Each was several days after Raw Story broke the news that Ramaswamy’s black baseball caps were manufactured in Myanmar, a country rife with human rights atrocities and led by a military junta that has close ties with China — a country with which Ramaswamy is campaigning to cut dependence.
RELATED ARTICLE: Ramaswamy campaign hats made in repressive nation with ‘one of the worst governments in the world’
In the video Ramaswamy posted he asks a staffer for a "truth hat" and then asks a man who's wearing a camouflage Donald Trump cap, "May I personally put this on you?"
When the man agrees, Ramaswamy ends the video saying, "Speak the truth," before thanking the man again.
Ramaswamy's campaign had pledged to ditch the made-in-Myanmar caps after Raw Story asked about them.
“When this was brought to Vivek’s attention, he said we were changing it. He was not aware at all of the source, and it has been changed,” Stefan Mychajliw, deputy communications director for Ramaswamy’s campaign, told Raw Story on Sept. 8.
But that change did not come to pass, and now, Mychajliw says he has “no idea” what happened to the remaining “Made in Myanmar” hats and “no knowledge” of them being distributed in Iowa last week.
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“This is brought to our attention from you and others in the field,” Mychajliw told Raw Story on Monday. “Mr. Ramaswamy encouraged all of our teams to use the products made in the USA, and his focus is cutting a million federal jobs, the government bombing cartels to protect the southern border, declaring independence in China. His sole focuses are domestic and foreign policy and his America first agenda."
Raw Story also learned that some of the Ramaswamy campaign hats and T-shirts distributed in Orange City, Iowa, on Sept. 8, and Bettendorf, Iowa, on Sept. 13, had their tags removed, but Mychajliw told Raw Story he had “zero knowledge of that.”
“Our teams were notified considering the fact that it was a one time quick rush order, our policy is to use products made in the USA, and nothing's changed on that,” Mychajliw said.
A tag inside a "Truth. Vote Vivek." hat distributed in Iowa by the Vivek Ramaswamy presidential campaign shows that the cap comes from a company called Otto and was made in Myanmar. The photo taken on the right shows the hat with the tag removed.
Why does a hat matter?
While Mychajliw said Ramaswamy has “much bigger issues to be concerned about running for the president of the United States,” human rights experts tell Raw Story that merchandising is an important part of a candidate’s public policy as it normalizes his positions with the public — especially a candidate such as Ramaswamy who has pushed an anti-China and “America first” foreign policy.
“It's hypocritical on his part to claim that he wants to move away from China but nevertheless is supporting products in places where China is very dominant, where it basically is behind many of these manufacturing companies,” Irina Tsukerman, a foreign policy expert, human rights and national security lawyer and president of communications advisory company, Scarab Rising, told Raw Story earlier this month.
Ramaswamy, who’s favorability has been declining slightly in polls but continues to run third behind former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in some recent national polls, has merchandise for sale on his website boasting “Made in USA” as a selling point.
Writing August 28 in The American Conservative, Ramaswamy said “it is unacceptably dangerous that so much of our way of life is dependent upon Chinese manufacturing and Taiwanese semiconductors.”
Ramaswamy continued his criticism of China, which has a close relationship with Myanmar, saying he’d “incentivize American companies to move supply chains away from China and rebase them in allied markets.”
When asked about “Made in America” stickers on The Fifth Column podcast, Ramaswamy said, “I’ve actually called for total decoupling from China, total economic independence from China, not on protectionist grounds at all but on grounds of long run national security … I think it is not good for the long run security interests of the United States when we are dependent economically on our enemy for our modern way of life.”
But factories in Myanmar, which shares a border with China, often are operated by Chinese factory owners, human rights experts told Raw Story, and China is a strong supporter of Myanmar’s military government, Tsukerman said, with the Council on Foreign Relations writing that China has “gone all in with the Myanmar regime”
“It's really rather astonishing to me that he would stoop so low to have a piece of merchandise coming from a country that is one of the worst rights abusing situations in the world,” Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asia division for Human Rights Watch, told Raw Story earlier this month. “It boggles the mind, frankly, that somehow they think it's alright to source something like a hat from Myanmar when any sort of brief Google search can come up with a full page of atrocities that have been committed by that military government.”
This article has been updated to include details about Ramaswamy giving a made-in-Myanmar campaign cap to a supporter.
