Vivek Ramaswamy Quotes

when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself.

Diversity” has become a term of art, a symbol, one so powerful that the symbol is now more important than the thing it was supposed to represent. Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive.

There’s even a new Chinese word for wokeness—baizuo—referring specifically to woke white people. They use it to laugh at America.

Wokenomics is a powerful weapon for CEOs, which they can readily deploy as a smoke screen to distract from greed, fraud, and malfeasance. It

America is becoming less and less like itself and more like a bastardized version of the European model of social progress, where elite executives work hand in hand with the government to do what they think is best for society.

When companies make political proclamations, employees who personally disagree with the company’s position face a stark choice: speak up freely and risk your career, or keep your job while keeping your head down. That isn’t how America is supposed to work, yet that is a reality for many Americans today.

Goldman Sachs preaching about diversity so it can be at the front of the line for the next government bailout. It’s AstraZeneca waxing eloquent about climate change so it can secure multibillion-dollar government contracts for vaccine production. It’s State Street building feminist statues to detract attention from wage discrimination lawsuits from female employees, all the while marketing its exchange-traded fund with the ticker “SHE.” It’s Chamath Palihapitiya founding a social impact investment fund and criticizing Silicon Valley, even though he and his wealth are products of Silicon Valley, all to cover up for his prior tenure as an executive at Facebook who dreamed out loud about a private corporate military. Those companies and people use their market power to prop up woke causes as a way to accumulate greater political capital—only to later come back and cash in that political capital for more dollars.

SO WHAT GIVES? One very real possibility is that we are in an ESG asset bubble that is ripe to crash—just like the housing bubble in 2008.

As imperfect as these solutions may be, one thing is clear to me: mixing ancillary social causes with the pursuit of profit is a bad investment in every sense.

If speech is abhorrent, a democracy like ours is supposed to answer it with more speech, not censorship. That’s one of the things that separates us from the Chinese Communist Party.

The whole affair exposed a darkly hilarious truth: the NBA and its stars felt duty-bound to criticize America’s president and judicial system but considered it beyond the pale to criticize China’s.

On the back of the government scratching Wall Street’s back with its corrupt bailout, it was corporate America’s turn to return the favor. They did it by directly assuming the responsibilities of democratic government—especially the agendas of liberal politicians who might otherwise have harmfully regulated or penalized big business. Messy debates about racial inequality? Don’t worry: we’ve got it covered. New policies to fight climate change? We’ll take care of that too. Big business volunteered to take on the role of liberal government itself—crucially, on terms that were favorable to its own interests. That’s what woke capitalism is all about. It’s the hip new avatar of old-school crony capitalism.

after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.

Nike acted in synchrony, pledging “a $40 million commitment over the next four years to support the Black community in the U.S.”27 This followed Nike’s widely aired commercial featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of social injustice. The trick? Distracting you from Nike’s practice of employing child labor in sweatshops across southeast Asia or marketing $200 sneakers to inner-city black kids who can’t afford to buy books for school.

The fundamental problem with wokeness isn’t just that it offers the wrong answer to the question of who we are. The deeper problem is that it forecloses the possibility of shared solidarity as Americans. If we see each other as nothing more than the color of our skin, our gender, our sexual orientation, or the number of digits in our bank accounts, then it becomes impossibly difficult to find commonality with those who don’t share those characteristics. Yet if we define ourselves on a plurality of attributes, then we find our path to true solidarity as a people.

Here’s the issue: woke capitalists often win in the end because they use their do-good smoke screen to capture the government itself. Unfortunately, that often proves to be the most profitable strategy of all: it’s modern crony capitalism, and it “works.” The winning trade may not be to short ESG stocks but to short American democracy.

So I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades.

This approach is flawed on multiple levels. First, when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself. Second, this approach empowers entrenched managers to create the visible appearance of diversity in their organizations while avoiding the need to engage with true diversity of thought, including challenges to their incumbency. Third, when a narrow conception of diversity is implemented through affirmative action or other quota-based systems, that fuels racism and sexism by fostering tokenism in the workplace and animus among communities that fail to benefit from these programs.

You might wonder how this hurts taxpayers, especially if you’re a liberal and you think these nonprofits fight for worthy causes. So here’s the kicker: that $11 billion meant for consumer relief? Not only did a lot of it go to Democratic-favored nonprofits instead, but it ended up being much less than $11 billion. That’s because the DOJ offered banks a huge discount whenever they “donated” that money to those nonprofits. Most of the settlements gave banks double or triple credit toward their fine for every dollar they donated to these nonprofits—for instance, a Bank of America $1.15 million “donation” to the National Urban League counted as $2.6 million toward meeting its settlement obligation, and every $1.5 million to La Raza counted as $3.5 million of consumer relief. This is so mind-boggling that it’s worth summing up: after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.

