Vivek Ramaswamy, biotechnology entrepreneur and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” threw his hat in the ring on Tuesday for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicate that Ramaswamy, 37, is registering as a Republican candidate. As a political newcomer, he joins the GOP race with former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
“We’re in the midst of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism, hard work, and family are on the decline,” Ramaswamy wrote in a statement provided to The Epoch Times, after announcing his presidential bid.
“Climateism, wokeism, and gender ideology have taken their place. We need to fill that identity vacuum with a vision of American national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance.”
He describes the Chinese regime as the “greatest external threat” America faces.
“If we defeat them economically now, we avoid having to do so militarily later. This involves real sacrifice, but we can rise to the occasion,” he said.
“As U.S. President, I will end federally mandated affirmative action—full stop. I will repeal Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 which mandates race-based quotas. Every Republican since Johnson had the opportunity to do it. I’ll do it on Day 1 without apology,” he wrote.
Additionally, Ramaswamy says he is committed to exposing government documents of state influence in private enterprises, or what he calls the “state action files,” if elected.
In another post, he gave a glimpse into other areas he would be tackling as president.
“There’s a lot else we can disagree on. But if you can’t make these basic commitments, you shouldn’t be a serious GOP contender,” he added.
The ‘Anti-Woke’ Man
Described by Politico as “one of the intellectual godfathers of the anti-woke movement,” Ramaswamy has been a vocal critic of “woke” ideologies—colloquially, ideology centered on identity politics—which he says is prevalent in American institutions.“My diagnosis at the end of ‘Woke, Inc.’ and in ‘Nation of Victims’ is that an entire generation is hungry for a cause, for purpose and meaning at this point in our national history,” he said, referring to the two books he authors.
Views on the Great Reset
In another interview with The Epoch Times’s American Thought Leaders in March 2022, Ramaswamy elaborated on his view of the Great Reset, an agenda that seeks to revamp human society into a new order governed by a technocratic entity, by largely exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic.Klaus Schwab, chair of the international organization World Economic Forum (WEF), first promulgated the Great Reset agenda among world leaders in 2020.
“The Great Reset is the use of COVID-19 and other catastrophes to be able to achieve something that people would have otherwise never accepted, which was a merger of power across the different institutional spheres of our lives,” Ramaswamy said. “With the ‘capital G’ Great Reset, I think that’s the disappearance of democracy as we know it.”
“It is the institution of modern monarchy where we don’t have one king, we have kings that together work,” he said. “We have a bureaucratic layer that collectively represents a technocratic king. That’s what that looks like. That is Klaus Schwab’s vision. That is the Great Reset,” he added.
“Stakeholder capitalism, ESG, corporate social responsibility, call it what you want, it is the apologist model of capitalism that merges state power with corporate power to create the modern form of fascism,” Ramaswamy said of the Great Reset.
“It is time, as I say, to reset the Great Reset,” he said during the interview.
This topic came up on Ramaswamy’s public social media page soon after he announced his bid.
In response to a remark by conservative commentator Jack Posobiec on Tuesday night, Ramaswamy recounted how the WEF tried to name him in its programs.
Views on Government Reform
Amid the looming Great Reset agenda, things nonetheless could go in another direction, Ramaswamy told American Thought Leader’s host Jan Jekielek in the March 2022 interview.Specifically, he mentioned that he would like to see a “realignment” in American society (a reset, but in the opposite direction to the Great Reset), in which arises “a dissolution of the managerial layer that intermediates what an institution stands for and the people who that institution is actually supposed to serve.”
“We don’t need Republican leaders or conservative leaders to incrementally reform a government agency by saying that we’re going to put a different person in charge and we’re going to cut its budget and starve it,” he said. “That’s old-school conservative solutions that resort to, I would say, superficial ideas about saving money, and then we can lower taxes.”
When it comes to reforming government institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ramaswamy noted, “the answer isn’t to incrementally reform those bureaucracies.”
“It is to shut them down and to replace them with something new,” he said. “Because there’s a managerial cancer that’s insulated from political accountability, that those very people, you can’t treat one metastasis at a time. You can’t treat the symptom by treating a cancer with a Tylenol and a bandaid.
“If you want to treat a cancer, you need to ultimately get rid of the tumor itself,” he added.
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