Conservative media personalityAnn Coulter told podcast host and former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy that she would not have voted for him simply because he is "an Indian," RadarOnline.com can confirm.
Coulter was a guest on Wednesday's episode of Ramaswamy's The Truth Podcast and praised the host as someone whose views she aligned with "probably more than most other candidates" during his 2024 bid for executive office, which he suspended in January.
"I agreed with many many things you said," she told the biotech engineer, before admitting, "but I still would not have voted for you, because you're an Indian."
Her comment came after Ramaswamy discussed the meaning of American loyalty, arguing that the Conservative movement was entering a "fork in the road" when it came to the idea of nationalism.
Ramaswamy said that he favored a "libertarian breed of nationalism" over what he viewed as a "kind of reactionary nationalism" preferred by those who "believe that there is some element of ethnic heritage that defines what it means to be an American."
Coulter told the host that she would use the word "citizenship" in place of "nationalism," and argued that "the only people who are not allowed to be proud of their ethnic group do tend to be Anglo-Saxons."
"Oh boy, you can't be proud of being white," she said, adding, "You do see basically every other ethnic group very proud of their ethnic group."
"There is a core national identity that is the identity of the WASP," Coulter continued, referring to the acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, "and that doesn't mean that we can't take anyone else in, a Sri Lankan, a Japanese, or an Indian, but the core around which the nation's values are formed is the WASP."
"We've never had a president who didn't have at least partial English ancestry," she asserted.
Ramaswamy then posited that citizenship "is about your loyalty," and asked, "On that axis of citizenship, what does ethnicity have to do with the matter?"
Coulter replied, "I'm only talking about the president of the United States, so obviously the framers thought there was something different about being president, the one man who holds one entire branch of government in his hands."
"It was so important that you had this deep, generation-wide loyalty. And why would they think that? Well, as many said at the time, freedom is a wonderful thing but it's a very hard thing to learn."
"It's striking and depressing, but lots of our very best immigrants just do not understand the second amendment, they do not get the first amendment," she claimed.
Ramaswamy said that he felt America was not defined by "a single ethnicity," but instead by "a single set of ideals."
The former candidate was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Indian parents who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. He earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard College and went on to study law at Yale before working at a hedge fund. He founded his biotech company, Roivant Sciences, in 2014.