But as the saying goes, he who marries the times will be a widower tomorrow.

in America we simply can’t do anything just for its own sake anymore. It’s like we’re constantly mixing earth and water. Each one is just fine on its own. But when you mix them up, you’re left with mud.

As poet John Donne reminded us, no man is an island. Every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main. As for America, we’re a nation of individuals. And that’s a good thing, as long as we still see ourselves as a nation in the end.

Historically, most countries were defined on the basis of a single attribute—a single ethnicity, a single language, a single religion, a single monarch. Not America. We were the first and greatest country defined exclusively on the basis of a set of ideas, enshrined under a single Constitution.

Corporations used to try to convince you that buying their stuff would make you cool; now they tell you buying it will make you good. The difference is subtle but important. What’s cool is entirely subjective, but what’s good is not. There’s no real risk to letting the slick PR people define what’s cool, but there’s a lot of risk to letting them define what’s good.

THE WAY WE use ordinary things to signal our tribal identities has dangerous consequences for our democracy.

Woke CEOs and investors trick consumers with the illusion that by engaging in normal acts of consumption we’re fulfilling our social obligations.

corporation ought to be free to pursue activities that go beyond the pursuit of profit—America is a free country, after all—but to the extent that it does, its social-activist shareholders shouldn’t receive any special protection from direct liability. There is no government regulatory action needed here. Just a simple legal fix—arguably a form of deregulation—that clarifies that the construct of limited liability is… well, limited.

I asked [Nick Maounis]: “What’s the main goal of your career?” He thought about it deeply in silence and then answered: “To be a billionaire. And also to own a sports team.” Sadly, Maounis never achieved either goal because Amaranth famously imploded the following year.

So what happens when an entire generation stands to benefit from the economic spoils of their parents’ work? Enter millennials—the children of baby boomers. For example, many of my peers at Harvard and at Yale grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and then matriculated at Ivy League colleges, often advantaged by their parents’ alumni status. These were the kids who needed at once to benefit from their parentally endowed privileges while also being morally superior to their parents for recognizing those privileges. Becoming woke to genetically inherited attributes like “whiteness” fit the bill perfectly, since it allowed an entire generation to blame their forefathers for the sin they had inherited at birth. It wasn’t quite their fault; it was someone else’s sin that they were merely burdened with.

Even if they’re right that the American system harms some groups, the burden of remedying that harm falls on the American people, and the American people should decide what to do about it democratically.

2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a whopping 61 percent of American voters lived in counties that voted for one of the two by a 20-point margin or more.

Chua and Rubenfeld note that no European or Asian country grants this right.20

1976, at the time of the election between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter—at that time, during a close contest, only 26 percent of Americans lived in counties where the vote was a landslide.

It’s distorting how investors allocate capital. And just like last time, I don’t think it will end well.

social purpose of the corporation was to pursue profit. He argued that “the doctrine of ‘social responsibility’” in business, if “taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity.” He warned that its proponents were “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism,” and “undermining the basis of a free society.

The government isn’t supposed to be able to police content on private platforms. But as tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld wrote in a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.

So, in a nutshell, here's how wokeness and capitalism shacked up : large corporations knocked up millennials. Together they birthed woke capitalism. And they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.

Uber said it would go out of business if it had to reclassify drivers as employees, pleading unprofitability even as it doled out millions to BLM.

Banks are not charitable institutions. When they do favors for government officials, they expect something in return.

A 2014 analysis found that from 1987 to 2012, the higher-education sector added more than half a million administrators. Their numbers have doubled relative to academic faculty.

And the clout of these administrators has also grown alongside their numbers: as Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School has argued, the balance of power at universities has increasingly shifted toward administrators, who increasingly control academic policy.

Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, recently calculated that his university has nearly 100 diversity administrators, with a total cost of approximately $14 million per year, or $300 per enrolled student.

The real question isn’t why predatory lenders in the early 2000s lent money to a bunch of borrowers who had poor credit scores; it’s why bad predatory lenders had all that money to give out in the first place. Answer: bad government policy. That ought to be one of our key lessons from the 2008 financial crisis: socially driven economic policy risks creating asset bubbles.

After BlackRock created its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the firm quietly secured its status as the main financial administrator of the economic stimulus package during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively playing the role of the government—and probably made a pretty penny for doing it. In January 2020, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced to much fanfare at (of course) the World Economic Forum in Davos a new investment commitment of $1 billion over ten years into environmental sustainability initiatives to fight climate change.

