Vivek Ramaswamy Takes on the Far Right and Comes Out Swinging in Support of Indian Americans

In an unexpected confrontation with elements of his own political coalition, Vivek Ramaswamy spent the third week of December 2025 drawing a stark line against white nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-Indian bigotry within conservative circles—earning both praise and fierce backlash from different corners of the right.

The 2024 Republican presidential candidate and current front-runner for Ohio governor used a high-profile New York Times op-ed and a speech before thousands of young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference to denounce what he called “un-American” ideologies festering within the GOP. His message: being American has nothing to do with ancestry or “heritage,” and conservatives who embrace racial identity politics have no place in the movement.

“Groyperism Isn’t Conservatism”

On Wednesday, December 18, 2025, Ramaswamy published an op-ed in The New York Times challenging his party to reject the rising influence of the “Groyper” movement—followers of white nationalist Nick Fuentes who promote a vision of America defined by race and ancestry.

Ramaswamy wrote: “If, like Mr. Fuentes, you believe that Hitler was ‘really f-ing cool,’ or if you publicly call Usha Vance a ‘jeet,’ then you have no place in the conservative movement, period.” The term “jeet” is a derogatory ethnic slur against South Asians that Fuentes has used to describe Second Lady Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrant parents.

In the op-ed, Ramaswamy articulated his vision of American identity: “Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you 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, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation,” according to Raw Story and The Federalist’s reporting on his argument.

Ramaswamy emphasized: “The point isn’t to clutch pearls, but to prevent the gradual legitimization of this un-American animus.” He compared the situation to Democratic failures to criticize progressive excesses, stating according to Raw Story: “This pattern eerily mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke excess in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election…If the post-Trump G.O.P. makes the same mistake with our own identitarian fringe, we will meet a similar fate.”

“This Is Deeply Personal to Me”

According to The New York Times, Ramaswamy revealed in a text to The Times: “This is deeply personal to me. It isn’t really about defending Jews, Indians, or any other minority group. It’s about defending the essence of America itself.”

The Times reported that Ramaswamy has been experiencing anti-Indian slurs dogging his Ohio gubernatorial campaign. In his op-ed Ramaswamy shared that he has experienced racism from the right on social media, with much of the hate coming from Fuentes’s followers, and noted there seems to be reluctance from conservatives to disavow them.

The context for his intervention is stark. According to the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, posts on X (formerly Twitter) that featured anti-Indian slurs, stereotypes or narratives like “deport Indians” garnered 280 million views over about two months in 2025. Over the last month alone, another 29,000 mentions of such language appeared on the platform. Raqib Hameed Naik, executive director of the nonprofit that tracks online extremism, told The Times: “The hateful rhetoric we are seeing right now is nothing like we have seen before.”

Taking It to MAGA’s Youth Base

Two days after his op-ed, on Friday, December 20, 2025, Ramaswamy delivered his message directly to the conservative movement’s future at AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona. According to NBC News and Fox News, he appeared onstage before thousands of young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s flagship conference.

“The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Ramaswamy told the crowd, according to The New York Times. 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.”

According to Fox News, Ramaswamy declared: “I think the idea of a heritage American is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up. There is no American who is more American than somebody else. … It is binary. Either you’re an American or you’re not.”

NBC News reported that Ramaswamy characterized “heritage Americanism”—the nationalist belief that those with Anglo-Protestant ancestry are more American than children of recent immigrants—as ideology “emergent in certain corridors of the online right,” though he acknowledged it without calling out specific party colleagues.

Nick Fuentes responded on social media, saying: “Reminder that Vivek Ramaswamy is an actual anchor baby, so everything he says can be completely disregarded.”

According to NBC News, Ramaswamy then pivoted to address racism and antisemitism more broadly: “If you believe in normalizing hatred towards any ethnic group, towards whites, towards blacks, towards Hispanics, towards Jews, towards Indians, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” he said to applause from the crowd.

He got more explicit about Nick Fuentes. According to NBC News: “If you believe that Hitler was pretty f–king cool, you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” he declared. “If you call Usha Vance, the Second Lady of the United States of America, a ‘jeet,’ you have no place in the future of the conservative movement,” he continued, referring to the anti-Indian slur.

Fox News reported that Ramaswamy also condemned what he called “victimhood culture” spreading from left to right: “Victimhood culture from the left to the right will be the ruin of this country,” he said.

The Backlash: Exposing the Divide

According to Raw Story, far from sparking introspection, Ramaswamy’s op-ed “flushed out the bigotry he condemned.” Nick Fuentes responded on social media, saying: “Reminder that Vivek Ramaswamy is an actual anchor baby, so everything he says can be completely disregarded.”

Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab (a social media platform described as a hotbed for intolerance), responded with a more-than-2,000 word post arguing that the notion anyone could become an American is “the most destructive lie ever told about American identity.”

When Ramaswamy defended his Democratic opponent Amy Acton (who is Jewish) against antisemitic attacks by tweeting “There’s a lot wrong with my Democrat opponent, but her Jewish faith isn’t on the list. Back off, anti-American,” Torba replied: “Ohio is 64% Christian. Its Jewish population is 1.5%. Its Hindu population is less than 1%…Neither of you worship the King that the vast majority of Ohioans call Lord. Both of you hold values theologically and fundamentally opposed to the Christian faith. You are two sides of the same foreign coin, arguing over which non-Christian gets to govern an American Christian people, my people.”

