Episode 10: Critical Race Theory with Vivek Ramaswamy

is vivek Rama Swamy. He's an incredibly successful entrepreneur. He's founded multibillion dollar enterprises, led a biotech company CEO, became a hedge fund partner in his twenties, trained as a scientist at Harvard and a lawyer at Yale. Needless to say, he's not a dumb guy. The Vega is also the author of the forthcoming book Woke, Inc. Which takes us inside corporate America's social justice scam. It comes out this August, and after talking to him, I can't wait to read it.

I think it's gonna be really interesting. The Vega has lived the American dream. His parents came here from India as immigrants, and he has built something for himself. He knows how unique and amazing America is, and that's why he is so concerned about critical race theory infecting America's institutions. Also, as an entrepreneur, he knows a thing or two about what's happening in corporate America today. The Vegue and I discussed critical race theory, this cancer, cancer that is infecting

our country. Right now, we're going to discuss the dangers of wokeness, his career in business, and so much more. And with that, I want to welcome the Vague Ramaswami to the show The Vegue. Thanks for coming on The Truth with Lisa Booth. Thanks for having me. So your parents immigrated from India. How did that shape your childhood growing up? Look? Actually, I was in second grade in ninety nine three when I actually watched Martin Luther King's

I Have a Dream speech for the first time. And in a certain sense, when I watched that speech, it actually made me think about my parents. That that was the one where he said he wanted his kids to grow up in a country where they'd be judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character, and as I thought about it in the years since then, that was that was really the dream that allowed my own parents to succeed in the

way that they had. Right my dad came halfway across the world in the late nineties seventies with a thickening accent, no dollars in his pocket, and built a career as an engineer at GE in Cincinnati over the course of forty years. My mom was a geriatric psychiatrist who created patients with Alzheimer's disease for her entire career, despite being a forg medical graduate. And to me, it was something that I took inspiration from and that I definitely couldn't

do that today. What they did, pack my bags and go halfway around the world, go to a different country with a different culture, a different surrounding. And by the way, in an era where we didn't have an internet, they had to have a loose phone connection. I wouldn't be able to do that. So in a certain sense, I took a lot of inspiration from the courage that my parents had in voting with their feet to come to a place where they wanted to build a new life.

But it was also a reminder of what the place they came to America was all about, was a place where they could live that dream that I learned about even when I was a young kid, that no matter who you are or what the color of your skin is, we now live in a country where you'd be judged on the content of your character and the content of your accomplishments rather than the color of your skin or

where you were born. And and to me, that's part of why I was always been partial to the American dream is that it wasn't just something I studied in school. It was something that my family and I had the privilege of living. But at what point do you think this focus at what point do you think that came into focus? I mean, at what point was there a shift or or or when do you think this happened in the country in terms of just this intense identity

politics focus. Yeah. Look, I think that the one of the beautiful things about the American dream is something that it's something that we aspire to, right, It's not a destination that we reach. It is a vision that we aspire to, which means we're always gonna fall forward. And so I think for as long as we've overcome the civil rights the civil rights the civil rights movement overcame a lot of historical injustices. You know, we were never

fully all the way there. And so in the nineties began the birth of critical race theory, the idea that there were these invisible power structures that governed the social universe, kind of like Karl Mark said it in the he thought there were these economic power relationships. There was the emergence of this new academic movement in the nineties, critical race theory and related woke ism that said that actually, no, it's not just economic disempowerment's racial disempowerment and bigotry and

misogyny and racism that govern our social forces. And this is a fringe theory in the academy, and it added something to the marketplace of ideas. It wasn't something that I personally subscribed to, but there's always something about a person who wants to challenge the system that I respect,

whether or not I agree with them. When this really changed, actually was an untold story that begins with the two eight financial crisis, when this went from being about challenging the system, when wokism actually became the new system itself, and it was a tricky It was a tricky trade underlying how that happened. But the way it worked was after two corporations were the bad guys. Wall Street was

the enemy. Corporate power was the target for the old Left, and what they wanted to do was take money from wealthy corporations and redistributed to poor people. Agree or disagree, that's what the old left wanted to do. And something new happened in the post two thousand eight period where there was this new left, this new woke left that actually said that now it wasn't really about economic injustice or poverty, No, it was about racial injustice and misogyny

and bigotry. And that actually presented the opportunity of a generation for the most powerful companies in the United States, presented an opportunity of generation for Wall Street. Because ocupy wall Street's a tough pill to swallow, but this woke

stuff was actually pretty easy. And so basically Wall Street jumped on the woke bandwagon, agreed to lend it not only it's money, but it's legitimacy to this new racial identity based movement, and together you've got a bunch of big banks that got together with a bunch of woke millennials together their birth woke capitalism, and then they put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption, and that actually proved to be a really convenient trade that took this nascent

idea of wokenness from the halls of the academy and supercharged it with the potency of capitalism. And then once wokeness got got in bed with capitalism, that's actually when it became unstoppable. And so Silicon Valle did the same thing, a backroom bargain where they say they're gonna censor content online that the woke movement doesn't want to hear, and in return, the woke movement agrees to work with the Democratic Party to leave their monopoly power intact. The rest

of corporate America started following the same pattern. That's really when wokeness became unstoppable, as when it merged with capitalism. And capitalism is a powerful tool, usually to organize the society's products, services, and economic affairs, but now it's being used to organize society's social affairs to under this guise of wokeness. So long story there, but but if you wanted the redux version. That's kind of how it goes. No, I,

