Nick Fuentes has lashed out at Vivek Ramaswamy after the Republican leader’s recent New York Times opinion essay, using racist language and questioning Ramaswamy’s right to belong in the United States. The attack has once again exposed deep fault lines on the American right over race, immigration, and what it means to be American.
Ramaswamy, an Indian American entrepreneur, conservative thinker, and former Republican presidential candidate, wrote in the Times that the United States is not defined by bloodlines or ethnicity, but by a common set of civic ideals. His argument, rooted in a values-based vision of the nation, drew sharp backlash from white nationalist corners of the movement, with Fuentes deriding him as an “anchor baby” and insisting he had “no right to be here.”
READ: Vivek Ramaswamy pitches Ohio’s education reform, receives backslash (
Ramaswamy wrote on X, “American identity 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 & 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. That’s the truth & it’s why I wrote this piece.”
The column quickly triggered outrage from the far right. Fuentes fired back with an incendiary post on X, amplifying the backlash and pushing the debate further into extremist territory.
“Reminder that Vivek Ramaswamy is an actual anchor baby, so everything he says can be completely disregarded,” Fuentes wrote. “Foreigners who have no right to be here don’t get to lecture me about what it is to be American.”
One of the users on X shared a clip of Ramaswamy talking to a journalist, wrote, “Absolutely unreal: this blowhard buffoon is a literal anchor baby. He indirectly admits he might not even be an American citizen by birth. His mother was not a citizen when he was born. His father is still not a citizen. But he has, completely uninvited, decided on Christmas Eve that it’s his place to lecture Americans whose families have been here for centuries, and who fought and died in wars for America, about what being an American is. And he’s pretending he’s somehow qualified to be the arbiter of who is and who is not American. Laughable. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Disqualifying. Why should we ever listen to this creepy blowhard buffoon about anything?”
While another wrote, “Men like Vivek Ramaswamy have the logic where the entire world can become American based on vague principles. No, America is a distinct place, people, and culture, and it should remain that way.”
Ramaswamy took aim at views that have been gaining ground on the far right in his op-ed. He rejected identity arguments built around “lineage, blood and soil,” explicitly tying them to white nationalist ideology, and called out the influence of the so-called Groyper movement, an online subculture that promotes a white-first vision of the nation.
READ: ‘Act like Americans’: Indian American Nikki Haley’s son sparks row over anti-H-1B stance (
One line in particular, “either you’re an American or you’re not,” has sparked sharp debate online. Some immigrants and civil rights advocates argued that the framing is too absolute and overlooks the United States’ long, complex, and pluralistic history.
What do you mean by “anchor baby”?
“Anchor baby” is a derogatory label used to describe children born in countries with birthright citizenship, including the United States, suggesting they are born mainly to help their families gain legal status. Ramaswamy was born and brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents, V. Ganapathy Ramaswamy, an engineer, and Geetha Ramaswamy, a geriatric psychiatrist, immigrated to the U.S. from Kerala, India.