Politics

This ‘Anti-Woke’ Businessman May Be The Next Big Right-Wing Star

THE NEW ABNORMAL

This week on The New Abnormal, there’s a new right-wing millionaire in Washington—and he wants to make some big changes.

Vivek Ramaswamy
Photo illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Reuters

There’s a new (almost) billionaire in town—and he wants your vote.

Millionaire businessman and Fox News fixture Vivek Ramaswamy has his eyes on the presidency, and on this week’s episode of The New Abnormal, Daniel Lippman, a reporter at Politico covering the White House and Washington, talks to host Danielle Moodie about why the “businessman-turned-culture warrior” is someone to watch.

“He wants to spread the gospel and he thinks that there’s currency among Republican voters who do not like how the culture in business and corporate America is becoming more progressive, more about social values and less about just pure profit making,” Lippman explains, saying he would outsmart Trump in a debate.

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“He is not a nobody, this is a person who has a lot of followers on Twitter and Instagram and you know, his books have been bestsellers. He gets a lot of people who say, ‘You know, you should run for president, you have my vote’.

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However, “he has a lot of work to do,” says Lippman.

“This is the start of the 2024 cycle. He’s a political newbie and I could see that firsthand. I think the issue is he is not running as a businessman. He is running as a culture warrior… He thinks that America’s almost become too soft.”

Also on the podcast, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Peter Hotez, discusses his new paper investigating rising anti-vaccine activism and key global policy missteps.

“Around 200,000 Americans have lost their lives overall, because they were victims of all of this anti-vaccine activism or anti-vaccine, anti-science aggression. And now unfortunately, it’s globalizing.”

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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