The last 2024 GOP presidential hopeful to speak at Erick Erickson’s Gathering in Atlanta on Saturday was Vivek Ramaswamy. I’ll confess that he’s the top-tier candidate I knew the least about, but he sat with Erickson for a fascinating conversation.
Before introducing Ramaswamy, Erickson joked that he didn’t like the idea of a presidential candidate who is younger than he is — Ramaswamy just turned 38 — but the candidate spoke with polish and wisdom beyond his years. Erickson led off by asking Ramaswamy about the tragic fires in Maui, which PJ Media’s own Lincoln Brown reported were at least partially the result of government mismanagement.
“If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we’re destined to make them again,” Ramaswamy stated. “There was an Obama appointee, a climate change activist who also believes as part of this broader Gaia-centric world view of the earth that water rights are to be protected, which led to a five-to-six-hour delay in the critical window of getting waters to put out those fires, and we will never know, although certain signs point to the fact that we very well could have avoided those catastrophic deaths, many of them if water had made it to the site of the fires on top.”
Ramaswamy transitioned to talking about the invasion of wokeness into every part of our culture, including education and the military. He pointed to patriotism and faith as the way to make our way out of the cultural fights that rage in America today. The phrase that he returned to time and time again was “American revival.”
The candidate said that Americans are missing that combination of faith and patriotism, and he asserted that “we have to fill that vacuum with our vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation, do it without apology, and that is how we will dilute these woke agendas to irrelevance.”
The candidate stated that the key to “American revival” was to replace the focus on race, gender, class, and identity with the individual, family, country, and God.
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Ramaswamy views this race somewhat differently than the other candidates. He told Erickson that he doesn’t see his end goal as November 2024 but as January 2033, the end of a second Ramaswamy presidential term. He also said he doesn’t talk about Joe Biden as much as the other candidates do because “I don’t believe I will be running against Joe Biden in the general election. I’ll be running against somebody else.” Instead, he said he prefers to address the “cancer” that lies behind Joe Biden’s presidency.
The candidate also addressed the criticisms that he’s a complete outsider to politics. Invoking the Founding Fathers, he said:
I’m an American. I’m an explorer. We are the pioneers. We are explorers, the people who will say, “Nothing’s gonna stop me from achieving my maximum God-given potential.” In fact, I have a duty to use my God-given potential to make the greatest possible contribution that I can right now because life is short. Our time on this earth is brief. There is more to life than the aimless passage of time. And so we have a purpose. God put us here for a purpose to realize our maximal greatest contribution in the short time we are given. And so no, I don’t believe that it’s my job to just wait my turn in some bureaucracy.
He also addressed the crowd from the perspective of a millennial. He explained, “We’ve been taught for so long to celebrate our diversity and our differences that we’ve forgotten how much we’re alike as Americans.”
Ramaswamy spoke with members of the press after his time with Erickson. He addressed the rumors that Gov. Ron DeSantis may aim some attacks at Ramaswamy by decrying the way “professional politicians use attacks against other candidates as a substitute for their own message.”
He added that DeSantis is “an excellent governor in Florida, I think. We have many excellent governors across the country. Kristi Noem, Brian Kemp, Kim Reynolds, Kevin Stitt, many others. Ron DeSantis is on that list of excellent governors. He’s part of our deep bench that we’re going to need.”
When a reporter asked Ramaswamy about Trump’s indictments, he answered, ” I think that these indictments are a disaster for the country. I think they set a dangerous precedent for the ruling party to use police force in the middle of an election against political opponents. That’s not justice. That is the politicization of justice.”
Another reporter asked Ramaswamy about Jan. 6 (because we all know how much that day lives rent-free in the heads of the mainstream media), and the candidate replied, “I think it is very important that we not conflate a bad decision with a crime.” He also said that he would pardon Donald Trump on day one of his time in office.
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