As Media Matters explained in its article accompanying the video of Ramaswamy on Hannity, host Sean Hannity acknowledged earlier in the day, on his radio show, that Republican presidential candidate Ramaswamy is not going to provide any real competition to either Donald Trump or Joe Biden and that “nobody really has known who he is up to this point.”
But Ramaswamy promoted his anti-trans message on Meet The Press last weekend and “won,” according to Hannity and other right-wingers. That earned Ramaswamy a slot on Fox News prime time, to both reiterate his poisonous anti-trans rhetoric and to take a victory lap while Hannity’s studio audience (nearly all white) cheered wildly.
“I just stuck to the basic facts, which everyone understands, what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman,” Ramaswamy gloated. “That is what it means to stand for truth.” He went on to call the LGBTQ "movement” a “cult.”
Ramaswamy also boasted that he “graduated from Harvard with a degree in biology,” as if that makes him an expert on the subject of gender and transgender. Not that Hannity challenged his bona fides, or lack thereof, in any way.
Even worse, Ramaswamy tried to pass of his transgender-phobia and hatred as something reasonable and tolerant. “Dress how you want. Behave how you want as an adult, live your life freely. But leave our kids alone and do not demand that we change our language or the way that we live our lives. We can all live peaceably that way.”
Actually, it’s folks like Ramaswamy, with their demonization of transgender care, transgender pronouns, etc., who are making demands on how we live and use our language. But biotech millionaire Ramaswamy knows how to use the right-wing playbook of victimhood: “So, in the name of rights, what they’ve actually done, Sean, is created a new culture of oppression in the opposite direction, imposing it on kids,” he claimed.
Ramaswamy called his diatribe “eminently reasonable” and he even said, with a straight face, “I think it can actually unify our country.”
In other words, Meet The Press did nothing but boost Ramaswamy’s stature, his right-wing cred and his media presence with the interview.
Media Matters’ Eric Kleefeld summed it up nicely:
The time would be better spent drilling down on the right-wing media ecosystem itself. For example, Ramaswamy has raised less than $1 million from people other than himself, despite the free publicity he has enjoyed from frequent appearances on Fox News and other right-wing media outlets. Since Ramaswamy himself says that his mainstream media appearances are an excursion to “the other side,” mainstream outlets should greet him not as if he were an actual candidate, but instead quiz him as the media political operative he so openly is.
