To most of the people – including journalists and members of the media around the world, Vivek Ramaswamy (Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy) still remains an unknown name. But this 37-year-old political outsider became an instant long-shot when on February 21, 2023 he announced his candidacy in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries on Tucker Carlson Tonight. According to Politico, he was inspired by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign to run “with an entrepreneurial spirit, unorthodox ideas, and few expectations, and end up developing a major following that will carry him to the presidency”.
On April 18, 2023, in a tweet, Vivek Ramaswamy said:
@VivekGRamaswamy “I have no problem with Ukraine pursuing a Ukraine First agenda & Poland pursuing a Poland First agenda. But we here in America should pursue the America First agenda & that means keeping our eye on the ball. That’s better for us and better for the free world too”.
I have no problem with Ukraine pursuing a Ukraine First agenda & Poland pursuing a Poland First agenda. But we here in America should pursue the America First agenda & that means keeping our eye on the ball. That’s better for us and better for the free world too. pic.twitter.com/cJbfLYVnuI
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) April 18, 2023
Vivek Ramaswamy, born in 1985 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised there. His parents emigrated from Vadakkencherry, Palakkad, Kerala, India. His father graduated from the regional engineering college in Kerala and worked for General Electric as an engineer and patent attorney, while his mother graduated from Mysore Medical College and worked as a geriatric psychiatrist.
Ramaswamy graduated in 2003 from St. Xavier High School, a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati. He was his class valedictorian and a nationally ranked junior tennis player.
In 2007, Ramaswamy graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude with an A.B. in biology and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He wrote his senior thesis on the ethical questions raised by creating human-animal chimeras. A precis of his thesis was published in The New York Times and The Boston Globe in 2007. In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In 2013, he received a J.D. from Yale Law School.
As the author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam”, Ramaswamy has been a leading voice sounding the alarm on crony capitalism, Big Tech censorship and critical race theory. This book debuted at No. 2 in the ‘Hardcover Nonfiction’ section of the New York Times Best Sellers list on September 5, 2021. Ramaswamy calls environmental, social, and corporate governance investing the most serious threat to American democracy. Ramaswamy discusses what he considers woke-motivated firings. Russell Greene, writing on Real Clear Markets, applauded the book’s timeliness and wrote, “the problems Ramaswamy describes are real and likely to get worse”, while also arguing that Ramaswamy did “not permit his ample experience to inform his theory”, leading him to present “a vision for business that overlooks how corporations, and corporate law, actually work”. Joe Berkowitz, in Fast Company, observed that Ramaswamy “often seems more concerned with so-called wokeness itself than with woke corporations”. The book significantly raised Ramaswamy’s profile, leading to frequent talk show appearances, especially on Fox News.
In Nation of Victims, Ramaswamy critiques what he sees as the victimhood culture at the heart of America’s decline. Using examples from history and incorporating themes from Western philosophy and Eastern theology, he suggests that the disappearance of excellence and exceptionalism, which he identifies as at the heart of American identity, has left a deep moral and cultural vacuum in the nation. In his review for The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan wrote that Nation of Victims makes a “passionate, persuasive case” for “closing off victimhood as a path to success”.
Comparing it to the work of Shelby Steele and John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, Varadarajan wrote:
Nation of Victims—always vigorous, in places uncompromising—offers a surprisingly wistful, even docile, solution to America’s problem of victimhood. We’re locked in a “grievance-fueled race to the bottom”, where the very language we use—including basic words like “woman” and “equality”—have [sic] paralyzed dialogue across partisan lines. How do we emerge from this civic hell of mutual incomprehension? Mr. Ramaswamy’s answer is that we must “find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim”. That sounds like a very fine idea.
After news broke that a Tennessee school massacre was carried out by a transgender individual, Ramaswamy took the issue head-on, calling out gender dysphoria as a mental health condition.
“When someone identifies as a gender different from their biological sex, more often than not, that is a sign and a symptom that they are suffering from a mental illness”, Ramaswamy said in a statement. “I reject the idea that it is somehow ‘humane’ to affirm their confusion rather than to actually help them. It’s inhumane”.
Regardless of how he fares in the 2024 contest, Ramaswamy remains a rising star in the GOP, and his message is well worth a listen, a political analyst said.
“Unencumbered by a political background, Ramaswamy issues quick, timely responses to societal events, unafraid of what blowback he may receive”, Kelly Sadler wrote in an analysis for The Washington Times.
Ramaswamy founded the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences. After leaving Roivant in 2021, the Ohio-born entrepreneur co-founded Strive Asset Management, an investment firm unapologetically opposed to the Left’s environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) framework.
Ramaswamy has called for abolishing the Department of Education and using the savings to put armed marshals in every school in the country.
“We spend $80 billion per year through the US Department of Education that helps fund radical gender and racial ideology to create psychopaths, yet [doesn’t] protect kids in our schools from being killed by them. That’s wrong”, he said.
Sadler noted: “Ramaswamy is 100% correct. He’s routinely first out of the gate to articulate what career politicians are too scared to say without extensive poll testing or focus grouping. He writes all of his speeches, and he doesn’t use a teleprompter or read off a script when addressing voters”.
What may be Ramaswamy’s “most effective message”, Sadler noted, “is the need to address America’s widening cultural divide — and how to fix it”.
Ramaswamy said: “Most Republican politicians are afraid of the word ‘nationalism’. They shouldn’t be. America is grounded in ideals & truth. We should embrace our national identity and be proud of it. That’s good for America and for the free world. If that makes me a nonwhite nationalist, so be it”.
America First didn’t start in 2016. It started in 1776. We’re taking it even further.
-Unleash the American economy: Achieve >5% GDP growth
-End affirmative action
-Declare independence from Communist China
-Shut down worthless + toxic government agencies
-End weaponization of… pic.twitter.com/2NyR81OnYM— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) April 19, 2023
He continued: “This is a 1776 moment. We need to revive the experiment that our Founding Fathers started 250 years ago. Excellence. Merit. Free speech. Democratic self-governance over aristocracy. A nation of laws. The same values that provide hope to the free world”.
When the news broke that former President Donald Trump would be indicted by George Soros-backed New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Ramaswamy was among the first to respond saying: “A Trump indictment would be a national disaster. It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals. This is not about principle, not about a person. The silence from the other [GOP] candidates is deafening. We need leaders, not lackeys”.
On why he is running for president, Ramaswamy said:
“We’ve celebrated our ‘diversity’ so much that we forgot all the ways we’re really the same as Americans, bound by ideals that united a divided, headstrong group of people 250 years ago. I believe deep in my bones those ideals still exist. I’m running for president to revive them”.
Shall Americans finally send Vivek Ramaswamy to the White House? Or it still a long road to go?
