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.
{snip}
But 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.”
{snip}
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.
{snip}
The post Ramaswamy Challenges Conservatives on Surging Bigotry on the Right appeared first on American Renaissance.
American RenaissanceRead More
R1
T1
