Dear Ohio, you have too many universities these days, please eliminate 3 of them. P.S. I am not a crackpot. (Update: Teaching = Day care)

Does anybody here remember Vivek Ramaswamy? The biotechbro billionaire turned Republican presidential candidate who was going to work with Lemu Onsk to wreck the federal government? But for some reason the apartheid princeling took against him and when he decided he would also run for governor of Ohio tRump found a scruple and shooed him out while muttering about how it just wasn’t going to work out?

It goes without saying that racism is always wrong, even when it happens to shithead billionaires who try to hang out with racists. But that was as funny as it was predictable.

Or it was funny. A quick peek at the latest on his campaign suggests the poor man might be suicidal.

The Ohio Republican Party’s candidate for governor, biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, says he loves Ohio’s state universities and colleges.

But some say he sure has a funny way of showing it.

Ramaswamy, in a video posted by his own campaign on Threads, said there are too many of them and raised the specter of closing or consolidating some of them.

“I want us to have the best universities,” Ramaswamy said in the video. “We have too many of them. They need to be consolidated.

“And when you consolidate them, they can actually be centers of excellence, who actually are the best in their respective domains, instead of trying to create replicas and clones of one another throughout the state.”

That statement pricked up the ears of state university administrators from Ashtabula to Cincinnati and everywhere in between, puzzled by how eliminating state universities — which are not only educational assets but economic drivers in nearly every part of the state — would be a wise decision.

Amy Acton, M.D, the Democratic candidate quickly made the video part of her campaign. His campaign responded with the standard Republican one-two punch of “Liar!” and “The words he’s saying are not what he meant!”

The proposal to consolidate Ohio’s institutions of higher learning, perhaps until they can be drowned in a bathtub, follows another idea about education.

Last fall, Ramaswamy had to walk back a video in which he proposed a 365-day public school year, with classes running from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. That proposal was met with so much derision and angry opposition that he immediately yanked it off his campaign site.

He’s not suicidal. He’s just another rich dickhead who wants to inflict his shit ideas on people.

Update: Several of you have speculated about the reason for his year-round school idea but I didn’t see any correct guesses.

It’s his solution to the high cost of childcare.

“I’m a dad.

Who has so much money that each of his kids’ nannies have have a team of assistant nannies. Fuck this guy for trying to be just plain folks.

Make parenting more affordable by making school year-round and going til 4 o’clock instead of 3 o’clock so you don’t have to pay for child care,” Ramaswamy said on the original video.

Everyone gets off at 3:30 pm right? Or they can send the au pair to pick up the kids. And teaching and daycare, that’s practically the same thing, right?

The video did not include any discussion of increased taxpayer costs for year-round schools or an extended school day.

Of course not. It’s maintenance, HVAC, staff, salaries, transportation, insurance for one state school system for three additional months, Michael, how much can it cost?

Republicans initially claimed that Acton’s camp created the video using deepfake AI, but the campaign confirmed to the Columbus Dispatch that the video was real.

Deny the evidence!

The school portion was edited out of the new video.

Delete the evidence!