Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Speaks at the California GOP Convention
After his speech, I asked Vivek Ramaswamy to share specific advice for parents. Watch his response on YouTube or play the embedded video at the end of this article.
ANAHEIM—Multiple presidential candidates visited the California Republican Party convention this weekend. The last to speak was Vivek Ramaswamy who addressed attendees at a lunch on September 30, 2023.
One of the first things Ramaswamy said after greeting the audience was “This is a speech I have not given before.”
Ramaswamy began his speech by exclaiming, “there’s a war going on in this country, not between black and white as the media would have you believe, or between man and woman, or gay and straight, or even Democrat and Republican.” There is a war between two ideologies, he explained, describing one side “who loves the ideals of this country and the ideals that set this nation into motion who believes that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator,” he added referring to the Declaration of Independence, “with certain inalienable rights, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Ramaswamy continued to praise the side “who believes that you get ahead in the United States not by the color of your skin but on the content of your character and your contribution,” channeling Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
He then said, “This is America’s time for choosing once again.”
Ramaswamy described this ideological split further: “Most of us, eighty-plus percent of this country easily, agree on our shared national values. A majority of us are on the side of standing for the United States of America without apologizing for it. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the other side is still winning. And so the question for us to answer today is why.” The reason Ramaswamy argued was a culture of fear “that spread across the United States like an epidemic.”
He explained the history behind that fear by criticizing the fact that Congresswoman Ayanna Presley (D-MA) had said “we don’t want any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” His reply to her statement was, “When your race goes from being about your skin color to being about the content of the ideas you’re allowed to espouse, then any disagreement with those ideas automatically makes you a racist or a climate denier or a transphobe or a homophobe.”
When Americans speak up for their values, they are labeled as extreme which creates a culture of fear, he explained, saying “everyday Americans are choosing to bend the knee.” He described Americans’ “fear of becoming an outcast in your own community and that culture of fear has displaced our culture of free speech.”
The New Left
Ramaswamy mentioned getting his first job in New York City on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis. A few years later, Occupy Wall Street happened in response to government bailouts, “led by a Republican administration, I’ll remind you,” he said referring to the Bush Administration, “while what Occupy Wall Street had to say was ‘we want to redistribute money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and give it to poor people to help poor people.’ Agree or not, that’s what the old left had to say.”
“But right around that time,” continued Ramaswamy, a new left, “the woke left,” was born. It was no longer an economic argument but a social one including race and gender such as “putting token minorities on your boards” and “news about the racially disparate effects of climate change after you fly a private jet to Davos.”
Vivek Ramaswamy speaks to an audience at the California GOP convention in Anaheim
While the “old left” was at odds with large corporations, he explained that the “new left” had a different relationship: corporations would look the other way on social issues with a demand in return that the “new left” look the other way and leave corporate power intact. “That’s the arranged marriage between these two unlikely bedfellows. It was not a marriage out of love. It's more like mutual prostitution.” Ramaswamy explained that the outcome was the birth of a woke industrial complex.
He got into specifics criticizing companies for “making statements about new voting laws in Georgia, sounding more like a super PAC than a soft drink manufacturer,” and Nike “musing about slavery 250 years ago in the United States without saying a peep about using slave labor to make $250 sneakers that they sell to black kids in the city who can’t afford to buy books for school.”
Education, Censorship, and the Deep State
Ramaswamy spoke to education in America and specifically criticized teachers unions as failing institutions that “blow some woke smoke” to deflect actual failure and “inability to teach.”
Speaking of K-12 education, the U.S. military, and more, he said, “It is woke smoke to deflect accountability for the fundamental failure of an institution that abandoned its true purpose.”
Echoing the disdain for stump speeches as he mentioned in the first Republican presidential debate, Ramaswamy said, “This isn’t a campaign speech I’m giving you guys. We’re getting the truth here.”
“We have a culture of censorship and fear” that stops people from expressing beliefs in public, he said and continued, “We have institutional leaders that have been captured from one institution, the private sector, to the public.”
Multiple times in his speech, Ramaswamy mentioned Ronald Reagan as a personal hero. He also quoted Abraham Lincoln who said, “The dogmas of a quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” which storms Ramaswamy interpreted to mean “the unique challenges we face today.”
“The real threat we face in the United States is the rise of that managerial class from our universities to corporate America to the ultimate mother of the managerial class in the administrative state in the federal government. Today the people we elect to run the government, they are no longer the ones who actually run the government. It is the deep state in the shadow government of those three-letter agencies that wield power today.” Ramaswamy then gave a promise, saying “we will shut down the unconstitutional Federal administrative state.”
His tone grew more intense as he said, “I refuse to be the puppet who sits in the White House today.”
The Next Generation
Speaking as the youngest Republican presidential candidate, Ramaswamy next spoke about his own generation and those that follow. “I’ll tell you what's going on with Millenials and Gen Z across this country [...] We are hungry for a cause. We are starved for purpose and meaning and identity.” He explained that belief in God, country, self, and family used to fill the void, but now wokeism, transgenderism, globalism, and suicide are “poisons” saying, “Do you think it is an accident that we see the rise of these poisons at this same time?” He explained, that these poisons are “symptoms of a deeper void of purpose and meaning”
Immediately following his speech, I asked Ramaswamy to provide advice for parents of children who are a part of that rising generation. Watch what he had to say below.