On November 29, Wajahat Ali responded to Donald Trump publicly calling for a halt to “third-world migration” by releasing a provocative video on his podcast, The Left Hook. In a widely-circulated, clipped version, Ali began his diatribe with this statement, in which he appears to be addressing white people in general: “You have lost. The mistake that you made is you let us in in the first place. I'm going to say this as a brown person. There’s a lotta us, and we're a breeding people.”
The taunting video, which quickly went viral, didn’t sit well with MAGA. Some conservatives expressed disgust, while others said they were thankful that Ali went public with the secret Muslim playbook to invade the under-breeding West and populate it with their own.
That strategy isn't a secret, even though the MSM pretends it doesn't exist. Former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi said in a 2006 televised address that Islam would “conquer Europe without swords or guns, just through Muslims living there.” UK Muslim preacher Anjem Choudary has said that Muslim immigration and higher birth rates would lead to the eventual establishment of Sharia law in Europe.
In 2015, Sheikh Muhammad Ayed, an imam at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque, called on Muslim migrants to Europe to produce children in order to conquer the continent “in the name of the coming Caliphate.”
An agitated Matt Walsh, staff member at the conservative Daily Wire, responded on his podcast by taking Ali’s words at face value, concluding that a Muslim saying these words was confirmation that the so-called “great replacement theory” has become an explicit goal. What Walsh left out of his own rant was that Ali prefaced his comments with, “I want all the hatemongers who watch this—and I hope they do watch this because I know they hate-watch us—you've lost, white supremacists, white nationalists. The unedited version provides the full context that Ali wasn't addressing white people in general. Rather his intent was to provoke by trolling white supremacists, which he believes all Trump voters are.
In light of how Ali framed his blistering, race-baiting comments, they must be interpreted in a tone Walsh and other conservatives missed, either intentionally or unintentionally. Ali was addressing MAGA, trying to give them some of their own medicine. Some have called his invective “satire,” but that's off the mark. Ali was flipping the script, as Malcolm X did, and fighting the enemy’s stereotypes with his own stereotypes. He was using fighting words that got him clicks, but whether or not his approach could be called “successful” depends on what his goal was.
There were some obvious clues that should’ve tipped Walsh off that this was “schtick.” Ali said, “Your story is a shitty story filled with misery.” He added, “your culture sucks,” “your food sucks,” your parties suck,” “your music sucks,” and “your women come to us.” That language is too over-the-top, from a political commentator who wants to remain employed, even if he's a double minority. Crowing about the brown hordes preparing to overturn crummy American culture doesn't do much for job security, even in left-wing media circles.
The language should've prompted Walsh, and others, to dig deeper, but that's not how the media currently works. Walsh wasn't alone in his lazy reporting. I watched YouTube responses to the situation by Michael Knowles (Daily Wire), Emily Jashinsky (on her After Party podcast), Megyn Kelly and Federalist CEO Sean Davis on Kelly's podcast, and Breitbart in a printed article that inaccurately added “[to whites]” before the edited transcript of Ali's screed, proving that the Democrats don’t have a monopoly on fake news.
All of these commentators addressed only the edited video. That's the better story, plus they know their audience doesn't care about Ali’s opening remarks.
But who really knows what was in Ali’s heart when he crudely mocked a culture “filled with plain chicken… with terrible, terrible dry-ass meat”? It's very possible that he harbors resentment towards white people due to his family history. His parents spent nearly five years in a federal prison after being convicted on 30 counts, including conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Ali blamed the convictions, with scant evidence, on systemic racism and Islamophobia, a blame pattern that he's followed in his career as a writer and political commentator. It had to be traumatic to see his upper middle-class parents lose everything while being branded as criminals.
Finding a scapegoat makes it easier to take, and hiding behind a persona while railing against “white culture” provides Ali with plausible deniability that he wasn't voicing his true thoughts. From what I've observed of this journalist over the years, making everything about race, a cheap shot that's hurt the Democratic Party, is his go-to rhetorical tactic.
If Wajahat Ali really cares about improving the immigration climate for brown Muslims, producing rage bait for his own and his fans’ short-term satisfaction isn't the way to go about it. He's about to find out how easy it is to use his words against him. How is gloating over interracial relationships as a form of cultural conquest an effective strategy, even if he's playacting? And how is it a wise choice to make this ugliness so easy to take out of context just by deleting the first line, especially when nothing that follows that line indicates that he's not speaking from the heart? He looks sincere and convincing in the video.
Ali, responding to the blowback, tweeted, “It's been a blast triggering the entirety of the right-wing media over the past week, which has voluntarily shown its racist ass to the world. Hoods are off. Now start goosestepping so we can all see.
Your tears of rage have been sugar for my chai. Enjoy the weekend! Assalam Alikum!”
With the KKK and Nazi references, he's reinforcing the divisive stereotype (that's also a losing strategy) that all Trump voters are Christian-nationalist white supremacists. As a partisan polemicist with a progressive audience, Ali’s not obligated to play nice, but does anyone believe that boasting about outbreeding the enemy as payback, and mocking white American culture with dehumanizing stereotypes will do anything other than make the great replacement theory look more like an actual plan, even to middle-of-the-road Republicans?
The moderate pro-immigration argument that can work on swing voters just became harder to sell in Pennsylvania.
While race-obsessed Ali is resting smugly in his belief that he “owned” MAGA, what he's done is give Trump a marker he can use for the midterm elections. To figure out what's to come, he can ask Hillary Clinton how her “basket of deplorables” remark played out.