Vivek Ramaswamy referred to the internet’s far right during his remarks at AmericaFest

Ohio Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy laid out his vision of what it means to be an American during remarks Friday at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, urging lawmakers to embrace principles and not “lineage.”

Ramaswamy dismissed what he called the racial ideology of the so-called “awakened left,” as well as what he called certain sections of the “internet right” that link American identity and heritage.

“I think the idea of ​​being an American is almost as criminal as waking up to it,” he said at the Turning Point conference in Phoenix, Arizona. “No American is more American than another person. … It’s a binary. You’re either American or you’re not.”

Rather, Ramaswamy said, it was a belief in the ideals that made one an American, calling himself the proud son of “legal immigrants.”

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“What does it mean to be an American in the year 2026? It means that we believe in those ideals of 1776,” he said. “It means that we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of the color of their skin.

“It means we believe in free speech and open debate,” he added. “Even those who disagree with us, from Nick Fuentes to Jimmy Kimmel, get to speak out without the government stopping you.”

Ramaswamy linked figures on the far left and right to each other, saying that there is no place in the civil rights movement for progressives who believe in racial equality, but also those who hate groups of people, especially calling the white far right activist Nick Fuentes some of his aggressive words.

He also urged those who will attend the event not to play victims like people who rise up on the left.

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“The culture of suffering from the left to the right will be the ruin of this country,” he said.

Ramaswamy’s speech followed his guest story earlier this week in the New York Times in which he argued that the American right was divided into two conflicting factions: a “blood and soil” ideology that focuses on identity and another based on American ideals.

“Regardless of who you are, if you wait your turn and get citizenship, you are as much an American as a descendant of the Mayflower, as long as you follow the creed of the American founding and the culture that gave birth to it,” he wrote. “This is what makes America unique.”

Ramaswamy, who was born in Ohio to Indian immigrant parents, wrote in the essay that older Republicans ignored the rise of Gen-Z White nationalism and antisemitism at their peril. Likening the momentum to the rise of far-left factions in the Democratic Party that make mainstream views such as racist statistics, he challenged Republicans to confront and criticize the politics of right-wing identity and protectionism from racist ideology.

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He called on Republicans to do more to shore up the poor economic climate for young Americans by cutting spending and giving them more skin in the game by “broader involvement in wealth creation from the stock market.”

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“The happy truth is that the solution to identity politics should not be one camp defeating the other, but rather to gain together the country’s speed to flee to a promising destination,” he wrote.

Behind Ramaswamy’s article is a war between different personalities in the right-wing media who are very different on everything from Israel to security to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has emerged as a fierce critic of people like Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, calling them frauds who undermine the organization and the country.

On the first night of AmericaFest, Shapiro and Carlson took to the stage separately and traded barbs, with Carlson saying that Shapiro was trying to get him out of line with Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk, who opposed all comers to college campuses.

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