Vivek Ramaswamy Announces 2024 Presidential Bid

Ramaswamy filed as a Republican, according to federal records

Vivek Ramaswamy, author of "Nation of Victims" and "Woke, Inc.," in Orlando, Fla. on Feb. 26, 2022. The Epoch Times

Vivek Ramaswamy, biotechnology entrepreneur and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam,” threw his hat in the ring on Tuesday for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

Filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicate that Ramaswamy, 37, is registering as a Republican candidate. As a political newcomer, he joins the GOP race with 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.”

He describes the Chinese regime as the “greatest external threat” America faces.

“Declaring independence from China won’t be easy, but we can do it if we rediscover who we really are,” he said in the statement. In a statement posted Wednesday morning on Twitter, Ramaswamy added that America needs to “ban 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 said.

In a statement posted on Twitter soon after his bid announcement, Ramaswamy wrote that his first move as U.S. president would be to repeal a Johnson-era mandate requiring affirmative action for federal contractors.

“As U.S. President, I will end federally mandated affirmative action—full stop. I will repeal Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 which mandates race-based quotas. Every Republican since Johnson had the opportunity to do it. I’ll do it on Day 1 without apology,” he wrote.

Additionally, Ramaswamy says he is committed to exposing government documents of state influence in private enterprises, or what he calls the “state action files,” if elected.

“Just as [Twitter CEO Elon Musk] did at Twitter, as President I will release the ’state action files’ from the federal government—exposing every instance where the feds pressured companies to take constitutionally prohibited actions. Roll that log over & see what crawls out,” Ramaswamy wrote. “Won’t be pretty.”

In another post, he gave a glimpse into other areas he would be tackling as president.

“I challenge every GOP candidate to join me in making some easy commitments: end affirmative action; abandon climate religion; total decoupling from China; 8-year limits for all federal bureaucrats; say NO to central bank digital currencies; release the ’state action' files,” Ramaswamy wrote in bullet points.

“There’s a lot else we can disagree on. But if you can’t make these basic commitments, you shouldn’t be a serious GOP contender,” he added.

Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, graduated from Harvard University with a biology degree and later obtained a juris doctor degree at Yale Law School. Until his Tuesday announcement, he served as the executive chairman of Strive Asset Management, a company focused on promoting “excellence capitalism and depoliticizing corporate America.” Before heading Strive, he founded and led biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences.

The ‘Anti-Woke’ Man

Described by Politico as “one of the intellectual godfathers of the anti-woke movement,” Ramaswamy has been a vocal critic of “woke” ideologies—colloquially, ideology centered on identity politics—which he says is prevalent in American institutions.

In a January interview with The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders program, he lamented 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.

“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 said, referring to the two books he authors.

“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,” he added. “But the path getting from A to B is a complicated one, running through some uncomfortable terrain.”

Views on the Great Reset

In another interview with The Epoch Times’s American Thought Leaders in March 2022, Ramaswamy elaborated on his view of the Great Reset, an agenda that seeks to revamp human society into a new order governed by a technocratic entity, by largely exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Klaus Schwab, chair of the international organization World Economic Forum (WEF), first promulgated the Great Reset agenda among world leaders in 2020.

“The Great Reset is the use of COVID-19 and other catastrophes to be able to achieve something that people would have otherwise never accepted, which was a merger of power across the different institutional spheres of our lives,” Ramaswamy said. “With the ‘capital G’ Great Reset, I think that’s the disappearance of democracy as we know it.”

“It is the institution of modern monarchy where we don’t have one king, we have kings that together work,” he said. “We have a bureaucratic layer that collectively represents a technocratic king. That’s what that looks like. That is Klaus Schwab’s vision. That is the Great Reset,” he added.

“Stakeholder capitalism, ESG, corporate social responsibility, call it what you want, it is the apologist model of capitalism that merges state power with corporate power to create the modern form of fascism,” Ramaswamy said of the Great Reset.

“It is time, as I say, to reset the Great Reset,” he said during the interview.

This topic came up on Ramaswamy’s public social media page soon after he announced his bid.

In response to a remark by conservative commentator Jack Posobiec on Tuesday night, Ramaswamy recounted how the WEF tried to name him in its programs.

“The first chapter of my upcoming book in April has the ’receipts’ of my exchanges with the World Economic Forum years ago when they *repeatedly* kept trying to get me to be named. I gave them a polite ‘hell no.’ Reveals the games that WEF plays,” Ramaswamy wrote, replying to Posobiec, who alluded that Ramaswamy may be tied to the WEF.

He later posted screenshots of his upcoming book, “Capitalist Punishment,“ which delves into details of his exchange with the WEF and how during a five-year WEF training course he took with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel, he expressed ”public opposition” to WEF’s agenda.

“The games they play are far worse than you imagine,” Ramaswamy said, apparently suggesting that the WEF intentionally attempted to conjure an affiliation between him and itself.

Views on Government Reform

Amid the looming Great Reset agenda, things nonetheless could go in another direction, Ramaswamy told American Thought Leader’s host Jan Jekielek in the March 2022 interview.

Specifically, he mentioned that he would like to see a “realignment” in American society (a reset, but in the opposite direction to the Great Reset), in which arises “a dissolution of the managerial layer that intermediates what an institution stands for and the people who that institution is actually supposed to serve.”

Frontrunners to this realignment movement are the Canadian truckers who protested the Trudeau administration’s vaccine mandates and restrictions, Ramaswamy said.

“We don’t need Republican leaders or conservative leaders to incrementally reform a government agency by saying that we’re going to put a different person in charge and we’re going to cut its budget and starve it,” he said. “That’s old-school conservative solutions that resort to, I would say, superficial ideas about saving money, and then we can lower taxes.”

When it comes to reforming government institutions such as the National Institutes of Health, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ramaswamy noted, “the answer isn’t to incrementally reform those bureaucracies.”

“It is to shut them down and to replace them with something new,” he said. “Because there’s a managerial cancer that’s insulated from political accountability, that those very people, you can’t treat one metastasis at a time. You can’t treat the symptom by treating a cancer with a Tylenol and a bandaid.

“If you want to treat a cancer, you need to ultimately get rid of the tumor itself,” he added.

Jan Jekielek contributed to this article.