Presidential Candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy

July 6, 2023 |

Vivek Ramaswamy campaign website: Home – Vivek 2024

By Ashley Bean Thornton

I have been summarizing the opening campaign speeches from the presidential candidates. I have been trying to sift through the campaign rhetoric to pick out what they are saying about what they actually plan to do if they are elected.

Vivek Ramaswamy announced his candidacy through a video, which I have linked below.  Since it does not go into much detail about his platform, I also watched a presentation and Q & A he did for a group in Iowa a couple of days after his announcement.

Mr. Ramaswamy spent a good part of his speech explaining his ideas about “3 Secular Religions” that he feels have taken root in America: (1) “woke-ism” – mainly in regard to race, (2) gender ideology, and (3) climate. His central idea seems to be that these “religions” are undermining our culture of merit and pride in American exceptionalism.

Summarizing Mr. Ramaswamy’s action plan was challenging for me because I think this philosophy of the three religions is central to his political approach, but in his explanation of them he did not explicitly say what he plans to DO with them. So, I did not end up including very much about them in my summary.

I don’t think my summary below captures all Mr. Ramaswamy had to say – but I did the best I could to capture anything that sounded like something he plans to actually DO.

I have shortened and paraphrased quite a bit, but I tried to stick pretty close to his own words and to be fair in summarizing what he plans to do.  Due to Mr. Ramaswamy’s speaking style his answers are not as succinct as the ones I was able to pull out for some of the other candidates. – ABT

Here are the links I used:

Here is the link to the page where I compare these speeches by topic – Candidate Comparison – Dead Armadillo Politics (deaddillo.com)

What he says he will do…

 Bipartisanship – I think the defining political divide right now is not Democrat versus Republican; it is pro American versus anti-American. I think that there’s the portion of the country that agrees with those basic principles I articulated: meritocracy, getting ahead on your own commitment and hard work and dedication regardless of the color of your skin, that you’re free to speak your mind as long as your neighbors can in return, that the people we like to run the government run the government according to democratic self-governance rather than according to an aristocracy. That’s the pro American side…What I will offer you is not to be the leader in pummeling the other side into the ground  – though I can do it I’ve done it on Fox News and elsewhere for the last couple of years – but if we’re going to have a nation left at the end of it, it is not about pummeling the other side into the ground and burying them.  We should make a declaration of independence from, not just China, but from that merger of state power and corporate power that is the new form of fascism that reigns.  We can make this a 1776 moment – a moment where the pro-American movement defeats the anti-American movement in this country.

China – I commit to a declaration of independence from China – that is the Declaration of Independence of the 21st Century. It will not be easy.  The easy stuff is abandoning this climate religion that shackles the United States without shackling China.  The easy stuff is to begin to at least bring up our own industrial base so that we could stand on our own two feet instead of depending on an enemy for the phones in our pocket and the shoes in our feet. That’s the easy stuff.  But we have got to go further to exact the retribution, the payment  – financially speaking  – for wreaking havoc on the world with the covid-19 pandemic.  Because if we don’t use every Financial lever available to us, you can expect worse in the future.  I think we need to ban U.S. companies from doing business in China until the CCP either falls or reforms its behaviors.  I’m a hardliner on that and I am not budging.

Culture – There is a vacuum at the heart of our national soul.  My generation – we’re so hungry for a cause.  We’re hungry for purpose and meaning and identity at a point when the things that used to fill that void – things like faith, patriotism, hard work, family – these things have disappeared…We’ve got to go to that black hole. We’ve got to go upstream and fill that void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes this woke agenda to irrelevance.  So, what does it mean to be American? It means we believe in Merit – that you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.

Education – I think that moral education, civic education in schools is actually something that I took away from my high school experience. It’s too bad I had to go to a private school to get it. You can get it in a not-expressly-Christian form in public schools, but I worry about that if it’s done top down from the federal government…I’m shutting down the Federal Department of Education because it has no reason to exist. We need to protect against a top-down moral education or civic education because that lends itself to capture… But, if you have a distributed system of competition and combine that with transparency – for example, whatever you are teaching needs to be on the website – the combination of transparency and choice creates the space for reviving moral and civic education…I gave a speech in Wisconsin about a year and a half ago where I proposed cameras in classrooms — I mean there’s no there’s no reason for that not to exist.  That’s not because people are going to be there watching it the whole time – it’s the sense of accountability. It’s a sense of who’s actually in charge.

