He is in 3rd place. He is the only GOP candidate who has not been indicted to receive widespread mainstream media coverage. His proximity to the inner circles of the GOP has given him unprecedented access to conduct opposition research for the Democrat party.
In 2011, Ramaswamy was awarded a post-graduate fellowship by the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. ( Past fellows include United States Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy (1998 Fellow), the second-youngest Surgeon General to occupy the position, as well as the first of Indian descent. Other alumni include Iranian-American Ebola researcher Pardis Sabeti (2001 Fellow) and Fei-Fei Li (1999 Fellow), a Stanford professor and artificial intelligence expert.) In 2013, he earned a J.D. from Yale Law School. In a 2023 interview, he also said that he was a member of the Jewish intellectual society Shabtai in college. While campaigning for the presidency in 2023, Ramaswamy called himself a "scientist" and said, "I developed a number of medicines." Although his undergraduate degree is in biology, he was never a scientist; his role in the biotechnology industry was that of a financier and entrepreneur.
In 2020, when Ramaswamy was CEO of Roivant Sciences, the company established a nonprofit social-impact arm, Roivant Social Ventures (RSV), with his support. A prior iteration of RSV was the Roivant Foundation. Although Ramaswamy has centered his presidential campaign on opposing corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiatives, RSV worked in support of pro-DEI and ESG initiatives, including promoting health equity and diversity within the biopharma and biotech industries. In 2023, while seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he downplayed his role in creating and overseeing RSV.
Ramaswamy said that he voted for the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 2004 but did not vote in the presidential elections in 2008, 2012, or 2016. He described himself as "apolitical" during this period. He supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election. In November 2021, he registered to vote in Franklin County, Ohio, as "unaffiliated", but described himself as a Republican. Ramaswamy has made political contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. From 2020 to 2023, he donated $30,000 to the Ohio Republican Party. In 2016, he donated $2,700 to the campaign of Dena Grayson, a Florida Democrat running for Congress. Before running for president, Ramaswamy considered running in the 2022 election for U.S. Senate in Ohio.
Payment for removal of references to George Soros on Wikipedia page
In May 2023, Ramaswamy's campaign admitted that he had paid an editor to alter his Wikipedia biography before announcing his candidacy, but denied that the payment for edits was politically motivated. Forbes reported Ramaswamy paid an editor to alter his Wikipedia page. The edits removed references to his postgraduate fellowship from the George Soros-funded Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans as well as his involvement with the Ohio COVID-19 Response Team. Paul and Daisy Soros are the elder brother and sister-in-law of businessman and social activist George Soros, who has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories among American conservatives. Ramaswamy's campaign denied attempting to "scrub" his Wikipedia page and argued the edits were revisions of "factual distortions".
Ramaswamy has promised to pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, and has called Snowden's actions "heroic". He has also indicated an openness to pardon Hunter Biden, if convicted of crimes, "in the interest of moving the nation forward”. He suggested that if nominated, he might consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate.
The information above is from Ramaswamy's Wikipedia page.
Vivek's past affiliations, his candidacy and the publicity he is receiving, when brought together, presents an awkwardly conflicting optic. How did he get here and what is he doing here? With all of these blatant hypocrisies and nobody calling him to task, he somehow managed to navigate the landscape of tech and the news media to the debate stage.
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