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Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy laid out his vision for what it means to be an American during his remarks Friday at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest, encouraging conservatives to embrace ideals and not "lineage."
Ramaswamy rejected what he called the race- and identity-obsessed vision of the "woke left," as well as what he called certain quarters of the "online right" that link American identity to heritage.
"I think the idea of a heritage American is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up," he said at Turning Point's conference in Phoenix, Arizona. "There is no American who is more American than somebody else. … It is binary. Either you're an American or you're not."
Rather, Ramaswamy said, it was believing in ideals that made someone 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 we believe in those ideals of 1776," he said. "It means we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color.
"It means we believe in free speech and open debate," he added. "Even for those who disagree with us, from Nick Fuentes to Jimmy Kimmel, you get to speak your mind in the open without the government censoring you."
Ramaswamy linked far-left and far-right figures to one another, saying there was no room in the conservative movement for progressives who believed in racial quotas, but also for those who rationalize hatred toward groups of people, specifically calling out far-right White nationalist Nick Fuentes for some of his inflammatory remarks.
He also urged attendees to not play victims like woke leftists.
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Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at a campaign rally for Donald Trump at Mullett Arena Oct. 24, 2024, in Tempe, Ariz. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
"Victimhood culture from the left to the right will be the ruin of this country," he said.
Ramaswamy's speech followed his guest essay earlier this week in The New York Times in which he argued the American right was divided by two sides that were incompatible: a "blood and soil" identity-obsessed outlook and one based on American ideals.
"No matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you are every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant, as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it," he wrote. "This is what makes American exceptionalism possible."
Ramaswamy, born in Ohio to Indian immigrant parents, wrote in the essay that older Republicans ignored the rising tide of Gen-Z White nationalism and antisemitism at their own peril. Likening the momentum to the rise of the far-left flank in the Democratic Party that normalized woke ideas like racist math, he challenged Republicans to confront and criticize identity politics on the right and to be a bulwark against racist attitudes.
He called on Republicans to do more to bolster the grim economic outlook for younger Americans by reducing costs and giving them more skin in the game through "broad-based participation in wealth generation from stock market gains."
"The uplifting truth is that the solution to identity politics needn’t be one camp defeating the other, but instead achieving together a national escape velocity to more promising terrain," he wrote.
In the background of Ramaswamy's essay is a fight among various personalities in right-wing media who differ sharply on everything from Israel to protectionism to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has emerged as a fierce critic of figures like Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, calling them conspiratorial charlatans who are undermining the movement and the country.
At AmericaFest's first night, Shapiro and Carlson took the stage separately and traded barbs at one another, with Carlson saying Shapiro was trying to de-platform him in a way that was antithetical to Turning Point co-founder Charlie Kirk, who debated all comers on college campuses.
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David Rutz is a senior editor at Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @davidrutz.