Free speech – We’re on a precipice. Don’t even call it “Big Tech” censorship anymore.  Call it what it is: It is Government Tech censorship, where government is using these companies to do through the back door what government could not get done through the front door. If these tech companies are going to be responsive to the federal government in Washington DC, then they ought to be bound by the same constraints as the federal government in Washington DC.

If it is state action in disguises, the Constitution applies.  Bind them by the First Amendment.

It’s not just limited to the Internet. It’s a culture of censorship. I think we need to make political expression a civil right in this country.  If you can’t fire somebody for their race, or their religion, or their sexual orientation, or their national origin –you should not be able to fire somebody on account of their political speech or their political expression either. America is not a country that forces you to choose between speaking your mind freely and putting food on the dinner table — between the American Dream and the First Amendment.

 Government Admin – I think it needs to be at the top of the Republican agenda to repeal Civil Service protections, to repeal federal employee union protections…I think a lot of these government agencies now have gone so far off the reservation that the only way to reform them is actually to shut them down — that begins from the Department of Education to the FBI.  We will shut down the agencies that cannot be reformed from within. “Shutting down” means just decimating, just totally leveling, gutting that administrative state, that three letter alphabet soup from the SEC to the FTC to the FAA to the TSA.  I will run the federal government the way it needs to be run – by firing the people and shutting down the agencies that need to be shut down.  The first step is to take the existing edifice and mostly burn it down, not in a physical and literal sense, but basically burn it down.  I call it gutting it.  I will take about 50% of the federal agencies and shut them down. Among the other half, we’re going to take about half the employees there and fire them.  For the 50% of agencies that we keep, we’re going to take a majority of them and spread them out across the country.  Get them out of Washington DC.  Make them more accountable to the people they’re supposed to serve.

Immigration – What does it mean to be American? It means the people who get into this country should be more people like my parents who came to this country through the front door, paid their taxes, followed the rules, raised two kids both of whom went on to found companies that helped thousands of Americans. We should want more immigrants like them. But – I say this as a first-generation immigrant — we should without apology close the door on people whose first act of entering this country is a law breaking one.  We need merit in who gets into this country. I will not apologize for that. That is not racist.  That is reality.

Fentanyl – I believe a proper use of the US military is to go in and decimate the cartels – physically decimate the cartels.  Air strikes — go Bin Laden on them — as the terrorists that they are. That’s how we solve the fentanyl crisis. We are “game over” in 6 months.  One cycle of shock and awe, and we’re done with the fentanyl crisis.

 Freedom of Religion – There is an attack on faith in this country.  There’s an attack on Christianity in this country. I can actually stand for you as a soldier in drawing that hard line and be more effective because they have to listen to me and deal with me. I am Hindu. I am deeply religious.  It means a lot to me. I believe in God, and I will not apologize for it. I share your conviction that America was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and I share those values.  I ask you to let me be your messenger and your vessel to actually defend that in a way that a lot of people –  who temporarily wear the Christian flag on their sleeve – didn’t actually get done.  Let me try doing that job for you and let’s see how that actually turns out because I will not budge an inch on this issue of religious liberty.

Foreign Policy – I am committed to pro-Israel policy not because I stand for Israel, but because I stand for America. I think that we have got to be careful with continuing to view it through that lens.  That is not an end in itself. It is a means to the end of advancing American interests. Do I see possibilities for commitments vis-à-vis having Saudi Arabia’s boot on our neck, especially when we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with respect to domestic oil production here at home, that can put pressure on that commitment? I think yes. That brings me back to a broader point in my foreign policy: the stronger we are at home to do what we need for ourselves, the more we can actually have a clear-headed foreign policy abroad.

Ukraine – I would not send another dollar to Ukraine.  I just wouldn’t. I would say it’s already been too much, but I wouldn’t give another dollar to them. I would actually focus on solving the cartel problem.

 Voter ID – I think we have a long way to go in full election Integrity in this country. I think the fact that voter ID laws would be rejected as racist tells you everything you need to know. We’ve come to this perverse place in America where if they’re calling you a racist for something that has nothing to do with race, it means you’re probably right over the flame and need to stay right on top of it because it’s just a deflection tactic to scare you off.

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