Support From Some Conservative Leaders

Not all Republicans rejected Ramaswamy’s message. Florida GOP Senator Rick Scott praised the op-ed on X, stating: “Thank you, @VivekGRamaswamy, for speaking much-needed truth and standing strong against those who seek to spread hatred, antisemitism and division.”

Ramaswamy is among a small contingent of conservatives trying to protect the movement from fringe ideologies. Business Standard reported that 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,” the movement would face serious consequences.

Rising Anti-Asian Hate

According to The New York Times reporting via DNYUZ, anti-immigrant rhetoric against South Asians is not new, but it surged in 2024 when the presidential cycle for the first time featured two Indian American candidates—Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley—and a Black and South Asian Democratic nominee in Kamala Harris.

Stephanie Chan, director of data and research for Stop AAPI Hate (a group that monitors anti-Asian discrimination), told The Times that Usha Vance has become a particular target. A fierce debate within the Trump administration over visas for highly skilled immigrant workers sparked additional anti-Indian rhetoric.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the first Indian American woman elected to the House, told The Times according to DNYUZ that attacks have increased during her nearly nine years in Congress. She recalled conversations from two decades ago with immigrants employed at Microsoft who 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 stated, “as Indian Americans, as immigrants, as naturalized citizens.”

Recent Conservative Movement Turmoil

Mainstream conservatism has been rocked by recent incidents highlighting bigotry within its ranks. In mid-October 2025, flagrantly racist, antisemitic and homophobic texts exchanged by young Republicans came to light. Weeks later, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who remains close to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, sat down for a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes. When the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, released a video refusing to criticize Carlson, senior officials and board members at the conservative think tank resigned in protest.

A Veiled Critique of JD Vance?

Interestingly, according to DNYUZ, Ramaswamy’s argument appeared to challenge aspects of “national conservatism,” whose adherents include Vice President JD Vance. The Times noted that Vance gave a speech in summer 2025 in which he worried that if being an American meant simply adhering to an ideal “of the Declaration of Independence,” American identity “would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens.”

Vance continued, according to the report, that defining citizenship purely as adhering to founding principles would exclude many on the right whose “own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War” but who don’t subscribe to those principles.

According to DNYUZ, in his opinion article, Ramaswamy took what seemed to be a veiled shot at Vance, who responded in October to outrage over young Republicans’ racist texts by saying: “I refuse to join the pearl clutching.”

An About-Face From 2024

NBC News offered a pointed observation about Ramaswamy’s evolution. According to their reporting, “Ramaswamy’s rebuke of the most sinister currents within the MAGA movement appears to be an about-face, compared to the way he dealt with similar bigotry during his fledgling 2024 presidential campaign.”

NBC noted that during his campaign, which featured 16-hour days and up to 12 town halls in a 24-hour period, “Iowans consistently questioned his Hindu faith and whether his heritage could be trusted in America. He took those tough questions on the chin, but never outwardly condemned the prejudiced forces driving them.” Additionally, “on the campaign trail, he advocated for far-right immigration policies, including the deportation of American-born children of undocumented immigrants.”

According to NBC: “Two years out from his run for president, Ramaswamy on Wednesday previewed his AmericaFest rebuke in an op-ed for the New York Times. But to deliver that same message before thousands at the right-wing conference signaled a renewed dedication to rooting out bigotry within his party.”

NBC News also noted potential contradictions between Ramaswamy’s message and current administration policy: “Ramaswamy’s message seemed to be in conflict with the Trump administration’s recent messaging and policy goals. The administration is actively working to strip some foreign-born Americans of their citizenship, according to The New York Times, and Trump himself has repeatedly touted his work supporting ‘American-born citizens.'”

Ramaswamy’s central warning to conservatives, according to Raw Story’s summary of his op-ed, is that the GOP risks making the same mistake Democrats made with progressive identity politics. “As one of the most vocal opponents of left-wing identity politics, I now see real reluctance from my former anti-woke peers to criticize the new identity politics on the right,” he wrote.

According to Raw Story, Ramaswamy concluded that Republicans need to forcibly condemn white supremacists like Groyper founder Nick Fuentes and focus on policies to lift everyone up like affordability reforms, so young conservatives won’t get radicalized.

A Fight for the Soul of Conservatism

Vivek Ramaswamy’s December 2025 intervention represents a rare moment of public reckoning within the conservative movement over race, identity, and American values. Whether his call for moral clarity will resonate with Republican voters—or cost him politically in his gubernatorial campaign—remains to be seen.

What is clear from the week’s events is that the fault lines Ramaswamy exposed run deep. His willingness to name Nick Fuentes explicitly, to defend the Second Lady against racist slurs, and to argue that “heritage Americanism” is “as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up” demonstrates either political courage or calculated positioning—or perhaps both.

As Ramaswamy told The New York Times: “This is deeply personal to me.” For the son of Indian immigrants now running to govern Ohio, the question of who gets to define American identity is no longer academic—it’s existential, both for his campaign and for the millions of South Asian Americans navigating an increasingly hostile political environment.

Top image: Courtesy of Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons. This story was aggregated by AI from several news reports and edited by American Kahani’s News Desk.