Indian-origin GOP leader Vivek Ramaswamy, running for Ohio Governor as the GOp candidate, announced Monday that his 2026 resolution is to become a social media toototaler. In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Ramaswamy said he deleted X and Instagram from his phone on December 31 and decided not to browse any of the apps himself for the time being, while his campaign team will still use social media on his behalf. Ramaswamy said sensing social media pulse can go wrong as social media pulse is increasingly manufactured by foreign actors and nonhuman bots. Addressing the non-stop hate he gets online because of his Indian-origin and because of his Hindu religion, Ramaswamy said he did not get that hate when he visited tens of thousands of voters in Ohio’s 88 counties. “I didn’t hear a single bigoted remark from an Ohio voter the entire year,” he said.
Another day, another Vivek Ramaswamy op-ed
The last time Vivek Ramaswamy wrote an op-ed, he was canceled by MAGA as he explained in that NYT piece what it means to be an American. MAGA rejected the preaching from an Indian-origin leader and rallied support to his rival candidate. In his Journal op-ed about social media, Ramaswamy clarified that he is not preaching that everyone should stay off social media. “None of this is to say citizens shouldn’t use social media to sway politicians. It’s their constitutional right to do so. But it’s up to elected leaders to know what they’re responding to,” he wrote. “Real leaders must break free. It’s fashionable these days for leaders to complain about the influence of social media on politics, but do nothing to fix it. Yet the first step doesn’t even require new laws. We just need to practice what we preach.”
Honorable mention: Nick Fuentes
In the WSJ op-ed too, Ramaswamy made a passing mention of Nick Fuentes, who announced to campaign against Ramaswamy in Ohio so that Christmas is celebrated at the Guv mansion in Ohio next year, instead of Diwali.”A recent report revealed that engagement with the X account of the now-notorious white nationalist Nick Fuentes shows signs of being “unusually fast, unusually concentrated and unusually foreign in origin.” Another investigation showed that hundreds of bots drove the pro-Democrat #BlueCrew hashtag, amplifying false claims that the assassination attempt on President Trump in Butler, Pa., was staged. Politicians who think they’re taking social media cues from U.S. citizens are often mistaken,” Ramaswamy wrote.
