Vivek Ramaswamy, the front-running Republican candidate for Ohio governor, challenged a gathering of conservative activists in Arizona on Friday to denounce a rising tide of bigotry on the political right and reject the idea that ancestry or “heritage” defines what makes an American.
“The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and candidate for the presidency in 2024, told an audience at AmericaFest, a conservative conference organized by Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the slain activist Charlie Kirk.
He added, “The online comment threads of Twitter might preach that our lineage is our strength. No, I’m sorry, our lineage is not our strength. Our true strength is what unites us across that diversity and through that lineage.”
Mr. Ramaswamy, who shaped his political identity with a series of books and media appearances denouncing left-wing “woke” ideology, has become perhaps the most visible target of a right-wing ideology — sometimes labeled “blood and soil” nationalism, a Nazi slogan that was used in Germany and has resurfaced among white supremacists globally. It is a worldview shaped by intolerance of immigrants, and those from India are one of the latest targets.
“Older Republicans who may doubt the rising prevalence of the blood-and-soil view should think again,” he wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times this week. “My social media feeds are littered with hundreds of slurs, most from accounts that I don’t recognize,” he wrote.
He went further on Friday, saying that people who cannot denounce hateful ideas toward any ethnic group “without stuttering” do not have a “place as a leader at any level in the conservative movement.”
In recent weeks, mainstream conservatism has been rocked by a series of incidents that have highlighted bigotry within its ranks. In mid-October, flagrantly racist, antisemitic and homophobic texts exchanged by young Republicans came to light. Weeks later, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who remains close to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, sat down for a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, an openly racist and antisemitic white nationalist.
When the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, released a video refusing to criticize Mr. Carlson, senior officials and board members at the conservative think tank resigned in protest.
Now, Mr. Ramaswamy is highlighting a new pressure point facing his party, surging intolerance toward Indian Americans.
“This is deeply personal to me,” he said in a text to The Times. “It isn’t really about defending Jews, Indians, or any other minority group. It’s about defending the essence of America itself.”
Derogatory slurs that were once seen only in extreme, right-wing pockets of the internet are becoming more mainstream, as are claims that Indians are “stealing American jobs,” according to organizations tracking online hate.
“The hateful rhetoric we are seeing right now is nothing like we have seen before,” said Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a nonprofit that tracks online extremism.
Mr. Ramaswamy spotlighted that surge this week when he revealed the anti-Indian slurs dogging his campaign for governor and argued in The New York Times article that being an American has nothing to do with one’s ancestry. Instead, he said, any U.S. citizen who vows allegiance to the country is an American so long as they “believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream.”
That was a direct challenge to “national conservatism,” whose adherents include prominent Republicans, including Mr. Vance, who gave a speech this summer in which he worried that if being an American meant simply adhering to an ideal, “let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence,” American identity “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens.”
“At the same time,” the vice president continued, defining citizenship purely as adhering to the principles of the nation’s founding documents would exclude many on the right who don’t subscribe to those principles and whose “own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”
In his opinion article, Mr. Ramaswamy took what seemed to be a veiled shot at Mr. Vance, who responded in October to outrage over the young Republicans’ racist texts by saying, “I refuse to join the pearl clutching.”
“The point isn’t to clutch pearls,” Mr. Ramaswamy wrote, “but to prevent the gradual legitimization of this un-American animus,” condemning a “reluctance from my former anti-woke peers to criticize the new identity politics on the right.”
Far from sparking introspection, Mr. Ramaswamy’s piece flushed out the bigotry he condemned. Mr. Fuentes said on social media that “foreigners who have no right to be here don’t get to lecture me about what it is to be American.”
Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a social media hotbed for intolerance, said in a more-than-2,000 word response that the notion that anyone could become an American is “the most destructive lie ever told about American identity.” Anti-immigrant rhetoric, including against South Asians, is not new. But it surged in 2024, when the presidential cycle for the first time featured two Indian American candidates, Mr. Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, and a Black and South Asian Democratic nominee in Kamala Harris.
Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, an Indian American and practicing Hindu, has become a particular target, said Stephanie Chan, director of data and research for Stop AAPI Hate, a group that monitors and responds to anti-Asian discrimination. A fierce debate within the Trump administration this year over visas for highly skilled immigrant workers sparked still more anti-Indian rhetoric.
Posts on X that featured anti-Indian slurs, stereotypes or narratives like “deport Indians” garnered 280 million views over about two months earlier this year, Mr. Naik’s group found. Over the last month, he said, another 29,000 mentions of such language has appeared on X, which Elon Musk purchased in 2022.
Mr. Ramaswamy is among a small contingent of conservatives who say the movement needs to protect itself from fringe ideologies like that of Mr. Fuentes’ groypers.
Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator, warned in a speech to the Heritage Foundation this week that “if conservatives do not stand up and draw lines, conservatism and the dream of America itself will cease to exist.”
According to a recent survey from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, almost a third of Republicans under the age of 50 openly express racist or antisemitic views, a finding based on a poll of about 2,800 mostly Republican voters.
Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of Stop AAPI Hate, said the anti-Indian rhetoric has been driven partly by policies of Mr. Trump, such his moves to limit H-1B visas, a program that has historically allowed 85,000 skilled workers, the vast majority of whom are Indian nationals, to work in the United States each year.
“It’s essentially about collective punishment against communities based on perceived threats,” she said.
Indian Americans have become the largest subgroup within the Asian American population among people who identify with one country of origin, and are on average the wealthiest and most educated. Six members of Congress are of Indian origin as is the newly elected mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who also faced significant vitriol online targeting his identity as a Uganda-born Muslim of Indian descent.
“There’s never been a prouder moment to be an Indian American,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said. Mr. Khanna, who said he has been targeted online because of his heritage, applauded Mr. Ramaswamy for denouncing the forces of intolerance instead of “pandering” to them.
Mr. Ramaswamy made the leap from business to politics by denouncing “wokeness” — a vaguely defined term many Republicans use to describe what they see as a liberal policing of speech involving minority groups.
With books, media appearances and a presidential campaign, he amplified the issue of “wokeism” and encouraged a backlash. But in his Times essay, he lamented what he called a natural consequence of that backlash: more people celebrating what they see as a historical bond of white people to America’s founding.
Earlier this year, Mr. Vance delivered a speech at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think-tank, in which he painted America in starkly different terms than Mr. Ramaswamy. “I think that people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” he said.
Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, said she has been a target of anti-immigrant sentiment and that attacks have increased during her nearly nine years in Congress. She recalled conversations from two decades ago with immigrants employed at Microsoft who she said at that time felt somewhat immune from ostracism because of their status. Now, she said, immigrants like them feel vulnerable.
“People understand this is an attack on all of us,” she said, “as Indian Americans, as immigrants, as naturalized citizens.”
Pooja Salhotra covers breaking news across the United States.
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