Ex-Republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy posted a video explaining why he supports the removal of protesters blockading college campuses though he praised the Freedom Convoy who blockaded roads and, at times, highways.
The video was posted to X Tuesday afternoon and has gained over one million views.
“You’re free to express your own opinion, but you’re not free to break the law as you do it. We need to enforce the rule of law when other students cannot attend their classes,” he said.
Once protesters have been warned and had the opportunity to exercise their right to express themselves, Ramaswamy believes they need to respect laws that allow others to exercise their own freedoms as well.
“So I believe that universities like Ohio State, NIU, Indiana, and Texas are in the right to forcibly remove and when necessary, arrest students that stopped other students from being able to attend their classes and get the education that they have paid to get from those universities,” Ramaswamy said.
Videos posted on X show some of the tactics law enforcement is using to remove pro-Palestine encampment protesters, such as mass arrests, rubber bullets, and in the case of the University of Florida, tear gas.
“I think part of the reason I have first a different distinction (between the truckers and the campus students) is you have a different standing to protest and to engage in civil disobedience when you yourself are the person who’s actually affected by it,” Ramaswamy said. “It’s a very convenient thing to do to be able to appropriate somebody else’s cause, especially from halfway around the world, as your own, but to be then able to exercise civil disobedience on somebody else’s account.”
Civil disobedience is characterized by willfully breaking the law in a non-violent way to enact social change.
“It’s different when you’re talking about Rosa Parks in the back of the bus, or whether you’re talking about Canadian truckers who themselves are being forced personally, to use a COVID-19 vaccine that they did not want to use, that they felt was being foisted upon them, that protested the lockdown policies that affected the way that those truckers themselves were being able to carry out their own work and live their own lives and make a living,” he said. “That I think is a much more sympathetic case for civil disobedience.
He said another distinction between the two protests was the government’s response.
On campuses, Ramaswamy supports using force to remove the encampments that prevent other students from accessing the education they paid for. At the Freedom Convoy, they had never before used the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of protesters.
“If somebody is blocking a highway or somebody is blocking a college campus, I do think that law enforcement authorities are in the right to actually remove them from the areas they’re blockading so that other people can continue freely living their lives,” Ramaswamy said. “That is different from using backdoor mechanisms that shouldn’t be used in that context.”
He said he would be against the “de-banking” of protesters on campuses as well as calling it “punishment of the wrong kind.”
“It doesn’t relate to the actual act of civil disobedience itself. Arresting them and removing them from campus so that somebody else can go to their class is an action of the right kind,” Ramaswamy said. “But you can’t use backdoor mechanisms that weaponize supposedly neutral terrain, like our financial system, to do it.”
In Canada, anti-Israel encampments have been established at uOttawa in Ottawa Ont., McGill University in Montreal Que., and University of British Columbia in Vancouver B.C.
