Nikki Haley (real name, Nimarata) released a cheesy campaign video the other day announcing her candidacy for the 2024 election. She starts the video by telling the world that as a child she felt like an ethnic outsider who was “not black” and “not white.” She says that she grew up in a South Carolina town where the “railroad tracks divided the town by race.” Whether she is aware of it or not, Haley is playing racial grievance politics for pity points. By making it clear that she identifies as a foreigner who happens to live in America, she wants white people to sympathize with her and non-whites to empathize with her. This “outsider complex” is a serious problem when it comes down to who is running the country and creating policies. People who don't truly identify as being American aren't capable of doing a good job because they aren't actually patriotic. For that reason, they are more willing and more likely to sell the country out to foreign interests. Moreover, they are incapable of racial impartiality when it comes to domestic governance. In fact, they tend to discriminate against the white majority population when it comes to rhetoric and making key decisions.
It is indisputable that the vast majority of ethnic minorities in the United States don’t feel any loyalty or kinship to the Founding Fathers or to the founding stock of the country. Many of them have an open or underlying antipathy for white Americans and would rather ignore or destroy the Euro-centric history of the country. Haley’s bias against white America was on display way back in 2016 when she made the absurd claim that Donald Trump’s rhetoric motivated Dylann Roof to gun down nine black parishioners at the Emanuel AME Church in her state. After the Dylan Roof shooting, Haley signed off on removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol.
People like Nikki (Nimarata) Haley will never stand up against the erasure of white American history and the cultural heritage of white Americans because she feels no attachment to those things. The Confederacy is an important part of the American story even though it was in favor of slavery and its heroes and symbols should be respected. Actually, a number of black Southerners have no problem with Confederate monuments because they understand their value. But Nikki Haley doesn't believe that, or understand that, at all. As a child of Indian immigrants who felt like an outsider growing up, she has no inclination or motivation to preserve Southern American traditions. Instead, as she has shown, she will jump at any opportunity to undermine or remove those symbols to prove that she is on the side of “people of color” and prove that she is not another white, “racist” Republican.
As typical Republicans often do, Haley pulls the old "switcheroo" in her ad. What do I mean by that? Well, she pivots from acknowledging that America can be tough for foreigners and non-Whites into suggesting that they should appreciate and love America because it is the greatest place on Earth to live. While that may be objectively true, aggrieved minorities will never see it that way. Republicans have been using the “America is actually wonderful if you just try to be colorblind” strategy for decades and it has never really worked. That tactic has never been successful because, quite frankly, race is real. Canned rhetoric about American “values” and “ideas” have never, and will never, strike a nerve with the millions of non-white people who have a racially motivated grudge against the foundational European roots of the United States.
As for the rest of her video, Haley puts on a faux-Southern drawl over the backdrop of very lame music and imagery of pastoral South Carolina. She utters tired Republican slogans about how America is the “greatest” country on Earth and how “blessed” we are even though the quality of life in once great places like New York City, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco has continued to decline year-by-year. She includes overused remarks about the “socialist Left,” “fiscal responsibility,” “securing the border,” and other stale talking points that every boring Republican candidate uses. Haley also manages to include typical right-wing American regime propaganda about China committing genocide against the Uyghurs, which is not true, and anti-Iranian rhetoric about how badly they treat women over there. The former South Carolina governor ends her cheesy announcement with a cringey feminist line about how she would use her “heels” to kick back at “bullies.” Presumably she meant she would kick them in the groin or something. Well, what more can be said? It should come as no surprise that the GOP is serving up candidates like Nimarata for 2024.
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