Vivek Ramaswamy for president?

Go ahead and laugh. But then, after you’ve blotted the coffee spit-take off your keyboard and monitor, take three minutes to watch his launch video. If you’re like us, you’ll be hard-pressed not to come away inspired. If ever a candidate spoke to what’s wrong with our country while hitting all the quintessentially American notes, it’s this 37-year-old Ohio-born son of Indian immigrants.

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

“We’ve celebrated our ‘diversity’ so much,” says Ramaswamy, “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.”

Ramaswamy is young and rich but virtually unknown among everyday Americans, so he faces some massive headwinds. He’s got a funny name, too, as he admits, but that didn’t stop a guy named Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. And his Indian heritage isn’t even novel: Two of the three Republican candidates to announce their run for the presidency are of Indian extraction — former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley being the other.

“America is in the midst of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy writes. “We hunger for purpose at a moment when faith, patriotism and hard work are on the decline. We embrace secular religions like climatism, Covidism and gender ideology to satisfy our need for meaning, yet we can’t answer what it means to be an American.”

As the Wall Street Journal editorial board writes: “[Ramaswamay] attended Harvard and earned a law degree from Yale, but don’t hold that against him. In 2014 he also founded a biotechnology firm, Roivant Sciences, and served as CEO until 2021.”

Unlike most Americans, the Journal’s editors are familiar with Ramaswamy due to his occasional contributions to their pages, which they say are “provocative and well-wrought even if we disagree.” They also note his “preternatural energy” and his ability to “argue his brief with the best of them.”

Ramaswamy has also written two books: one in 2021 called Woke, Inc.: Inside America’s Social Justice Scam, and another just last year titled Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence. Judging by the titles alone, it’s clear that Ramaswamy isn’t afraid to poke the progressives.

If this entrepreneurial upstart sounds too good to be true at the moment, give us a moment. Although his friends at The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are understandably effusive in their praise of Ramaswamy, he does have a significant business history that’s well worth examining — and deserving of some explanation.

In a Substack piece titled “Vetting Vivek Ramaswamy,” investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel notes that Ramaswamy was “nominated and selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2021, which is an obvious, massive red flag.”

We’ll say. We’ve written plenty about the WEF and The Great Reset, none of it good.

When Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec raised this troubling association in a tweet, Ramaswamy replied: “Funny you should bring this up. The first chapter of my upcoming book in April has the ‘receipts’ of my exchanges with the World Economic Forum years ago when they repeatedly kept trying to get me to be named. I gave them a polite ‘hell no.’ Reveals the games that WEF plays.”

Fair enough. But, as Schachtel notes, Ramaswamy has also taken a tough public stance against China, and yet he was “a featured speaker at a Shanghai investment conference in 2018” and “has launched companies out of China and formed partnerships with Chinese firms.”

Ramaswamy’s biotech firm, Roivant, also has a checkered history with Big Pharma, and he himself has extensive ties to Pfizer, according to Schachtel. In addition, “Roivant has also sued Moderna, claiming patent infringement related to its disastrous lipid nanoparticle delivery system, which has shown to wreak havoc on the entire human body.” Yikes.

None of this is disqualifying, of course. Business ventures have their ups and downs, and they often make strange bedfellows. But if Ramaswamy’s candidacy takes flight and he one day finds himself on a debate stage with fellow Republicans, we can be sure he’ll be asked about these and other business dealings. And that’s just as it should be.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Why I’m Running for President,” Ramaswamy says that in order to put America first, “We need to rediscover what America is. That’s why I am running for president. I am launching not only a political campaign but a cultural movement to create a new American Dream — one that is not only about money but about the unapologetic pursuit of excellence.”

Welcome to the party, Vivek. As Donald Trump might say, “The more, the merrier.”