Woke Capitalism Against America | Vivek Ramaswamy

My parents immigrated from India 40 years ago to southwest Ohio, where I was born. They were not rich. I asked my father why I chose to come to Ohio and he told me it was because his older sister, who also came from India, now lived in Fort Wayne Indiana. That, of course, raised the question of why my aunt had left India to come to Fort Wayne and we joked about that because it's the only state where the word India is contained in the name of the state of Indiana, so that's the story that Anyway, my father was a business man, he was at the ge plant in Evendale, Ohio, he worked there loyally for over 40 years and my mother was a geriatric psychiatrist and spent most of her career treating patients with Alzheimer's disease in nursing homes in the Ohio area.

If I learned anything during my own education it was that being the odd man out in the crowd is not always a bad thing. I went to a pretty tough public school until eighth grade, where it wasn't particularly abnormal for a kid to show off. I came to school with a knife, my parents then moved me to a private Jesuit high school, something that really shaped my own views even though I am Hindu and when I went to college and graduated in biology from Harvard in 2007 , I ended up becoming a biotech investor instead of an academic scientist I went to law school along the way I went to Yale I wanted to study law and political philosophy but I decided to keep my job at the fund where I worked and after I finished school law in 2013 had a new itch.

I wanted to build something instead of just being a passive investor in biotech, so I left my job to start a biotech company. I started by developing a drug for Alzheimer's disease, a passion I had actually acquired. for my mother, but eventually that drug failed, it was the first drug we developed, that failure hurt me and haunted me, but it also taught me that hardship is not the same as victimhood, and finally, fortunately, the company developed important drugs for others. diseases that ultimately helped many patients, one of which was a medication for prostate cancer. I ran the company for seven years until I stepped down as CEO in January because I felt even more compelled to help treat a different type of cancer. that affects the heart of our country it's not a biological cancer, it's cultural and given the reality of the world we live in, I wasn't really free to talk about it as CEO of a high profile company, so I had to give a step forward. below to be able to talk about it not as a CEO but as a citizen that new disease that new infection is spreading through our country like wildfire is something that not even the best science is going to cure and that new disease is called awakening culture is The new secular religion in America and its belief system centers on the idea that your identity is based on your race, your gender and your sexual orientation, period, it posits that the United States is a systemically racist country and that if you are black , you are inherently disadvantaged and that if you are white you are inherently privileged, no matter how much money you have, no matter what your education was, your race and gender govern who you are and what thoughts you can have, that's it, congresswoman ianna presley. she summed it up pretty clearly last year when she unapologetically declared that we don't need more black faces that don't want to be a black voice, we don't need more brown faces that don't want to be a brown voice. end quote I'm going to guess that she didn't fit her description of what is considered a brown voice.

Here's the smart part about how this particular virus spreads. If you disagree with any of those statements, then that really means you're just racist. and you don't know it and the more you resist the

woke

claim the more it looks to validate it if you say I'm not racist that means you're racist if you say all lives matter that somehow means you believe black lives don't It doesn't matter if you capitalize the w in white or you don't capitalize the b in black, you are a racist and there is no greater sentence in modern America than being labeled a racist, so between swearing allegiance to this new religion and being smeared with the scarlet r ordinary Americans choose to bend the knee the consequences could be existential for

america

this has created a new culture of fear in our country fear of losing your job fear of failing a class in school fear of becoming a an outcast in his own community and almost every day someone new is sacrificed at the altar and excommunicated from civil society for saying the wrong thing.

This new culture of fear has completely eroded our culture of free speech in America. A good measure of the health of any democracy, especially American democracy, is the percentage. of people who really feel free to say what they really think in public and right now I'm sorry to say that we are doing abysmally on that metric, according to a recent survey by the Cato Institute, more than 60 percent of Americans, uh , an overwhelming majority of this. The country says they are afraid to say what they believe because of the current political climate. That's not the United States.

It's not the country my parents came halfway around the world to join. It is not the country I learned to swear allegiance to as a child. We have a new red guard in our country reminiscent of the Chinese cultural revolution, except instead of adhering to Marxism, the new guiding principle of today's red guard is this new form of wokism, so that's where we are today in name of the diversity we have sacrificed true diversity of thought in the name of democracy. We have sacrificed our most important democratic norms of freedom of expression and open debate in the name of inclusion.

We have created an exclusionary culture where certain opinions are simply not welcome. So how do we get here? How did this new wokism become so dominant in our country? The story dates back to the 1990s. A new discipline emerged in American academia. It was called critical race theory. He postulated that race and other inherited characteristics created these invisible power structures that actually govern our real social society. relationships in the 1890s karl marx had postulated that invisible power relations were based on the loss of economic power, but critical race theory changed that narrative in the 1990s critical race theory posited that the real culprit was the loss of invisible racial power, that's when Locaism was born, now to be clear in the 90's Wokism used to be about challenging the system and there's something about that that I respect even if I don't agree with it, but today Wokism It's not about challenging the system.

