In an impassioned plea, GOP Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy took to the podium in Iowa on Saturday to drive home the sanctity of free speech. He underscored its fundamental role in a functioning society and threw a spotlight on the adverse consequences of muffling voices.
Ramaswamy’s rhetoric reverberated through the Twitterverse, where a video captured him asserting, “Free speech is a precondition for truth.” Through the power of succinct language, he depicted the unraveling of social fabric when voices are curtailed: “You tell people they cannot speak, that is when they scream. You tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.”
Harkening back to yesteryears, Ramaswamy brought to fore the venerated wisdom of the founding fathers, casting the limelight on icons such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. He anchored the essence of being an American to open debate: “Speech and open debate that you get to speak your mind and you do and you do and you do too. As long as I get to in return, that’s the bargain of what it means to be American.”
The candidate did not shy away from swiveling the conversation to pandemic-induced school closures, fastening them to the absence of free speech. A poignant reflection: “You think about those school closures two years ago, you think we would have closed those schools in this country? If we had been allowed to say that we shouldn’t close those schools in this country? Right? We wouldn’t have.”
Ramaswamy sifted through the skepticism surrounding the origins of the coronavirus, inferring a clamping down of counter-narratives: “Do you think we would have waited three years before we woke up to the fact that that virus started in a manmade lab in Wuhan? You couldn’t say it. They delete your accounts if you said that, right?”
A compliment was offered to the parent’s rights organization Moms for Liberty, as he commended, “One of the things I love about Moms for Liberty is nobody’s going to tell you that you’re not going to speak, you will be heard. That is what it means to be American.”
