If the polls are to be believed, biotech entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy won’t be President come November. But the 38-year-old fast-talker is providing Americans with a masterclass in how to defeat woke talking heads — and how to have fun doing it.
“You want to know the best way to end discrimination on the basis of race? Stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Two of his encounters with legacy press botherers from just the last week spring readily to mind.
In a short video that collected millions of impressions across social media on Tuesday, a Washington Post reporter can be heard off-screen unironically demanding Ramaswamy — a man of Indian extraction — to condemn white supremacy. (READ MORE: The Washington Post and a ‘Trump Dictatorship’)
“I’m not going to recite some catechism for you,” he clapped back. “I’m against vicious racial discrimination in this country. I’m not pledging allegiance to your new religion of modern wokeism.”
Concerned the reporter may have mistaken his reply for good manners, Ramaswamy drilled the point home: “I’m not going to bend the knee to your religion. Sorry, I’m not asking you to bend your knee to mine, and I’m not going to bend the knee to yours.”
Ramaswamy’s secret sauce was staying a move ahead of his ideological opponent, and making sure she knew it.
“I know you’re going to go and print the headline tomorrow,” he teased. “I already know this. We know how your game works. Vivek Ramaswamy Refuses to Condemn White Supremacy.”
Unable to restrain herself, and evidently deprived of column space from her newsroom editor, later that day Meryl Kornfield emerged from the shadows on X (formerly Twitter) to identify herself as the hapless wonder out of view in the exchange — and, of course, to fulfil Vivek’s prophecy by whining about his failure to “condemn white supremacy.”
Ramaswamy: 1, Woke, Inc: 0.
Perhaps the highlight of the whole interchange, however, was the positive vision Ramaswamy cast for a revived America, when he explained:
You want to know the best way to end discrimination on the basis of race? Stop discriminating on the basis of race. Do that and we’re going to move the country forward, and I don’t care whether you’re black, white, brown or anything in between, that’s how we’re going to unite this country.
The second viral moment took place the next day, when NBC News Correspondent Dasha Burns gave Ramaswamy a follow-up interrogation about the white supremacy teacup storm.
Ramaswamy wasn’t having it. After repeating his denunciation of racial animus “no matter how it happens,” he turned the question back on Burns, taking a torch to the wokearazzi’s motte-and-bailey definition of white supremacy. (READ MORE: How to Fight Wokeness)
“Do you believe punctuality is a vestige of white supremacy, Dasha?” he asked.
“Or the written word? Or the nuclear family?”
(He was referencing the laughable whiteness chart once displayed in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., which infamously listed hard work, the Scientific method, respect for authority, delayed gratification, and a host of other universal virtues as lamentable aspects of “white culture”).
Then, when Burns quoted Anti-Defamation League statistics alleging a recent rise in “white supremacist propaganda,” Ramaswamy scoffed, “The ADL, I don’t think, is a particularly credible source.”
“So who are we supposed to look to when we’re talking about this?” Burns pleaded, airing her left-wing laundry for all to see.
Ramaswamy: 2, Woke, Inc: 0.
Ramaswamy’s great skill was in remaining rational and calm, even as his inquisitor worked herself into fits of fury. At one point, he was forced to cut through her unrelenting interruptions. But his persistence was worth it: “I’ve never denied that racism is a problem … Racism has been a major problem for most of our national history. But we’re getting close to the promised land that Martin Luther King envisioned. We’re as darn close to it as we ever have been.”
In Ramaswamy’s sundry media encounters, it is evident that he comes prepared, while Woke, Inc. — to quote a former president — is just not sending their best.
Even if Vivek’s campaign stops short of the White House, even if it’s mostly about enhanced brand recognition, I’m here for it.
And I hope the rest of the country is, too.