Joel Berry Lies About Vivek Ramaswamy For The Real Pagan Right

Joel Berry spent the last 72 hours defending two claims that take an enormous amount of gaslighting to swallow: that Vivek Ramaswamy is “the most right-wing gov candidate Ohio has had in generations,” and that the Hindu entrepreneur is “fully Anglo-Protestant in his political philosophy.” The pushback was immediate, and it was not confined to anonymous accounts.

Berry, a former Babylon Bee editor now producing for The Jeremy Boreing Show, posted Friday that objections to Ramaswamy’s Hinduism missed the point. “His political philosophy is pure Anglo-Protestantism,” he wrote. “And his opponent is a psychotic communist. This isn’t a hard decision.” When that line drew quotes and ridicule, he doubled down: “He’s not pretending. Vivek is fully Anglo-Protestant in his political philosophy. Does this confuse you?”

It did. Accounts on the Christian Nationalist and “heritage American” right treated the phrasing as a category error. Evangelical Dark Web’s Ray Fava wrote that “Anglo-Protestant means nothing if attributable to Vivek Ramaswamy” and, earlier, “If Vivek is Anglo-Protestant, then no one is.” Others asked how a political tradition rooted in English Protestant settlement, individual conscience, and a historically Christian moral order could be detached from both Englishness and Protestantism and then assigned to a practicing Hindu born to Indian immigrants.

The fight is not abstract. Ramaswamy, 40, is the Republican nominee for Ohio governor in the November 3 general election against Democrat Amy Acton, the former state health director who ran Ohio’s early COVID response. Incumbent Republican Mike DeWine is term-limited. Polling in late September has the race inside the margin of error in a state that voted for Donald Trump three times. If Ramaswamy wins, he would be the first Hindu governor in the United States.

Berry’s argument is that ancestry and personal worship should not decide the race. In his telling, “Anglo-Protestant political philosophy” is a tradition of classical liberalism, individual conscience, popular sovereignty, and a moral citizenry, not a bloodline or a baptismal certificate. He has spent months applying a companion label, “Pagan Right” or “Ethnopagan Right,” to conservatives who treat ethnicity, heritage, or religious identity as the core of American belonging. He has described that camp as holding a “warped, pagan anthropology,” compared it to “satanic movements,” and said it is trying to replace a creedal nation with a “racial feudalist monarchy.” Critics say the label is doing different work in the Ohio race: it recasts Christians who will not vote for a Hindu candidate as pagans, while treating the Hindu candidate as the authentic heir of Protestant political order.

A recurring jab in Berry’s mentions: the “Pagan Right” is supposedly so pagan that it refuses to elect a pagan. Berry’s own usage is broader than Hinduism. He has said there are “Christians in the Pagan Right, and non-Christians in the conservative Right,” and he has applied the term to White identitarians, some Catholic traditionalists he accuses of using the cross as a “magical totem,” and anyone who treats “heritage American” status as a caste. Still, in the Ohio thread he tied the label directly to people who will not back Ramaswamy because he is “brown” or Hindu, and he accused Stephen Wolfe’s orbit of preferring “a White Leftist woman” to a conservative who does not share their ancestry, neglecting to mention that Amy Acton is Jewish.

Ramaswamy’s record gives both sides material. Before he ran for president in 2023, he was a biotech founder, not a movement conservative officeholder. He has said he voted Libertarian in 2004 and Trump in 2020, while criticizing Trump’s spending and tariffs. Roivant Sciences, the company he founded, had 29 H-1B visas approved between 2018 and 2023. On social issues he later packaged a list of “10 truths”—God is real, two genders, fossil fuels, colorblind merit, closed borders—that tracked the post-2016 Republican coalition more closely than his earlier libertarian profile. He also described January 6 as “a dark day for democracy” in his 2022 book before adopting a harder line in the primary. Simply put, he was not discernably right wing prior to running for President in the Republican primary.

Immigration is the sharpest contrast his critics use. On the 2024 campaign trail, he said the H-1B system should be “gutted” and replaced with a merit selection process, not a lottery, and that workers should not be tied to a single employer. Berry repeats that line now: Ramaswamy, he says, wants mass deportations and a gutted H-1B program. The counter-clip is from December 26, 2024, when Ramaswamy, then co-chairing the Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk, argued that tech firms hire foreign-born engineers because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence.” He cited sitcoms and the elevation of “the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ.” The post detonated on the MAGA right. He left DOGE weeks later. He has not withdrawn the cultural premise, even as he continues to call the current lottery “broken.”

That sequence is why the “most right-wing in generations” claim is doing so much work. Berry measures right-wing by present platform and contrast with Acton. Detractors measure it by continuity: a candidate who used H-1Bs as an employer, defended foreign tech hiring as a cultural necessity, rejects “heritage American” hierarchy, and is not a Christian cannot, in their view, be the culmination of Ohio’s conservative tradition—especially not an “Anglo-Protestant” one.

Berry’s reply is that the alternative is handing a red state to Acton over theology and ancestry, and that a creedal definition of Americanism is the only definition that can both restrict immigration and treat naturalized citizens as equals. Ramaswamy made a version of that case in a December 2025 New York Times essay against “Groyper” ancestry politics: Americanness, he wrote, is binary, not scalar. His critics answer that a creed without a people is an HR manual, and that Protestant political culture was not a free-floating software package that any talented immigrant can install.

The argument will not be settled on X. Ohio voters will decide it in five weeks. What the weekend made visible is a split that has been building for more than a year: one faction of the right treating religion and historic peoplehood as optional packaging around a policy list, and another treating those things as the list. Berry put Ramaswamy on the first side and called the second pagan. A lot of Christians heard that as the accusation running the wrong direction.