Vivek Ramaswamy, biotechnology entrepreneur and author of “Nation of Victims,” threw his hat in the ring on Tuesday for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Statements of candidacy filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicates that Ramaswamy, 37, is registering as a Republican. He became the third Republican to join the race, after former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
“We’re in the midst of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism, hard work, and family are on the decline,” Ramaswamy wrote in a statement provided to The Epoch Times, after announcing his presidential bid. “Climateism, wokeism, and gender ideology have taken their place. We need to fill that identity vacuum with a vision of American national identity that dilutes the woke agenda to irrelevance. If we revive American pride, then we can take on the single greatest external threat we face: Communist China.”
“Declaring independence from China won’t be easy, but we can do it if we rediscover who we really are,” he continued.
Ramaswamy has been a vocal critic of “woke” ideologies—colloquially, ideology centered on identity politics—in America. In a January interview with The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, he lamented how values that used to be meaningful, such as “patriotism, hard work, family, and faith, have slowly receded from modern life,” leaving what he calls “a black hole of identity” in the younger generation of Americans that allowed woke ideologies to creep in.
“In a democratic society, citizens are supposed to settle political differences through free speech and open debate, where everyone’s voice and vote count equally,” Ramaswamy said.
“When we delegate the authority to make those political decisions, whether and how to fight climate change or systemic racism, for example, what we’re really saying is that business elites in corporate boardrooms get to make those decisions, which sucks the air and the lifeblood out of a democracy,” he said in the interview.
“My diagnosis at the end of ‘Woke, Inc.’ and in ‘Nation of Victims’ is that an entire generation is hungry for a cause, for purpose and meaning at this point in our national history,” he continued. “The kinds of things that used to fulfill that purpose, such as patriotism, hard work, family, and faith, have slowly receded from modern life. That leaves a black hole of identity in its wake, which allows wokeism to find its home in the heart of the American soul.”
“We need to fill that identity vacuum with something based on the shared pursuit of excellence as part of what it means to be American. But the path getting from A to B is a complicated one, running through some uncomfortable terrain,” he said.
This is a breaking story and will be updated with more details.