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The land of the free and the home of the… weird? This seems to be tech entrepreneur and unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s new motto.
In an intriguing piece for The Free Press, Ramaswamy defends the “weirdness” that has made America and its people so great. Of the Founding Fathers, he writes: “They were weird. Often the ones who said the weirdest things adopted some of the weirdest viewpoints by the standards of their day.”
Ramaswamy goes on to note that John Adams was an abolitionist when slavery was the norm and a self-taught Hindu scholar. Thomas Jefferson was fluent in four languages, wrote 19,000 letters by hand, and invented prototypes of the polygraph and the swivel chair. Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod, bifocal spectacles, and founded hospitals.
“People like [John] Adams made our nation a magnet for minds that were as courageous and bizarre as their own,” wrote Rawaswamy. Make America weird again?
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