MAGA Indians and White Nationalism: Kash Patel, Harmeet Dhillon and Vivek Ramaswamy Must Stand Up to It
- Hate doesn't stay confined to phone screens. It spills into brutal real-world violence, shattering lives and exposing the deadly cost of scapegoating.
Right-wing commentator Ann Coulter has built a career on hate, targeting blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and others with relentless venom. In July 2025, she posted a vile screed on X that burned through 10 million views before its deletion: “We didn’t kill enough Indians.” This wasn’t a mere jab at Native Americans, the Indigenous peoples of the United States. It was a grotesque call for genocidal violence, rightly denounced by the National Congress of American Indians as “genocidal hate speech” that poisons public discourse. Her venom toward blacks and Mexicans is relentless, from calling black people “lazy welfare leeches” in her 2015 book “Adios, America!” to labeling Mexicans “rapists and drug runners” in a 2019 Fox News segment. In 2007, she slung a homophobic slur at John Edwards during a CPAC speech, calling him a “faggot,” drawing condemnation from the Human Rights Campaign, and told CNBC’s Donny Deutsch that Jews need to be “perfected” through conversion to Christianity, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to denounce her anti-Semitism.
A decade ago, at the 2016 Comedy Central Roast of Rob Lowe, Coulter faced a reckoning. The event became a masterclass in using comedy to confront hate with sharp-witted laughter, not more vitriol. Comedian Nikki Glaser eviscerated her, saying, “Ann Coulter has written 11 books, 12 if you include Mein Kampf. Ann’s been called things like a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, a white supremacist, and that’s just while getting plowed by Bill Maher. The only person you’ll ever make happy is the Mexicans that dig your grave.”
David Spade piled on, quipping, “She seems stiff and conservative, but Ann gets wild in the sheets, just ask the Klan. Is Pete white? Is he black? Ann Coulter needs to know, so she can decide if she hates him. Ann hopes the Republicans can hold onto the House so she can still haunt it.” Pete Davidson delivered one of the night’s harshest burns, saying, “Ann Coulter and no black people? What are we roasting? A cross? Ann describes herself as a polemicist, but most people call her a c***. If Ann Coulter is here, then who’s scaring the crows away from our crops?” The audience roared with laughter, their boos drowning Coulter’s attempt to peddle her Trump book. This wasn’t just humor. It was a cultural rebuke, showing how comedy can deflate hate with wit rather than fuel it with rage, a lesson we desperately need. Yet her rhetoric, like that of her far-right peers, doesn’t just provoke. It incites. The assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 proves the stakes. Hate speech, festering in online swamps, can spark real-world bloodshed.
Indians in Crosshairs
Far-right rhetoric often hinges on scapegoating minorities, casting them as threats to a nostalgic, white, Christian America. Immigrants from India have become Coulter’s latest, softest target, with a surge of hate exploding in December 2024 after President-elect Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan, an Indian-origin tech executive, as his senior AI policy advisor. Far-right activist Laura Loomer blasted the move as “deeply disturbing” and a betrayal of “America First,” digging up Krishnan’s old tweet on removing green card country caps to accuse him of pushing “career leftist” policies that let foreigners “take jobs from American STEM graduates.”
Vivek Ramaswamy’s tweet defending H-1B visas and arguing American culture “venerates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” poured fuel on the fire, drawing MAGA backlash calling him an “H1-B leech” who should “go back to India.” Ann Coulter, despite Ramaswamy’s fawning attempts to win her over during his 2024 campaign, rejected him outright, telling him to his face she wouldn’t vote for him because he was Indian.
Real-Life Consequences
This hate doesn’t stay confined to screens. It spills into brutal real-world violence, shattering lives and exposing the deadly cost of scapegoating. In October 2023, Varun Raj Pucha, a 24-year-old Indian student from Telangana, was stabbed to death in an Indiana gym by an assailant shouting racial slurs, a hate crime that stunned his university community. In January 2024, Vivek Saini, a 25-year-old Indian MBA student, was beaten over 50 times with a hammer in Georgia, killed while protecting a coworker during a robbery fueled by anti-immigrant hostility. In Chicago, Sai Teja Nukarapu, a 22-year-old Indian student, was shot dead in November 2024 during a store robbery, one of many attacks targeting South Asian workers amid online tropes painting them as “wealthy foreigners.”
On September 25, 2024, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Sacramento, California, was vandalized with expletive-laden graffiti screaming “Hindus go back!,” a hate crime investigated by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, coming just days after a similar desecration in New York and amid a wave of temple attacks tied to anti-Hindu sentiment. These tragedies, tracked by Stop AAPI Hate, show how digital venom, often amplified by figures like Coulter, ignites physical harm, turning hateful words into bloodshed.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s tweet defending H-1B visas and arguing American culture “venerates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ” poured fuel on the fire, drawing MAGA backlash calling him an “H1-B leech.”
Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist labeled an FBI domestic threat, has fueled this hate with unhinged zeal, notably attacking Harmeet Dhillon’s Sikh prayer at the 2024 RNC as “total blasphemy” and a “satanic Hindu prayer,” ranting, “This is blasphemy. Oh, fuck off,” dismissing her faith as unfit for a “Christian country.” Yet Indian Americans like Ramaswamy, Kash Patel, and Dhillon, who’ve risen to prominence in Trump’s MAGA world, stay quiet about the white nationalism simmering among his supporters, even as those supporters turn on them with ugly attacks.
