Kash Patel Was Scheduled to Speak Alongside a Putin Apologist with Neo-Nazi Views
Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel was advertised to speak at a “MAGA & Hindus” event in Lawrenceville, Georgia last October alongside Utsav Sanduja, a pro-Putin activist and the former COO of the antisemitic social media network Gab. Until 2023, Sanduja ran a series of newsletters and meme pages where he promoted antisemitism and celebrated historic Nazis like Adolf Hitler and American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell.
In addition to Sanduja and Patel, the event also featured then-House candidate Narender Reddy and Sammy Baker, the chairman of the Gwinnet County Republican Party, who hosted the event. In December Sanduja suggested the event with Patel occurred as advertised.
Poster for PATRIOT ALLIANCE: MAGA 7 HINDUS UNITED FOR TRUMP! Retrieved from the Gwinnett County Republicans’ Twitter/X account.
“Putin is based. He gives the Jew chores to do…”
Sanduja has made attempts to be seen as a serious political voice since at least the mid-2000s. His political trajectory began in Canada, where he claims he was a volunteer for Toronto mayor Rob Ford, then in the United States, where Sanduja says he immigrated to in 2010. While in Toronto, he appeared on Sun News television and attended open events with politicians, often networking with influential media figures. As a result, he has acquired a significant collection of photographs with Canadian political figures including former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Toronto mayors Rob Ford and John Tory, podcaster Jordan Peterson, and US political figures like Eric Trump, Vivek Ramaswamay, Tulsi Gabbard, and Tucker Carlson, Chris Christie, and John Bolton.
Following his turn from political conservatism to white nationalism (more on that later on), Sanduja and his wife Emma continued their photograph collection with white nationalist figureheads. Both proudly posed for photographs with longtime white supremacist author Jared Taylor and with Steve King, a former Republican congressman who Sanduja described as a “white nationalist” in a social media post boasting about the picture.
Throughout the 2010s and 2020s, Sanduja continued to offer pseudo-expertise on topics such as social media, emerging technology, free speech, Canadian politics, Canada-India relations, Hindu advocacy, Khalistani extremism, Chinese intelligence, British federal politics, Bangladesh-India relations, Brexit, foreign policy pertaining to Canada, India, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, the United States, and pretty much any topic that any Youtuber would have him on to talk to about. A Bangladesh-based tabloid described Sanduja as someone “proclaiming himself as an influential member of Donald Trump’s team, a close associate of Tulsi Gabbard, and someone with substantial influence in the US Capitol” and accused him of being a “fraudster, scammer, and chameleon.”
While much of Sanduja’s supposed expertise is evidently dubious, which has restrained him to fringe, sometimes extreme Youtube channels, he had moments of close proximity to influence while advocating against the military defense of Ukraine. Last summer, Sanduja was an advertised speaker at Rage Against the War Machine, a joint conference spearheaded by the United States Libertarian Party which involved left-wing anti-war groups and right-wing pro-Trump groups. Max Blumenthal, the son of a Clinton advisor and a former journalist who now spearheads Gray Zone - a pro-Putin, pro-Assad media outlet which boasts viewership from left- and right-leaning viewers – took the stage after Sanduja. So did Ian Raiklin, an anti-democracy activist who proposed a prominent legal theory promoted by Donald Trump that, if successful, would have overturned the 2020 federal election results. Sanduja also discussed the war on RT News, a Russian state-owned media outlet now sanctioned by Canada and the US.
While Sanduja would publicly echo softly pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine messaging, his commentary on the topic was much more openly racist on private social media. For example, in October 2022, he applauded the Russian government for the invasion of Ukraine by saying “Putin is based. He gives the Jew chores to do and they end up fleeing Russia.” In another post, he actually called for the war by Russia to end, but did so by invoking the Nazi skinhead slogan “No More Brother Wars,” suggesting the position was due to the fact that it was a war killing white people.
These comments are in line with other politics Sanduja began to express in the late 2010s, when he appeared to have shifted his focus from Conservativism to white nationalism. He worked as the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Communications Officer of the antisemitic Twitter-clone Gab between 2017 and 2018, before falling out with the platform’s founder Andrew Torba. Torba himself is a loud, unabashed antisemite and white Christian nationalist with no qualms about speaking at white supremacist conferences or advocating for Holocaust deniers - including ones that celebrate Hitler. Sanduja’s role at Gab elevated his platform to national and international news, netting him screen time on NBC and friendly interviews with international far-right media like the German pro-AfD newspaper Junge Freiheit.
