A 2024 Republican presidential hopeful is taking heat for a response he gave to a question about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
During an interview on Tuesday, The Blazeās Alex Stein asked entrepreneur and Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy a series of rapid-fire questions.
āWas the moon landing real or fake?ā Stein asked
Ramaswamy responded, āI have no evidence to suggest it was fake, so Iām going to assume it was real.ā
Stein then asked, āOK, 9/11, inside job or exactly as the government tells us?ā
āI donāt believe the government has told us the truth,ā the Republican hopeful responded.
He added, āIām driven by evidence and data. What Iāve seen in the last several years is we have to be skeptical of what the government does tell us. I havenāt seen evidence to the contrary, but do I believe everything the government has told us about it? Absolutely not.ā
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David Harsanyi, a senior editor at The Federalist, wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, āI mean, obviously. Why would a bunch of Islamists who openly promised to blow up the Twin Towers for years, and then tried and failed to blow up the Twin Towers, actually blow up the Twin Towers? Gotta be something else!ā
āThere is no bottom,ā wrote conservative writer Ryan James Girdusky.
Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor of National Review, wrote, āThey say it because it sells. But it does the country great harm, keeping its brain addled.ā
āIf you want to be the GOP presidential nominee, you need to believe the government blew up the Twin Towers, and Osama bin Laden is an innocent man whoās living under an alias in Miami,ā Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) chimed in.
The Atlanticās Yair Rosenberg suggested, āSomething worth watching for in any aspiring politician is whether they have the backbone and rhetorical deftness to reject the implications of bad questions rather than pandering to their interviewer or audience.ā
āIf they canāt do this, they wonāt go far,ā he added.
Townhallās John Hasson wrote, āAaaaand this is what happens when youāre a novelty candidate whose whole brand is āthink outside the box.āā
Ramaswamy later tried to clarify his comments in a post on X as he wrote, āDo I believe our government has been completely forthright about 9/11? No.ā
āAl-Qaeda clearly planned and executed the attacks, but we have never fully addressed who knew what in the Saudi government about it. We *can* handle the TRUTH,ā he added.
