Texas congressional candidate Nick Tran slams House Dem Leader Gene Wu for calling white people 'oppressors'

The leader of Texas state House Democrats, Rep. Gene Wu, is being slammed on social media after critics shared a video of him framing White Americans as “oppressors.” One of the responses to Wu came from Nick Tran, candidate for Congress in Texas’ 8th Congressional District, arguing the country needs less “grievance politics” and more restraint and accountability in Washington.

Tran posted a video criticizing Wu’s language and arguing it reflects a worldview built on victimhood and division. Tran, an immigrant and combat veteran, said he was “tired of white Americans being told they should feel like strangers in their own country,” and he objected to Wu’s reference to a shared “oppressor.”

In his video, Tran argued that calling a racial group an “oppressor” is not accidental but ideological, claiming it encourages people to see themselves primarily as victims. He said that approach leads to dependency rather than empowerment, and he framed it as “how Marxists talk,” contrasting it with what he described as a constitutional system designed to limit government power.Tran also connected his criticism to his own experience in the military, saying he served alongside people of many races, “black, brown, red, yellow,” including “most of them were white,” and that they treated him as an equal, not a victim. “Those men weren’t my oppressors,” he said.

In a Dec. 31, 2024, episode of the Define American podcast hosted by journalist and filmmaker Antonio Vargas, titled, “In this Texas District, 1/3 of Residents are Undocumented,” Vargas said he believed Texas will play a large role in shaping the country’s political future and asked Wu to lay out what he sees as the bigger picture behind today’s immigration and demographic debates.
 

He spoke the "undocumented" immigrants in his district, the majority-Latino district Texas 137th, saying "And these are all the people who take care of everything. Your life. They work for your companies. They clean your house, they mow your lawn. They take care of things that you don't even know that they take care of. And if they're gone, if they're deported, you will, I promise you. You will feel it immediately."

He went on to say "what is driving this newest round of anti immigrant sentiment is is purely a sense of white nationalism, that there is a sense of America really just belongs to white people, that this was a lot of people believe that God gave America to white people to rule, and that anytime that immigrants minorities make progress in this country, that that is a scene as a slight against them, instead of saying that this is a shared nation, where, when we all do better, our nation does better."

Wu states "a lot of the immigrants who came here, they came here in the last 20 years or so, and they see an America where everyone essentially has about equal rights, and that things are prosperous and things are great, and their vision of America is a movie version of America... The problem is we have this internal vision of America as a place of true equity, as a place of fairness and justice, without acknowledging the fact that those things have to be fought for. They don't just happen because you wish it. They happen because people go in the streets and demand it."

The clip that went viral shows Wu saying "it's not just Latinos, it's not just Asians, it's not just African Americans, it's everybody right. We, our country and the forces that be, the powers that be, have spent tremendous time, effort and money to make sure that those groups are never united, that they always see each other as enemies, as competitors, without ever realizing that they share one thing in common, that their oppressors all are the same right, the oppression comes from one place. 

"And I always tell people the day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they are, that they share the same oppressor, is the day we start winning, because we are the majority in this country now. We are, we have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone and to make things fair."