The TOI Correspondent from Washington: In a manic weekend of mutual MAGA bloodletting at a conservative conference where Trump devotees knifed each other verbally, Vivek Ramaswamy was just another collateral casualty. The biotech bro-turned-GOP gadfly, who thought being the party’s voice of reason was a viable career move in a mob that embraces bigotry for breakfast, delivered a stern lecture on the surging anti-Indian hate in the movement, scolding MAGA minions for their fixation on “heritage Americans,” calling it “loony as anything the woke left has actually put up.“Defending Usha Vance, vice-president JD Vance’s wife, against slurs like “jeet” (short form of “pajeet,” the new slur for Indian-Americans) from MAGA extremists, he told them that American identity is about ideals like merit and free speech, not ancestry. Taking a not-so-veiled swipe at the vice-president himself, accused of not defending his wife from nativist attacks, Ramaswamy declared that “There is no American who is more American than somebody else... It is binary. Either you’re an American or you’re not.”It did not go down well. The MAGA backlash was as swift as it was savage—because nothing says “America first” like telling an immigrant’s kid to pack his bags. “Deport him!” snarled one nativist keyboard warrior, while another told him, “You know nothing about this country… You and the rest of your tech bros can f— right off,” Tarred as an outsider by the very base he courts, Ramaswamy, running for governor of Ohio, retired hurt. But that was just an appetiser in the feast of fratricide, as the Turning Point Conference, billed as a solemn homage to founder Charlie Kirk—assassinated in September 2025 —degenerated into a reality TV implosion, with conspiracy theories and character assassination.What followed was less a conference than a cage fight, with leading MAGA influencers turning the memorial into a rolling audition for who could land the sharpest blow. Ben Shapiro, the movement’s self-appointed headmaster, unloaded on Tucker Carlson for interviewing white nationalist Nick Fuentes, branding him a “Hitler apologist” and “Nazi-loving piece of refuse.” Shapiro then pivoted to Candace Owens, his former Daily Wire colleague turned chaos agent, accusing her of “conspiracism and dishonesty” for amplifying lurid theories about Kirk’s killing, ranging from TPUSA cover-ups to foreign plots, with Israel lurking as an implied villain.Enter Fox News diva Megyn Kelly, who, accusing Shapiro’s “ardent pro-Israel” camp of policing opinions and pressuring allies to publicly denounce Owens, declared with high-school pique that she’s not friends with Shapiro anymore, and reminding listeners that she had “helped make him a star.” Then came Steve Bannon, disheveled and defiant, looking as if he had wandered straight out of a car he had slept in, dismissing Shapiro as “a cancer” eating away at the movement, accusing him of plotting a hostile takeover of Turning Point USA and of putting “Israel first” over America as part of a 2028 power grab.Amid all this bloodletting, Candace Owens loomed large in absentia, her messy fallout with TPUSA turning what was meant to be a tribute into a mud-wrestling spectacle.From all accounts, the vocabulary—parasite, cancer, coward, antisemite—once aimed at Democrats is now standard issue within the MAGA tent. Even loyal attendees appeared exhausted, lamenting the “distraction” and “infighting” that was less policy debate and more of “autoimmune apocalypse.” A movement long fueled by outrage and the thrill of “owning the libs” has finally run out of external enemies and begun devouring its own.
