San Ynez Valley Today

It started with a picture of Indian American kids cheering at a University of Texas football game. It ended with a Texas Republican calling for their ethnic cleansing — and a national argument over who really counts as American. Bo French, the little-known GOP nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted the photo alongside inflammatory rhetoric warning of foreign "invaders." It wasn't his first such outburst, and it won't be his last. But the reaction told a bigger story than French himself: while establishment Republicans like John Cornyn and Ted Cruz denounced him, a loud chorus of right-wing media figures and activists rushed to defend his message, turning a college football celebration into a referendum on belonging. The episode exposes a deeper pattern within the ascendant "New Right" — a movement whose hostility toward immigrants, this story argues, has little to do with legality, income, assimilation, or even party loyalty. The students in that photo were legal, high-achieving, low-crime, sweater-wearing Longhorns fans — many from families that vote Republican. None of it mattered. This piece traces how that zero-sum, us-versus-them worldview is quietly shrinking the conservative coalition just as it appeared poised to expand, alienating Hispanic, Muslim, Jewish, and now Indian American voters in turn. It's a story about a fringe movement's outsized noise, the establishment's uneasy silence, and what recent polling suggests: most Americans still don't buy the "invasion" narrative — leaving the immigration debate more winnable, and more consequential, than either side may realize.

A popular argument in Washington and Silicon Valley goes like this: regulating artificial intelligence is pointless unless China agrees to do the same, otherwise American companies fall behind while the risks remain unchecked anyway. It's an intuitive claim, invoked constantly in debates over AI oversight. But does it actually hold up? Drawing a comparison to decades of environmental policy, this piece dismantles that logic by walking through how America has always regulated purely domestic harms without waiting for global consensus. Nobody argued the Clean Air Act should wait for Beijing. Even in the climate change debate, where the "China excuse" has loomed largest, the case for unilateral action turns out to be stronger than skeptics assume, since emissions cuts deliver real domestic benefits regardless of what other countries do. The same reasoning, it argues, applies squarely to AI. Companies already face liability under existing tort and criminal law, no international treaty required. So the real question isn't whether to wait for China, but whether a proposed AI Regulatory Commission would sensibly protect Americans from genuine domestic harms without smothering the innovation needed to stay competitive, including the very innovations that make AI safer. The upshot is a case for building smart, targeted AI oversight now, rather than treating international agreement as a prerequisite for any regulation at all. It's a nuanced argument that reframes a common talking point and asks readers to think harder about what regulation is actually meant to accomplish, and for whom.