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Tonight, mainstream audiences around the nation will be introduced to Vivek Ramaswamy - multi-disciplinary genius, serial entrepreneur, modern renaissance man, and nigh-messianic wünderkind who in this commenter’s humble opinion offers our beleaguered country’s best hope of national redemption
The story of Vivek is the story of the American Dream par excellence. A first generation American, Vivek was born to industrious immigrants who came to this land with nothing and went on to become a geriatric psychiatrist and engineer / patent attorney, respectively. Vivek’s giftedness shone through from the start, overcoming severe bullying - to the point of being hospitalized + needing surgery after being thrown down a flight of stairs - to become an accomplished pianist, nationally ranked tennis player, and class Valedictorian by time he left high school to attend Harvard via scholarship
Thriving among the nation’s intellectual elite, Vivek became President of Harvard’s Political Union (as a conservative!), won the Ivy’s prestigious Bowdoin prize for his senior thesis, and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in biology whilst working for top hedge funds in the biotech investment sector, all while moonlighting as as a rapper (Da Vek) and making club appearances as an amateur stand-up comedian while publishing scientific articles in the nation’s top papers and founding a 7-figure networking business. Upon graduating, Vivek made partner at a major hedge fund while simultaneously attending Yale Law School on a lark, having earned $15M by the time he graduated with his J.D. with a scholar’s grounding in the principles of Constitutional governance
Shortly after, Vivek founded a revolutionary biotech company that created a paradigm shift in pharmaceutical development. Developing an ingenious business model that leveraged market forces to determine the promise of various drug candidates (by spinning off a new company for each treatment and holding IPOs) he cut through the pharmaceutical bureaucracy to develop 5 FDA approved drugs (including life-saving treatments) in under a decade. His company, Roivant, is now worth over $9 Billion(!), with Vivek maintaining an approximately $650M stake
Vivek left his company following internal and external pressure to make a corporate statement in favor of the controversial - and in his view - socially corrosive #BLM movement, during a period in which nationwide race riots killed dozens, caused $2 billion in damages, and coincided with an enduring crime surge with an immediate ~30% homicide increase that represented the largest year-to-year murder spike in our nation’s history. Choosing to stand on principle rather than genuflect to the reigning hysteria, Vivek went on to write 3 best selling books in 18 months exposing the pernicious spread of radical left wing ideology throughout the corporate world. One such book shone a light on the ESG movement by which asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street leverage the assets of everyday Americans to force partisan political agendas across the nation’s corporate boardrooms. Not satisfied to merely expose this undercovered movement, Vivek started his own asset management firm, Strive, that serves as a counterbalance to the major institutional players and their attempts to politicize the very free market itself. (Strive currently approaches $1billion under management.) Simultaneously, he founded another company, Chapter, to help citizens navigate the federal bureaucracy with regard to Medicare, all while raising two young children with his loving and accomplished (surgeon!) wife
A fearless iconoclast, intellectual titan, and charismatic orator, Vivek has now taken on the audacious goal of becoming our country’s next President. Swearing off Super PACs and institutional backers, Vivek has self-funded an ambitious campaign, seizing upon earned media to make a name for himself despite virtually no ad expenditures by appearing on a litany of podcasts and programs across the political spectrum. This young and daring patriot - the first millennial to run for President - boldly aired his policy briefings as almost daily podcasts to give every day Americans insight into how the political process truly works. With a uniquely invigorating platform, full of heretofore unthinkable ideas, Vivek has thrown conventional political wisdom to the wind in the name of running a campaign centered on truth and national revival
Encouragingly, this dazzlingly bright young maverick has found his message resonating with the electorate, surging to third place in the all important race for the 2024 Republican nomination. Polling ahead of sitting senators, former governors, and even a former vice president, Vivek as a Hindu, dark-skinned political neophyte has already achieved the impossible and situated himself as the arguable heir apparent to the American nationalist movement
Tonight he makes his true debut on the national stage and makes his case to take on the political establishment, impose constitutional limits to a federal bureaucracy run amok, and restore a unifying sense of national purpose. Excited to watch - stream on Rumble at 9pm Eastern
https://rumble.com/v3ak5c2-fox-news-republican-presidential-primary-debate.html
I didn't watch the debate (mostly because it's in America, I'm not, and I didn't know it was on last night) but reading the accounts of it on our national broadcasting service, I'm laughing and kicking myself for missing this.
The serious bit - I think Mike Pence's only chance is to sell himself as the Defender Of Democracy over the whole Jan6th kerfuffle. The only problem there is (a) the Democrats will still paint him as Second Next To Hitler because of being Trump's VP and his conservative, Christian, views and (b) for the Trump and don't support Trump personally but love how he drives the libs wild types, he's now someone who's a turncoat. He's not really able to portray himself as reining in or holding back Trump, and even if he did follow the rules and resist the pressure, that's not a strong enough image of him to overcome the negatives.
The semi-serious part - DeSantis may be holding back waiting to see who will emerge as the contender against him and then go on the attack, but I still think this was the wrong election for him and waiting for 2028 (if God spares us all) would have been better. I know the argument for going now, while he has momentum going, and that waiting will just dissipate anything he has built up but my opinion is that taking on Trump right now is the wrong thing to do. Better for him to wait until Trump really is out of the running and done with, and let the Culture War cool down a little. If there is a backlash against woke starting, he'd be better positioned next time to take advantage of that by building up more wins as Governor of Florida. In 2028 he will still only be 52, young enough to run. By running now, I think he's going to be the new Mitt Romney: shot his bolt and no chance later.