Wokism is the system, so how did this fringe intellectual theory from unknown academics in the 1990s manage to infect our most important social institutions today, that is the question and in my opinion the answer actually begins with the crisis financial crisis of 2008, immediately after the 2008 crisis. You will remember that the corporations were the bad guys. The old left used to say that corporate power was bad and what we needed to do was redistribute money from the rich to the poor to help the poor whether they agreed or not with that was their theory, but the new modern left In the post-2008 world they had a different theory, they said the real problem was not poverty, it was not economic injustice, but racial injustice, misogyny and intolerance.

I guess that presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Wall Street: They could no longer be the bad guys, but they could become the good guys. just adopting these

woke

values, now remember occupy wall street, that was after 2008, it was a hard pill for wall street to swallow, but this woke thing that was easy, applaud diversity and inclusion, put some women in boards, create an affinity group for analysts of color, it's already done, just look at what Goldman Sachs did last year when its CEO declared from, of course, the mountaintops of Davos that Goldman would not do take a company public in the United States unless it met Goldman Sachs standards for board diversity.

Of course, Goldman is the sole arbiter of who is considered diverse. The banks were delighted to dance to this new melody of awakening. They were happy to lend both their money and their legitimacy and credibility to this new woke movement, but they only need one thing in return, just one. ask in return to wake up the left, get the new left to leave Wall Street alone and it worked, each side won on trade, the big banks had to use their market power to force these woke values ​​down our throats and then Instead, the new left accepts looking at the other. way when it comes to leaving your market power intact so in a nutshell this is how it worked Wall Street got into bed with a bunch of woke millennials together they both woke up

capitalism

and of course put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption, you don't even know.

You don't know what that is anymore, that's the Wall Street edition, as it turns out there's a very similar secret deal going on on the other coast of Silicon Valley too and that's how it works there, woke activists demand that Big Tech censor political opinions that I don't like and in exchange the left agrees to leave the monopoly power of Big Tech intact and is once again working masterfully for both parties this is how this new arranged marriage works this is not a love marriage this is more like mutual prostitution and it is working and the net result is the rise of America's newest leviathan, the woke industrial complex, it is no longer just Wall Street, it is no longer just Silicon Valley, it is the entirety of American corporations as We know them, it's Coca-Cola training its employees in a quote. -not to mention how to be less white and issue public statements on voting laws that make him look more like a super pac than a soda maker.

United Airlines says it will apply a quota system based on race and gender for pilots in the cockpit even if it means scrapping pilot tests as part of the process Major League Baseball decides to move the All-Star Game from This year outside of Atlanta is Nike donating tens of millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter a Marxist movement that professes to care about Black lives while also calling for the annihilation of the nuclear family structure while, by the way, Nike, of course, continues to market 200 sneakers to inner-city black kids who can't afford to buy books for school, go figure. liberals accept it because they love work because old school republicans look the other way because their inner conscience tells them that the free market can do nothing wrong without realizing that the so-called free market that they idealize does not actually exist. today, so both sides are ultimately blinded to the rise of this new 21st century monster that is far more insidious and far more powerful than anything we have ever seen in our country's history.

I would love to tell you that it doesn't get any worse than that, but it gets worse. There's a new guest who came on the scene and turned this unholy alliance into a trio. That's the Communist Party of China. They understand this game more deeply than any of us. There's even a chinese word for woke byzuo is the word it literally refers to woke white people in the united states and they use it to laugh at us and worse yet they are using wokism as a geopolitical tool to erode our position on the global stage and if If you have any doubts about it just look at what they said last year when European Union leaders pressed Xi Jinping on human rights violations in China, including the imprisonment of more than 1 million Uyghurs in concentration camps that, for True, Apple uses slave labor to manufacture its iPhones.

I bet not. Telling them that their first response was that black lives matter shows that the United States is no better Last month, when China's top diplomat came here to the Alaska summit, in his opening remarks he falsely claimed that the United States is massacring , that's their word, massacring black people. Americans and that he hopes the United States will do better on human rights. That would be ridiculous if it didn't have such serious consequences. They know that our greatest geopolitical advantage is not our nuclear arsenal, but our moral standing, but now they are using the Americans.