After BlackRock created its Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the firm quietly secured its status as the main financial administrator of the economic stimulus package during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively playing the role of the government—and probably made a pretty penny for doing it. In January 2020, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced to much fanfare at (of course) the World Economic Forum in Davos a new investment commitment of $1 billion over ten years into environmental sustainability initiatives to fight climate change. Just a couple of months later, it received a $1.2 billion grant—not a loan, but a grant—from US taxpayers to subsidize its development of for-profit vaccines.

It's one thing for me to decide a barber's racist, go to a different one, and tell my friends about it. It's another if I don't even need a haircut, I hear about a racist barber in another city, and I drive over to stand outside his shop with a bullhorn yelling at everyone not to go in. You can choose your barber based on whether you like his views on race, or whether you like his wallpaper, but consumers start to cross a moral line when they move beyond making their own decisions and start making everyone else's. When I stand outside the barber shop with a bullhorn, yelling about his racism, I'm not making my own decision about where to get my hair cut, I'm trying to starve the barber. Wealth is a bullhorn, that's one of the biggest problems about woke consumerism. Playing politics through consumer boycotts is a rich man's game. The more money you have, the more impact your boycott has. In capitalism, each dollar is like a vote. It's perfectly fine for dollars vote for which goods and services rise to the top. [...] But the market place of ideas is supposed to follow one person one vote, that's how we aggregate votes in a democracy. When we normalize using dollars to win battles over ideas, we're just handing the wealthy control over society's values.

Guests and hosts are at the top of Airbnb’s stakeholder list. Yet it was stealing and sharing data from both of these stakeholders to share it with an even more important one.

Part of being a loyal henchman is that you don’t just reward the boss’s friends; you punish their enemies

They’ve realized a simple truth, the same one I learned years ago during my summer at Goldman Sachs: whoever has the gold makes the rules.

If you prioritize diversity, you lose merit. But if you prioritize merit, you'll often get diversity too.

The scariest fact of all is the way that most people uncritically accept these companies’ judgments at face value, even when the companies later admit they were wrong.

Superstar LeBron James, known for his social justice advocacy, also threw his weight behind the cause to demonize Morey.

It cannot be thought that any single person or group shall ever have the right to determine what communication may be made to the American people… We cannot allow any single person or group to place themselves in the position where they can censor the material which shall be broadcasted to the public.”17

These companies then come back to the US with pent-up moral frustration for what they can’t say in China and let off their moral steam back home through the performative acts of woke capitalism.

Yet in a move that Airbnb tried to sweep under the rug, Joyce resigned before the end of the year over concerns about how the behemoth was sharing data on millions of its users—without their knowledge—with the Chinese Communist Party.

In sum, here’s how the game works. First, Black Lives Matter activists—or environmentalists or feminists or whoever—become the front for American technology companies to win consumer trust. Second, those companies monetize that trust by generating clicks, selling ads, and charging fees—generating a treasure trove of sensitive personalized data about each of their consumers. Third, the CCP demands access to that data as a condition of entry for companies to do business in China.

In sum, here’s how the game works. First, Black Lives Matter activists—or environmentalists or feminists or whoever—become the front for American technology companies to win consumer trust. Second, those companies monetize that trust by generating clicks, selling ads, and charging fees—generating a treasure trove of sensitive personalized data about each of their consumers. Third, the CCP demands access to that data as a condition of entry for companies to do business in China. Fourth, these companies supplicate to the CCP and make a killing in China. Fifth, they keep mum about their dealings in China while continuing to issue woke proclamations through their corporate megaphones. BLM wins. Silicon Valley wins. The CCP wins. The real losers of this game are the American people.

the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead.

There’s another problem. Using the WHO as a single source of truth is dangerous to science—and to public health too.

But the beauty of this scam is that it’s a class-action lawsuit. The members of the class don’t even know they were supposed to get anything, so they’ll never miss it. Another masterful trick from the woke-industrial complex.

A corporation offers woke people money and influence, and in return they lend it the protective cloak of wokeness’s moral superiority to hide its wrongdoing.

UN Women is willing to tolerate racism in exchange for a token portion of Unilever’s enormous profits.

HERE’S ANOTHER ANGLE to the quid pro quo between woke nonprofits and corporations. Remember those massive settlements that companies like Goldman pay for violating laws, like the $5 billion in fines it paid for that Malaysian scandal I talked about in the Chapter 1? Well, here’s a second part of the scam—the settlement money that’s supposed to go to taxpayers ends up in the pockets of left-wing nonprofits

Part of being a loyal henchman is that you don’t just reward the boss’s friends; you punish their enemies. And that’s what the DOJ has become—a goon squad that kicks down the doors of wokeness’s public enemies.

