‘Shut Down the Administrative State,’ 2024 Presidential Candidate Vows

Meet Vivek Ramaswamy: The Biotech Entrepreneur Turned GOP Presidential Candidate

From biotech entrepreneur to GOP presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy has made a name for himself as a successful businessman and political outsider. But his journey to the campaign trail is not your typical rags-to-riches story.

The American Dream

As a child of Indian immigrants who arrived in America with almost no money, Ramaswamy founded a biotechnology firm at the age of 29 and quickly built it into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, landing him on the cover of Forbes. That was his American dream.

A Different Kind of Cancer

But Ramaswamy left the medical field to treat “a different kind of cancer” metastasizing in America. “Not a biological cancer, but a cultural cancer that threatened to kill that dream that Martin Luther King had 60 years ago, that threatened to kill the dream that allowed me to achieve everything I ever had in my life,” Ramaswamy told a full house at a campaign event hosted by the New York Metropolitan Republican Club on April 26.

“Pick your favorite ‘-ism’: woke-ism, transgenderism, climate-ism, COVID-ism, globalism—whatever it is, you think it’s an accident that these things cropped up at the same time?” he said. “It’s not. It’s a symptom of a deeper identity crisis.”

The Campaign Platform

The candidate touted the ideas that would ultimately underlie his campaign platform, from instituting radical government reform to reviving a national identity to fill “the vacuum at the heart of our national soul.”

The gist of his promise is to revive the values that made his American dream possible: faith, patriotism, hard work, and family. And a necessary step in achieving this goal, he said, is dissolving the federal agencies controlled by a corporate managerial class.

“[President] Ronald Reagan led us out of our last national identity crisis in 1980. I’m running for president to do the same thing again in 2024,” Ramaswamy said in closing his speech.

‘Gut It’

Ramaswamy has a campaign message that strikes a similar tone to that which propelled candidate Donald Trump to victory in 2016: overhaul the Washington establishment.

“I’m going to shut down the administrative state—the unconstitutional fourth branch of government—gut it,” he told The Epoch Times after the event while on his way to downtown Manhattan for dinner.

According to Ramaswamy’s 2021 book “Woke Inc.” and subsequent online posts, these agencies include the FBI, the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Education, and others.

The Wokenomics Scheme

In “Woke Inc.,” the entrepreneur writes that these agencies have been fundamentally transformed by a scheme he calls “wokenomics”: C-suit executives of corporations like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street deploy woke ideologies as a “smokescreen to distract from greed, fraud, and malfeasance.”

This scheme, he argues, goes beyond the “old” crony capitalism model in which corporations influence legislation via campaign contributions: corporations promulgate this woke ideology, which permeates government administrative agencies, who in turn “became the willing henchmen of the woke-industrial complex.”

As a result, a set of pseudo-moral principles has dominated American institutions, devastated American values, and spawned an administrative state—a federal bureaucracy largely controlled by a corporate managerial class.

The Invisible Fist of Government

That administrative state, he said, then comes back to force the market to adopt agendas most American people don’t agree with—an agenda that conforms to the “climate cult,” for example.

“That’s not the invisible hand of the market. That is the invisible fist of government,” he said during his speech.

The Promise

So, vowing to treat what he describes as a “cultural cancer” and dissolve the administrative state, Ramaswamy, 37, in February threw his hat in the ring for the Republican presidential nomination.

With a campaign platform that promises to revive the American dream and overhaul the Washington establishment, Ramaswamy is a candidate to watch in the 2024 presidential race.