Weaponizing

capitalism

to achieve its own goals by using woke corporations to undermine the United States from within. take disney just a couple of years ago he said he couldn't filmin georgia in the state of georgia they did pass a new statute against abortion however, they just filmed Mulan last year in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which is literally ground zero, the epicenter of the human rights crisis of the Uyghurs, and they not only filmed there, they went further, they said: we thank the local government, they thanked the CCP for allowing them to film there that's disney the nba is even worse the nba regularly denounces alleged racial injustice here in the united states but no says not a peep while they continue to expand in the chinese market it gets worse than that when daryl mori the general the manager of the houston rockets once tweeted fight for freedom stand with hong kong lebron james one of the most outspoken critics of the last president one of the most outspoken supporters of black lives matter last week tweeting a photo of a police officer in columbus ohio and saying to hold him accountable, he's the guy who immediately came out, of course, to publicly defend china.

This two-faced behavior by corporations and their celebrities, famous cronies, is not just an accident, it is intentional, the CCP is playing us like a Chinese mandolin and it is working, and they are doing it by using our own companies against us and Why do these companies do it? The answer is plain and simple: Money China restricts market access to any company that criticizes the CCP and, better yet, favors access to China's market for companies that criticize the United States is as simple as companies simply They do what companies do, whatever makes them the most money, unfortunately the American people are falling into the trap, it has worked wonders, especially for China, so now it is no surprise that they are using that same tactic to divert responsibility from coven 19 and, in particular, the origin of this virus.

Let's just talk about the name of the virus, the Marburg virus is named after a city in Germany where the virus originated, the Ebola virus is named after a river in Africa, where it came from, the Zika virus is named after a forest in Africa. where came countless other examples japanese encephalitis encephalitis virus i could go on even when it comes to covet 19, you can say the UK strain, you can say the South African strain, you can say the Brazilian strain, you can say the Indian double mutant strain, any of them are perfectly acceptable, but if you say the Wuhan virus is immediately branded as racist and bigoted, ask yourself why the CCP has successfully weaponized not only the coven 19 pandemic but also the awakening pandemic by using the threat of racism against the United States to evade responsibility for its own actions and, worst of all, Americans. corporations are helping them every step of the way, that is the real Chinese virus we need to combat, it is a cultural virus that erodes America's greatest competitive advantage by equating American idealism with Chinese nihilism and when that happens, nihilism always wins, thanks Lebron. the james corporations win the woke activists win the chinese communist party wins the real losers in this game are the

america

n people and american democracy itself so what is the solution to all of this?

In 1980, one of my heroes, Ronald Reagan, correctly identified that the greatest threat to individual freedom. and prosperity in this country was big government, but today that is only half the story, the real threat in America is not just big government, it is this new hybrid of big government and big business. I'm all for cutting taxes and cutting government regulations, but as Abraham Lincoln, a great Republican, said 160 years ago, the dogmas of a peaceful past are inadequate for the stormy present. We are going to need new legislative solutions that address the challenges of 2021, not just the challenges of 1980.

It is no longer just about savings. big government capitalism is about saving capitalism from itself in the short term we are going to need legislative solutions that stay true to our unwavering belief in the power of private enterprise, yes, but at the same time recognizing the ways in which our private enterprise system has been co-opted and corrupted by outside forces. Take the case of Big Tech censorship, conventional wisdom holds that technology companies should be free to regulate what content does and does not appear on their websites due to the private companies and the first amendment conventionally only protects against big government censorship is fine, but that actually misses the essence of what is happening in the real world today, the liberal wing of congress has actually co-opted to Silicon Valley through the back door to do what the government cannot directly accomplish under the constitution if you have any doubts.

On that look at what they do in these congressional hearings, Democrats regularly threaten social media companies with regulatory retaliation if they fail to remove so-called hate speech or misinformation, and it worked last year, the day before that another Democratic grilling in Congress, Facebook announces new restrictions. about so-called hate speech and these restrictions became even stricter after, of course, the Democrats took control of the White House and the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives, which was actually what the senator from Connecticut , Richard Blumenthal, attributed in his words, in quotes, to a change. in the political winds those are his words and he was right now if those threats from Congress are the stick there is also the legislative carrot which is section 230 of the communications decency act of 1996 that immunizes technology companies from responsibility for censoring speech that would otherwise be constitutionally protected, so together these actually represent a modern form of crony capitalism, except conversely, big government is able to turn corporations into pawns to participate in censorship that would otherwise be constitutionally prohibited, and I personally believe that state action under the mantle of private enterprise is still state action.

I think we have to do it. a legal fix for section 230, we need to fix section 230 and it says that if you benefit from this kind of broad federal immunity, then these technology companies should also be held to the same standards as the federal government, plain and simple, The federal government can't send a private company to do what the federal government can't do directly, and when it comes to political censorship, it means meeting First Amendment standards after all, even if you're a tech company. , as long as you benefit from section 230 immunity. I am in favor of other legislative solutions that eliminate crony capitalism and especially this reverse form of crony capitalism and the fundamental injustice that results from it, especially fundamental injustice that arises from flawed policies, first of all, let me give you another example if we live in a In today's world, where private companies cannot discriminate based on race, sex or religious beliefs, then I also do not believe that those companies should be able to discriminate based on reasons of political beliefs, but that is exactly what happens day in and day out in our country today.

