Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy told independent show host Tucker Carlson that “pervasive censorship in this country” caused the January 6, 2021, Capitol Riot.
Ramaswamy sat down with Carlson for Blaze Media’s” The Summit Friday” where the pair discussed important policy issues including the often explosive topic of January 6. “You want to know what caused January 6, it’s pervasive censorship in this country in the lead up to January 6,” Ramaswamy said. “You tell people in this country they cannot speak, that is when they scream. You tell people they cannot scream, that is when they tear things down.”
The pair noted that the protest turned riot has been often blamed on “one man whose name is unspeakable” or “Qanon.” However, the unprecedented pandemic, violent riots and tumultuous election cycle suggest there was so much more to it than that.
“[T]he reality is, we were told that you could not question where the [COVID-19] virus came from when we all knew that it came from a lab in Wuhan which they now admit,” Ramaswamy noted.“We were told that you could not send a private message to someone on the eve of an election that Hunter Biden’s laptop story was actually a true story worth considering before an election. You were systematically suppressed.”
“So that’s the lead-up of one full year of telling people you have to shut up, sit down and do as you’re told,” he said. He later added that “what caused January 6 is a cycle of censorship in this country and until we look ourselves in the mirror and admit the truth on that, we will not move forward as a country.”
Carlson pointed out that many who defend censorship seem to think there is good reason to censor speech. “A lot of the people who are pushing censorship [...] claim they’re doing it in order to protect Democracy. But how can you have a Democracy with censorship?,” he asked.
Ramaswamy agreed and noted that “the best measure of the health of our American democracy, our constitutional republic, is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public.” In Ramaswamy’s estimation,“[t]here’s no doubt we’re doing poorly.”
The presidential candidate also pointed to the hotly debated issue of BigTech-government collusion to censor viewpoints that go against the approved narratives. “The culture is censorious enough. Now if you say the government on top of that is using social media companies to do through the back door what government could not censor through the front door under the constitution, that creates the real threat to lower case d ‘democracy,’” Ramaswamy stated.
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