Are we stuck with these guys forever
I hate the Silicon Valley Candidate trend
The candidate of the moment is Vivek Ramaswamy and God is he unpleasant to watch.
I caught some of the GOP primary debate, and here is what it was like to listen to Vivek Ramaswamy:
Imagine being forced to sit through a timeshare pitch that was also racist.
Imagine being cornered at a party by a coked-up Jos A. Bank mannequin.
Imagine watching Tucker Carlson at 2x speed, and his guest is your boss complaining that women shouldn’t get paid during maternity leave.
Chris Christie had the only memorable line of the debate. He said that Ramaswamy “sounded like ChatGPT.”
This is half-right. Vivek Ramaswamy sounds like if ChatGPT was invented by Rush Limbaugh and trained on late-night infomercials. The man is like a “Shark Tank” pitch for a government ban on gay Pixar characters.
He has rancid energy. He would be an effective antagonist in an “Animal House” sequel. Where did he come from?
Ramaswamy is 38 years old and became rich building a pharmaceutical company you have never heard of. The company was founded in 2014; it has never had a single profitable year but Ramaswamy is worth $950 million from it anyway. (Say what you will about Howard Schultz, at least he sold coffee at a profit).
Nowadays Ramaswamy’s full-time job is going on Fox News and complaining that Wokeness is ruining Modelo commercials.
“Being Anti-Woke” is this man’s entire personality. He is a man who stubs his toe and blames drag queens. Over the weekend he reached a new-ish low: After a mass shooting in Jacksonville, where a White supremacist murdered 3 Black people because he is a bigot, Ramaswamy blamed the shooting on the mainstream media focusing too much on racism.
His thesis was, basically, that racism was almost dead, and then the Liberal media started covering racism again, and that inspired this racist to do a racist mass shooting.
Even Chuck Todd, an NBC robot programmed to say “Interesting perspective, Sir,” was dumbfounded.
As The Nation points out, every year there is a minority GOP candidate who runs as The Candidate Who Makes Your Peepaw Feel Okay About Hating Al Sharpton.
Ramaswamy joins Alan Keyes, Ben Carson, and Herman Cain in this cursed Wikipedia category. He will probably join them in defeat, too; he is a minority running in an election whose voters largely resent minorities.
Here is what is going to happen: Vivek Ramaswamy is going to hit 8% in Iowa and 6% in South Carolina. He will then join CNN as its most irritating contributor; Wolf Blitzer will trot him out to give Joe Biden advice on how to beat Trump by coming to the center on abortion e.g. banning it after 2 weeks with no exception.
No one will enjoy watching him and he’ll get fired after finally saying something so racist about Ilhan Omar that even the bloodless centrists at CNN agree he went too far.
He will then pop up on Fox News to complain that the REAL RACISTS in America are Don Lemon and Van Jones.
Ramaswamy is obviously way out of his depth as a presidential hopeful. Hating The 1619 Project is not a policy platform.
But I am worried that we are doomed to an eternity of this candidate.
I am not talking about the GOP minority candidate who scolds minorities.
I am talking aobut the mysteriously wealthy, overly slick tech guy who talks like a LinkedIn post and who butts his way into the spotlight, sucking away oxygen from politicians with actual ideas and expertise.
Remember Andrew Yang in 2020? The Universal Basic Income, Yang-bucks for all guy? He also outpolled Governors, Senators, and People Who Generally Know What the 13th Amendment Is.
Both Yang and Ramaswamy seemed to emerge fully-formed from a TechCrunch podcast to dominate political coverage for a few months.
They both had exactly one thing to say, over and over again, to any television camera pointed in their direction.
Is this our future?
Every 4 years a different smarmy millionaire materializes from out of a Sweetgreen to lecture us about how entrepreneurship can revitalize Detroit?
God, I despise these guys. Mostly because they have nothing to say. We have to sit there and watch them at debates saying shit like, “I was an early investor in Uber and so can America.”
It used to be that the entitled wealthy turds of our nation waited decades before declaring that they could fix this country just like they fixed supply chain issues in Dallas.
You would serve as CEO until you were 53, you would spend an early retirement on your private sex island, and then you would return to America to run for president on the platform of Me Good At Business.
But this new breed of Silicon candidate isn’t even waiting for their midlife crisis before declaring themselves America’s Corporate Savior. Andrew Yang was 44 when he ran. Vivek Ramaswamy is 38.
One day you have no idea who these people are and the next day they are onstage next to the former Vice President declaring that if you are a single Mom who is a heroin addict you don’t need government assistance, you need to read “Zero to One” and learn to write Python.
We can’t live like this, America. Senator JD Vance is already one Senator JD Vance too many.
Please let Vivek Ramaswamy be the last Founder to Disrupt American Politics.
We are all very proud of you for selling your company at age 33 to the evil corporation from Blade Runner.
But I cannot listen to another Ultra-Wealthy Podcast Automaton say he will bring the Startup Hustle to Washington D.C., am so bored of these over-confident men who have conquered Money and San Francisco and who view the White House as a natural next conquest.
I am tired of being cornered by these coked-up mannequins with One Big Idea to change Politics.
You are 38 years old and obscenely wealthy. Someone send these men a catalog for Super Yachts so that the country doesn’t have to endure their shtick anymore.