permitted,” “at our discretion,” “on our terms,” then there is some national continuity between Scots, Englishman, Germans, French, Italians… and Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Nigerians, Ashkenazim, and Venezuelans?
After gratuitously mentioning that Vance is “a Zionist,” Fuentes, who believes in the Great Replacement, complains that Vance is so very liberal that he went and had non-white babies with his Indian-American wife, writing
Vance says that if his children are buried with him and his wife in his family’s cemetery in Kentucky then there will be seven generations there. But what is the basis of continuity if his ancestors fought in the civil war and his children are third generation immigrants from Asia?
He also vaguely asserts that
According to some reports, Vance got married in a traditional Telugu wedding ceremony and his wife was raised Hindu although it’s ambiguous if she even believes in God.
The horror!
But because Vance says things that sound nice to vicious racists, Fuentes believes he is “redirecting the justified racial and class anxiety away from a true alternative and back into this liberal framework using similar-sounding rhetoric. That poses a graver danger than someone weaker and less clever like [North Dakota Gov. Doug] Burgum or [Sen. Marco] Rubio,” who were both leading contenders for the VP nod.
Fuentes’ problem with Vance is not complicated: he sees Vance as a conduit through which whiteness in the US will be permanently diluted, which for Fuentes and his supporters is so obviously a bad thing it that doesn’t bear examination. And worse, Vance represents a kind of stealthy infiltrator, insofar as he has the capacity to trap people within “this liberal framework” of racial chaos by diverting them from the “true alternative” of Fuentes and his cohort.
Exhibit B for the fascist panic over nefarious Indians is Stew Peters. Fortunately, the people at Angry White Men keep up with him, so I don’t have to.
Peters has a history of calling for the death of people he doesn’t like (Anthony Fauci, Hunter Biden, Taylor Swift) as well as Holocaust denial and actual flat Eartherism. He is also a believer in the Great Replacement, and has presumably read the conspiracy theory’s ur-text The Camp of the Saints. How could I possibly know that, you ask? Okay, I can’t actually guarantee he has, but here’s why it seems likely: COTS, a wildly racist novel published by French author Jean Raspail in 1973, is a story about a horde of literally 1 million impoverished Indians sailing on dilapidated boats from Calcutta to the French Riviera, where [warning: spoiler] they proceed to take over and wipe out all the white people, first in France, then across Europe and around the world. Raspail’s depiction of those Indians is shockingly dehumanizing, reducing them to mere body parts, primal instincts, vacant gazes — and a smell so powerful and atrocious it is noticeable from a mile away on the open sea.
There are only two people out of that million who are in any way identified as individual characters. One is a mutant child who doesn’t speak, but seems to control all of the others with his diabolical mind, and the other is that child’s caretaker, who is described over and over as a “turd-eater.” And that’s not a metaphor. Raspail goes on at some length about the many uses Indian people allegedly have for their own feces, and he does not draw the line at cuisine.
After Vance’s nomination was confirmed on Wednesday, Peters wasted no time streaming about it and referring to Usha Vance, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy as “dung eaters” while asking “What the hell is going on here? Why are we being subverted by Indians?” He further complained that “JD Vance is married to a Hindu, who likely eats shit and brushes her teeth with the same.” So yeah, I suspect Peters has read Camp of the Saints and is just fine with its content.
Of course, Peters has other problems with Vance as well. He also claimed that “Indians aren’t the only ones who’ve subverted JD Vance,” and that he is “beholden to the Zionist political operators that are steamrolling us into World War III.” Peters’ guest Frankie Stockes crudely elaborated on this, saying that “The Indians are a very tribalistic people. They have this caste system. The higher castes have fanned out all over the world, and they have what you could call a ‘mother ship mentality.’ They’re all contributing back to the mother ship, just like the Zionists.”
So there you have it. There’s no need to invent a new conspiracy theory, because antisemitism is a handy, all-purpose one that’s already lying around just waiting to be applied to any new context that turns up.
Beyond that, the white nationalist world has coughed up any number of petty insults attacking Vance’s whiteness, calling for his wife to be deported, and expressing anxiety that Kamala Harris could become the first Indian-American president. Robert Randall Smart, a domestic abuser, radical antisemite, and QAnon influencer who goes by the pseudonym GhostEzra, couldn’t have been more blunt when he told his 123,000 Telegram channel subscribers: “Deport JD Vance’s wife. 🔥🔥🔥🔥” The white nationalist media outlet Red Ice resorted to name calling, claiming that Vance “wears black eyeliner … presumably to look more Indian”. A meme that has been making the rounds bizarrely alters Vance’s official Senate portrait to make him “look Indian” by darkening his skin and hair, while challenging the legitimacy of his nomination by presenting him as a naive outsider who has not mastered the English language with the caption “Saar, I am VP pick Saar”.
This current uptick in anti-Indian racism may be a blip that fades away as other events take center stage in the days ahead, but it may not, particularly if Joe Biden does bow out of the presidential race and Kamala Harris makes a serious bid — or even wins. Nor is there any reason to assume that this spurt of hateful rhetoric won’t manifest in violent action. The effort by Trump and others to brand COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus” led to a major increase in anti-Asian discrimination, threats, and violence during the first few years of the pandemic. In 2012, a neo-nazi entered a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and shot 10 people, ultimately killing seven of them. And in the wake of the attack on September 11, 2001, Arabs, South Asians, or any other people whose skin was more than a shade darker than butter or whose clothing indicated a non-Western religious affiliation was at risk of severe, sometimes deadly violence. Almost 25 years later, that has not entirely ended.
Regardless of how this moment plays out, it also highlights the flimsiness of the privileges that mere proximity to whiteness affords. Indian-Americans have long been allotted the dubious honor of the “model minority” label, but when it comes down to it, skin color, religion, language, ethnicity, and/or immigration status can always be dredged up to supersede any of that. Moreover, Nazis old and new, as well as folkish ideologues generally, have spilled many tons of ink over the past 150 years describing the common roots that ostensibly unite Northern Europeans and high-caste Hindus in the form of a shared “Aryan” ancestry. But they will give that up at the first hint that people with dark skin might have access to any kind of real power in a “white country.” People like Nick Fuentes can talk all they want about “continuity,” but they are often about as consistent as they are humane — which is to say not at all.
