Vivek Ramaswamy fires back at reporter asking if he condemns white supremacy: ‘Stupid question’ 

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy went off on a reporter Wednesday who asked him if he condemns “white supremacy and white nationalism.”

The 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur schooled the reporter about his position that white supremacy is not to blame. Instead, however, “affirmative action” causes much strife and racial conflict in the country, he explained.

“Of course I condemn any form of vicious racial discrimination in this country. But I think that the presumption of your question is fundamentally based on a falsehood that really is the main form of racial discrimination we see in this country today,” he told the Washington Post reporter during a campaign event in Scott County, Iowa.

“Institutionalized racism is institutionalized racial discrimination that we see that doesn’t come from somehow discriminating against people on the basis of some tentative white supremacy. It’s based on affirmative action. It’s based on actually discriminating against people on the color of their skin in a way that’s actually institutionalized today,” Ramaswamy added. 

Ramaswamy acknowledged that in the past, “vicious forms of anti-black or anti-brown discrimination” did exist in the US, but he chided the reporters for “looking in the rearview mirror … to pose a question today that is so far removed from what the reality is.”

“I think that it’s, frankly, questions and framings like that, that has caused the American public to lose all trust in the mainstream media,” he went on. 

The Washington Post reporter then jumped in, telling the GOP candidate, “You didn’t say that you condemn white supremacy.” 

To which, Ramaswamy fired back, “I’m not I’m not gonna recite some catechism for you,” reiterating that he’s “against vicious racial discrimination in this country.” 

“I’m not pledging allegiance to your new religion of modern wokeism,” the increasingly agitated White House hopeful went on, accusing the reporter of asking a “stupid question.”  

“You want to know what the best way is to end discrimination on the basis of race? Stop discriminating on the basis of race – do that and we’re going to move this country forward,” Ramaswamy argued. 

The reporter’s question stemmed from controversial former Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King’s Tuesday endorsement of Ramaswamy. 

King, who served 18 years in the House of Representatives, lost his primary race to Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra in June 2020 after being stripped of his committee assignments over comments that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle deemed as offensive and racist.  

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King, 74, told The New York Times in January 2019. 

He later issued a statement saying that rejected “those labels and the evil ideology that they define.”