It was our political worlds that intersected when he organized a forum through his Asian Industry B2B group. His guest speaker was Carmel Foster, the South African immigrant domestic worker who had a years-long affair with California Assemblyman and Budget Chair Phil Ting (D-19) and was manipulated by Ting and California Labor Unions to promote legislation, including AB5 and AB2314. Marc found my three-part expose on her story at Communities Digital News, and wanted other political allies to hear the story and understand how Sacramento manipulates and controls legislation not according to the will of the people, but through their preferred interests groups, and how they will use vulnerable individuals like immigrants and illegal aliens toward those ends.

It was a successful night, and Marc and I exchanged information in order to collaborate on other kindred projects in the near future.

With the recent attention given to the increase in Asian hate crimes, that coming together to collaborate came sooner than expected.

The United States has seen an increase in violence against people of Asian descent starting last spring, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since March of 2020, there have been over 100 reported episodes of what is perceived as race-based hate. This number may be even higher, as many of these types of crimes go unreported. The media immediately connected the March 16 violence at an Atlanta massage parlor to white supremacy. The perpetrator was a white male, and eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed.

Marc’s perspective is more nuanced, and he has been cutting through the noise to debunk that myth. Marc refuses to sign onto the knee-jerk, white supremacy agenda fomented by the Left.

Marc has been interviewed on OANN for Dan Ball’s Real America program, and he has been featured in articles on Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times. He has been able to speak clearly about the factors behind this rash of Asian American hate crimes, as well as the AAPI population as a voting bloc.

“Let’s really think about the murders, and where this is coming from. A lot of the crime on Asians, you know, sadly, is coming from Blacks. It’s not me blaming it on Blacks, it’s blaming it on socioeconomics.”

He’s not wrong. Having come from a racially divided city like Chicago, in Southern California, the color of discrimination is green. Any racial distinctions immediately dissolve once that color is applied.

Marc and several other concerned Asian advocacy groups held a press conference on April 6 regarding the Stop Anti-Asian Hate agenda. However, the coalition’s goal was to disconnect the crimes against Asians from a political agenda or a white supremacy narrative.

As Marc expressed at that conference,

“The overall national coverage on attacks on Asians, while well-intentioned, there was a quick, knee-jerk reaction to further certain narratives at the expense of others,” Marc said.

“In Atlanta there were false emails that furthered a white supremacy narrative that never existed.”

However, the drumbeat of the legacy media agenda wants to 1) assign the cause of the “hate” to comments by a past administration, and 2) make it about white supremacy.

But, as Marc and I continued to discuss the issue, the narrative driven fails to address the reality or to produce solutions.

“I don’t think it’s racism, Marc said. I think racism is a distraction.”

Those bright, shiny objects the Left loves to dangle in order to gin up anger and produce unrest. We both see you.

Marc continued,

“Okay, can you and I agree on this: that L.A.’s pretty colorblind. We intermarry, we socialize with all different races. I don’t go like, oh, you know we have a—, and I hated this about the South, especially. You have the Liberals in the South, they love to tokenize: ‘I got a Black friend… I got an Asian friend!’

“Yeah, there’s a lot of that. But I think because the whites are the minority here, we’re actually like very, very mixed here. And I’ve just seen especially in the last 10 years, it’s like all this stuff, it sounds so antiquated. It’s like, why are we going backwards? We’re so open here in California of… you know, dating other races, working with them in business, socializing. It’s so cool, actually. And now you want to further divide us again.”

As a conservative and a political strategist, Marc studied the demographics of voting blocs in the Trump 2020 campaign.

“ What I’ve seen especially with the Trump victories in Miami and also for us in Orange County. He got the Cubans, and the Vietnamese, all that. And he also improved his margins among African-American males.”

Which makes the narrative of blaming Trump for racism against Asians fall particularly flat. People know who and what they voted for, and it wasn’t Jim Crow Dementia Joe.

Aside from the clear voter fraud, there is a trend among the younger generation of Asians to buy into the Woke agenda that wants to find grievance and racism under every rock. Marc discussed that a bit.

“Nationally, there’s overlap with Asians. Asians are now starting to go into that liberal frame of mind, which is why we had this whole debate with Prop 16.

Prop 16 harkened back to what Marc said about “going backwards”. It was progressive California’s attempt to overturn Prop 209, which eliminated race-based preferences in government and education, and allowed meritocracy to become the natural order. Pushed by Liberal elites and the Woke demographic, it was a slap in the face to many in the Asian community, and was thankfully defeated by a wide margin at the ballot box.

