Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced in a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had quit Instagram and X after facing attacks for being Indian.
Ramaswamy previously wrote in a Dec. 17 New York Times op-ed that his “social media feeds [were] littered with hundreds of slurs … about ‘pajeets’ and ‘street shitters’ and calls to deport [him] ‘back to India,’” despite being born in the United States and never living elsewhere. He wrote in the WSJ piece that what he saw on social media did not reflect his real-world experiences.
Happy New Year! Grateful to the incredible Ohioans we met in every one of the 88 counties this year. You made it a year worth remembering, I’ll never forget it. Excited for a purposeful 2026 ahead. Now put away your phone & enjoy time with your family tonight!
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 1, 2026
“In 2025 I saw a spate of shocking racial slurs and worse on social media. Yet that same year I visited tens of thousands of voters across all of Ohio’s 88 counties—from inner cities to farms, union halls to factories, Republican rallies to one-on-one discussions with protesters—and I didn’t hear a single bigoted remark from an Ohio voter the entire year,” Ramaswamy wrote.
Ramaswamy noted that quitting social media was his New Year’s resolution for 2026.
“If my current New Year’s resolution resembles past ones, I might be back to scrolling X by March,” he wrote. “But for now I’m running the experiment, and I invite my fellow Republicans to join me. Who knows, it might be the extra X-factor that helps us secure victories in 2026.”
Nick Fuentes has also attacked Ramaswamy over his heritage and took credit for his social media departure in a Monday X post.
Nearly half of the reposts on Fuentes’ six most viral posts — three before Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s assassination and three after — allegedly came from foreign accounts, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute’s December report in partnership with Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab.
Ramaswamy referenced the report in his WSJ op-ed.
We bullied Vivek off Twitter
pic.twitter.com/xjEhIUO7yh
— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) January 5, 2026
President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk endorsed Ramaswamy in his governor’s race in February 2025. The Ohio Republican Party endorsed him in May 2025.
Ramaswamy was originally slated to work with Musk to jointly run Trump’s Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but as the president began his second term, he instead pivoted to running for governor. He has a narrow lead over his Democratic opponent, former Ohio Department of Health director Amy Acton, according to the RealClearPolling average.
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