Oh(io) No: Vivek Ramaswamy's Catch-22 problem with MAGA

The Indian identity has always cast a strange shadow over America, even before the USA came into existence. Christopher Columbus – who never reached the present-day mainland US and yet became one of its founding symbols because Americans needed something to differentiate themselves from the British, and an Italian voyager flying under the Spanish flag made for better storytelling – called the natives “Indians”.The name came from Columbus believing that the Antilles were part of the Asian lands Europeans called the Indies, and Native Americans got stuck with the “Indian” label for centuries because, when a European makes a mistake, our colonial legacy ensures it lives on almost infinitely.Indians would arrive later in the US of A to provide various services, what comedian Nimesh Patel labels “gas, beds, and meds”, but today the Indian identity on the right side of American politics is going through what can be called a…