We could easily solve that problem in a really simple way: add political beliefs to the list of protected classes in title vii of the civil rights act of 1964 and that's it. Now, of course, there's the libertarian side of my brain, even the libertarian of my conscience, who says that look, isn't it wrong to just add another rule to what private companies can and can't do because in a libertarian utopia the market should solve these problems on its own? I'll tell you how the market could solve the problem for For example, I used to think this way, if some company is discriminated against conservatives, that should, in theory, create a business opportunity for someone else to take advantage of, e.g. hiring those same conservatives who are fired by these companies here.

Well, guess what that creates? a market opportunity for the next guy who can hire those laid-off conservatives sounds great if you're into libertarian utopia. Here is the main problem with that argument that the same logic should also apply to discrimination based on race, sex or religion. In a society where we now unquestioningly accept those restrictions on business, maybe there is an academic debate somewhere about whether even those restrictions were or are a bad idea too, but that's really a moot point nowadays, since that no one, not a Republican, not a Democrat, not even any public libertarian is seriously defending the idea that companies should be able to discriminate based on race, sex or religion, so my opinion is that, in that context, if a company can't fire someone because they're black, Muslim, or gay, so a company shouldn't be able to fire someone just because they're an avowed conservative;

If a social network can't kick you off its platform for being black, Muslim, or gay, then it shouldn't be able to deny you service just because you're a hardline Republican or a Democrat. In fact, this isn't just an academic debate, it's happening. almost every day in this country, if it can happen to the 45th president of the United States, it can happen to anyone I meet. A handful of additional legal solutions in my next book, but really these legal solutions are just a form of symptomatic therapy. What we really need in this country is a cultural cure.

The real solution to these problems is actually to gradually rebuild a shared vision of American life. identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes this more woke nonsense to irrelevance the answer doesn't really start with the government, it starts with ordinary citizens who are willing to speak up and challenge the new woke dogma in school , at work, at home and in your community also means cultivating a shared identity both in ourselves and in the next generation of Americans with the resurgence of the civics education that we have long lost in this country our schools teach our children to view our history with shame instead of pride patriotism is underway the decline of religion has almost disappeared, what does it mean to be an American today in the year 2021?

I don't remember a time in my life when we more desperately needed an answer to that question and I personally believe that answering that question is the hardest thing and the most important work we will ever do as Americans today as a people we are hungry for a cause we are hungry for a sense of purpose we hunger for identity the absence of a shared cause in America is the black hole at the center of the life of our soul nation and when you have a void that runs so deep, bad things begin to fill the void that It's part of what makes wokeness so appealing as the new religion of our time, it's the modern version of opioids for our masses as Americans, our jobs in the next few years is to fill that void with something more meaningful than just wake up.

Americans are hungry for a cause, and yet we have forgotten that in America our country can be that cause. We have spent over a decade celebrating our diversity and the differences we have. Forgetting all the ways in which we are actually equal, united by a common set of ideals as a country, most nations throughout human history defined themselves on the basis of an ethnicity, a language, a religion, or a monarch. , not the United States, we were the first. and the greatest country that can be found based on a set of ideals that unified a polyglot and divided group of people, America was not just a place, it was a shared vision of what that place could be and a part Fundamental to that vision was the American dream, the idea that no matter who your parents were, you can achieve your dreams with hard work, your own commitment, and your own ingenuity.

I have lived that dream. We call it the American dream for a reason. It's not a destination we reach for, it's a vision we Aspire to, something we will always lack but will continue to pursue anyway. That's part of what it means to have a dream, but in the last decade something scary happened. We wake up and once you wake up from a dream, you forget what. It was all about that you might remember how it felt and pretty soon forget it too, that's the real danger of waking up, but we still have time to get it right.

If the 2010s were about celebrating our demographic diversity, then the 2020s should be about celebrating what unites. us together as a people the American dream e pluribus unum of many the other side might say this is just a bunch of altruistic nonsense because we never lived up to our ideals as a country and nowYou know what they're right about, it's true. that America is not perfect, we were not perfect at our founding, we are not perfect today. I will go so far as to say that we will never be perfect as a country, but more than any nation in the history of mankind, America is the pursuit of perfection, the pursuit of a more perfect union the pursuit of happiness the pursuit of freedom equality and justice for all these are the values ​​that won us the American Revolution these are the values ​​that united us after the Civil War these are the values ​​that won us World War I and World War II and the Cold War, these are the values that they still give hope to the free world and if we embrace these common values ​​then no one in the world, not a corporation, not a nation, not a virus, is going to feed us, that is what true American exceptionalism is. it's all about and that's what we will need to organize to defeat this new cultural epidemic, thank you