URBANDALE, Iowa — While Liberal-led LinkedIn may want to silence Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Iowans have welcomed the Ohio businessman with open arms.
Ramaswamy preached American revival with Iowa voters Saturday morning at the rustic, farmer-themed Machine Shed restaurant in suburban Des Moines, part of a multi-city trip to the Hawkeye State this Memorial Day Weekend. It’s the candidate’s fifth since announcing his run for the White House in February.
The political outsider who has built a top five national campaign thanks in no small part to his familiarity with the kick-off caucus state, reminded the packed gathering of a hundred or so Iowa souls that his campaign is about conversations. And Big Tech this week reminded America that it has and will continue to try to control those conversations.
Ramaswamy said LinkedIn locked his account and censored him for posting videos in which he expressed fact-based views as a presidential candidate about climate policy and President Joe Biden’s relationship with China. His team asked LinkedIn what they deemed to be factually incorrect.
“They came back and said, ‘Actually, this violates our policies … on misinformation, hate speech and violence,” he told a stunned Machine Shed gathering. After posting his experiences on Twitter, Ramaswamy said LinkedIn told journalists that it all was “an error” and that the candidate’s account had been restored. The room echoed with applause.
“This is how we win,” Ramaswamy said. “We show up and we engage.”
The anti-woke crusader used his battles with liberal-led LinkedIn to illustrate the broader point of the left waging war on free speech, on political difference of opinion. He spoke, as he often does, of the leftists’ “secular cults” that have popped up in recent years — the climate change cult, the gender identity cult, the racially woke cult. Ramaswamy said Americans (and core American values) have been taken hostage by what he calls a “culture of fear.”
And there is no greater damnation in modern America, he said, than to be called a racist. And if you don’t believe in the cult’s new testament, that there are the privileged and there are the oppressors, you are likely to be labeled a racist in this brave new world.
“So you’re either pledging allegiance to this new religion or you are being tarred with that Scarlet ‘R’,” Ramaswamy said. “Everyday Americans are choosing to bend a knee out of fear: The fear of losing your job, the fear of your kids getting a bad grade in school, the fear of becoming an outcast in your community.”
But to a young presidential candidate in an increasingly crowded field of Republican contenders, the rise of the left’s political cults is the symptom of a “deeper void” in modern America. At 37, Ramaswamy is the first millennial Republican candidate for president. He says his generation in particularly is hungry for purpose, for a cause, to fill a chasm of lost identity.
So Ramaswamy says he’s taking the battle for national revival to the places politicians have forgotten. That includes his recent trip to the south side of Chicago
“Not a lot of Republicans go there. Not a lot of Democrats go there. Not a lot of police go there,” he said of the crime-ridden part of a crime-ridden major American city. The residents there — who, coincidentally, keep voting for the same liberals that have led decades-long deterioration — are enduring the same struggles with dysfunctional government, Ramaswamy said.
Iowans had plenty of questions for Ramaswamy, as voters in the first-in-the-nation caucus state do for all presidential hopefuls. Top of mind is the concern over the crumbling U.S. southern border, a situation that has only gotten more complicated since the Biden administration ended Title 42.
Ramaswamy said building a wall isn’t enough. He said, as president, he would deploy the U.S. military to secure the border.
“Are you willing to shoot people with rubber bullets? How are you going to keep them out?” one woman asked.
Ramaswamy said it’s about deterrence. It’s about upholding the rule of law. That’s why thousands of illegal immigrants, violent criminals and poison peddlers continue to pour into the United States every day, he said, because they know the president isn’t going to uphold the laws of legal immigration. It’s not the migrant’s fault, Ramaswamy said. It’s an administration that disregards the law, ultimately for political purposes.
But Ramaswamy said the root cause is a “deep abandonment of the rule of law in America.” He noted the expiration of the pandemic-era Title 42 that served as a check on illegal immigration, the New York prosecution of chokehold suspect U.S. Marine Daniel Penny, and the Durham report showing the FBI failed to follow the law in its bogus Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
“The cancer is we’ve abandoned the rule of law in our country. When the top law enforcement agency abandons it how can we expect anyone else to [follow the law],” Ramaswamy said, repeating his pledge to shut down the FBI, the Department of Education and other “corrupt” federal agencies.
– – –
M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Vivek Ramaswamy in Urbandale” by Vivek Ramaswamy.
