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The ugliest Americans
MAGA may be asserting dominance, but the country is still more beautiful than those at the top
Charles Davis
October 01, 2025
The news, in brief …
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America the beautiful
One of the last things that conservative influencer Charlie Kirk did before he passed away was argue that Omar Fateh should not have been born in America.
Fateh, a native-born U.S. citizen currently running to be the mayor of Minneapolis, is the child of Somali immigrants. He is also a socialist and a Muslim. To America’s new know-nothings, what else do you need to know?
“Mass migration from the third world must be stopped,” Kirk posted on X this past July, commenting on a video in which Fateh acknowledged his Somali heritage. “We are committing suicide.”
The former head of Turning Point USA was still more subtle than some other far-right influencers. “Send anyone with that phenotype back to Africa,” posted another account with 1.5 million followers, Gunther Eagleman, in Kirk’s replies.
Chaya Raichek, whose “Libs of TikTok” account has amassed more than 4.4 million followers and won her an invite to the Trump White House, was yet more overt. “The average IQ in Somalia is 68,” she posted, referencing far-right pseudo-science alongside a photo of Fateh.
Speaking to Salon’s Tatyana Tadanpolie, Fateh brushed aside the MAGA right’s gutter racism.
“When extremists like them come after me, or campaigns like mine — to me, it means that we're doing something right,” Fateh said. “That they're scared of a working-class, multiracial coalition that is rising in Minneapolis and that we're also seeing across our nation.”
But the attacks have since made their way offline. Last week, Fateh’s campaign headquarters was defaced with an explicit threat. “Somali Muslim — this warning is no joke,” read the graffiti found on the side of the building.
All of this comes from the top: President Donald Trump and the band of low-character men around him. Last year, now-White House aide Stephen Miller accused Democrats of seeking to “turn the entire Midwest into Mogadishu,” referencing the capital of Somalia. The president, meanwhile, has made it a habit to go after Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in particular, for reasons that are not to hard to discern, expressing outrage that the U.S. citizen and elected representative would dare “[tell] us how to run the United States of America” — suggesting, even, that the former child refugee should go back to Africa.
It’s an ugly time in America, where elites no longer feel any pressure to behave with dignity and honor; where social media has become Stormfront; where posting straight-up racism is a full-time career. But the success of the Fateh campaign in Minneapolis, like that of Zohran Mamdani in New York, is a reminder that America is still more than just its ugliest parts.
What explains the uptick in unvarnished racism on the right? And will it incite a progressive, anti-racist backlash? Sound off in the comments.
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