After getting torched by his own party, Vivek Ramaswamy’s latest social-media meltdown ended with him rage-quitting the platform where the pile-on started.
In a lengthy Wall Street Journal essay published this week, the republican gubernatorial hopeful announced what he framed as a New Year’s resolution: stepping away from Instagram and X after weeks of backlash from fellow conservatives.
“I deleted X and Instagram from my phone,” he wrote, calling social media “a trap” for politicians who mistake online outrage for real-world sentiment.
Ramaswamy said the self-imposed exile would free up time to engage with “real-world Ohio,” arguing that quitting social media would make him “a better leader and a happier man.”
The decision, however, came only after his standing within the GOP took a noticeable hit following a controversial speech last month at a Turning Point USA conference.
At the event, Ramaswamy dismissed the concept of “heritage Americans,” calling it “about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up.” He added, “There is no American who is more American than somebody else. It’s crazy talk. We believe in ideals. That is who we are.”
Clips of the remarks quickly spread online, triggering outrage from conservatives accusing him of pandering and disloyalty.
Conservative commentator William Wolfe joined the pile-on with a thinly veiled jab, with a post on X captioned “Interesting” alongside an image of the Constitution’s natural-born-citizen clause.
The implication was clear: for parts of the right, Ramaswamy’s rejection of “heritage Americans” runs headlong into long-standing ideas about who counts as truly American.
While Ramaswamy insisted in his essay that the live audience reaction was overwhelmingly positive—claiming he received a standing ovation from more than 20,000 attendees—online backlash from conservatives told a very different story. In his essay, Ramswamay says his socials were flooded with a flurry of racial slurs and bigoted remarks after his speech.
Despite the dramatic sign-off, Ramaswamy’s exit from social media is more symbolic than absolute. His political accounts will remain active, run by staffers who will continue posting messages and videos on his behalf. In effect, the candidate is still online—just by proxy.
Ramaswamy used the moment to lecture fellow politicians, arguing that leaders who rely on social media to gauge public opinion are “looking through a broken mirror.” According to him, the issues voters actually care about—take-home pay, electric bills, and education—rarely trend online precisely because they are so universal.
The GOP, however, has not responded kindly to his digital retreat. Casey Putsch, Ramaswamy’s rival in the 2026 Ohio gubernatorial race, mocked the move on X: “Which is it, Vivek? Should politicians engage with their voters on social media or not? Why are you really leaving X? I’m not going anywhere.”
The episode also revived memories of Ramaswamy’s earlier holiday controversy last Christmas, when he scolded American culture in a viral post where he suggested that immigrant parents raised better children than parents born in the U.S. This seemingly annual controversy earned him the nickname “Christmas crashout”—as the backlash to his latest remarks mounted.
Whether Ramaswamy’s social-media detox sticks remains to be seen, even he acknowledged the odds. “If my current New Year’s resolution resembles past ones,” he wrote, “I might be back to scrolling X by March.” For now, though, the MAGA pile-on has claimed another digital casualty.
