
N-wordāslinging woman becomes right-wing hero
OVER THE PAST WEEK, portions of the American right have embraced a Minnesota woman whose claim to fame is that she allegedly called a 5-year-old boy the n-word, going so far as to help her raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But the development has also confounded others in the MAGA movement, including some well-known personalities who warn that itās not the best of looks to celebrate an overtly racist, highly viral rant.
The episode centers on Shiloh Hendrix, who shot to infamy last week after a video showed her arguing with a Somali-American man on a playground.
In the video, a man claims he had just seen Hendrix call a black child the n-word before the recording started. Hendrix then confirms on video that she did, indeed, call the child the slur because he tried to steal from her bag. She then proceeds to call the man the same racial slur.
There arenāt really extenuating circumstances here. Hendrix, again, admits to deploying the racist epithet. Yet significant portions of MAGA media have championed her, arguing that they should do so as a matter of free speech and to fight the spread of āanti-whiteā racism.
As of Tuesday morning, Hendrix has raised over $700,000 on crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, with a campaign goal of $1 million.
āSheās making money,ā YouTuber Tim Pool said on his show. āThis sends a message to other white people: Stop taking racial abuse.ā
Pool conceded that calling kindergarten-age children racial slurs is ācrass and crude.ā But he argued that the support for Hendrix was part of a larger white backlash to being subjected to slurs themselves. The fundraiserās success, Pool argued, is evidence that āwhite guiltā is ālargely over.ā
Like many of Hendrixās defenders, Anna Khachiyan, the cohost of the quasi-fascist urban-sophisticate Red Scare podcast, said in an X post that calling a child the n-word isnāt great overallāand certainly not ideal parenting by Hendrix, who was carrying her own toddler during the encounter while repeating the n-word, sticking out her tongue, and flipping the bird to the camera. But Khachiyan said she would still support Hendrix as a stand against āspeech codes.ā
āI will support her on principle because of the importance of not letting the left dictate speech codes and torment everyone with gay race communism,ā Khachiyan wrote.
Like other viral-video incidents, a lot of the facts arenāt clear. The man who shot the video claimed the child Hendrix allegedly accosted is autistic. Some of Hendrixās supporters, meanwhile, have suggested the child is actually quite older, comparing the childās height with the height of some playground equipment. They argue that the child is roughly 10, which apparently would be a far more defensible age to call the boy a racial slur.
Hendrix couldnāt be reached for comment. On Monday, police investigating the case said they had completed their investigation but wouldnāt reveal whether they have recommended any charges.
Much of the success of Hendrixās crowdfunding has been attributed to a conservative backlash to the April stabbing death of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a suburban Dallas track meet. Metcalf, who was white, was allegedly murdered by a black student, Karmelo Anthony, at the meet. Anthony has been charged with first-degree murder.
That case was closely watched on the very-online right, especially after Anthonyās legal defense raised hundreds of thousands of dollarsāmore than $520,000 as of Tuesday morningāa figure that Hendrixās supporters have cited to generate support for her case.
āBlack people just raised $500,000 for a cold-blooded killer who stabbed a white teenager to death,ā white nationalist and onetime Donald Trump dinner companion Nick Fuentes tweeted, in reference to Anthonyās crowdfunding. āSo I donāt want to hear ONE WORD about the Shiloh Hendrix fundraiser. Either everybody gets to be tribal or nobody does.ā
After Hendrixās fundraiser outpaced Anthonyās own total in just a few days, Elijah Schaffer, a former host for Glenn Beckās the Blaze, posted a video of a man jubilantly singing, with the caption: āMe the morning I saw Shiloh Hendrix passed Karmelo Anthony on GiveSendGo.ā
All of this has made some MAGA personalities a bit uncomfortable, under the belief that maybe the right shouldnāt exalt or financially support a woman who called a child a racist slur. Riley Gaines, a college swimmer who became a conservative pundit over her opposition to trans participation in sports, posted on X that Hendrixās fundraising success had to be a joke, adding that the right did not need āa white Karmelo Anthony.ā
āWhatās the goal in rewarding this?ā she asked.
Aaron Prager, host of a right-wing YouTube show and the son of longtime conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager, complained that Republicans supporting Hendrix would only perpetuate narratives that Republicans are racist.
The fundraisers for Hendrix and Anthony are both hosted on crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo. The site, which started as a way to crowdfund Christian mission trips, has turned into a wild-and-woolier version of GoFundMe, hosting fundraisers for people like Kyle Rittenhouse and alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione.
But the back and forth between the Anthony and Hendrix fundraisers proved to be too much for GiveSendGo. After a flood of racist remarks on the donation pages for the fundraisers, cofounder Jacob Wells announced that the site would limit comments on both campaigns, on the grounds that the comments being posted donāt represent āvalues of hope, compassion, and fairness.ā The company will continue to collect money for them.
A hallucinatory vision of The View for conservatives
POPULAR PODCASTER PATRICK BET-DAVID has leveraged a business background into a MAGA media empire, in part by sitting around a table with a bunch of hustle-culture lunkheads and talking about how great a businessman Donald Trump is.
And now, Bet-David has a new idea: What if he replicated his podcastās appeal, but with women? A sort of conservative version of The View, if you will.
Enter Her Take, a new YouTube show that has what I can only describe as a tense, uneasy aura.
There has, to date, been only one episode released. But from it, we get a sign of where things are going when central host Jillian Michaelsāperhaps best known as one of the trainers from The Biggest Loser and the star of infomercials endorsing fitness products and servicesāexplains that she had ChatGPT write an explanation of what the show would be about, which she then read to the audience. Things only went sideways from there.
The other cohosts include Ana Kasparian, who helps anchor the progressive online show The Young Turks and who has turned increasingly rightward over trans issues and urban crime, as well as Amy Dangerfield, a Bet-David associate who didnāt bring a whole lot to the first episode.
But the biggest star on Her Take is clearly Lindy Li, a former Democratic consultant who has broken the land-speed record for opportunistic political pivots. In the seven months since the election, Li has gone from a Kamala Harris fundraiser to somehow being to the right of Sean Hannity. And now she has a YouTube show for her efforts!
In Her Takeās first episode alone, Li argues that the United States has no obligation to accept asylum seekers, calls undocumented immigrants āparasites,ā and praises Japan and Hungary for being ethnically homogenous societies and āmuch more stable.ā
She says the āGreat Replacementā theoryāthe idea that Democrats are scheming to open the borders so that they can outbreed white Americans to ensure decades of political dominanceāis real. Liās off-the-wall takes astounded even the conservative panelists.
I canāt stress enough that the energy on this show is unhinged. At one point, Kasparian and Li get into it over the Mahmoud Khalil case, with Li arguing that Khalilāthe Columbia University student who was detained because of his pro-Palestinian activismāshould be deported. Kasparian stated that Khalil, like any other person in the country, has a First Amendment right to free speech.
āHereās the law, Lind-eee,ā Kasparian said, drawing out the last syllable on Liās name.
āYou donāt have to be cruel,ā Li replied, before saying in an aside to Michaels, āSheās losing herāā
āI am losing it!ā Kasparian replied, cutting her off.
In other words, Iāll certainly be watching episode 2.
"Republicans supporting Hendrix would only perpetuate narratives that Republicans are racist."
How could anyone have gotten that idea?
Starting to feel like this country is un-fixable... Maybe a better word would be irredeemable