Republicans lean into anti-Asian racism ahead of midterms

It’s election season and, like clockwork, some conservatives are resorting to anti-Asian racism and anti-Chinese xenophobia as the Republican Party faces a potential shellacking in this year’s midterms.

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The below campaign ad featuring Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican and gubernatorial candidate, in which she crushes fortune cookies while vowing to “hunt down” communists and “crack down on China,” is a prime example.

Some observers, while rebuking the racist video, noted that modern fortune cookies weren’t invented in China, but rather in the United States by Japanese immigrants.

Anti-Asian racism has also roiled the Arizona Republican Party. The state’s GOP primary race for schools chief was recently rocked by a racist incident in which a dark-money group put out a bigoted ad with gong noise and stereotypical Asian imagery that labeled candidate Kimberly Yee, who is Asian American, as the “empress of DEI.”

Yee’s primary opponent, incumbent Tom Horne, has requested that the group remove the ad. “I am shocked by the appeal to ethnic prejudice and denounce it,” he told Phoenix television station KPNX.