Trump has pledged to take a fresh look at revoking dubious birthright citizenship — a concept not contained in the original Constitution but rather a product of the Fourteenth Amendment originally intended to confer the right to freed slaves.
Via CNN (emphasis added):
“President-elect Donald Trump’s team is assessing multiple options to fulfill his long-promised pledge to end birthright citizenship, according to two sources familiar with the discussions, teeing up a legal fight with the expectation that the Supreme Court would ultimately have to rule on the matter.
Trump has railed against birthright citizenship, which is protected by the 14th Amendment, for years and suggested he’d use executive action to ban it.
“We’re gonna have to get it changed, or maybe I would go back to the people, but we have to end it. We’re the only country that has it,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker, echoing a false statement he’s made in the past. “If we can, through executive action. I was going to do it through executive action, but then we had to fix Covid first, to be honest with you.””
I wish he’d start the legal experiment with Vivek — a cancerous lesion on the American civilization in desperate need of excision.
In my opinion, if not in law, Vivek Ramaswamy is not American in any meaningful sense of the word; he is the product of Indian immigrants who benefitted from the aforementioned birthright citizenship — and an utterly ungrateful one at that.
Ramaswamy’s utter contempt for America and American culture, in the context of demanding the import of millions of more Indians willing to slave for substandard wages for tech firms that he invests in so that he can squeeze a little more black ink out of them, can be found here in concern-trolling Tweet form, December 26, 2024 (emphasis added):
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.”
That’s a lot of tough talk from a guy who you might guess, based on the above prescription, is a scientist who attended “weekend science competitions” and boned up on physics to support the great cause of technological progress for the benefit of mankind.
However, Vivek is nothing of the sort; he’s a hedge fund investor who adds nothing of any substantial value to American society or economy, but rather moves money around to capitalize off of other people’s innovations for personal enrichment.
He’s a glorified money-changer — you know, the kind that Jesus excoriated in the Bible.
Vivek first struck gold as a biomedical financier when he bought the rights to a junk Alzheimer’s drug that had already failed four clinical trials, talked it up like any greaseball used car salesman would of a junker he was trying to get off his lot, got a bunch of investors on board, including small-time middle-class American investors, and then bailed out with a massive personal pay-off before the SHTF because he knew it was going to fail even while he was still shilling it in public.
Investors call this a classic “pump-and-dump” scheme.
Via Fortune (emphasis added):
“Ramaswamy’s tax records show that the first time he ever made big money was when he hyped up an Alzheimer’s drug candidate, Axovant, which had been discarded by other pharmaceutical companies. Axovant, which was 78% owned by Ramaswamy’s corporate holding company Roivant, blew up after failing FDA tests, with the stock crashing from $200 to 40 cents, fleecing thousands of mom-and-pop investors who bought into the hype. Ramaswamy himself profited handsomely (even if the Ramaswamy campaign took a while to acknowledge the truth).
Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin first told us that “the idea that Vivek made any money on [Axovant’s] failure is a total lie” before finally acknowledging that Ramaswamy did indeed cash out, claiming “[Ramaswamy] and other shareholders were forced to sell a tiny portion of their shares in 2015 to facilitate an outside investor entering Roivant.” The facts are that Ramaswamy’s own tax returns show he opportunely sold out of nearly $40 million of Roivant stock right as Axovant’s hype was peaking. Meanwhile, Roivant was raising $500 million driven largely by Axovant. As Ramaswamy was busy selling his own personal stake, Roivant gradually reduced and diluted its Axovant stake from 78% to just 25%...
Ramaswamy was not “forced to sell” as that was clearly a personal choice without anyone holding a gun to his head. Amazingly, Ramaswamy’s spokesperson further confirmed to us that Ramaswamy was aware that 99.7% of all drugs tested for Alzheimer’s fail even though he was relentlessly hyping Axovant’s chances of success with nary a mention of that inconvenient truth.”
(For the record, all of these drugs fail because they fail to address the actual root cause of Alzheimer’s and only are designed to treat the symptoms. Vivek very likely knows this, being a trained biologist; he just doesn’t care because there’s money to be milked from desperate people.)
Before he became a politician and tried to rebrand himself as someone with principles, Vivek spent the pandemic creating a lucrative partnership with NIH to use Americans’ own public money to steal their private medical data and then concentrate it in a single database to be weaponized for whatever nefarious purpose he and his colleagues might invent in the future — including, conceivably, vaccine passports and social credit scores.
Via The Dossier (emphasis added):
“Before rebranding as a warrior for free speech and a passionate crusader for privacy rights, newly announced presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy was pitching the U.S. and world governments on his efforts to install a broad, centralized database of private medical records.
In a pursuit forged through one of his subsidiary companies, a 'health information' data mining outfit called Datavant, Ramaswamy’s outfit pursued the establishment of a single national and global database for all covid-related patient health records.
Through a partnership with Snowflake, a San Francisco based cloud computing company, Ramaswamy wanted to 'fight covid-19' by manufacturing a 'single repository of all the real-world medical data' thanks to the production of a “national data infrastructure” of private and public patient records, all without the consent of the actual patients.
Datavant claimed the records would be anonymized through their internal systems and that the broad database would only be available to researchers and government officials. However, some weren’t buying the sales pitch, citing gross violations of medical privacy. Moreover, none of the methods to supposedly anonymize records were made open source for review.
Nonetheless Ramaswamy’s Datavant sought to profit off of the hysteria and violate basic ethical standards in the process. They succeeded in establishing a partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).”
All of this is, to say the least, not a great look for an alleged populist small-government conservative who cares about Constitutional rights, so to remedy the situation, once he entered the political arena, Vivek bribed Wikipedia editors to scrub all of his inconvenient history from the site.
Luckily, he got caught.
Via Mediate (emphasis added):
“Vivek Ramaswamy has accused his prospective Republican rivals of parroting him, but Ramaswamy himself has made an intentional effort to conceal his own biography, even paying a Wikipedia editor to remove potentially politically damaging details about his past from his page.
Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page includes the warning, “this article has multiple issues,” with a note that it “contains paid contributions” and “may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view.”
The source of these concerns are changes made by an editor with the screen name “Jhofferman,” who has disclosed that he was paid by Ramaswamy to make alterations to the page.
According to the article’s version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011. Paul Soros was the older brother of billionaire funder of leftist causes George Soros, who was the biggest individual political donor in the United States during the 2022 election cycle. Also removed from the page on February 9, 2023 was Ramaswamy’s role on the state of Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamy’s Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidate’s own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed “extraneous material” by the editor.”
All that to say: Vivek and I are not fellow travelers; we are not the same caliber or class or human; we are not simpatico.
I don’t want him on my “team”; if I’m feeling more generous than vengeful, I want him on a nice, comfortable boat back to India where he’ll feel much more at home after the nearly billion-dollar fortune he fleeced from actual Americans is liberated from his bank accounts.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
