WASHINGTON: Vivek Ramaswamy, an Indian-American tech entrepreneur, announced that he's running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
In a short video launched on Tuesday, the 37-year-old said: "We've celebrated our 'diversity' so much that we forgot all the ways we're really the same as Americans, bound by ideals that united a divided, headstrong group of people 250 years ago. I believe deep in my bones those ideals still exist. I'm running for President to revive them.
"We're in the midst of a national identity crisis. Faith, patriotism & family are disappearing. We embrace one secular religion after another -- from wokeism to climatism -- to satisfy our deeper need for meaning. Yet we cannot even answer what it means to be an American.
"The GOP can fill that void. E pluribus unum: from many, one. That is the dream that won the American Revolution; that reunited us after the Civil War, that won us two World Wars & the Cold War. That is the dream that still gives hope to the world. That is American exceptionalism."
Ramaswamy, whose parents immigrated from Vadakkencherry in Palakkad, Kerala, co-founded Strive Asset Management and currently serves as the Executive Chairman.
Prior to Strive, he founded the biopharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences.
He is also the author of the books, "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam", published in August 2021 and "Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence", published in September 2022.
Ramaswamy filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission earlier on Tuesday and is scheduled to speak at a Polk County Republican event in Iowa on Thursday.
The other Indian-American to launch her Republican presidential bid is Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina Governor and Permanent Representative to the UN.