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.
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"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.
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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.
