‘You’re the Wokest Out of Everybody!’ Ramaswamy and Comic Dave Smith Attack DeSantis For Crackdown on Anti-Israel Speech

Freedom of speech, the most celebrated amendment in the Bill of Rights, has become the subject of hot-button debate since the start of the Israel-Hamas War. And self-declared “free speech absolutist” Vivek Ramaswamy called out one fellow Republican for his own censorship on comedian Dave Smith’s podcast.

Ramaswamy, who is running to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, has a lot of opinions and boy, does he love sharing them. They might be making him less likeable by the day, but Smith actually gave Ramaswamy props for his position on differing opinions and how they are freely expressed in these United States:

There are a lot of people in the kind of, like, conservative pundit world, and I’m not really even talking about like the corporate press. I’m talking more about like, you know, Ben Shapiros and people like that, who kind of rose to fame off of opposing identity politics and opposing cancel culture and censorship. And that seems to all change when Israel is involved in a war. And all of a sudden, if you are, say, critical of the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians or you’re critical of the war, you are a Jew hater. It seems very similar to me to the way woke leftists, you know, would dismiss people who make any type of argument.

Ramaswamy, who wrote a book called Woke Inc., which he plugged during the conversation, made it clear how much he supports free speech even though some of those opinions are made by “idiots” with whom he disagrees, in the case of “lost” college students protesting in support of Palestine.

But given that example, Ramaswamy pointed to fellow GOP presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis, who passed a law requiring the Florida chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine to shut down:

And you have Ron DeSantis passing a law in Florida that requires Students for Justice for Palestine — which is like an idiotic student group, no doubt, many things they say I find offensive — but literally calling for them to disband, requiring them to disband in Florida state universities because he said they’re part of assisting, providing material support to a terrorist organization. I mean, this is post-9-11 stuff here. This is Dick Cheney, Patriot Act stuff here in this country. These kids weren’t providing munitions and money to Hamas. They were tweeting in favor of Palestinians. And to call that material support and then to ban them, that’s a First Amendment violation.

Which led Smith to point out that DeSantis “runs as Mr. Anti-Woke” but then employs his own cancel culture on pro-Palestine students, making him “the wokest out of everybody!”

Watch the video above via Chief Nerd on Twitter/X.

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