While most polls show former President Donald Trump to be the clear favorite among Republican voters, he is not the only one vying for his party's nomination.
According to Breitbart, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy released a video on Tuesday in which he announced a 2024 White House run.
"We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis today. Our nation is hungry for a cause, for purpose, for meaning," Breitbart quoted Ramaswamy as saying.
"The things that used to fill that void like faith, patriotism, hard work, and family have disappeared. We now embrace one secular religion after another, from Covid-ism to climate-ism and gender ideology to satisfy our deeper need for identity," he continued.
"Yet we cannot even answer the question of what it means to be an American in the year 2023. Today, the woke left preys on that vacuum," Ramaswamy complained.
"They tell you that your race, your gender, and your sexual orientation govern who you are and what you can achieve in life," the businessman pointed out.
"If you question that orthodoxy, they call you a bigot, a homophobe, a climate denier, a racist. There is no greater damnation in modern America than to be called a racist," he pointed out.
"This is psychological slavery and that’s created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America," Ramaswamy declared.
Ramaswamy also released a video on Twitter in which he recalled hearing Martin Luther King’s 'I have a dream' speech for the first time as a child in 1993.
We’ve celebrated our “diversity” so much that we forgot all the ways we’re really the same as Americans, bound by ideals that united a divided, headstrong group of people 250 years ago. I believe deep in my bones those ideals still exist. I’m running for President to revive them. pic.twitter.com/bz5Qtt4tmm
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) February 22, 2023
"That was the speech where he said, ‘I hope my four children grow up in a country where they are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. That dream stuck with me," Ramaswamy recalled.
He then complained of how "the woke left" insists that "your race, your gender, and your sexual orientation govern who you are, what you can achieve, and how you are allowed to think."
However, Ramaswamy has already gained detractors, with some sharing footage of an interview with conservative commentator Candace Owens in which he appeared to downplay left-wing Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's soft treatment of sex offenders.
Flashback:
Candace Owens explains Ketanji Brown Jackson’s soft sentences for child porn traffickers
Vivek: “I don’t think this is the hill conservatives should die on” pic.twitter.com/cDc869tTRI
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) February 22, 2023