Around 150 people gathered at the Palace Events Center in Treynor, Iowa to have cake and hear from entrepreneur and Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy, 37, is one of the youngest people to run for President on the Republican ticket and the first Millennial. He is also fairly new on the political scene, having made his fortune at a young age. Ramaswamy founded the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences in 2014 before turning to politics.
The driving force behind his talk was recreating an “American Identity,” likening “Pillars of Truth” such as faith in God, American citizenship, and family as a kind of sonar used by blind bats in a cave. “We Americans, we send out these signals and it bounces off something that is true, something that is fixed, something that is real,” Ramaswamy said. “It bounces back and says this is where I am.”
Ramaswamy spoke on a handful of positions, such as eliminating affirmative action, illegal immigration, and the department is education. He also spoke on topic of private companies “de-platforming” speech online, occasionally at the behest of political operatives (as was in the recently-published “Twitter files”).
“We’re not a country where the party in power can use private companies to do through the back door what government cannot get done through the front door.” Ramaswamy said. “If the government is deputizing a social media company, or a bank, or an internet company to silence political speech that the government could not censor directly, then it is a state action in disguise and the Constitution still applies.”
Other topics Ramaswamy spoke about included term limits for government “bureaucrats,” pardoning non-violent January 6 protestors along with Julian Assange and even Donald Trump, and keeping the Chinese Communist Party from buying land in the United States. He also spoke on shutting down the FBI, “one of the most politicized institutions in our federal government.”
The event was hosted by Free Speech America, a non-profit, non-partisan organization, which will also be hosting a similar talk by Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in mid-June. Ramaswamy’s talk was part of a fundraiser for a fireworks show the group plans to host on July 1, 2023. You can learn more about the organization on their website, freespeechamerica.org.
