In a speech that wouldn’t have sounded out of place beneath the roar of a burning cross, Vice President JD Vance said, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore,” which is a thing that has never happened anywhere at anytime.

Vance delivered his white Christian nationalist manifesto on Sunday at AmericaFest, the right-wing conference hosted by Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk. It was an event that garnered more attention than usual because of recent MAGA squabbling over the future of the movement, including which racists they want — and those they claim they don’t — in their ranks.

This is all grimly comical, since the MAGA movement began in 2015 when Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign with a racist diatribe against Mexican immigrants. Such blatant bigotry should have marked the beginning and end of his White House bid. Instead, the former reality show host forged a tie with perpetually aggrieved white people that binds his followers to him with a cultlike devotion.

Now MAGA has been shaken not only by Kirk’s killing in September but also by the scramble among those who want to assume his MAGA mantle. Avowed white supremacist, Holocaust denier, and former Mar-a-Lago dinner guest Nick Fuentes wants that spot, but the guy who calls Adolf Hitler “cool” is too reprehensible even for some of the MAGA faithful.

The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing group that created Project 2025, has been in turmoil since its president, Kevin Roberts, defended an interview that Tucker Carlson, the fired Fox News host, conducted with Fuentes in October.

Last weekend, more than a dozen staffers left the organization over what The Washington Post called “allegations of antisemitism.”

It’s neck-snapping whiplash, as if MAGA devotees are trying to decide how much racism and antisemitism are acceptable in the movement. The right answer should be none, but then again this is a group led by a president who refers to nations with Black or brown majorities as “shithole countries” and believes the only refugees worthy of coming to America are white South Africans.

In his own AmericaFest speech last Friday, Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, chided MAGA for its failure to condemn caustic right-wing narratives around “heritage” Americans, or authentic Americanness determined by ancestry.

“The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Ramaswamy said. He added. “The online comment threads of Twitter might preach that our lineage is our strength. No, I’m sorry, our lineage is not our strength. Our true strength is what unites us across that diversity and through that lineage.”

Of course, Ramaswamy, an Indian American, didn’t call out by name the racism propelling all the talk about “heritage,” though he certainly has experienced his share since entering politics.

When Ramaswamy ended his campaign in early 2024, The Babylon Bee, a website that describes itself as “Christian news satire,” wrote that Trump had offered the entrepreneur a Cabinet position running the White House 7-Eleven convenience store.

Going all in on its racist joke, the website claimed that Ramaswamy was watching training videos on “how to fix the Slurpee machine” and “offer fast service ringing up Big Gulps.”

Ramaswamy played along. On a social media post by a conservative podcaster who got a snack at 7-Eleven, Ramaswamy wrote, “Thank you for coming & don’t forget to grab a Slurpee!”

Nothing quite defines an unquenchable thirst for white acceptance like clowning yourself for racists. And now that he’s a candidate in the Ohio governor’s race, he’s been inundated with racist and anti-Hindu invective, including calls for him to be deported back to India, though he was born in Cincinnati.

That’s what Ramaswamy wrote in a recent guest essay in The New York Times as he assailed “groyperism,” yet another far-right offshoot that, he said, “argues for the creation of a white-centric identity.”

As someone who isn’t white, that leaves Ramaswamy on the outside looking in. But the racism he decries now drew nothing but silence from him when the targets were Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, or Venezuelans in Colorado.

Conservatives want to focus on Fuentes as their primary problem while ignoring how Trump and his movement made Fuentes’s rise possible. (Notably, Trump has not condemned him, for which Fuentes thanked him on social media.)

In an interview after his AmericaFest speech, Vance said that Fuentes could “eat shit” for racist comments he’s made about Usha Vance, the vice president’s Indian American wife, and their three children. But Vance’s hypocrisy is stunning, in that he’s fine with bigoted comments — and making them himself — so long as they’re targeting others.

As MAGA dickers over whether its tent is big enough for all of the Trump-loving racists and antisemites, the most poisonous movement in modern American politics is slowly and publicly gagging on its own venom.

Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com.