“Let’s muse about the racially disparate impact of climate change as you fly on a private jet to Davos,” he said, to laughter from the nearly all-white crowd. Corporate virtue-signalling and hypocrisy are everywhere, he told the audience. One of the opinions he wished to air to those assembled was that “woke-ism”-a belief system that Ramaswamy sees as an insidious secular creed-has overtaken religious faith, patriotism, and the work ethic as a key American value. It was “the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think, in public.” The true test of the strength of a democracy was not, he argued, how many people voted. He enjoyed forums like this, “where there’s no agenda, there’s no objective, other than to create spaces for open conversation, for people to be free to say, and feel free to say, the kinds of things that they might have wanted to say behind closed doors,” he said, smiling brightly. At the front of the auditorium, perched on a stool, he spoke into his microphone with a showman’s brio, as if addressing a far larger crowd. Out on the sidewalk, he’d hastily replaced his flip-flops with sneakers, in a nod to formality. Ramaswamy has perfect-looking teeth, a high forehead, and a thick shock of hair that rises into a swirl at his crown. All the flame-throwing had established him, in the words of one anchor, as the network’s “woke and cancel-culture guru.” In the past year, he had cast aspersions on Black Lives Matter and “the death of merit” mask mandates and U.S.-border protection public-school curricula and the actor Jussie Smollett. Now, thanks to dozens of appearances on Fox News to criticize “cultural totalitarianism” enforced by liberal élites, he was closing in on fame as a conservative pundit. Vivek Ramaswamy, a thirty-seven-year-old entrepreneur, had settled in the area with his wife and toddler son after making a large fortune as the founder of a biotech company. In June, as the sun set on Dublin, Ohio, a well-to-do suburb of Columbus, several dozen people dressed in golf shirts and floral shifts filed into a small auditorium to listen to a talk by a new neighbor.
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