Multimillionaire and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy announced on Tuesday that he would run for the Republican nomination against former president Donald Trump.
He is the second Republican to challenge the former president, and the second Indian American, after Nikki Haley, the former UN Ambassador and governor of South Carolina.
Born to Indian parents in Cincinnati and having graduated from Harvard University with a biology degree and Yale University with a law degree, Ramaswamy described himself as “a political outsider” who presents as a lesser-known figure in the world of politics, according to QUARTZ.
Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences, a healthcare company focused on drug development in 2014 and continued to start other healthcare and technology companies.
However, technology and business did not dominate him. The 37-year-old Indian American framed his presidential campaign as a broad counteroffensive to what he called the “woke left”, and described it as a threat to open speech, the free exchanging of ideas, and American exceptionalism itself, said Politico.
In a video titled The New American Dream, Ramaswamy claimed the nation is facing an identity crisis.
“Faith, patriotism & family are disappearing. We embrace one secular religion after
another—from wokeism to climatism—to satisfy our deeper need for meaning. Yet we cannot even answer what it means to be an American,” Ramaswamy wrote.
“The Republican Party’s top priority should be to fill this void with an inspiring national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance,” he continued.
He also considered “securing the border unapologetically and eliminating lottery-based immigration in favor of meritocratic admission,” according to his Wall Street Journal op-ed.
As for economics, he planned to eliminate affirmative action across the American economy, including rescinding Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 that mandates that federal contractors—which employ approximately 20% of the US workforce—adopt race-based hiring preference, and ordering the justice department to prosecute illegal race-based preferences, said QUARTZ.
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