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N-word–slinging woman becomes right-wing hero
OVER THE PAST WEEK, portions of the American right have embraced a Minnesota woman whose claim to fame is that she allegedly called a 5-year-old boy the n-word, going so far as to help her raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But the development has also confounded others in the MAGA movement, including some well-known personalities who warn that it’s not the best of looks to celebrate an overtly racist, highly viral rant.
The episode centers on Shiloh Hendrix, who shot to infamy last week after a video showed her arguing with a Somali-American man on a playground.
In the video, a man claims he had just seen Hendrix call a black child the n-word before the recording started. Hendrix then confirms on video that she did, indeed, call the child the slur because he tried to steal from her bag. She then proceeds to call the man the same racial slur.
There aren’t really extenuating circumstances here. Hendrix, again, admits to deploying the racist epithet. Yet significant portions of MAGA media have championed her, arguing that they should do so as a matter of free speech and to fight the spread of “anti-white” racism.
As of Tuesday morning, Hendrix has raised over $700,000 on crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, with a campaign goal of $1 million.
“She’s making money,” YouTuber Tim Pool said on his show. “This sends a message to other white people: Stop taking racial abuse.”
Pool conceded that calling kindergarten-age children racial slurs is “crass and crude.” But he argued that the support for Hendrix was part of a larger white backlash to being subjected to slurs themselves. The fundraiser’s success, Pool argued, is evidence that “white guilt” is “largely over.”
Like many of Hendrix’s defenders, Anna Khachiyan, the cohost of the quasi-fascist urban-sophisticate Red Scare podcast, said in an X post that calling a child the n-word isn’t great overall—and certainly not ideal parenting by Hendrix, who was carrying her own toddler during the encounter while repeating the n-word, sticking out her tongue, and flipping the bird to the camera. But Khachiyan said she would still support Hendrix as a stand against “speech codes.”
“I will support her on principle because of the importance of not letting the left dictate speech codes and torment everyone with gay race communism,” Khachiyan wrote.
Like other viral-video incidents, a lot of the facts aren’t clear. The man who shot the video claimed the child Hendrix allegedly accosted is autistic. Some of Hendrix’s supporters, meanwhile, have suggested the child is actually quite older, comparing the child’s height with the height of some playground equipment. They argue that the child is roughly 10, which apparently would be a far more defensible age to call the boy a racial slur.
Hendrix couldn’t be reached for comment. On Monday, police investigating the case said they had completed their investigation but wouldn’t reveal whether they have recommended any charges.
Much of the success of Hendrix’s crowdfunding has been attributed to a conservative backlash to the April stabbing death of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a suburban Dallas track meet. Metcalf, who was white, was allegedly murdered by a black student, Karmelo Anthony, at the meet. Anthony has been charged with first-degree murder.
That case was closely watched on the very-online right, especially after Anthony’s legal defense raised hundreds of thousands of dollars—more than $520,000 as of Tuesday morning—a figure that Hendrix’s supporters have cited to generate support for her case.
“Black people just raised $500,000 for a cold-blooded killer who stabbed a white teenager to death,” white nationalist and onetime Donald Trump dinner companion Nick Fuentes tweeted, in reference to Anthony’s crowdfunding. “So I don’t want to hear ONE WORD about the Shiloh Hendrix fundraiser. Either everybody gets to be tribal or nobody does.”
After Hendrix’s fundraiser outpaced Anthony’s own total in just a few days, Elijah Schaffer, a former host for Glenn Beck’s the Blaze, posted a video of a man jubilantly singing, with the caption: “Me the morning I saw Shiloh Hendrix passed Karmelo Anthony on GiveSendGo.”
All of this has made some MAGA personalities a bit uncomfortable, under the belief that maybe the right shouldn’t exalt or financially support a woman who called a child a racist slur. Riley Gaines, a college swimmer who became a conservative pundit over her opposition to trans participation in sports, posted on X that Hendrix’s fundraising success had to be a joke, adding that the right did not need “a white Karmelo Anthony.”
“What’s the goal in rewarding this?” she asked.
Aaron Prager, host of a right-wing YouTube show and the son of longtime conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager, complained that Republicans supporting Hendrix would only perpetuate narratives that Republicans are racist.
The fundraisers for Hendrix and Anthony are both hosted on crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo. The site, which started as a way to crowdfund Christian mission trips, has turned into a wild-and-woolier version of GoFundMe, hosting fundraisers for people like Kyle Rittenhouse and alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione.
But the back and forth between the Anthony and Hendrix fundraisers proved to be too much for GiveSendGo. After a flood of racist remarks on the donation pages for the fundraisers, cofounder Jacob Wells announced that the site would limit comments on both campaigns, on the grounds that the comments being posted don’t represent “values of hope, compassion, and fairness.” The company will continue to collect money for them.