Trump has pledged to take a fresh look at revoking dubious birthright citizenship โ 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.
Viaย CNNย (emphasis added):
โPresident-elect Donald Trumpโs 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 heโd use executive action to ban it.
โWeโre gonna have to get it changed, or maybe I would go back to the people, but we have to end it. Weโre the only country that has it,โ Trump told NBCโs Kristen Welker, echoing a false statement heโs made in the past. โIf 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.โโ
I wish heโd start the legal experiment with Vivek โ 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 โ and an utterly ungrateful one at that.
Ramaswamyโs 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 hereย in concern-trolling Tweet form, December 26, 2024 (emphasis added):
โA 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 โBoy Meets World,โ or Zach & Slater over Screech in โSaved by the Bell,โ or โStefanโ over Steve Urkel in โFamily Matters,โ 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 mediocrityโฆand their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of โFriends.โ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less โchillin.โ More extracurriculars, less โhanging out at the mall.โ
Most normal American parents look skeptically at โthose kinds of parents.โ More normal American kids view such โthose kinds of kidsโ with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.โ
Thatโs a lot of tough talk from a guy who you might guess, based on the above prescription, is a scientist who attended โweekend science competitionsโ 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; heโs 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 peopleโs innovations for personal enrichment.
Heโs a glorified money-changer โ 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 Alzheimerโs 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 โpump-and-dumpโ scheme.
Viaย Fortuneย (emphasis added):
โRamaswamyโs tax records show that the first time he ever made big money was when he hyped up an Alzheimerโs drug candidate, Axovant, which had been discarded by other pharmaceutical companies. Axovant, which was 78% owned by Ramaswamyโs 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 โthe idea that Vivek made any money on [Axovantโs] failure is a total lieโ before finally acknowledging that Ramaswamy did indeed cash out, claiming โ[Ramaswamy] and other shareholders were forced to sell a tiny portion of their shares in 2015 to facilitate an outside investor entering Roivant.โ The facts are that Ramaswamyโs own tax returns show he opportunely sold out of nearly $40 million of Roivant stock right as Axovantโs 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 โforced to sellโ as that was clearly a personal choice without anyone holding a gun to his head. Amazingly, Ramaswamyโs spokesperson further confirmed to us that Ramaswamy was aware that 99.7% of all drugs tested for Alzheimerโs fail even though he was relentlessly hyping Axovantโs chances of success with nary a mention of that inconvenient truth.โ
(For the record, all of these drugs fail because they fail to address the actual root cause of Alzheimerโs and only are designed to treat the symptoms. Vivek very likely knows this, being a trained biologist; he just doesnโt care because thereโs money to be milked from desperate people.)
Related:ย Funding Bill Includes Cash for a DOZEN Biolabs to โResearchโ/Engineer New Viruses
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 Americansโ 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 โ including, conceivably, vaccine passports and social credit scores.
Via The Dossier (emphasis added):
โBefore 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 hisย subsidiaryย companies, a ‘health information’ data mining outfit called Datavant, Ramaswamyโs outfit pursued the establishment of a single national and global database for all covid-related patient health records.
Through a partnership withย Snowflake, a San Francisco based cloud computing company,ย Ramaswamy wanted to ‘fight covid-19’ by manufacturing a ‘single repository of all the real-world medical data’ย thanks to the production of a โnational data infrastructureโ 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 werenโt 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.
Nonethelessย Ramaswamyโs Datavantย sought to profit off of the hysteria and violate basic ethical standards in the process. Theyย succeeded inย establishing a partnershipย with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).โ
Related:ย SHOCK Poll: A Quarter of Americans Say They Know Someone Personally Killed by COVID Jab
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):
โVivek 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.
Ramaswamyโs Wikipedia page includes the warning, โthis article has multiple issues,โ with a note that it โcontains paid contributionsโ and โmay require cleanup to comply with Wikipediaโs content policies, particularly neutral point of view.โ
The source of these concerns are changes made by an editor with the screen name โJhofferman,โ who has disclosed that he was paid by Ramaswamy to make alterations to the page.
According to the articleโs version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamyโs 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 Ramaswamyโs role on the state of Ohioโs Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamyโs Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidateโs own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed โextraneous materialโ by the editor.โ
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 donโt want him on my โteamโ; if Iโm feeling more generous than vengeful, I want him on a nice, comfortable boat back to India where heโll 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.
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