(LifeSiteNews) — Vivek Ramaswamy, a young entrepreneur and vocal opponent of “woke” corporate policies, announced Tuesday that he is running for president, making him the third official GOP candidate in the 2024 election.
While still relatively obscure, Ramaswamy, 37, is perhaps best known for his bestselling book “Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” in which he slams business policies that prioritize values like environmental “sustainability” and “diversity” over profit, and as one book reviewer put it, “provide[s] a legal roadmap for using the courts to dismantle the … Woke maze that threatens our republic.”
Thus, Ramaswamy sharply contrasts his ideal of capitalism with the pro-Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) so-called “stakeholder” capitalism pushed by the World Economic Forum and its founder, Klaus Schwab.
In his fight against this “woke” agenda, in 2022, Ramaswamy founded Strive, an asset-management firm that he has framed as directly competing with behemoth groups like BlackRock and Vanguard, to restore “the voices of everyday citizens in the American economy by leading companies to focus on excellence over politics.”
The Harvard graduate’s life’s work reflects what he has declared will be some of his top priorities as president: ending affirmative action and “dismantl[ing] climate religion.”
On Tuesday, he listed several other objectives on his Twitter page: “8-year limits for federal bureaucrats. Shut down worthless federal agencies. Declare Total Independence from China. Annihilate the drug cartels. Make political expression a civil right. No CBDCs (central bank digital currencies). Revive merit & excellence.”
In his aspiration to sever ties with China, Ramaswamy has called for banning “most U.S. companies from doing business in China until the CCP falls or radically reforms.”
“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 tweeted.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Ramaswamy warned that CBDCs “open a clear path to social credit scoring,” and called them a symptom of a “deeper cancer.”
“Americans should tell our government what everyday Chinese people are now telling theirs: hell no,” he said of CBDCs.
“We should not see this ‘Great Reset,’ this dissolution of boundaries between the public and private sector, between different nations, ultimately create this new world order. And CBDCs, mark my words, are just the symptom of that deeper cancer,” he continued.
For years, critics have denounced CBDCs as an open door to unprecedented tyranny by allowing governments to directly access their citizens’ bank accounts.
The Washington Post has noted that in the video announcing his candidacy that Ramaswamy has minimized the importance of taxes and COVID beliefs in favor of the importance of free speech.
“If you ask me, the best measure of the health of American democracy is actually the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public,” Ramaswamy said in the campaign-launch video. “And right now we’re doing abysmally.”
Indeed, Ramaswamy’s stances on many key issues remain to be seen, among them abortion, taxes, gun laws, energy policy, COVID policy, and foreign policy.
After Ramaswamy announced his run for president, journalist Jack Posobiec pointed out that Ramaswamy’s name has disappeared from the World Economic Forum’s list of 2021 Young Global Leaders.
Ramaswamy replied on Twitter, “Nobody has been working to dismantle the global WEF takeover more than me. You’re right over the target, stay on it. I’ll send you a signed book so you can learn more about it. It’s worse than you ever imagine.”
He then shared screenshots of his upcoming book in which he reveals he told the WEF he wanted “nothing to do with” the Young Global Leader program after they congratulated him on his nomination to the program.
In 2014, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences, a biotech company where he “oversaw the development of five drugs that went on to become FDA-approved.” In 2020, the company administered a monoclonal antibody called gimsilumab to prevent and treat acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in patients with COVID-19.
Ramaswamy has shared that he is a Hindu.
Ramaswamy’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination follows the presidential run announcements of former President Donald Trump and former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.