‘Entrepreneurial Huckster’: Vivek Ramaswamy Must Be Stopped at Any Cost From Winning in Ohio
- His recent proposals for overhauling education seek to regiment the lives of American kids, stripping away the very elements that define the nation's spirit of freedom, play, and individuality.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur turned Republican gubernatorial hopeful in Ohio, has built a political brand on bold, unapologetic calls to remake American life. But his recent proposals for overhauling education reveal something deeper and more unsettling: a personal crusade to regiment the lives of American kids, stripping away the very elements that define the nation’s spirit of freedom, play, and individuality.
This is not just policy tinkering. It is an obsession with molding children into his image of relentless, joyless productivity, born perhaps from unresolved schoolyard wounds, and it threatens to turn the United States into a nation of sweatshops where fun is the first casualty. As Ramaswamy eyes the Ohio governor’s mansion in 2026, his ideas demand scrutiny, especially given his murky past as a biotech huckster whose empire left investors in the dust.
At the heart of Ramaswamy’s educational fervor is a disdain for what he sees as American cultural excess. In a viral 2023 social media post, he lamented the nation’s priorities, writing, “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” He doubled down with a prescription for reform: “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.'”
This tweet ignited a firestorm, with critics accusing him of wanting to erase childhood whimsy in favor of a grind that echoes the immigrant “tiger mom” ethos he credits for his own success. But Ramaswamy’s vision goes further, repeatedly framing American kids as deficient compared to foreign talent. In a December 2024 rant defending H-1B visas, he blamed U.S. culture for failing to produce enough engineers, saying American students prioritize “partying” over rigorous study, necessitating an influx of high-skilled immigrants. “The reason we can’t find enough American-born, qualified engineers to fill these job openings is not because we can’t educate our kids to do the work,” he claimed. “It’s because we have created a culture that increasingly teaches them that they can get ahead in life based not on the content of their work but on the color of their skin.”
This rhetoric paints a picture of Ramaswamy as a cultural surgeon, eager to excise the “fun things” that make America American: backyard barbecues, Friday night lights, lazy summer days. His latest salvo came in a November 2025 TikTok video, where he pitched year-round schooling and extended days as a childcare fix. “I’m a dad. Make parenting more affordable by making school year-round and going til 4 o’clock instead of 3 o’clock so you don’t have to pay for child care,” he said, framing it as a pragmatic boon for working families.
Beneath this educational zeal lurks Ramaswamy’s fake persona, a slick fusion of pseudo-nationalism and performative patriotism that critics have shredded as opportunistic grift.
The clip sparked outrage, with even his MAGA allies initially dismissing it as AI-generated deepfake from Democratic rival Amy Acton’s camp. Ramaswamy’s team later edited it out, calling it a “casual back-and-forth” rather than policy, but the damage was done. Acton’s campaign manager, Philip Stein, fired back: “Blowing a massive hole in public school budgets by forcing teachers and students into year-round school is yet another example of how out of touch Vivek Ramaswamy is with Ohioans.”
Nikki Haley’s son, Nalin, went further on X, branding Ramaswamy a “creep” imposing “third world parenting style” on American kids, resurfacing a 2022 post where Ramaswamy suggested renaming Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill to “Wait Until 8” to delay sex education until age eight.
How big a nerd loser is this guy, really? Ramaswamy’s fixation on nerds over jocks feels less like policy and more like autobiography. Raised in Cincinnati by Indian immigrant parents, he endured bullying that scarred his worldview. In his 2022 book “Nation of Victims,” he recounts an eighth-grade incident at Princeton Junior High where a “big black kid thought it would be amusing to push a nerdy high-achieving Indian kid down the stairs,” requiring surgery.
