MSNBC guest Wajahat Ali ratcheted up the racism on Sunday evening to attack former Governor Nikki Haley, who is the daughter of Indian immigrants, claiming that she was essentially using her “brown skin to launder white supremacist talking points.”
Ali was responding to Haley’s campaign launch — she announced last week that she planned to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 — and he joined MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan to discuss the latest developments.
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“I see her and I feel sad because she uses her brown skin to launder white supremacist talking points,” @WajahatAli tells @MehdiRHasan about Nikki Haley’s presidential bid strategy and how it falls short. pic.twitter.com/MYNhZfz3ea
— The Mehdi Hasan Show (@MehdiHasanShow) February 20, 2023
“To quote Zora Neale Hurston, ‘not all skin-folk are kinfolk.’ Nikki Haley instead is the Dinesh D’Souza of Candace Owens. She’s the alpha-Karen with brown skin. And for white supremacists and racists, she is a perfect Manchurian candidate,” Ali began, his comments only getting more racially charged from that point on.
“I’m just disgusted by people like Nikki Haley who know better,” Ali continued, suggesting — like “The View” host Sunny Hostin did — that Haley only really embraced her ethnicity when it would benefit her politically.
“What does she do? Like all these model minorities, which by the way, is the strategy of white supremacy — to use Asians in particular — as a cudgel against black folks,” Ali kept at it, claiming that Haley was part of a concerted effort by racists and white supremacists to use certain other minorities to continue to oppress black people.
“Instead of pulling us up from the bootstraps, and pulling others from the bootstrap, we’re told to take our boot and put it on the neck of poor browns, immigrants, refugees, and black folks. That’s what she did in her ad. I see her, and I feel sad because she uses her brown skin as a weapon against poor black folks and poor brown folks, and she uses her brown skin to launder white supremacist talking points,” he claimed.
“It will never be enough. They will never love her,” Ali concluded.
Haley responded Monday to a number of attacks, telling Fox News host Martha MacCallum that she was “unfazed” by all of it. Recalling that State Representative Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D-SC) had once referred to her as not a minority but a “nice conservative woman with a tan,” Haley pushed back on critics who couldn’t think of anything more substantive than her age or ethnicity to attack.
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