After Sanduja’s departure from Gab, Sanduja appears to have only shifted to more extreme rhetoric, even rivalling Torba’s own laser-focus on promoting antisemitism. In 2022, he frequently posted antisemitic memes and comments on his Instagram page, joking in one Instagram post: “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m ‘pro’ semite,” and suggesting that Ashkenazis “are America’s biggest problem” in another. Sanduja also posted images celebrating Adolf Hitler and George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, to his personal social media. He also promoted the neo-Nazi group White Lives Matter by name during this period.
In addition to Jews, Sanduja also promoted hatred towards Black people by posting pictures of racist caricatures of Black slaves and mocking African American vernacular. He also posted Confederate flags to his personal social media.
Much of Sanduja’s most extreme messaging was often posted under his moniker “DarthApu88,” seemingly a tongue-in-cheek homage to Hitler and Sanduja’s own Indian ethnicity (88 is common numeric shorthand for HH-“Heil Hitler”, while Apu is a character from the Simpsons often referenced as an Indian-American caricature). Sanduja sometimes paired this moniker with two lightning bolts resembling the logo of the Waffen SS (Nazi Germany’s paramilitary). Sanduja operated two connected Instagram pages as Darth Apu. The more explicitly racist account, which Sanduja referred to as “Darth Apu’s alt,” had posts only available to a small number of approved followers (112 by December 2022), many of whom used Nazi symbols in their usernames or profile pictures. (Darth Apu 88’s bio includes a line saying “Memes and follows do not mean anything. It is all satire.”) Sanduja’s main profile has since been cleaned of openly racist posts and only contains content going back to 2024. Despite the profile having less than 150 followers, a history of posting racist content, and formerly containing references to his neo-Nazi page, Sanduja’s main profile is now verified by Instagram. (If anyone is interested, I have access to archives of both of these Instagram profile between 2022 and 2023.)
As Darth Apu 88, Sanduja portrayed his newfound white nationalist beliefs as the conclusions of a non-white observer, going so far as to call himself a “White ally” in the bio of his personal Instagram. In one Instagram post, he said he “loves White [sic] people and cherishes all Aryan [sic] peoples.” In another, he referred to himself as a “P*jeet” (an anti-Indian slur) in a caption to a photograph of himself making a hand signal adapted by white supremacists. Despite his enthusiasm, Sanduja appeared to clash with other white nationalists at this time over his race. On his now-defunct Substack, Sanduja posted what appears to be screenshots of a message from an associate calling him a racial slur.
From Neo-Nazism to Hindu American Nationalism
While he brands himself as a right-leaning Hindu Trump supporter today, Sanduja referenced his past as a Conservative as a point of shame while writing for a National Socialist audience. In November 2022, Sanduja said that it was in the interest of “full disclosure” that he admitted to being “a card-carrying British and Canadian Conservative” just three years prior.
In 2023 - around the time that Sanduja cleaned up much of his social media presence promoting neo-Nazi content – he had success at becoming an occasional guest on English right-wing Indian television and in Indian diaspora newspapers as a Canadian political expert, where he has been characterized as having worked closely with Stephen Harper during his time as Prime Minister. Sanduja described this time differently on Instagram, referring to himself as merely “a bureaucrat in the Canadian government.” Sanduja gave several interviews about Khalistani extremism and India-Canada relations (from his presumed home in the United States) following Canada’s reaction to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, at times perpetuating narratives that Canada is a safe haven for Khalistani extremism. An interview which introduces Sanduja as a “geopolitics and hybrid state actors analyst” (he is not one) in the Sunday Guardian suggests Justin Trudeau may have lied about Nijjar’s citizenship status in Canada.
In recent years, Utsav and Emma Sanduja formed Hindus for America First, an official Political Action Committee for Republican and pro-Trump Hindus in the United States. The PAC bolstered Utsav to more publicity, including flattering coverage to many Indian news outlets – including some Hindu nationalist outlets, Australian news media, and the US magazine Religion News Services, who reported that Sanduja obtained his US citizenship in 2024.
Sanduja has also boasted closer proximity with the Republican party insiders under Hindus for America First. In November, he claimed to have been scheduled to meet with Tulsi Gabbard. In December, he claimed to have not only met with Kash Patel, but to have spoken alongside him at a Georgia campaign event. Sanduja posted about the event on Dec. 1 on Twitter/X to congratulate Patel on his nomination to direct the FBI, telling Patel he “was honored to host you” at the event six weeks earlier. Sanduja has since deleted the post.
The Senate hearing for Kash Patel’s nomination to FBI director is set for Thursday. Utsav Sanduja has tweeted in support of Patel securing the position.