He has since described this as a “wakeup call,” forging a philosophy of self-reliance over victimhood. A 2025 podcast appearance elaborated: “You get up, you pick up and you move on. But that was a wakeup call for us.” At Harvard and Yale Law, Ramaswamy honed his contrarian edge, debating professors and leading protests against worker raises as “at the cost of respect.” Classmates recall a driven but arrogant kid playing “Stump the Vivek” on the tennis court.
The rejection stings through his words today. “We have created a culture that increasingly teaches them that they can get ahead in life based not on the content of their work but on the color of their skin,” he said in 2024, echoing the mockery he faced as an ethnic outsider. One wonders: Is his push to “mould American kids in his image” therapy for the dweeb who never quite fit in, or a genuine belief that joy is the enemy of progress? Either way, it reeks of a man projecting his grievances onto a generation that deserves better than his sterile sweatshop fantasy.
Beneath this educational zeal lurks Ramaswamy’s fake persona, a slick fusion of pseudo-nationalism and performative patriotism that critics have shredded as opportunistic grift. He rails against “woke capitalism” in his 2021 book “Woke, Inc.,” decrying corporations for “feigning wokeness” to mask sins like muzzling China critics. Yet his own biotech empire, Roivant Sciences, launched a DEI initiative in 2020 under his watch, aiming to foster “DEI opportunities for future leaders in biopharma and biotech.” Sam Nunberg, a former Trump advisor, called him out in a 2023 Newsweek op-ed: “Vivek Ramaswamy Is a Fraud—and Always Has Been.”
Nunberg highlighted Roivant’s $1.2 billion loss in 2023 and $924.1 million the prior year, despite Ramaswamy cashing out $32 million in stock to fund his campaign. Worse, his 2015 Axovant subsidiary bought a failed Alzheimer’s drug from GlaxoSmithKline for $5 million, hyped it to a $3 billion IPO, then watched it crater after FDA failure, wiping out retail investors while Ramaswamy pocketed nearly $40 million. Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld dubbed him an “entrepreneurial huckster” with a “shady business track record of brazen pump-and-dump schemes.” In a 2024 Geopolitical Economy Report, he was likened to Martin Shkreli, a “Wall Street speculator accused of pump-and-dump schemes, not a scientist.”
Ramaswamy’s nationalism fares no better under scrutiny. He preaches “America First” while defending H-1B visas that import the talent he says U.S. culture fails to produce, drawing charges of hypocrisy from MAGA diehards. A viral 2025 X post accused him of being “culturally Indian,” unfit for Ohio because his vision demands “EVERY AMERICAN needs to be a hyper-productive AP-Calculus HS Robotics Champion.” In a 2023 Slate analysis, his blend of Hindu nationalism and Christian nationalism was called “unorthodox” and “worshipful of two faiths,” with ties to Modi’s India that clash with white supremacist undertones in the GOP.
A 2023 New York Times piece noted his rejection of “Indian American” identity, prioritizing national unity over ethnic labels, yet his 2024 X post blaming “Black people” in a dog-whistle rant alienated even allies. Ezra Klein’s 2024 podcast guests labeled him a “pseudo intellectual buoyed almost entirely by a Herculean commitment to talking well after he’s established himself as incompetent and a fool.” Even DeSantis’ super PAC memo urged calling him “Vivek the Fake.”
Ramaswamy must be stopped at any cost from winning in Ohio. His murky antecedents as a biotech scammer who profited from failure while preaching meritocracy disqualify him from shaping policy, let alone children’s futures. In a state still reeling from pandemic learning losses, his year-round grind would exacerbate burnout, not fix it, as Acton warns.
Ohioans deserve a governor who celebrates the full spectrum of American youth, not one hell-bent on revenge against the jocks who once pushed him down. Ramaswamy’s nerd utopia is no dream. It is a dystopia where kids trade touchdowns for textbooks, and the soul of America gets traded away too. If he wins, the Buckeye State becomes ground zero for his cultural purge. Voters, wake up before recess ends for good.
Vikram Zutshi is an American journalist and filmmaker specializing in religion, art, history, politics and culture.
