22 October 2026 - 5:00pm
This week, Vivek Ramaswamy — the venture-capital chancer running for governor in Ohio as a Republican — put out what is undoubtedly one of the most cynical campaign ads in US political history. In it, the mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calls her daughter a liar for telling a harrowing story about her childhood. The problem: extensive legal records show that Acton did in fact suffer a harrowing childhood as a result of her mother staying with an abusive boyfriend.
The ad has invited bipartisan condemnation, with the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, pressing Ramaswamy to withdraw it (but stopping short of retracting his endorsement). The ad has also drawn an unlikely group to Acton’s cause: the Groypers, the boisterously racist and antisemitic followers of Nick Fuentes. It is a curious turn that shows how racialisation has scrambled Republican politics in fraught, unpredictable ways.
Ramaswamy was in trouble with the populist Right — and not just the Groypers — long before his campaign launched the ad. In December 2024, he was practically driven off the X app for a post in which he blamed jock-and-sitcom culture for young Americans falling behind their Asian peers, especially in science and engineering. And while he opposes illegal migration, he supports liberal rules for recruiting foreign workers in tech and other sectors.
The subtext of his much-reviled December 2024 post was clear: young Americans are struggling to find stable jobs because they are lazy, not because corporations exploit wage differentials and labour arbitrage to undercut them.
Whatever the merits of the argument — I rejected it in a YouTube debate with Ramaswamy around that time — the post made him a stand-in for everything the online Right believes is wrong with America. At the heart of their grievance is mass migration, and particularly the abuse of guest-worker visas that pits native-born students and professionals against newcomers willing to work for much less.
Indeed, even before the ad, Fuentes had urged his supporters to vote for Acton (or really, to vote against Ramaswamy). “Democrats > Indians,” one Fuentes fan replied. As UnHerd’s Ryan Zickgraf noted, at times it seemed Ramaswamy was trying to live up to his Right-wing enemies’ picture of him as, well, alien. A campaign video showed him awkwardly swinging a bat at incoming baseballs (and barely managing to make contact; one imagines how much worse the outtakes were). At a rally, he tried and failed to pick up a child.
To be clear, American politics has thrown up plenty of heinous ads produced on behalf of candidates of every race. But the Groypers’ reaction is instructive in two important respects.
First, the group’s embrace of Acton highlights the unpredictable directions that the politics of racial solidarity can take. Acton is a full-spectrum progressive, albeit one adept at tailoring her message to a red-state environment. In policy terms, Ramaswamy is unquestionably closer to the Groypers than she is. But when race is elevated to the central or even sole political heuristic, policy and ideology come to matter less.
Second, there is the danger to the GOP’s presumptive nominee in 2028, JD Vance, who’s receiving across-the-board heat for defending the Ramaswamy ad (the ad was “telling it like it is,” the Vice President told a rally).
No, Fuentes and the online Groypers don’t represent a mass constituency, and Vance is comfortable attacking Fuentes personally (he told the Groyper King to “eat shit” in an interview with me last year). But Vance is also sharply attuned to the sentiments of a wider subset of Gen-Z men who were fed up with liberal immigration policy, but are now equally or more irate over the Iran war and the shape of the economy under the second Trump administration.
By standing behind Ramaswamy, Vance is showing himself to be a good soldier for the Republican Party in a crucial state ahead of a challenging midterm election. And he is defying the racial frame the Groypers wish to impose on the Right. But he’s also taking a political risk on behalf of a figure, Ramaswamy, who’s run a lousy campaign from the start — and whose own instincts on immigration and other issues couldn’t clash more sharply with the young Right’s.
Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd. His next book, on The Triumph of Normal, is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
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