Vivek Ramaswamy Didn t Get the Memo

Hello friends, I hope you're all well today. You may remember about this time last year, it seemed like you had, well, there was that, we'd had the election, hadn't we? And it was, Trump was going to become president again for the second time, possibly third. And we were going to have this, I mean, it was really quite cringe, this Avengers-style team, right? Who were going to go in there, they were gonna suit up, and they were basically just gonna take on the swamp and defeat the establishment and bring about the golden age of America, right? That MAGA just seemed to be undefeatable. There was such confidence in it all. Oh dear. But one of the main Avengers, to use that expression, was Vivek Ramaswamy. Now, Ramaswamy was one of those guys who was, you know, he'd get up on stage, he was a very, very effective communicator. He had good energy. You know, he had presence. He knew how to spin an argument. However, since then, Vivek had a little bit of a fall from grace. Remember, he put out, kind of when he seemed to have it in the bag, right? He was gonna get an actual position in Trump's administration. He was gonna help Elon with Doge. And then he had that really weird crash out where he basically said, look, the romantic ideal of the American high school, college, you know, with the jock and the cheerleader, we just need to do away with all that. No, what America needs to be is a school that glorifies the tech nerd, right? It glorifies the Chinese geek and sort of the Indian tech bro. I can't imagine for a second why Vivek would want that to be the case, but he did. And this went down very, very poorly. Turns out that Vivek, for all of his cleverness and wiliness, hadn't quite managed to clinch his own success and get that position. And then it seemed that he just disappeared. And now he's currently running for Republican governor of Ohio. And we'll get to that a little bit later. But coinciding with all of this, and this particular, this first year of Trump's presidency for the second term is, of course, the rise of the radical Zoomers, you know, I mean, calling them the Groikas and the Fuentes lot. And this is a group that cares significantly more about the ethnic side of American identity, right? It believes in heritage and it basically holds itself in total contradiction to Vivek's opinion here, which is that there is no American who is more American than somebody else. You see, I disagree with that notion intensely, actually, Vivek. I mean, take me for instance, you know, I'm white, I'm Anglo. I don't think for a second that even I, you know, who come from the same, you know, genetic people who actually founded America, I don't think that I could just get on a plane, go to America, get my papers in order, and that suddenly make me as American as anybody else, right? I just, I don't believe that. And I feel like if I were to go there and pretend that that was the case, that would be insulting to Americans, right? There is nothing more insulting than inauthenticity. And Vivek is a very, very inauthentic person. We have to remember as well that this is a man who ran an absolute scam of a drugs company and then really just got onto the whole anti-woke warrior train as a grift and as a form of just self-promotion for himself, many such cases. But it's a fact that, of course, at the same time, Vivek has been given so much power and momentum by the Republican establishment as well. And Vivek seems to take this establishment endorsement of him as an American as somehow the same as being from the consent of the actual American people, right? And I just feel like as time goes on, this is not gonna hold up. And you can tell the part of the reason that Vivek is giving the speech at all at AmFest is because he's scared, right? He's spooked by the fact that all of a sudden there is a greater sense of scrutiny over who is acceptably an American. The other thing as well to point out as well is just the fact that Vivek wrote this containment piece in the New York Times where he basically says, oh, griperism isn't conservatism. But he's using griperism to immediately obviously just give the article a negative flavor. What he's really appealing to is the fact that heritage, heritage isn't conservatism, right? Which is what the gripers are actually making an argument about, the fact that if you are born in America from Americans, meaning people of European heritage, as the nation was founded by in the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson, if all of these things are true, that you are actually, your voice should matter, your representation matters more than, oh, I don't know, the Hart-Celler Act being put through in the 1960s and your parents coming in just after that, and now you get to tell other people whose ancestors go back 250 years, in some cases even further, what their identity actually means and the acceptable parameters that they are allowed to tread within, right? You're basically filling the sandbox of their identity with your own toys and telling them to use them. And I just don't think that that's a very kind thing to do personally. So Vivek goes on to point out as well that, well, he says here, American-ness isn't a scale of quality that varies based on your ancestry, it's binary. Either you're an American or you're not. And he talks about colorblind meritocracy, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and, but the thing is as well, colorblind meritocracy definitely wasn't one of the values that America was built upon, right? I think if there's one thing that we've learned about the founding fathers since all of the post-colonial studies and through all of wokeness, it's actually these weren't colorblind people. These were people who were acutely aware of identity and the difference, not only the different perceptions, but the genuine differences between different people, disparate peoples. And this is not to say better or worse, but it is different. And with difference can come incompatibility in many cases. And so, no, the United States was founded for the progeny of the European Americans who had arrived there, built it, made it their home. The people who going on into the 1800s as well, those who had crossed, bravely