Conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
Ramaswamy, 37, who founded a health care company called Roivant in 2014, told Tucker Carlson that people in the country have forgotten the ways “we’re really just the same as Americans, bound by a common set of ideals.”
“That’s why I’m proud to say tonight that I’m running for United States president to revive those ideals in this country, those basic rules of the road,” he said.
Ramaswamy said in a video posted on his Twitter profile as he announced his candidacy in the Fox interview that the country is in the midst of an identity crisis.
In his interview and the campaign launch video, Ramaswamy criticized a focus on diversity from “the woke left” and denounced policies that left-leaning politicians have taken to address situations like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
He claimed faith, patriotism and hard work have been replaced by “secular religions like COVIDism, climateism and gender ideology.”
He said people in the country cannot answer what being an American means and the left “preys on that vacuum.”
“They tell you that your race, your gender and your sexual orientation govern who you are, what you can achieve and what you’re allowed to think,” Ramaswamy said.
He told Fox that the United States needs a “total decoupling” from China, which he said is a more significant threat than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. He said an economic separation from China will not be easy, but “some sacrifice of short-term conveniences” are necessary to accomplish long-term goals.
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Ramaswamy also wants to work to limit Big Tech companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms as part of “restoring free speech.” Other plans include “dismantling” affirmative action “in every sphere of American life” and what he called a “new climate religion.”
Ramaswamy was nicknamed the “CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc.” in a profile on him from The New Yorker in December. The name is a reference to his 2021 book, “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” which slams a “woke-industrial complex” for “mixing morality with consumerism.”
Ramaswamy, who is launching what is likely a long-shot bid for the GOP nomination, is joining a Republican field that includes former President Trump and former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. A few other less prominent Republican candidates like former Cranston, R.I., Mayor Steve Laffey and former Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton have also announced bids.