Ramaswamy, the Ohio-born biotech entrepreneur who ran for president in 2024, ignores the hate targeting his roots. Patel, now leading the FBI as the son of Gujarati immigrants, pushes Trump’s conspiracy theories about “deep state” enemies but hasn’t said a word about the far-right backlash branding him a “foreign plant” unfit to lead because of his Indian heritage. Dhillon, a Sikh lawyer born in India and confirmed as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in April 2025, faced slurs like “turbaned outsider” from Trump supporters on X after her RNC prayer, yet she’s never called out the anti-immigrant bile aimed at her own community. These MAGA Indians, embraced for their loyalty but smeared as “invaders” by the same crowd, put ambition ahead of confronting the hate that targets them, a silence that deepens division. Contrast this with Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who has taken Trump to task over the Epstein files, leading a bipartisan push for transparency and accountability, showing how one voice can challenge power without compromise.
Charlie’s Ire Against Indians
Charlie Kirk, the late Turning Point USA founder, swam in these same toxic waters. His rhetoric vilified immigrants, black activists, and LGBTQ+ communities. In a 2023 podcast, he warned, “Illegal immigrants are flooding our borders to replace white voters and destroy our culture,” peddling a white nationalist “great replacement” trope. In 2024, on his War Room podcast, he claimed, “The left wants to turn America into a third-world hellhole with their DEI nonsense and open borders.” At a 2022 rally, he called transgender rights a “mental illness pushed by groomers to mutilate kids.”
Kirk targeted Indian immigrants, posting on X on September 1, 2025: “America does not need more visas for people from India. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.” Indian professionals, vital to tech and healthcare, called out the baseless claim. Kirk dismissed empathy as a “made-up New Age term” in a 2022 X post, adding, “Toughness, not feelings, saves America.” Most strikingly, he downplayed gun violence in a 2023 speech, saying, “Gun violence is a myth created by urban liberals to disarm patriots. The real issue is black-on-black crime, not guns.”
Kirk’s comments on George Floyd, the black man whose murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, captured on video as Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes, leading to global protests against racial injustice and police brutality, were particularly callous. In a 2021 speech at Minnesota State University, Kirk called Floyd a “scumbag,” claiming without evidence that his death was due to an “overdose” rather than police violence, and dismissing the ensuing Black Lives Matter movement as undeserved attention for someone unworthy.
Kirk’s assassination on September 10, 2025, by Tyler Robinson, a lone-wolf gunman radicalized in online fever swamps laid bare the consequences. The FBI found no ties to organized groups, only Robinson’s texts railing against Kirk’s inflammatory views. Despite far-right claims, echoed by Coulter, pinning such acts on leftists, evidence points to individual radicalization, not political conspiracies. X posts like #KirkHadItComing, trending at 200,000, reflect public exhaustion with his divisiveness. At Kirk’s funeral, his widow, Erika, offered a moment of grace, forgiving Robinson in a heartfelt speech, saying, “I forgive him because it is what Christ did.” Tragically, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies shattered this grace. Trump declared he hated his opponents and could never forgive them, while Stephen Miller, in a funeral speech, vowed vengeance against “our enemies,” declaring, “You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing!” and promising to bring the full force of the federal government against “terrorist networks,” despite no evidence linking Robinson to any network.
Alex Jones, another far-right provocateur, was banned from platforms in 2018 for calling the Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012, which killed 20 young children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, a “synthetic, completely fake” hoax with “crisis actors.” His lies tormented grieving families, profiting off their pain while fueling conspiracies. In 2025, he stoked post-Kirk violence, declaring on Infowars, “The left’s war on whites demands retribution.” The bitter irony is that Kirk, like many on the right, dismissed the urgency of gun safety laws, like universal background checks backed by most Americans, to instead scapegoat transgender people and the “left” as threats, even as gun violence, including his own assassination, underscores the need for action.
Coulter, more loathed than Kirk, faces a perilous path. Her 68 percent unfavorable rating in a 2019 Pew poll, climbing to 72 percent in 2024 per YouGov, dwarfs Kirk’s notoriety. On X, users brand her a “racist hag,” with #BoycottAnnCoulter hitting 100,000 posts after her 2025 remark. Alyssa Milano called her “pure venom.” Even conservatives, like CPAC in 2007, shun her. Kirk’s death, fueled by online hate, stands as a warning. Hate speech can ignite tragedy, and figures like Coulter fuel that fire. Scapegoating doesn’t just dehumanize. It destabilizes. When figures like Coulter paint communities as threats, they invite bloodshed.
Yet resistance offers hope. The National Congress of American Indians’ fierce response to Coulter and the Anti-Defamation League’s relentless lawsuits against Jones signal a public determined to fight back. The Rob Lowe roast showed comedy can puncture hate with laughter, not rage, a vital lesson. Yet the battle demands more. X’s loosened moderation under Elon Musk has turned the platform into a megaphone for venom. Robust content policies, like those pre-2022 that banned Jones for incitement, must return to curb radicalizing rhetoric without stifling free speech. Stronger hate speech laws, like Germany’s fining platforms for unchecked violent content, could deter provocateurs while protecting communities. Erika Kirk’s grace at her husband’s funeral stands as a beacon, urging forgiveness over vengeance. How can Indian Americans like Ramaswamy, or Dhillon, born in India yet silent, stand by as Trump’s base spews white nationalist bile against their own people? Their silence, amid the toxic legacy of Coulter, Kirk, Fuentes, and Jones, risks letting the next vile post ignite not just outrage but tragedy.
Vikram Zutshi is an American journalist and filmmaker specializing in religion, art, history, politics and culture.