In an “interview” with The Breakfast Club, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy answered intense hostility with calm eloquence and gain a lot of followers in the process.
In the video, Ramaswamy fielded personal attacks about his character in the guise of questions from a guest host Tezlyn Figaro.
She said that Ramaswamy wasn’t a good candidate because he’s never really served his country. He never voted until he was in his 30s and he never “served” the country in the way that she understands serving. He never was class president and he never was a community organizer, and he never was in the military like she was or organized classmates to stand up to a teacher who was “snatching papers from kids.”
Ramaswamy explained that he served his community and the country in other ways including starting a multi-million-dollar pharmaceutical company that has created FDA-approved drugs that have saved lives, including children’s lives.
Ramaswamy defended his position with the defense of capitalism that I used in my critique of his book Woke, Inc. He said that people only make money in capitalism if they provide a product or a service that benefits others or that others value more than the money they spend on the product or service. And he said, “Capitalism is the best system known to man to lift people out of poverty,” which is exactly right.
But Figaro claimed that that wasn’t “serving” because he made money doing it. To her, people who make money doing something are only “self-serving,” unlike her, who constantly reminded the viewers that she was a veteran. Veterans who “signed up to die” for this country, aren’t self-serving.
Ramaswamy kindly let Figaro off the hook by not mentioning that Figaro didn’t volunteer to serve in the Air Force and she likely had her college paid for by that “selfless service.” She also constantly wore it as a badge of honor to serve her purposes in the interview. But go ahead and tell me how that was real “service” but how creating novel pharmaceuticals that saved kids’ lives isn’t.