How Troubled School Years Led a ‘Truth-Bomb Thrower’ to Start MAGA Civil War

When Vivek Ramsawamy launched an explosive attack on much of American culture in a post-Christmas tweet, he started an all-out MAGA civil war. He also put himself on the couch.

The 39-year-old tech entrepreneur turned fast-talking ultra-Trump loyalist lashed out at a culture that lauds jocks and prom queens, sleepovers and Friends, “chillin’” and “hanging out at the mall.” These, he posited, were why tech firms wanted to hire “foreign-born & first-generation engineers.”

The 400-word post prompted outraged responses ranging from the incredulous to the racist; parts of MAGA had thought they were voting against all immigration.

But at the heart of the tirade may well be a truly American story: a boy experiencing difficult times in the tough teenage years and a man who still has thoughts about his fellow middle- and high-schoolers.

Ramaswamy was born to Indian immigrant parents in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother, Geetha, was a psychiatrist, his father V. G., or Ganapathy, was an engineer turned patent attorney for General Electric, although, he told The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, they “came with not a lot of money.”

Despite his attack on “jocks,” he said his first dream was to be a professional basketball player, until he realized in fourth grade that he was not going to succeed.

But what is clear is that his early teenage years were not to his liking. He told the podcast that he attended a public school which he described as “not particularly great,” and said, “That was a place where being the straight-laced, academic, put your head down go to science class sort of kid wasn’t actually particularly rewarded,” he said.

In the eighth grade, he suffered an incident that clearly shaped his worldview. In one telling, to the Iced Coffee Hour podcast, he said he “got pushed down the stairs carrying my books to science class,” and said that it was probably the cause of hip surgery a few months later.

“It was a random kid,” he said. “A lot of these kids grew up in difficult backgrounds, so a lot of the kids in the classrooms—they weren’t in my classes necessarily—but were like one or two years left behind. These were kids who were 15 or 16 years old but were still in the seventh grade. You get a nerdy kid who’s wearing glasses, who’s carrying science books, who’s a target. I can’t even remember who the kid was.” He added that a teacher told his parents, “You have to get this kid the heck out of here.”

That telling of the story is notably less racially loaded than how he put it in his book, Nation of Victims, where he wrote, “…a big Black kid thought it would be amusing to push a nerdy high-achieving Indian kid down the stairs. Whether our races were relevant, I don’t know, but I’ve learned that others think it’s part of these stories.”

Ramaswamy has not named the school but it was identified by The Cincinnati Enquirer as Princeton Junior High School, which is now Princeton Community Middle School, in Sharonville, a suburb of Cincinnati. Whether the school was “not particularly great” is open to question; the paper ran a photo of eighth grade Ramaswamy taking part in an opera.

His mother emailed the paper to say of her son, at the time running for the presidency, “He was a bit shy and went through some rough times in school days but never once complained. He was always genuinely interested in learning and excelling and at the same time, embraced failures gracefully.”

In his tellings of that story, Ramaswamy has said that being thrown down the stairs prompted his parents to send him to St. Xavier High School, one of Cincinnati’s elite schools. The Catholic high school—fees are now $16,000 a year—is run by Jesuit priests. Graduates include a selection of Ohio politicians, including current Republican congressman Brad Wenstrup, as well as business and media figures including Joel Podolny, a former dean of the Yale School of Management turned Apple executive, and the CNBC anchor Joe Kernen, who is a “close contact” of Donald Trump.

As a “lone” Hindu at a Catholic school, Ramaswamy found himself “an outsider,” he has said. (His graduating year was not all Catholic, including at least one Sikh.)

But his “outsider” status seems to have ended quickly; by the end of his time there he was headed for Harvard and was valedictorian. His attack on a culture that honors quarterbacks over valedictorians does not entirely mesh with how he used his speech to speak about watching the Xavier football team losing in the state finals, which he described as “heartbreak.”

It appears the school was not exactly honoring athletes over academics. In his telling at the speech, he highlighted the swim team’s 25th state title, then added, “We might remember that the best recognition our school could give for that 25th state title was an optional fifth period lunchtime ceremony.”

Ramaswamy also flamed “hanging out at the mall” in his Thursday tweet suggesting he was studying in the windowless, white-painted room in the basement of his parents’ home.

His own upbringing is also hinted at in the tweet’s flaming of a series of TV hits from the ’90s, including Saved by The Bell and Friends.

“I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the ’90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity,” he wrote.

Perhaps the most poignant insight into what turned Ramaswamy into the self-proclaimed “hard truths” teller is this passage, hinting at the impact he felt his family life had in his teenage years. “Most normal American parents look skeptically at ‘those kinds of parents.’ More normal American kids view such ‘those kinds of kids’ with scorn.”

This time, it’s the MAGA movement he thought was his own that is bringing the scorn.