But it was not without a fight, and sadly, many Asians in the younger generation bought into the narrative that their excellence was the issue that impeded the success of other races.

Apparently, Woke school boards are using the same tactics in Virginia and North Carolina in order to further marginalize Asian American achievement.

“Yeah, exactly, a meritocracy for the sake of all, you know, the poor. Do you know that we allow ourselves to be used as an excuse? That just angers me.

“I was shocked that Asians were not voting their self-interest. Self-interest is an ugly word. It has become an ugly word, and it shouldn’t be.”

Like our overall American identity, when attention is not paid to those values, and they are no longer passed down or deemed important, they will diminish.

“The first signs of that was the breaking of the silos between the different Asian groups. So, you know, a lot of times it’s, oh the Vietnamese immigrants don’t really mingle with, say, the Koreans. You had that sharp divide between Westminster and Garden Grove [cities in Orange County], for example. Where you had the Garden Grove Koreans, Westminster Vietnamese. Over time, they intermingled, and they mixed, and they intermarried. And now it’s this Pan-Asian identity.”

This is much like what the Left is doing in eroding and outright destroying our American history and the Constitution occurring on a smaller scale within the Asian community.

“So it’s almost like reality caught up with the Dem narrative. The Dem narrative was actually, how do you say it? Ahead of its time. Because they love lumping people into groups, right? So they said, “all Asian Americans”, but that wasn’t the case for the longest time. But the second generation definitely bought into that.

“Think about how the Indians feel? They’re always like this awkward stepchild.”

Marc made an excellent point about how Kamala Harris is the poster child of this hybrid nonsense.

“She’s a great example of the duplicity of the Left. She can be who you want her to be! She’s Jamaican if you want her to be.”

What a profound and frightening insight.

While I dive deeper into solutions for combatting the hate and false narratives in my article on the April 6 Asian coalition’s press conference, Marc discussed this landscape a bit as we concluded our conversation:

“I really want to talk about Racism 2021. Racism 2021 is very different. It should not be operating under the old rules.

“I think the old rules is the whole white supremacy argument, right? It’s always like, ‘minorities didn’t get their time a day’, and you know these are things I agree with. Certainly in 1965, it probably wasn’t as fair or as balanced to the minority experience when we had a more homogeneous population. I don’t think it necessarily came from an evil place. But I think it came from, that’s just the way things were.

“Now you can’t apply that anymore in California 2021 when the whites themselves are a minority.

If diversity truly is the buzzword, then that diversity needs to filter down to how we do work, how we interact, and how we do life. From AB5, to school choice, to ensuring free and fair elections, the Left has decided that diversity and their favorite word of “equity” is only skin deep.

The battle in California over AB5, and now nationally the PRO Act, is reflective of this limitation of diversity on the Left. Not everyone can or wants to be a part of a union, and not everyone is supposed to be a W-2 employee, but this 1930s paradigm is one in which they expect everyone to fit.

“Do you expect everyone to become a highly paid government worker? I mean, you can’t have a majority of government workers [in the state]. And then this is, you know, it’s like the upside down pyramid, right? You have mostly government workers up top and then you have that tiny little bit of the tip of the pyramid, the upside down pyramid: that is, you know, the private sector producers that are creating value, and that are creating things we can export to other countries.”

As the people who create that value leave the State in droves, the pyramid will ultimately collapse. In fact, the pyramid is collapsing, but the Left wishes to place the causation on racism, lack of diversity, and lack of equity, rather than their failed agendas and policies.

“You have to account for the different environment that we’re in. Getting more diverse, and more interesting people, which includes White people.

“So I think the solutions are for people to actually think about what the word diversity really means, or you know, start truly celebrating that.”

This goes beyond diversity of skin, to diversity of thought. Diversity is not supposed to be exclusive, but inclusive, which means acknowledging the contributions and incorporation of a so-called white society, not the elimination of it.

“Because there are some very interesting voices out there, and they are not people of color. So, if your focus is on diversity and you want your second grade writing assignment to be on a role model, that should include different kinds of people, including Conservatives.

“Vilifying one subset of the population is the first step in actually truly being racist or truly being bigoted, so that hypocrisy really needs to be highlighted.”

Marc and I decided we needed to continue our conversation on an ongoing basis, so we have started the Red Beans and Fried Rice Podcast to do just that.

Visit the Podcast’s Facebook page or on Twitter to catch the episodes.