OPINION
Who is Vivek Ramaswamy?
The Republican presidential aspirant seems to have come out of nowhere to leap to third in the Republican primary polls. Depending on the poll, Ramaswamy is either just behind or neck-and-neck with fellow Floridian, governor Ron DeSantis — with both trailing former president Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy first came to my own attention back in May, when he challenged NBC’s Chuck Todd on gender ideology. Ramaswamy rubbished the claim that “gender is a spectrum”, and attacked the “genital mutilation or chemical castration” of children. During his so-far brief political career, Ramaswamy has positioned himself as an anti-woke conservative warrior. At the recent Republican debates, he continued his longstanding vocal support of Trump (he voted for Trump in 2020).
But is he all that he pretends? Certainly, he’s garnering plenty of criticism. Not just from the left: many on the right condemn him as a Big Pharma shill, a RINO, a Soros plant, and so on. Is it all true, or does he just have the Republican establishment as frightened as Trump did?
It’s true that Ramaswamy’s background as a biotech entrepreneur has tied his fortune to the pharmaceutical industry. From a public school background, he was already a multimillionaire by the time he finished his post-doctoral studies at Yale (where he befriended future senator J. D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy fame). His biotech company Roivant Sciences made billions on potential Alzheimer’s treatment, interpedine. Although the drug eventually failed to pass clinical trials, and billions were wiped from the value of Roivant subsidiary Axovant, Ramaswamy personally banked tens of millions in capital gains.
It’s also true that Ramaswamy received a $90,000 grant from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship to attend Yale Law School. It’s true, too, that Ramaswamy has taken some pains to downplay that fact, the Soros name being the bete noir for the right that it is.
But Paul and Daisy Soros are not George Soros. Paul is George’s elder brother. Rather than the open political meddling of his little brother’s vast web of influence, the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship is a United States postgraduate fellowship for immigrants and children of immigrants. Still, apparently contrary to his claims that he “didn’t have the money” to attend Yale Law, Ramaswamy was already a millionaire at the time.
Still, his campaign manager insists there’s nothing tying Ramaswamy to George Soros.
Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin gave Fox a similar explanation.
“Vivek won a generic scholarship that hundreds of students win to attend graduate school,” she said. “It was funded by a relative of George Soros who is long dead.”
“Vivek would have been a fool to turn down that scholarship – Anyone who would have shouldn’t get anywhere near the White House doing trade deals.”
It’s undoubted, though, that Ramaswamy is well aware that the Soros name is potential poison for an aspirant Republican candidate.
In May Mediaite reported that “Ramaswamy himself has made an intentional effort to conceal his own biography, even paying a Wikipedia editor to remove potentially politically damaging details about his past from his page.”
According to Mediaite the changes to Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page were made just weeks before he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president.
NewsMax
For his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy is touting a raft of anti-woke policies, from promising to pardon Donald Trump, to opposing affirmative action and the ideology of Critical Race Theory, and the “cult movement” of LGBTQ. He supports abolishing the Department of Education, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service. He calls the Food and Drug Administration “corrupt” and vowed to “expose and ultimately gut” the FDA if elected. Perhaps most controversially, he proposes raising the standard voting age to 25, with 18-24-year-olds only allowed to vote if they are enlisted in the military, work as first responders, or pass the same civics test required for naturalisation.
It’s no surprise, then, that the media are launching a barrage of attacks on the would-be Republican candidate. Most recently, Ramaswamy enraged CNN’s Dana Bash by comparing proponents of CRT to “modern grand wizards of the KKK”.
While on the campaign trail in Iowa, Ramaswamy was recorded telling one voter, “Ayanna Pressley, she’s in the Congress today. She’s a member of ‘the squad.’ Her words, not mine: ‘We don’t want any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t want any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice.'”
Ramaswamy then quoted bestselling author [Ibrahim Kendi] from his book “How To Be Anti-Racist.”
“Here’s what it says,” said Ramaswamy. “Opening lines: ‘The remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
“These are the words of the modern grand wizards of the modern KKK,” said Ramaswamy.
When Bash attacked Ramaswamy during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union program, he refused to back down.
“What I said is the grand wizards of the KKK would be proud of what they would hear her say,” Ramaswamy answered, “because there’s nothing more racist than saying that your skin color predicts something about the content of your viewpoints or your ideas.”
RadarOnline
The media are also trying to paint Ramaswamy as a crypto anti-Semite.
He has floated ending U.S. aid to Israel.
In June, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Ramaswamy suggested that he would be open to ending aid to Israel as “part of a broader disengagement with the Middle East.” He later walked back those comments. But last week, he told actor and podcaster Russell Brand that he does, in fact, want to end U.S. aid to Israel in 2028, the year when the current U.S. commitment to provide $3.8 billion annually to Israel expires.
Ramaswamy argues that this is because Israel no longer needs US taxpayer’s money, and that ending aid would help further the normalisation of relations in the Middle East that President Trump began, with his Abraham Accords.
“Come 2028, that additional aid won’t be necessary in order to still have the kind of stability that we’d actually have in the Middle East by having Israel more integrated in with its partners,” he said on a show Brand hosts on the video platform Rumble.
Ramaswamy has also attacked new laws enacted in Florida by DeSantis, to penalise anti-Semitic acts. His argument is that such laws are just another in the creeping tide of censorship.
He added that “bad speech” has to be countered with “free speech and open debate.” He pointed to a famous Supreme Court case permitting neo-Nazis to march in the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, as an example of a bigotry-related issue that was “decided correctly.”
“I stand fiercely against bigotry and hatred and harassing speech,” he added.
As for the suggestion that Ramaswamy is an anti-Semite.
Ramaswamy told JNS that he was one of the “key members” of Shabtai, a Jewish alternative to the “secret societies” at Yale University, where he attended law school. He said the society’s co-founder and rabbinical adviser, Rabbi Shmully Hecht, is a mentor of his […]
Ramaswamy describes his time with Shabtai as formative, and the group has touted him as an alum. Following publication of this article, Hecht told JTA that Ramaswamy has been a “dear friend” of his for 13 years and was unanimously accepted into Shabtai, where he took on a leadership role and helped expand the society’s activities in several cities in the United States and Israel.
“Vivek is the most Pro Israel candidate running for President of the United States,” Hecht wrote in a message to JTA. “He is not merely a political friend of the Jews. He is an integral and genuine part of our community.”
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
So, is this prodigy of Indian-American immigrant success really an anti-woke warrior, or just another double-speaking, Big Pharma snake oil salesman?
It’s up to American voters to decide.