If they’re fines, they naturally go to the US Treasury, and the Constitution says, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”7 That means that Congress decides what happens to that bank money. But if it turns into donations instead of fines, the money never goes to the Treasury, and the executive branch gets to decide where it goes.

The scam is fundamentally the same: when corporations reach settlements over their wrongdoing, judges and lawyers find ways to direct the money to their pet causes instead of to the people who were wronged.

In a different Google case, federal district judge James Ware rewrote the settlement to direct $500,000 to his own alma mater, Santa Clara University School of Law, where he taught classes. The money—I’m not joking about this—went to fund a center on ethics.8

In early 2021, YouTube did the same thing by censoring the Senate testimony of a doctor who made the medical case for ivermectin, a little-known tropical medicine, to treat severe COVID-19 patients, with no explanation other than to say it violated its misinformation policy.

Under its stated standard, YouTube would’ve banned any videos in January 2020 that claimed that human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 was possible, given the official WHO stance at the time. In retrospect, that was arguably the most dangerous lie about public health in modern history.

This is not a marriage of love. this is more like mutual prostitution... and it is working!

The American vision of separating church from state, and democracy from capitalism, has been supplanted by this new global vision of mixing them all with one another—leaving us with none of them in the end.

stakeholder capitalism: it allows them to exercise quasi-political power without having to go through the hassle of getting elected. Yet that hassle is part and parcel of democracy itself.

I believe even honest woke capitalists fail to see how much additional harm they do to American democracy when business elites tell ordinary Americans what causes they’re supposed to prioritize.

So they crafted a clever solution… one that already existed, actually. Counterintuitively, it was actually the legal mandate to maximize shareholder value. To protect against corporations becoming behemoth monsters, corporations needed to be restricted to their purposes.

Now corporations have simply come up with a new trick tailored for Democrats: they lend corporate power as a tool to implement radical agendas that Democrats could never pass in Congress.

Companies like Airbnb, Disney, and the NBA gain moral clout when they preach about how much they care about stakeholders at home. But then they turn around and use that moral clout to implicitly endorse atrocities abroad when foreign dictators flex their own stakeholder status. That’s the key difference between stakeholder and shareholder capitalism:

THE CCP IS the spider at the center of the global web of stakeholder capitalism.

By acting like the good guys, as Wokenomics demands they do, pharma companies are actually able to get away with behavior that leaves society worse off in the end.

THE POWER OF the managerial class is now spreading like a plague to other spheres of our society. It afflicts governments, nonprofits, universities, and even hospitals. It’s a cultural cancer that threatens to erode American identity in each of these institutions from within.

The key problem with Section 230 isn’t just the statute itself but the abuse of the statute by companies.

The Wall Street Journal summed up the situation in an article titled “China has one powerful friend left in the US: Wall Street.”35 And it turns out the CCP’s very best friend on Wall Street is Larry Fink.

As it turns out, woke activists are more easily appeased: to mollify them, Disney made the Tibetan monk a woman instead of a man, casting popular actress Tilda Swinton in the role.

Companies like Airbnb, Disney, and the NBA gain moral clout when they preach about how much they care about stakeholders at home. But then they turn around and use that moral clout to implicitly endorse atrocities abroad when foreign dictators flex their own stakeholder status.

Yet Airbnb effectively gets to have it both ways—flaunting a sleek video titled “We Stand with #BlackLivesMatter” while quietly collaborating with CCP without any mention of China on Instagram or anywhere else.

Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay, successfully published several purposefully farcical academic papers in peer-reviewed journals in fields like cultural studies, queer studies, fat studies, race and gender studies, and so on.

Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals.

Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities.

The ugliness of woke consumerism is the way it replaces that invitation with a call to using brute force as punishment instead. It’s a game in which all the players lose.

Social media companies promised to bring people together, but instead they provide echo chambers where like-minded people reinforce each other’s biases.

it is unbecoming for one citizen to use the threat of starvation and homelessness to silence a fellow citizen. It lacks common decency.

Service is too often bundled with an ulterior motive in America. Only the best of us pursue it for its own sake. For the rest, including my younger self, it’s frequently packaged with something self-serving to make it more appetizing.

In practice, universities quickly learned that they could get away with whatever they wanted as long as they chanted “we practice holistic review” at judges whenever they got sued over their affirmative action policies.

In 2020, the mantra of “keeping money out of politics” was no longer a liberal slogan.

Imposing an ideological racial purity test on Black men and women is dangerous. It is divide and conquer. It is colonial. But news media companies who purport to be anti-racist are often blind to this reality.

the woke mob is just behaving the way any mob does. First it tars and feathers the enemy; then when the enemy’s supporters reveal themselves, it tars and feathers them too.

According to corporate America, it’s anti-semitic to compare liberals to Nazis but praiseworthy to compare conservatives to them.