On Saturday night, college-football fans in Texas were blessed with a moment of collective ecstasy. Their Longhorns were playing Ohio State, the nation’s No. 1 team, and trailed by 20 points. Then they improbably scored three touchdowns in the fourth quarter. A frenzy shook the stadium as more than 100,000 people, most in team colors, celebrated the stunning comeback. But Bo French, the Republican nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, was upset by what he saw in the crowd.“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote yesterday on X, where he posted an image of a cluster of fans at the stadium who appeared to be of South Asian ancestry. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Dispelling any doubts about his meaning, he continued: “I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans.” He added, “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”In reality, there is no reason to assume that the students in the photograph are foreigners, and Texas does not prioritize foreigners over Texans. Quite the contrary. Ninety percent of slots for first-year students at UT Austin are reserved for Texas residents. Foreign students even pay higher tuition, which effectively acts as a subsidy for Texas residents at the college. But some people are so psychologically distressed by diversity and difference that their reactions have little to do with the facts on the ground.Some prominent Republicans have objected to the latest––but not the only––bigoted remarks from French. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has held office since 2002, posted on X, “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.” He warned, “This is how great political parties self destruct.”But others seemed more incensed by Cornyn’s critique than they were by French’s remarks. A Republican state legislator from North Dakota wrote, “Eat shit you fucking loser.” John Doyle, who has a show for the populist-right outlet Blaze Media, wrote, “For now we can ignore how unqualified you are to speak on behalf of ‘The Republican Party’ as someone who reflexively embraces liberal moralizing about ‘racism’ and ‘intolerance’ in response to a Patriot acknowledging that Texans didn’t ask for their state to become a playground for the third world.”Changes to content moderation on X under Elon Musk’s ownership––not to mention rhetoric and actions within the federal government––have made clear how common bigoted identitarianism is in the GOP coalition. Republicans who believe in the values of Christianity, the creed of the Declaration of Independence, or the moral imperative to judge people as individuals need to confront the prejudice in their ranks.The identitarian right’s rise has lessons for progressives too. First, seeking to raise the salience of race and ethnicity in American politics and culture was a mistake––as ought to have been clear by 2016, when Donald Trump exploited that heightened salience for his own ends. As the political scientist Karen Stenner argued in her 2005 book, causing people who are uncomfortable with difference to perceive it as a threat to social cohesion can activate a latent predisposition toward intolerance.Second, not only was embracing race as a factor in university admissions unpopular with voters, so much so that it lost ballot initiatives even in left-leaning California; colleges’ discrimination against white people and Asians also stoked racial resentment by putting identity groups in a zero-sum competition.And third, once the left began to treat mere departures from left-identitarian shibboleths as racist, it became harder to stigmatize actual racism or xenophobia, as surely as crying wolf at every shih tzu, tabby cat, and hamster would make it harder to warn against actual wolves on the hunt.The Republican and Democratic Parties could do well in future elections to revive a straightforward, morally sound position: Judge others by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. That ethos needn’t foreclose all disagreements about immigration. And one needn’t pretend not to notice racial and ethnic diversity. But insofar as a diverse crowd cheering for a Longhorn victory implies anything about past or present immigration and its effects, it is this: People of all races and ethnicities have already assimilated into the quasi-religion of Texas football, one of America’s most distinctive cultural phenomena.If, heaven forbid, this great multiethnic nation is ever invaded by a foreign power, there is evidence that the people in that Texas stadium could unite in common cause without regard to race or ancestry. Bo French, who feels distress at seeing his neighbors come together, may lack that ability––a weakness that makes him unfit for office in America.