Courting Slur-Users Isn’t A Winning Strategy When They Have Slurs For You

Aspiring politician Vivek Ramaswamy broke his lifelong vegetarianism Tuesday night, eating a fat one in the Ohio gubernatorial race where he ran as a Republican against Democratic candidate Amy Acton. It’s certainly a vexed time to try and court a right-wing audience as a Hindu and Indian-American candidate. Let’s wind back the clock and see how that strategy worked out for him over the past few years.

Recall the promising origins of Ramaswamy’s political consciousness: biotech executive abruptly turned critic of the “modern woke-industrial complex.” With the release of his 2021 book Woke, Inc. and his unfortunate slide into public view, he offered the country a strain of sleazy, technocratic Trumpism. Even as he opposed the scourge of identity politics, he seemed not to realize that he himself would soon be subject to them. From the start of his national prominence, Ramaswamy has tried to make his Hinduism more palatable and relatable to his fellow Republicans. This was a throughline of his 2024 presidential campaign as a Republican. “The lessons learned being Hindu were similar and in many ways overlapping with Judeo-Christian values like sacrifice, performing your duty without attachment to the results and believing that your work on this Earth is not being done by you, but through you,” he said in a 2023 interview with the Associated Press. The article, paraphrasing Ramaswamy’s views, noted his belief that “Hindu values seem to resonate with Christian and Jewish audiences.”

Shockingly, Ramaswamy’s political instincts might have led him astray on that front. He suspended his presidential campaign in January 2024. In May of that year, after a Republican candidate debate, Ramaswamy hosted conservative commentator Ann Coulter on his own podcast, where she expressed a view that was undoubtedly prevalent among his hypothetical voter base. Ramaswamy voluntarily promoted that episode by saying that Coulter “told me flat-out to my face that she couldn’t vote for me ‘because you’re an Indian,’ even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back.” Here, he adopted his signature pose: groveling to people who plainly hate anyone who looks like him, under the pretense of accepting their tough ideological disagreements. He would later face similar attacks from Coulter’s millennial and Zoomer spiritual successors, Laura Loomer (who criticized him for opening America’s borders to “third-world invaders”) and Nick Fuentes (who said he’d rather see a Democrat win than Ramaswamy).