Indian-American tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has launched his 2024 presidential bid with a promise to “put merit back” and end dependence on China, becoming the second community member to enter the Republican Party’s presidential primary after Nikki Haley.
Ramaswamy, 37, whose parents migrated to the United States from Kerala and worked at a General Electric plant in Ohio, made the announcement during a live interview on Fox News’s prime time show of Tucker Carlson, a conservative political commentator.
Earlier this month, two-term former governor of South Carolina and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Haley announced her presidential campaign. She announced that she will contest against her former boss and ex-US President Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s nomination.
“We are in the middle of this national identity crisis, Tucker, where we have celebrated our differences for so long that we forgot all the ways we are really just the same as Americans bound by a common set of ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago,” Mr Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy, the author of ‘Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam’, calls “wokeism” a national threat “That’s why I am proud to say tonight that I am running for United States president to revive those ideals in this country,” he announced.
A second-generation Indian American, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences in 2014. He has founded other healthcare and technology companies.
“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.
Ramaswamy said the US faces external threats like the rise of China. It “has got to be our top foreign policy threat that we’ve got to respond to, and not pointless wars somewhere else.” “That’s going to require some sacrifice. It’s going to require a declaration of independence from China and complete decoupling. And that’s not going to be easy. It’s going to require some inconvenience,” he said.
(PTI)
