(LifeSiteNews) — In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy declared that there’s a deep void – a vacuum – in this nation that needs to be replaced with an “affirmative alternative vision” that will revive the shared ideals and spirit of Americans in the spring of 1776 that led to the American Revolution.
“That’s what this moment calls for,” he asserted in the 45-minute video interview on X that garnered over 30 million views in less than 24 hours.
Those ideals that “set the nation in motion in 1776” are “innate to our nature as human beings, as Americans,” Ramaswamy said. “I think that there’s a hunger for a revival of those ideals. That’s where we are.”
“Either we rise to that occasion and we take that 1776 spring spirit and we channel it into a revival, or else we will be the Israelites lost in the desert asking to go back and be ruled by Pharaoh,” Ramaswamy said, “on a march towards quietly becoming a people of sheep so our government can be a government of wolves.”
The job of the next U.S. president might be the most important one ever faced by an incoming administration: “To fill that void with an answer to the question of what does it mean to be an American?”
He broke his question down:
- What does it mean to be an individual rather than riding a tectonic plate of group identity?
- What does it mean to be a member of a family, a nuclear family with a mother and a father that, by definition, brought you into this world?
- What does it mean to be a citizen of this nation – not some nebulous, vague global citizen fighting climate change – but a citizen of this nation on this land with these ideals?
- What does it mean to believe in God? To be a nation under God?
“I believe that if we fill that void with an actual affirmative vision, we will dilute other poisons to irrelevance. They are symptoms. They’re symptoms of a deeper cancer. That cancer itself is a void, a black hole. Fill that void with an actual affirmative vision of who we really are. That’s got to be how we win.”
Ep. 17 Vivek Ramaswamy is the youngest Republican presidential candidate ever. He’s worth listening to. pic.twitter.com/9wGqptHdto
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 17, 2023
There’s “deep distrust in our existing institutions, including the government in this country,” noted Ramaswamy, who predicted that there are “two ways this could break.”
The first is that the nation goes through a period of hardship and comes out “strengthened by that hardship.”
But “if we don’t channel that frustration in a direction that creates something, a sort of reincarnation of our American experiment,” then the resulting revolution will likely be “the destructive kind.”
Ramaswamy further explained that “there’s a bipartisan consensus in this country right now that we, the people, we can’t handle the truth,” before launching into a litany of recent examples of great magnitude begging the questions:
- “COVID-19. What was the origin?
- What did we know about the vaccines before we mandated them?
- What do we know about Hunter Biden’s dealings before we systematically suppressed that story?
- What do we know about the truth of what happened on January 6th?
- What do we know about that Nashville shooter manifesto, the transgender individual who shot up a bunch of people in a Christian school?
He said that before 1776 it was elite leaders who decided what’s right for society at large while sequestered in the “back of palace halls.”
The American Revolution created a new type of government system where “every person’s voice and vote count equally,” and that brought secret deliberations out into the public square.
But now we’re back to decisions being made “in the back of three little government agencies in Washington, D.C.” or “in the back of BlackRock’s corner office on Park Avenue in Manhattan.”
The wide-ranging interview covered a lot of ground, from national security to decoupling our country from dependence on Taiwan as the near-sole source for the semiconductors that keep this country running.
Ramaswamy also strongly suggested that both the LGBT and climate change movements are like religions with “cult-like belief systems.”
“The most dangerous religions of all are those that claim to be secular but are actually religious in their conviction.”
“Whether it relates to the climate dogma, whether it relates to LGBTQA+ ism, whether it relates to racial wokeism,” together they represent different facets of the same secular religion “that defines itself in opposition to the American vision, to the American way of life.”
“The thing we’re describing here is an alternative world view grounded in race, in gender and sexuality, in climate.”