MAGA attorney general candidate vows to strip Houston lawmaker of citizenship

A MAGA candidate for Texas attorney general vowed Monday to strip citizenship from Houston-area state Rep. Gene Wu based partly on a circulating viral clip from an old interview being deceptively paraphrased by far-right social media accounts.

"As AG, I want to see @GeneforTexas de-naturalized," wrote Aaron Reitz, who has worked for the Trump Justice Department and under sitting Texas AG Ken Paxton. "On what basis? He likely concealed his anti-American sentiment throughout his citizenship app process—the details of which are conspicuously absent from the public record. Wu is a subversive whose citizenship should be revoked."

Wu, the Democratic caucus leader in the Texas House of Representatives, was born in Guangzhou, China, and immigrated to the United States with his family as a child. He played a key role in the Democratic walkout that briefly stalled GOP efforts to pass an aggressive mid-decade gerrymander that seeks to grant Republicans up to five extra seats.

The subject of Reitz's ire was a brief clip of Wu being circulated by the pro-Trump account End Wokeness. The video, taken from a 2024 interview with Pulitzer laureate journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, captions him as saying, "Non-whites share the same oppressor and we are the majority now. We can take over this country." Pro-Trump accounts, and even some Texas lawmakers, are sharing the clip as proof Wu is anti-white or even wants a "white genocide."

But as Evan Mintz pointed out in the Houston Chronicle, this is a wildly misleading paraphrase of what Wu actually said.

“I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning,” said Wu. “Because we are the majority in this country now. We have the ability to take over this country and do what is needed for everyone. And to make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided — they’re completely divided.”

Pressed for comment, Wu explained the "oppressor" he was talking about in the 2024 clip was not white people, but Republicans: “It is undeniable that Republicans have spent the past 50 years beating down communities. It’s not just minority communities. It’s the poor, it's religious minorities, it's women, it's veterans, it's the disabled, it's every community like that that’s oppressed.”