It was the social media post that launched a MAGA civil war over what is the appropriate way to demonize immigrants.

Bo French, the Republican candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, shared a photo last Sunday depicting ecstatic University of Texas students cheering the school’s football team — some of them possibly of South Asian descent — with the text, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” French probably didn’t realize it, given most Republicans’ adoration for the unabashedly racist President Donald Trump, but he kicked a hornet’s nest on the right, sparking a pitched fight over “heritage Americans” and the MAGA struggle to package its xenophobia in more polite terms like “Western civilization.”

A number of influential conservatives and elected Republicans condemned French’s post for presuming a bunch of seemingly non-Caucasian Longhorns fans were “foreigners” rather than Americans, possibly the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Ben Shapiro posted to X, “Wait, why are we supposed to be upset that some kids of Indian ethnicity were cheering the UT football team on Saturday? WTF?” (It should be noted that the ethnicities of the scores of students in the picture have not been confirmed.)

There were also condemnations from Texas’ Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows, who posted to X, “You can oppose immigration policy without demeaning people because of their race or ethnicity.” The National Review’s editorial board slammed French’s “repulsive online attack,” but he also added, “Too much immigration — even when the immigrants themselves are law-abiding and economically successful — can be disruptive to communities and nations, threatening their sense of shared belonging, creating tensions or at least frictions. In the case of Indian Americans, however, the difficulties have been thankfully minimal.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who lost his primary race to the Trump-backed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, condemned French’s racism outright, with no addendum about how it’s still OK to despise immigrants. (Another case of a Trump-era Republican miraculously discovering his spine and moral compass in his last few months in office.)

But there were plenty of MAGA heavyweights who had French’s bigoted back.

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Sean Davis, the Federalist’s CEO and co-founder, rebuked Shapiro on X, saying, “People are upset by the systemic displacement and replacement of Americans, specifically white men, with foreigners across every major institution in America. That it is happening in a state like Texas makes it even more stark.” Davis later quoted on X the late Charlie Kirk, who less than two weeks before he was assassinated in 2025 wrote, “America does not need more visas for people from India. Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.”

Pizzagate propagandist Jack Posobiec — well-known for boosting racist and antisemitic content and also being a guest of the Trump administration on foreign trips — defended French in a number of posts, including one saying, “If you live in Texas you need to vote for Bo French.”

But it was Shapiro’s interview Wednesday with the serial plagiarist MAGA influencer Benny Johnson that really gave the game away. Johnson cited incorrect and misleading data when he said that Texas’ population was 90% white a few decades ago but is now close to 40%. Johnson didn’t mention that the data he was citing was from an era when the U.S. census counted all Hispanics as “white.”

Shapiro — whose public persona is that of a pedantic nerd who is also a vicious bully, always armed and ready to fire “facts [that] don’t care about your feelings” at a liberal college undergrad — didn’t challenge his fellow MAGA podcaster’s wildly inaccurate premise. Instead, Shapiro sheepishly conceded, “I would agree with that general principle,” adding that he’s “actually on the side of the idea of barring mass migration as a general reality.”

Last month, Shapiro — who is apparently trying to position himself as the “good” xenophobe when compared to the rank racism of French and his supporters — said that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (a U.S. citizen born in Uganda), Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (a natural born U.S. citizen) and far-left provocateur Hasan Piker (a natural born U.S. citizen) shouldn’t be in the United States at all. This is the delicate dance Shapiro and his ilk are attempting: masking their bigotry in lofty terms about “civilization” and which religions are compatible with it and which are not. And apparently forgetting that the “freedom of religion” portion of the First Amendment doesn’t come with an asterisk.

But ultimately, this intra-GOP battle over “civilized” xenophobia versus crude, uncouth racism is a pointless morality play.

This is, after all, the party of Donald Trump, America’s foremost purveyor of casual racist slurs and eugenist brain droppings that wouldn’t be out of place in 1930s Berlin. No one of significance in the current iterations of the Republican Party or the conservative movement — not Shapiro, not National Review editors, not Cornyn — has dared call out the boss for his hateful rhetoric as president, which has only grown more mainstream throughout the right, thanks in part to their collective cowardice.

Mainstream conservatives like Shapiro see French’s racism as bad for business, an unwelcome stain on their more socially acceptable prejudice. But they won’t say a thing about Trump’s, proving their pearl-clutching over French is performative and ultimately meaningless.

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