Mother Jones illustration; Mary Schwalm/AP
“You cannot rely on the government,” Lily Tang Williams told me last year, shortly after Election Day. “You have to rely on your communities. You have to rely on yourself.”
The week before, Tang Williams had gone viral when she slammed her Democratic opponent, Maggie Goodlander, for being a multimillionaire who couldn’t understand the working class. “You’re worth $20 million to $30 million,” Tang Williams—a Republican running for a western New Hampshire congressional seat—said in a late-October debate. “How do you know about regular people’s suffering? Do you go shopping? Go to Walmart? Buy food? I talk to those people.”
Thank you all for sharing my viral debate clip on @WMUR9 with my opponent @MaggieG603.
I have the fire in my belly to fight for the people in #NH02. I will always tell the truth.
A vote for me is a vote for American Dream.
I will be honored to serve you in Congress. pic.twitter.com/SdhY4A8yE4
— Lily Tang Williams (@Lily4Liberty) November 2, 2024
In that instant, Goodlander—who served in the Biden administration’s Justice Department; is married to Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan; and owned up to $39 million worth of investments and assets, much of it inherited—became the embodiment of the out-of-touch DC elite. Tang Williams’ populist rhetoric seemed to resonate far beyond her conservative base, striking a chord online with a broad swath of people fed up with rising prices and economic instability.
It wasn’t enough to carry Tang Williams—who is also a multi-millionaire, albeit a less well-off one—to an upset victory in the Democratic-leaning district. But her 6-point defeat was still a significant improvement on the performance of the 2022 GOP candidate there. Donald Trump also experienced a boost in the district, compared to 2020.
In the months since, Tang Williams has turbo-charged her status as a hard-right influencer, posting social media attacks on DEI proponents, “Marxist-Communists,” immigrant-rights protesters, and critics of Elon Musk. In April, she announced another run against Goodlander next year—a race that political analysts view as potentially competitive as Democrats fight to break the GOP monopoly on power in DC.
“Lots of Democrat politicians have become elitist…They don’t understand regular working-class people’s suffering, and they don’t understand the immigrant minorities who live in their blue cities.”
There have been countless think pieces and books published in the aftermath of November 5, all seeking to explain why former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost ground in so many places. One recurring theme is the dramatic rightward shifts among a wide range of traditionally Democratic-leaning demographic groups. Exit polls and post-election studies show huge increases in Trump’s support from 2016 to 2024 among Hispanic voters, Black men, Asian Americans, younger voters, immigrants, and low-income voters. Those shifts outstripped Trump’s 4-point improvement in the overall national popular vote.
When I asked Tang Williams—an immigrant from China with an up-by-the-bootstraps biography—about her exchange with Goodlander, she framed it as part of what she says is a growing disconnect between Democratic officials and working-class people of color who have long formed the base of the party.
“They have been forgotten. Lots of Democrat politicians have become elitist,” she told me. “They don’t understand regular working-class people’s suffering, and they don’t understand the immigrant minorities who live in their blue cities.” Many of these voters, says Tang Williams, are concerned about the high cost of living, crime, and undocumented immigrants, who, she claims, are “draining community resources.”
“There is huge difference [between] a legal immigrant & an illegal one,” she tweeted in June, complaining that anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles were leading to delays at government offices for “real” asylum-seekers. “Supporting illegals is opposing legal immigrants!”
In July, Tang Williams posted about her brother, who she sponsored to immigrate to the United States but who still had to wait 13 years to complete the move. Noting the drawn-out process of background checks, health screenings, in-person interviews, and fees, she wrote, “He has worked nonstop to support his family. If we need workers, let legal immigrants come in quicker & work. No amnesty! No free handouts!”
I’ve spent a good deal of time covering the Trump-era political and cultural battles in Asian American communities. Within those debates, Tang Williams sits at the far-right end of the spectrum—a gun-owning former Libertarian who rails against undocumented immigrants while tweeting conspiracy theories about the Chinese Communist Party. But you can hear echoes of her views from immigrants across the country, including from some members of my own family, who came to the US from Vietnam in the years following the Vietnam War.
It was clear that Tang Williams could relate to my family and that she understood a good deal of why I had reached out to her—to examine the seemingly stark difference between how they see their own immigration experience and how they view the experiences of many other people of color in America. They persevered through war and authoritarian regimes, fled their homes, started a new life from scratch, and struggled for upward mobility. But they believe they’re now paying for a system designed by Democrats that redistributes their earnings.
There were points in our conversation where I found Tang Williams’ perspective on race and immigration deeply pernicious. “The government actually hurts Asian Americans. Asian Americans are discriminated because we work hard. We rely on meritocracy, we study the hardest, we try,” she told me. “So you are being punished by so-called government policies because you’re not dark enough.”
“Inner-city Black communities live in generational poverty because of broken families, lack of school choice, and being used by the Democratic Party for politics,” she said.
