Nikki Haley Is Dragged to Hell for Harkening Back to America’s ‘Simple, Easy’ Past

Nikki Haley woke up Saturday feeling some kind of way. Maybe it was low blood sugar; maybe she needed a Snickers. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that things just used to be better in this country. Not in any specific year or decade or even era—just before, you know? She wants to hit rewind, to hop in a time machine and say, “Dealer’s choice, just as long as it’s not forward.” So she rolled up her sleeves and typed some words out on Twitter dot com.

“Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country,” she tweeted. “We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.”

If Barack Obama ran on a slogan of “hope and change,” Nikki’s slogan is more like “lose hope and change back.” It’s not particularly inspiring, but it is a pretty simple distillation of the entire conservative philosophy: Social progress, in general, is scary and must be stopped.

Of course, the former South Carolina governor’s tweet did not land well with many people; it was immediately roasted and ratio’d. Most Black Americans, for instance, certainly don’t long for the simplicity and easiness of previous decades. “Yeah, my mom and dad’s interracial marriage was illegal until I was a year old and—later—they struggled to buy a home in their Long Island community because people didn’t want to sell to a Black lady,” broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien replied. “Good times!”

LGBTQ people in Haley’s replies didn’t recall life being much easier for them in previous decades, either. “No,” wrote legal analyst Chris Geidner. “I remember being closeted while an earlier generation of people like you were saying that ‘AIDS was god’s punishment for homosexuality’ and the Reagan administration, and Ronald Reagan specifically, ignored or did far too little to address growing numbers of AIDS deaths.”

Comedian Hal Sparks gave Haley a general history lesson in the replies (which was genuinely impressive in scope, given Twitter’s character limit):

Haley’s tweet may be more expected coming from one of the old white men in the Republican presidential field, as they openly long for a 1950s America when women’s place was to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, queer people were generally forced into hiding, and Black people had only nominally gained some civil rights but were still treated horrifically and denied any upward mobility, etc. The general nostalgia is perhaps more puzzling coming from the daughter of Indian immigrants, who grew up a brown child in South Carolina; but these have always been Haley’s politics. She’s said Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), a Black American pastor, should be “deported;” she said she stands with Moms for Liberty, a right-wing hate group that fights to get books banned in schools and literally quoted Adolf Hitler in their June newsletter; she doesn’t believe trans people have a right to exist; her “compromise” on abortion is that women shouldn’t be executed for it.

The sad truth for Haley is that while she may love white patriarchal power structures, they will never love her back. She’s currently polling at only 4% in the Republican primary, behind four white men—including scandal-ridden New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), hilariously. So while some people may, indeed, long for a vague, nebulous “past” in this country, it’s definitely a past in which Nimarata Nikki Randhawa Haley could never have been taken seriously as a politician in the first place. The rich irony.