Abortion, and they're all trying to shuffle around that. Cue Nikki Haley leaving herself wide open for the view, expressed on here as well, that if pro-lifers reeeeellly believed it was murder, they'd put the woman in jail, and so if they don't, that means they don't reeeeellly believe it's taking a human life, it's reeeellly about punishing women for exercising their sexuality:
That's not going to help her; the pro-choice side will still hate her for supporting any kind of limitation on abortion and paint her as a gender traitor etc. and if she looks to be weakening or mushy on the pro-life side, then that loses her support there. I'd kinda like to see Nikki selected as again, it would be a difficult angle of attack for the Democrats to go after a minority-descent woman after all the "vote for the First Female Ever", but they'd go for her on social issues like abortion I suppose.
Now the fun part. Oh Vivek, I had no idea you were so feisty! 😁
I almost want to see him be the serious contender, because I do want to see the Democrats grapple with trying to attack the Republican nominee without falling into the pit of accusations of racism or attacking a minority person. While he is rich, cis, het and male, he's not white or Christian, so that removes an angle of attack. I guess they would have to hammer on the "rich entrepreneur who doesn't care about the poor and sick", there's a mini-maybe scandal on his Wikipedia page about boosting and hyping an Alzheimer's drug, cashing in and getting out before the thing tanked (as expected because GlaxoSmithKline had sold it off as a no-hoper):
But right now? Trump is still the 800lb gorilla they have to wrassle before they can get the nomination.
When Larry Elder run in CA against the lily-white Newsom, it wasn't a problem at all. They just defined him as "blackface of white supremacy" and were done with it. You shouldn't assume their hangups about race and identity are anything that should be taken at face value, as sincere axioms sine qua non - of course they can declare a black person a literal racist hitler, if that's necessary to keep the power. And they've got many PhDs in racial studies who would be glad to explain to you, with abundant quotes from highly peer-reviewed sources, why it is a scientific fact.
That was California, though. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown". Trying to do the same on the national stage and win over all the minority voters while you're simultaneously claiming to be the party of brown people while attacking a brown person might be a bit tougher.
Or maybe not - he's the wrong sort of brown person, Indian rather than Hispanic/Latinx.
Right on cue: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1694896172853293076
I guess there's one conclusion here: Vivek is serious enough candidate to qualify as literally Hitler. Which is a prerequisite for any Republican candidate of any importance since 1940s. So congrats to him on that.
And of course, it won't stop "moderates" from claiming that Reds just need to stop backing these loonies, and just compromise back to a "center" defined arbitrarily by their enemies.
Status independence or bust.
It's not surprising to be that Dems are claiming that again and again - "if only you nominated a normal non-extremist candidate, we wouldn't call him Hitler, but you always nominate Hitlers!". This is a simple and time-tested tactics - "we're not political or ideological, we are just defending common sense from those crazies". The oldest trick in the book. What is astonishing there are still people on the red side that fail to see through the con. How many years of this happening again and again, with literally every single candidate, one needs to understand the pattern?
Why does it only work one way, though?
There was a comment yesterday about Democratic voters being motivated by Trump and by abortion rights, with voters not trusting Republicans to not write insane abortion laws. That's probably a reasonably accurate analysis. The necessary question, though, is whether that perception is due to the actual insanity of Trump and Republican abortion laws, or because of the perceptions of Trump and Republican abortion laws created by the Blue consensus machine.
"Moderates" want things to be normal and peaceful, and Blues can deny them normality and peace arbitrarily. Scott and other "moderate" blues often have stated how they want a "functional" Red establishment to moderate the crazier Blues. But what Red interest is provided in providing them that moderation? The moderate Blues have no interest in Red values at all, and will never concede to tolerating them if they don't absolutely have to. Providing such moderation just advances Blue dominance and further bricks Red interests out of any hope of actual power.
The relationship is abusive. The solution is, at best, to leave.
It doesn’t. Lots of people think Obama was a socialist.
As for why reds are generally less successful than blues at it, it’s because of who controls the media.
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One might, for example, compare the abortion laws promoted by Republicans with ones common in Europe. After all, European policies could not be made by insane MAGA Trumpsters? One could check how many countries practice "no limits up to the moment of birth" abortion, and for those that have term limits, what the average terms are and how they relate to Republican proposals. But the US mainstream press is largely completely disinterested in that discussion. Because it is almost completely owned by one tribe, and for that tribe it is more convenient to present any Republican policies as utter insanity which no normal people would ever discuss.
And I believe them. But when it comes to actually doing that, turns out that each move of the Reds to "cooperate" is met with vigorous "defect, defect, defect, defect!" on the Blue side. Try to make late terms abortion limited, by any reasonable term? Maybe let's try to find some middle ground here? Nope, no restrictions at all, Roe gives us this power and we intend to use it to the max. Well, how is that working for you? Try to find solution to a migration crisis? Nope, any border is racist, we'll refuse to follow the law and call it "sanctuary". I can hardly remember a moderate cooperative move for Republicans where it ended up with them not getting the shaft. What exactly is the point of keeping conceding? I'd get if it were in the interest of peace - this smells an awful lot of blackmail, but to heck with it, if we get peace - but there's no peace. It only gets worse.
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