FRISCO — They arrived with cameras and agendas, filming shoppers at Costco and at the town’s Hindu temple, stopping strangers to ask where they were born. Online, they mocked a predominantly Indian boy scout troop and derided the names of Indian city council candidates. The Dallas suburb, they warned, was being invaded.
Saahas Kaul watched all of this unfold on social media, perplexed. Kaul grew up in Frisco, playing high school soccer and attending Sunday school at the temple. Frisco was his home. In all of his years, he had never witnessed the sort of coordinated hatred now shaking the city.
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that tracks online extremism, found that anti-Indian posts on X received more than 280 million views over 10 weeks last summer. Posts frequently framed Indians as “invaders” and “job thieves,” the center wrote in a report.
Raqib Naik, the center’s executive director, said this rhetoric is rooted in the great replacement theory, in which white supremacists believe politicians are conspiring to replace white people with non-white immigrants. The rise in anti-Indian bias coincides with a separate rise in Islamophobia, he said, pointing to a movement in Texas to ban Sharia, the moral code laid out in Muslim scripture.
“This has been going on for some time in the fringe space, but we’ve seen it coming into the mainstream,” Naik said. “In the digital economy, these influencers know that bashing Indians and promoting bigotry gets you clicks and attention.”