OPINION:
Although a long shot to become the next Republican presidential nominee, Vivek Ramaswamy is a rising star within the GOP, and his message is worth a listen.
Mr. Ramaswamy, 37, is a political outsider who 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 notorious environmental, social and corporate governance framework. As the author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” Mr. Ramaswamy has been a leading voice sounding the alarm on crony capitalism, Big Tech censorship and critical race theory.
Unencumbered by a political background, Mr. Ramaswamy issues quick, timely responses to societal events, unafraid of what blowback he may receive. After news broke this week of a Tennessee school shooting by a transgender person, Mr. 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,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in a statement on Monday. “I reject the idea that it is somehow ‘humane’ to affirm their confusion rather than to actually help them. It’s inhumane.”
Mr. Ramaswamy has called for abolishing the Department of Education, using the savings to put armed marshals in every school in the country.
“We spend $80 billion per year through the U.S. 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.
Mr. 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.
His voice is authentic, consistent and sharply focused.
When news broke that former President Donald Trump may be indicted by liberal New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Mr. Ramaswamy was among the first to respond: “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.”
He continued: “This is not about principle, not about a person. The silence from the other [GOP] candidates is deafening. We need leaders, not lackeys.”
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed earlier this month, Mr. Ramaswamy penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal the very next day, arguing against a federal bailout. He then warned of a China-inspired push for a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. He rejected the idea that a digital dollar managed by the Federal Reserve would be beneficial for the U.S. economy. It’s an issue that’s been percolating for some time, but most politicians haven’t directly addressed it.
“That’s a good path to get us to be more like China,” Mr. Ramaswamy told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in November of CBDC, “which is not a good way for the U.S. to go in terms of being a surveillance state, and actually, it’s exactly for that reason that if you think about it, the U.S. could actually have a stronger dollar if it does not jump onto the CBDC bandwagon because people might want to actually hold a currency that doesn’t allow them to be the subject of surveillance and control.”
He called on all Republican candidates for the 2024 nomination to come out unequivocally against a CBDC. Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis followed Mr. Ramaswamy’s lead and introduced a first-in-the-nation proposal to amend Florida’s Uniform Commercial Code to explicitly prohibit the use of federal or foreign CBDC as money.
But perhaps Mr. Ramaswamy’s most effective message is the need to address America’s widening cultural divide — and how to fix it.
“Most Republican politicians are afraid of the word ‘nationalism.’ They shouldn’t be. America is grounded in ideals & truth,” Mr. Ramaswamy says. “We should embrace our national identity & be proud of it. That’s good for America & for the free world. If that makes me a nonwhite nationalist, so be it.”
He continues: “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.”
A welcome message. So why is he running for president?
“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.”
God bless Mr. Ramaswamy’s candidacy. He may be just the person this country needs at this perilous time. He, at least, gives me hope.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
