Multimillionaire biotech company founder and investor Vivek Ramaswamy said on Tuesday that he was entering the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race.
The 37-year-old entrepreneur and author officially entered the Republican presidential race with an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. He also posted a video on social media announcing his White House bid.
He said: “We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like Covidism, climatism and gender ideology.”
“We hunger to be part of something bigger than ourselves, yet we can not even answer the question of what it means to be an American.”
He continued: “Today, the woke left preys on that vacuum and tells Americans that their race, gender and sexual orientation govern who you are, what you can achieve and what you are allowed to think.”
Mr Ramaswamy is the author of “Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam”. He is co-founder of Strive Asset Management, which was launched last year with backing from billionaire investor Peter Thiel and calls on companies to focus on excellence over politics.
He told Fox News: “I’m all for putting America first, but in order to put America first, we have to first rediscover what America is. And to me, those are these basic rules of the road that set this nation into motion from meritocracy to free speech, to self-governance over aristocracy.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Mr Ramaswamy, who was born and raised in southwest Ohio, said what distinguished him from the other Republicans who are running or are likely to run, was “a vision of national identity that dilutes these other agendas to irrelevance”.
“Over the next few months, Republicans are guaranteed to take exceedingly extreme positions on everything from banning abortion to cutting Social Security and Medicare,” Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said in a statement after Mr Ramaswamy’s announcement.
“We look forward to continuing to ensure every American knows just how extreme the MAGA agenda is.”
Mr Ramaswamy has a degree in biology from Harvard University and a law degree from Yale. According to his personal website, he founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 and led biotech initial public offerings in 2015 and 2016, as well as helping to start other healthcare and technology companies.
