'Anti-woke' entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy announces 2024 presidential campaign

Conservative commentator, entrepreneur, and author Vivek Ramaswamy announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential race on Tuesday during an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

"We are in the middle of this national identity crisis, Tucker, where we have celebrated our differences for so long that we forgot all the ways we are really just the same as Americans bound by a common set of ideals that set this nation into motion 250 years ago," he said.

"That's why I am proud to say tonight that I am running for United States president to revive those ideals in this country," Ramaswamy said on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

Ramaswamy, 37, was born to Indian immigrant parents in Cincinnati. He holds a degree from Yale and Harvard and is a healthcare and tech sector entrepreneur reportedly worth over $500 million. The entrepreneur became widely known for being the author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.”

At the same time, he announced his bid on the show, Ramaswamy released a campaign video, in which he says his campaign will reject the “poison of wokeism, climatism, transgenderism, and COVIDism.”

"This isn’t just a political campaign; this is a cultural movement to create a new dream for the next generation of Americans," he says in the video.

Ramaswamy said his presidential campaign is "about the unapologetic pursuit of excellence in our country. It means you believe in merit; that you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin but on the content of your character and your contributions."

The multimillionaire is also calling for a “total decoupling” from Communist China, claiming that the Asian country poses a bigger threat to America today than the Soviet Union during the cold war. 

Ramaswamy will run against former President Donal Trump and Nikki Hailey for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. He says that what sets him apart from the other Republicans who are running is his “vision of national identity that dilutes these other agendas to irrelevance.”