Noah Rotenstreich, 13, an eighth grader at the Altamont School in Birmingham, was front and center when Republican presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy spoke to Alabama Republicans on Tuesday night.

“You can have the microphone,” Ramaswamy said during a question-and-answer session after his speech at the Renaissance Birmingham Ross Bridge hotel leading into a debate set for Wednesday night in Tuscaloosa. “Let everybody hear.”

Rotenstreich walked to the stage and took the microphone.

“What would your advice be for a kid growing up in a school and a society that is just extremely pushing wokeism as mandatory?” Rotenstreich said.

“We’re going to divide up some responsibilities, alright, some of it’s going to be on me and some of it’s going to be on you,” Ramaswamy said. “The part that’s on me, on us, really,is a lot of what we’re seeing across the educational system and across the economy is downright illegal, it’s a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. I wrote this in my first book, ‘Woke, Inc.’ You can’t discriminate on the basis of religion in this country. That means an employer can’t force an employee to bow down to that employer’s religion. I think much of what we see in the modern wokeism across our schools undoubtedly meets the Supreme Court’s test for what counts as a religion. If that’s the case, certain words you can’t say, clothes you can’t wear, apologies you must recite, excommunication procedures, that’s what cancel culture’s all about. That means we’re seeing a widespread civil rights violation in this country. My view is if you can’t be fired for being a particular race or gender, you shouldn’t be able to be fired for expressing a particular set of beliefs either. We’ve got to apply those standards even-handedly, and that’s not your fault, that’s the fault of a generation that came before you, that has failed to apply those rules even-handedly. So, there’s a role for the government to play to make sure that our existing rules are applied even-handedly, and to play our role in shutting down the U.S. Department of Education foisting down wokeism and using our taxpayer money to do it.”

Then he told Rotenstreich what he should do.

“You can’t expect someone to come from on high in the White House to save us,” Ramaswamy said. “Our politics doesn’t work that way. If we are going to be saved, it is going to be because we save ourselves. Parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, business leaders, teenagers in this country each doing their part as well. I’ll give you two things to do. When you find yourself in a room, and you believe that your are the only person who believes what you do, you have an obligation, now more than ever, to stand up, and say it.”

Rotenstreich smiled and nodded as Ramaswamy spoke.

“When you do that, you will find you are not the only person in that room who believed what you did,” Ramaswamy said.

Ramaswamy will be one of four Republican presidential candidates on stage Wednesday night, Dec. 6, for the fourth Republican debate, to be held on the campus of the University of Alabama. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

Former President Donald Trump, with a wide lead in the polls, has opted to skip the debates so far.

The two-hour debate will start at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 6, moderated by NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas, SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly, and Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon. It will air on The CW Network, which is WTTO Channel 21 in Birmingham, and on The NewsNation web site.

See also: Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at Ross Bridge