Kathy Zhu has reason to feel discriminated against for her conservative beliefs, but that doesn’t mean she should rely on alt-right conspiracy theorists to come to her defense.
Zhu, who was crowned Miss Michigan last week, lost her title just a day later, after the Miss World America organization noticed some of her old tweets. In one, which she later explained came in response to a criticism of police officers, she wrote, “Did you know the majority of black deaths are caused by other blacks? Fix problems within your own community first before blaming others.”
In another, which made headlines on at least two different news sites more than a year ago, she complained about a “try a hijab on” booth at her campus.
“There’s a ‘try a hijab on’ booth at my college campus,” she wrote in a now-deleted tweet. “So you’re telling me that it’s now just a fashion accessory and not a religious thing? Or are you just trying to get women used to being oppressed under Islam?”
At most, you could say the tweets were “insensitive,” as Miss World America claimed, but the organization’s charges of “offensive” and “inappropriate” language that violates its standard of “good character” is ridiculous. Zhu is no racist, as some have claimed.
“They just immediately assumed that I was a racist,” Zhu told the New York Times. “They should have let me explain myself.”
The issue is made even more ridiculous by the fact that these tweets were always publicly available, and the organization could have easily found them before last week. Conservatives have cause to be peeved, but that doesn’t mean Zhu is the best representative of the Right.
Zhu, who is the vice president of the University of Michigan’s College Republicans, has long made herself comfortable with grifters and conspiracy theorists. She boasts on her Patreon account about having appeared on InfoWars, the website owned by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Perhaps her most vocal defender in the wake of the Miss Michigan scandal has been Jack Posobiec, the alt-right troll who promulgated Pizzagate, the debunked conspiracy theory about a Democratic child-sex ring at a D.C. pizzeria. Zhu has repeatedly shared his and his wife’s tweets supporting her.
Posobiec’s blessing doesn’t mean Zhu’s plight is any less valid, but she’s not helping her cause by amplifying the testimony of conspiracy theorists and right-wing grifters. Posobiec is no more conservative than Milo Yiannopoulos, with whom Zhu met a few years back.
“When I met Milo, he called me hot and then said, ‘Hot people don’t need feminism’. #antifeminist #FeminismIsCancer,” she tweeted in 2016. Yiannopoulos, a far-right troll, is not exactly a force for the conservative movement, and neither is the maxim that “hot people don’t need feminism.”
Zhu identifies as a “right-leading moderate” according to the Detroit News, but supporting same-sex marriage doesn’t make you a moderate if you can’t distance yourself from the likes of Jones, Posobiec, or Yiannopoulos. Though Zhu has been a vocal supporter of President Trump for years, her exuberant support for the president isn’t the most flagrant indication that she’s selling out.
When considering the Zhu story, conservatives should have two takeaways: 1) Miss World America displayed poor leadership and a lack of professionalism by stripping Miss Michigan of her title for a couple of poorly understood tweets; 2) As Zhu expands her platform as a voice in the conservative movement, she has a choice to make:
She can continue to damage her credibility by associating with alt-right types just to gather more support, or she can choose to distance herself from grifters in order to remind the Left that conservatism is not a convenient caricature. You can be a conservative without becoming a troll, but if you look at Zhu’s supporters, it can be hard to tell the difference.
