After Nikki Haley, here comes another Indian American to enter the Republican Party's presidential bid. Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur, has announced his presidential candidature for 2024, pledging to "bring merit back" and end dependence on China. Ramaswamy remarked during a live interview with Tucker Carlson, a conservative political pundit, on Fox News' prime time programme.
After Haley, the 37-year-old has emerged as a Republican challenger to former US president Donald Trump who declared his reelection run last November.
“I am proud to say tonight that I am running for president to revive those ideals in this country,” Ramaswamy said in an interview with Fox News. “I think we need to put ‘merit’ back into ‘America’ in every spirit of our lives.”
“This isn’t just a political campaign; this is a cultural movement to create a new dream for the next generation of Americans,” he emphasised. He said his campaign is “about the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in our country. It means you believe in merit; that you get ahead in this country not on the colour of your skin but on the content of your character and your contributions”.
Ramaswamy was born in southwest Ohio to Indian immigrants. According to The New Yorker, his mother was a geriatric psychiatrist and his father worked as an engineer and patent lawyer at General Electric.
As per a Politico report, Ramaswamy went to Harvard for undergrad where he studied biology and got a law degree from Yale. He started his career as a biotech investor and developed medicines.
According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, he is also the executive chairman of Strive, an asset management firm that aims to convince companies to shun politics and social issues. Strive is backed financially by the likes Peter Thiel and Bill Ackerman, according to Bloomberg.
The New Yorker dubbed Ramaswamy the "CEO of Anti-Woke Inc." He is the author book Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam. According to Politico, he is an anti-ESG (environmental, social, and governance) crusader who warns about the threat of "wokeism" and socially responsible investing.
According to Bloomberg, The businessman has been vocal against “woke capitalism” which he says is companies focusing on cultural and political issues instead of profits and innovation.
In a column published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) titled “Why I am running for President”, Ramaswamy wrote, “America is in the midst of a national identity crisis. We hunger for purpose at a moment when faith, patriotism and hard work are on the decline. We embrace secular religions like climatism, Covidism and gender ideology to satisfy our need for meaning, yet we can’t answer what it means to be an American.”
“The Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance. Instead, many top Republicans recite slogans they memorized in 1980 or criticize left-wing culture without offering an alternative. To put America first, we need to rediscover what America is. That’s why I am running for president,” he opined.
Speaking to the publication, he said, “I believe that I’ve developed a vision for American national identity that I have deep conviction for and is the product of my own journey of having lived the gifts that this country has afforded me”.
“And the combination of both doing it intellectually and having personally experienced that vision of our nation makes me well suited to articulate that and deliver on it,” the businessman added.