Still, hearing Tang Williams’ story helped me further contextualize the political shifts in communities across the country, illuminating the ways in which many Asian Americans feel their voices are ignored in media and government policy—and how the right is tapping into that growing anger.
For all her rhetoric about wealthy Democrats, Tang Williams is hardly an archetype of “regular people’s suffering” these days. As of May 2025, her assets included stakes in rental properties across at least five states and an array of investments in stock and cryptocurrency.
But that isn’t where she started out.
Born in 1964 to working-class parents in China, she grew up during the Cultural Revolution, the decade-long sociopolitical earthquake unleashed by communist leader Mao Zedong in 1966. Life was difficult. “We lived in a primitive worker’s row house sharing one restroom and faucet with eight other families,” she recalled in a Mother’s Day X post commemorating her mom, who died in Colorado at the height of the Covid pandemic. “We were literally dirt-poor; our mud floor would sprout mushrooms after flooding. We barely survived on food rationing coupons from the government.”
“Somebody who came here with nothing can achieve the unbelievable.”
The violence supported by Mao was widespread, often carried out by the Red Guards, student-led militants who terrorized individuals and whole communities they deemed counter-revolutionary. “Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road,” the Chinese Communist Party declared at the time.
The victims extended well beyond the wealthy and powerful. Institutions—including schools and universities—were shut down; private houses were destroyed; political murder was widespread. Workers also joined in the bloodshed until Mao deployed the military to establish order, sharply increasing the number of deaths. According to Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder, approximately 1.6 million people died during the years of mass upheaval from 1966 to 1969.
“Mao used critical class theory to destroy thousands of years of Chinese civilization, culture, religion, and art. One-third of cultural relics were destroyed,” Tang Williams told right-wing commentator Tim Pool in 2021. “Even beautiful Chinese dresses were banned to wear during Mao’s time. I could not lay my hair down like this…because that was capitalist. So everything had to be in line and conform to collective society.”
Her mother quietly rebelled against the enforced proletarian conformity. “She was elegant, clean, and loved pretty, pink clothing, which was frowned upon under Mao’s regime,” Tang Williams wrote. “Using what little money she saved to buy pink fabrics was a small act of defiance against Mao’s Cultural Revolution.”
After Mao’s death, China embarked on a series of economic reforms. Tang Williams competed against other students in her province of roughly 80 million, becoming one of just three admitted to law school at Fudan University. She hoped to help steer China away from dictatorship. “I was patriotic. I wanted to change China for the better and build a rule of law and have equal liberty and justice for all ordinary people because I was born into poverty,” she told me. “So I’ve always had this big heart for people who are poor, who have no connection, and who don’t have any power.”
But China still lacked basic civil liberties and Tang Williams saw few opportunities to advance her political vision. So after American students attending the university opened her mind to what a “free country” could be, she became interested in moving to the United States.
It wasn’t easy. She had to get permission from the Communist Party to leave law school and apply for a private passport. She signed an agreement with China promising to return after getting her master’s degree.
When she arrived in the US in 1988, she had just $100 in her pocket—money borrowed from friends. Her American sponsor paid for all of her early expenses, including a plane ticket, paperwork, and her graduate school application to the University of Texas at Austin to study social work. “I owed him $1,200, so I did not start from zero. I started in the negative in this country at almost 24 years old,” she recalled, describing her experience as emblematic of the American Dream. “Somebody who came here with nothing can achieve the unbelievable.”
While living in Colorado, one moment in particular ignited her desire to reshape US politics. Just before the crash of 2001, she was handed a pink slip at her corporate telecommunications job and had to remove her belongings from her office that same day.
Determined to never again work for someone else, she launched a consulting venture to help firms do business in China after it joined the World Trade Organization. “It was not profitable for eight years, so we had to cut expenses,” Tang Williams told me. She was raising three children with her husband, and the family was relying on his job to pay the bills. During the 2008 financial crisis, she began reading books about real estate investment— including Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter’s Rich Dad Poor Dad—and built her own real estate business.
“I don’t want our young people to be brainwashed into believing that the government is their solution.”
In her telling, she soon came to view a wide range of federal government policies as reminiscent of the abuses she had experienced in China. Initially a Republican, she saw President George W. Bush’s 2001 Patriot Act as an egregious infringement on civil liberties and privacy. By 2008, she’d decamped to the Libertarian Party—a reaction to the Bush administration’s abandonment of “small, limited government.” She objected to the financial sector bailouts in 2008 and 2009, which were carried out by officials from both major parties. And she was angered by the Obama administration’s embrace of Common Core curriculum standards, which she considered “centralized indoctrination.” Obama’s attempt to ban assault weapons seemed especially offensive to Tang Williams, who owns an AR-15, because “the largest mass shooter actually is a tyrannical government.”
