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Vivek Ramaswamy made his fortune in biotech, but it turns out his true talent may be in glib, attention-getting demagoguery.
He’s put his no-hope presidential campaign on the radar screen with his media ubiquity, his willingness to go anywhere and answer any question, the sense he’s having fun out on the trail, and his pungent expression of certain timeless truths.
That’s all to the good — we need more happy warriors. (We’ve published Ramaswamy over the years, and he’s spoken at National Review Institute events.)
Smart enough to know where the MAGA energy is, though, he hardly ever criticizes his supposed opponent, Donald Trump, who has openly welcomed Ramaswamy’s rise in the polls, and he’s offered tawdry justifications of January 6 and flirted with conspiracy theories. His ongoing 9/11 fiasco is the latest example.
Asked by an interviewer whether 9/11 was an inside job or he believes the government, Ramaswamy said he doesn’t believe the 9/11 commission. Now, the commission’s work isn’t unassailable, and our own Andy McCarthy has long written about how the government has shamelessly hidden the ball on the level of Saudi involvement in the attack.
When pressed on his comments, Ramaswamy explained that he was talking about the Saudi angle. But his initially open-ended remarks could be heard as entertaining more extravagant conspiracy theories — while he had the Saudi escape hatch. If this sounds too clever by half, there should be no doubt that Ramaswamy is very clever.
His take on 9/11 collided with another fraught topic — his excuses for January 6 — in an interview with the Atlantic.
Last month, Ramaswamy told Tucker Carlson at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa that “what caused January 6 is pervasive censorship in this country.” He added, “You tell people in this country they cannot speak. That is when they scream. You tell people they cannot scream. That is when they tear things down.”
This is bad sociology that sounds like vintage Al Sharpton trying to justify the latest urban riot. You can obviously be upset with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story and the bias of social-media algorithms, without macing Capitol Hill police officers and breaking into the U.S. Capitol.
Of course, despite his self-styled commitment to truth-telling, Ramaswamy can’t bring himself to admit that the Capitol Hill rioters were hepped up on a frothy stew of lies fed to them by Donald Trump and his minions, some of whom have now admitted they were lying. Instead, he’s played footsie with the idea that the riot might have been caused by federal provocateurs.
This is where the Atlantic interview comes in. By way of explaining why we need to learn about the potential federal role in January 6, Ramaswamy said, “I think it is legitimate to say, How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers? Like, I think we want—maybe the answer is zero, probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.”
This was such a stupid thing to say that Ramaswamy retreated to the standard cornered politician’s defense that he’d been misquoted. Given the detailed nature of his remarks, this explanation was inherently implausible, and, sure enough, the reporter produced a recording showing that Ramaswamy said exactly what he denied saying.
Because notoriety is the coin of the realm in Republican politics at the moment, the episode may not hurt Ramaswamy, indeed may even help him by garnering him more attention. But, for anyone truly paying attention, he’s been making it obvious how much the truth, his calling card and slogan, means to him.