Pepple on Trump's supposed racism

Dr. John Pepple asks: "Racist, eh?" He writes:

Over 100,000 brown bodies came out a couple days ago to welcome President Trump in India. Yes, despite the claims of leftists that he is a terrible racist, he manages to get non-whites to support him.

Go figure, right? I guess a leftie might sneer that the 100,000 enthusiastic Indians were all audience plants, forced at gunpoint to greet the US president.

Here's Styx on Trump's visit to India:


Styx makes the important point that the US ought to be making friends with India right now: India is the obvious alternative to outsourcing work to (and trading heavily with) China. India is a democracy, so on some level, India and the US have a shared set of values, including the value of pluralism: Indian culture is amazingly complex and diverse, and there isn't the same brutally monolithic doctrine of conformist ethnocentrism that you find being preached in China (even though the demographic reality in China is that the Chinese are also quite diverse—linguistically, racially, ethnically, and culturally). Given the US's trade-related conflicts with China and China's role in spreading COVID-19 across the globe, now might be the perfect time for something like an economic divorce from the Middle Kingdom and a reorientation toward its arguably friendlier South Asian neighbor.