crossed the frontier, those who had laid down the railways across the United States, those who had gone into the far west of the country and dug in the mines of Oregon and California, those working class men in New York and Chicago who'd raised the skyscrapers, all of a sudden to Vivek, those men and the people who were descended from those men are not more American than Vivek Ramaswamy. Can't imagine why he'd think that, but he does. But another thing that Vivek harks on a lot in this article is that actually this is all just a product of economics. If the young people were simply able to get a house, if they were all able to become millionaires, then somehow they would be indifferent to demographic replacement, which is really what he's arguing for here. It's like, look, if we can just create enough economic prosperity to bribe them into giving up their homeland, then everything would be absolutely fine. As long as they're rich, nothing else matters. I actually think it does. I know this very well from our own current standing here in England, I would rather be poor and have a homogenous, safe country, and I feel like a lot of natural prosperity would flow from those circumstances, as against what England is becoming now, where so much rot and torment has been endured in the name of creating economic growth, which is all built on a lie anyway, and in America as well. America is only becoming more and more dangerous. We've done more than enough segments now on what goes on in Dearborn, Michigan, which has become the first Arab-American major city, and oddly enough, they don't seem to believe in colorblind meritocracy. Can't imagine how on earth they got through customs and through the application process, but they have in their millions, and so even on the merits of what Vivek is arguing for here, oh, if we just bring in people who believe in Americanism, who believe in its ideals, who can recite the Declaration of Independence just from memory, well, you've not been doing that either. And so you're not even offering young people the choice between having a homogenous nation and your version of it where only people who are patriotic to America are allowed to arrive. In fact, basically any Tom, Dick, and Harry, or names I suppose that sound a lot more foreign than those, have been allowed to come into the United States and totally subvert it and make it a country not for the wasps and the people of European stock whose ancestors actually helped to found America and make it the desirable prosperous place that has worked as a magnet to draw so many more people to it, but in fact will allow the new arrivals to dictate to the older settled people what their identity actually is. It's just total madness, and what's more, it's untenable. And it's that fact that it's untenable, which is the reason that Vivek is writing this argument, because he knows that without significant containment, these ideas are attractive to young people who have seen their home, the place that should have been their birthright to inherit, taken away from them. And it's funny as well that he invokes Ronald Reagan here. He says, if Ronald Reagan quit, you can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. But anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American. Well, first of all, I can only wish that France actually still believe that itself, because unfortunately it also seems to believe that it is America by that argument. But what's more as well, why is that fair, Vivek? Why is it fair that France is a homeland for someone, in this case, the French, but the United States never gets to be that? Because I don't think that that's true, right? It is not the case that America has always been welcoming to foreigners. There was an entire hiatus of it during the 1920s. And obviously until the Hart-Celler Act as well in the 60s, those people who were foreign and coming into the United States were only doing so from very, very specific places. And they didn't include India, oddly enough. They didn't feel the need to have people from India come and explain to them why them being Hindu basically meant that they were Jeffersonian liberals and how actually there was no distinction between the two and just don't think too much about it, right? There was none of that. And I think that Aaron McIntyre has the perfect response to all of this, where he says, when John Jay described America, he talked about people with shared religion and heritage. The Constitution tells us who America is for, ourselves and our posterity, not anyone who believes in the rule of law. People in Singapore believe in the rule of law. They aren't American. And he goes on to point out as well that Thomas Jefferson was hardly colorblind, as I'd said earlier. And so this really just blows apart Vivek's entire argument because ideals, all values are transient, right? There is a sense of spirit of England in what we believe and some of it, yes, has carried on for centuries and centuries, but not all of it. And just because something has been replaced with a newer idea, or perhaps in some cases, we decided to return to an older one, what mattered, what made us who we were was the continuity of the people. It was the heritage. It was that generation-to-generation Burkean chain of being. In this same way, the Roman Empire didn't become less Roman after changing from a republic. It was still Roman, irrespective of the configuration of its political system. And so I think that the philosophy of people like Vivek Ramaswamy, who hold it entirely out of their own sense of power and self-preservation, and vindictively against the Americans that America was actually founded and built for, I think it's on borrowed time. It doesn't hold weight, but you can see the Sivnats now having to come out and actually meet these arguments on the battlefield, which in and of itself is the first sign of weakness. If you're having to come out with the same microwave talking points that you've basically made a career out of for the past few years, then I would just suggest, Vivek, that you really should have listened to Sam Hyde and wound your neck in, because actually everybody knows what an American is, and no papers or establishment backing is ever really going to change that.