In 2014, she ran a long-shot campaign as a Libertarian for the Colorado House of Representatives, pulling in 6 percent of the vote. The following year, she became chairperson of the state party. She launched another quixotic bid for office in 2016, this time for US Senate.
Three years later, Tang Williams and her family moved to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project—a long-running effort by libertarian activists to flock to the Granite State and win control of its government. “I really enjoy their liberty, spirit, and ‘Live Free or Die’ motto,” she says of her adopted home.
For years, Tang Williams spoke in classrooms about her experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution—a project she undertook as part of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit “devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million people killed by communism around the world.” She says she was surprised by how little students and teachers seemed to know about China and communism.
Like many immigrants from communist countries, what she wanted was the polar opposite of the totalitarian society she’d left behind. And she came to see American progressive politics as a dangerous step away from freedom.
“I don’t want this country to go down that path,” she told me. “I don’t want our young people to be brainwashed into believing that the government is their solution. When the government gets too big and out of control, we will be oppressed.”
In her 2021 interview with Pool, she equated “critical culture theory” under Mao with “critical race theory”—the academic concept that racial biases are systemically embedded within our laws and institutions that has become a bogeyman for the likes of Christopher Rufo and Ron DeSantis. Democrats, she argues, have substituted communities of color for Mao’s “oppressed class” of workers, attempting to persuade voters that they have been discriminated against and that they should elect Democrats, who promise to use government power to help them.
Tang Williams insists that this supposed arrangement ends up harming the very people Democrats promise to aid by enforcing a “victim mentality” and an over-reliance on outside assistance. She argues that minority voters should instead demand conservative policies such as school choice, which, she claims, will better promote individual achievement and equal opportunity.
“I made my kids study hard and not waste food,” she says. “It’s high expectations for them.”
If Tang Williams represents one side of the arguments reshaping Asian American politics, Roksana Mun represents a very different one. Mun is a co-director of Grassroots Asians Rising, a national network of progressive organizations rooted in Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant, refugee, and working-class communities.
Where Tang Williams calls for slashing federal spending and regulations, Mun pushes for solutions like universal health care and a wealth tax. And where Tang Williams blasts “open border policies” and calls for deporting “illegal criminals,” Mun speaks out against efforts to blame migrants “for the problems that we’re facing.”
Despite their ideological differences, the two share some views regarding the Democratic Party’s failures. “The government is not doing enough to support everyday working-class people on the ground, and Democrats—the only time they show up to our communities is for ‘get out the vote,’” Mun told me. But Mun rejects the idea that immigrant success stories—like what Tang Williams has achieved—prove systemic racism is no longer a defining feature of American life.
In recent years, Tang Williams’ side of the debate seems to have made increasing inroads among Asian American voters, and conservative groups have found success organizing around issues like affirmative action, education, and crime. In 2020, Asian Americans voted for Joe Biden over Trump 70 percent to 30 percent, according to a recent Pew study. Four years later, that margin shrunk by more than half, with Harris carrying Asian Americans 57 percent to 40 percent.
“Part of that is the fact that it’s being done by people who very much buy into the model minority myth from a very ahistorical perspective and completely decontextualizing why other communities of color are the way they are,” Mun says. “It’s a narrative that says, ‘If we’re able to do it, anybody else can.’”
It’s also a narrative often used to downplay the realities of racial inequality in America—one that ignores the difference in circumstance between those who came here with law degrees and those whose ancestors came as low-wage laborers or against their will. But it’s a narrative Tang Williams embraces unapologetically—America as a colorblind land of opportunity. “Asian Americans succeed, even if they come here with nothing like me, because we truly value education,” she says. If other communities join in the fight for school choice, then they can “become better educated, they can get a better-paying job, and they can become entrepreneurs.”
Sometimes, there’s a fine line between entrepreneurship and performatively enriching the world’s wealthiest man to own the libs.
“I’m inside my brand new Tesla I bought to support Elon Musk and DOGE,” Tang Williams announced in a March video that has been viewed 4 million times on X. “Radical leftists are Marxist-communists. They want to shut you down if you do not comply to them, if you are a threat to their corruption, their money, their special interests.”
It’s Tesla, baby! I bought it to support @elonmusk @DOGE. We, the free people must defeat the leftists/Marxists/communist mobs or they will destroy America! pic.twitter.com/dC0UmqJwZj
— Lily Tang Williams (@Lily4Liberty) March 10, 2025
“I’m going to go buy some more Tesla stocks and support them whenever I can,” she added. “We must win as a free people.”
That freedom has limits. In June, as millions of Americans took to the streets for “No Kings” protests against Trump, Tang Williams took aim at a group of demonstrators in Los Angeles who were speaking Mandarin Chinese.
“The way they were chanting and raising their fists remind me [of] Red Guards,” she tweeted. “These are CCP operatives, some might be illegals.” Then she tagged ICE.