By Rosetta Miller-Perry
There are few things worse in life and society than people who deliberately embrace evil principles for personal goals. Dictators and mass murderers are prime examples of that, but so are people like Vidkun Quisling who founded a pro-Nazi party called the Fascist National Union Party. He was a Norwegian politician who volunteered to help the Nazis take over Norway. His betrayal of Norway to Germany has made his name a label for all collaborators and traitors. After World War II, Norwegian authorities arrested Quisling, tried and convicted him on charges of treason and he received a death sentence. The term quisling has since become the dictionary definition of someone who collaborates with an enemy occupying force for personal gain.
Sadly, there are Black quisling including other people of color in America. No, it’s not a question of liberal or conservative, because there can be legitimately differing political views on how to pursue policies that help people of all races. A quisling is someone who knowingly says or does things they know will hurt large groups of their own race solely for personal political benefit.
The Republican Party’s legacy — originally founded in 1854 for the purpose of ending slavery and became a national majority by winning over Southern white racist voters. Although the GOP is basically racist, for years, the GOP has pandered to and placated racists and white supremacists, willing to sow division and disunion in order to grow and maintain electoral power, particularly in the South. That was the genesis of the “Southern strategy,” used to describe how the Republican Party exploited racist fears to court white voters during the Civil Rights era way, today’s Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.
Black Herschel Walker to Black Tim Scott, denying racism and extolling self-reliance which is the Republican party line.
Presently, the biggest quisling on the national scene is presidential candidate brown skin Vivek Ramaswamy. In a conservative party that has always embraced structural racism and racist policies as a key strategic tool, Ramaswamy is cheerfully wallowing in it, espousing some of the most overtly bigoted and hateful rhetoric of any Republican candidate in a long time. This is truly saying something in a party dominated by Donald Trump and Trumpism and whose supporters include white Klansmen, white Neo-Nazis, white Proud Boys and other celebrators of white supremacy, Anti-Semitism, homophobia and sexism.
The latest polls show Vivek Ramaswamy has leapfrogged Ron DeSantis into second place in the race to become the 2024 Republican presidential candidate. He’s simply trying to grab as much notoriety and money as he can in a race to hell. He has seen Ron DeSantis employing a similar strategy in Florida, making ridiculous claims that graduate level critical race theory is being taught in the public schools, openly espousing hatred of LBGTQ individuals, pushing revisionist history in textbooks, and going after Black prosecutors who don’t incarcerate enough Blacks for his appetite. But DeSantis is just following the white supremacy playbook, one that has won him widespread contempt among Blacks and those Brown Latinos who haven’t let anti-Castro fervor blind them to racist appeals.
Ramaswamy and fellow candidate Nikki Haley are Asians, but neither has seen fit to address the wave of anti-Asian racial attacks that have spiraled thanks to the blight of Trumpism. As the global pandemic took hold, then-President Donald Trump started using xenophobic terms to blame the Chinese for spreading Covid-19. Anti-Asian hate crimes spiked, with people self-reporting more than 9,000 incidents to the advocacy organization Stop AAPI Hate. A shooter in Atlanta killed eight people, six of them East Asian women, and sparked national outrage. A 19-year-old gunman killed eight people, four of them Sikhs, at an Indianapolis-area FedEx facility in 2021 that had Sikhs mourning.
Yet, Haley seldom if ever discusses her Asian heritage, Haley was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa in Bamberg, South Carolina, to immigrant Indian Sikh parents. Her father, Ajit Singh Randhawa, and her mother, Raj Kaur Randhawa, immigrated to the United States from Amritsar, Punjab, India.
Ramaswamy, stone cold racist, parents are also immigrates came from the Palakkad district in Kerala. How this brown man has the nerve to have an all-out attack on Black Americans whose ancestors arrived in this country in 1619 . However, one would think there’s a limit to how low someone can go and Ramaswamy proved to the voting population that he isn’t worthy to be president of the United States and he must understand that there’s no bottom when it comes to vile discourse for a true quisling.
But even as the worthless DeSantis was acknowledging the fatal shooting of three Black people was an act of hatred, Ramaswamy was going on Sunday morning news shows claiming that what the shooter Palmeter did was really the fault of people who are opposing racism. “The reality is we’ve created such a radicalized culture in this country in the last several years…. as the last few burning embers of racism were burning out, we have a culture in this country largely created by media and establishment and universities and politicians that throw kerosene on that racism.” Ramaswamy said on Face The Nation. He added, “And I can think of no better way to fuel racism in this country than to take something away from other people on the basis of their skin color.” Later on Meet The Press he claimed to be “genuinely worried that we’re seeing a new wave of anti-Black and anti-Hispanic racism as a consequence of the so-called anti-racist movements.”
So it’s not the fault of white supremacy that hate crimes have risen dramatically over the last few years. It’s not the rhetoric of Trump and his MAGA co-horts. No, it’s the people who are trying to eradicate racism that are at fault. Just as there are Southern historians who’ve been running around for decades claiming that the handful of Blacks who owned slaves and/or fought for the Confederacy prove that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, so Ramaswamy has created his own special reality in which the white supremacists aren’t the problem, but the people who are fighting against them.
Ramaswamy isn’t the only quisling in the ranks of people of color. The Black community has long had them. But even former Black Republican presidential candidates like Alan Keyes (who ran in 1996, 2000, and 2008), Herman Cain (2000 and 2012), and Ben Carson (2016), never went that far. Even current Black Republican candidates like Tim Scott acknowledge that police have stopped Black motorists without reason on multiple occasions (he even claims to have been stopped a few times in Washington D.C.) Of course neither Tim Scott him, William Hurd, Larry Elder, or any other Black man or woman running in the Republican Party has the faintest chance of winning the nomination. Scott is widely viewed as a possible choice for the Vice-Presidential nod, and that would be the ultimate cynical GOP ploy, to put a Black man on a ticket for a party that’s currently in court in three states for trying to illegally gerrymander state maps to suppress Black voters.
Here’s some of quisling Ramaswamy’s other rhetoric. He’s called Black Lives Matters “Big Lavish Mansions.” He claims “Affirmative action is the single biggest form of institutionalized racism in America today.” One of his prime comrades is hardcore racist supposed intellectual Richard Hanania. A strong advocate of scientific racism, Hanania has frequently argued for the creation of a “white ethnostate.” He finally had to acknowledge just how racist (and straight out of Nazi ideology) that viewpoint was, so he’s now modified his stance to claim America can prosper by maintaining a racist hierarchy within existing liberal capitalism, a pathetic attempt at balancing bigotry and economics.
Ultimately Vivek Ramaswamy is going to fade into the woodwork. The current GOP is never going to make its presidential standard bearer as an Asian, no matter how repulsive, racist and hate-filled his rhetoric becomes. That is simply not happening in a party dominated by backward-thinking Trump types. They’ll tolerate him so long as he performs for them, delivers standard anti-Black rhetoric, and allows them to pretend that they are a party with a wide tent, just as they tolerate Scott, Elder, Hurd and Haley.
But make no mistake, Vivek Ramaswamy and people like him are in some ways worse than white supremacists. Those types can be dismissed as insane jerks. His kind know exactly what they are doing and saying, but are willing to put personal power and profit ahead of ethics and principles.