I think that's incredibly interesting. And so you've sort of existed though in a lot of these structures where you know, wokeisum is so prevalent. Right, So you graduated underground at Harvard, you went to Yale law school, you're an entrepreneur, you've existed in the biotech industry. I mean, how much indoctrination did you find going on when you went to school at Harvard and Yale. Well, I actually think it's changed

a lot over the last decade. So to be clear, Harvard and Yale were definitely left leaning places at the point at the point in time where I was there. But I'll tell you this, Lisas, I actually benefited from it, right. I think I got a better education than most of my peers because I didn't necessarily subscribe to liberal dogma.

And that means you get your views challenge, and I mean sometimes you change your view, and sometimes it means that you've come out with your same view, but with a better understanding of why it is you believe what you do, rather than just knowing what it is that

you believe. So I was actually grateful for it and when I went to Harvard I graduate two seven, I still found it to be a place that was about the intellectual meritocracy, in the marketplace of ideas, where the best ideas and the best arguments when on their own terms, irrespective of the background or the color of the skin of the person who's making that argument. It was it

was definitely tilted in one direction. But I actually do that is tilted in my favor in that by being in the intellectual minority, actually got a better education out of it. I think things changed dramatically over the decade. Over the last decade, I do not think that's the intellectual environment at Harvard today. It is definitely not the

intellectual environment at Yale today. And now what you say is merged with your identity that somebody can't evaluate your ideas without also evaluating the other inherited attributes that you were born with, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation. And there was this bizarre move intellectual move over the worse of the last few years, where race actually meant something that went even beyond the color of your skin.

Ianna Pressley, remember the Squad, summed it up actually pretty well last year when she said we don't want any more black faces that don't want to be black voices. We don't want any more brown faces that don't want to be brown voices. The side note, I definitely don't fit her description of what counts as a brown voice, despite the fact that I have brown skin. But to be being brown or being black was always about a

skin color, not about a voice. And so now that created the opportunity to say that actually, there's such a thing as a black voice and a brown voice. And now it's just one step further to say that if you then disagree with any of those claims, that actually means you're racist, not in the conventional sense that we think of racism is discriminating on a basis skin color, but now racism as disagreeing with a dogma, even in

good faith, in the spirit of open debate. And that's really what chilled open debate in this country and set set in this new era, righted in this new era of fear that has supplanted our original culture of free speech and open debate. And the irony and all of this is that in the name of diversity, we've then sacrificed true diversity of thought, including at our leading universities. I've seen it firsthand. In the name of democracy, democracy

is not just about casting some valid every November. In the name of democracy, we've actually sacrificed our most important democratic ideals of free speech and open debate. And in the name of inclusion, including in our educational institutions, we've created this new exclusionary culture or certain points of view just aren't welcome. And so you know, for me, I'm writing this book I told you about, I'm not doing

it as a journalist that's reporting on my findings. I consider myself actually to be something more of a whistleblower. Having been in elite I releague institutions, having been in elite hedge funds, and then started a Company's a number of companies that have en venture backed and successful in the worlds of New York finance to Silicon Valley to biotech.

I've had firsthand experiences that made me compel to say that somebody needs to speak up, not from the outside looking in, but from the inside looking out to really reveal the heart of what's going on, because we're gonna

need a better way forward. But in order to for you better way forward, we're gonna first need to understand the essence of the problem that has really taken a chokehold of all of our major institutions in the private sector, not just corporate America, but nonprofits, museums, philanthropies, universities, educational institutions, and then of course the government itself well. And as you just laid out, and as I laid out in the intro of the show, and as our listeners, no,

I mean, look, you've accomplished. I was telling you earlier and we were talking. I was telling you about some of the things I was working on. I feel lazy in comparison. You've accomplished so much at your age. But you know, as you've mentioned, you're a hedge fund partner in your twenties, founded multibillion dollar enterprises. Let you lead a biotech company. You're on Forbes America's Riches Entrepreneurs Under forty list. I've not made the list. I'm thirty six,

so maybe I have a couple of years. But you've accomplished a lot, and lately, you know, you've been vocal about this topic. You're writing a book, Woking, which is out auguste Why what what compelled you? Why did you feel because obviously there's a level of risk. There's always a level of risk in speaking out for you know, particularly uh for you and you know, with companies and with your work. Why why did you speak out? Yeah, Look,

I felt some sense of obligation to do it. I actually consider this my form of public service, at least in the near term, because I told you about it at the very beginning. It's near and near to my heart, the American dream, because I've lived it right. I've gone in a single generation from being the kid of immigrant who came to this country with literally no money forty years ago to becoming the founder of multibillion dollar companies, including one that's going public this year for over seven

billion dollars in a single generation. That was the dream that I was able to live. And you know, as I let a company a CEO for seven years, I developed medicines for a number of diseases, probably the one I'm most proud of as a drug for the treatment of prostate cancer. But at the end of the day, there was a new cancer that even the best of

science wasn't going to address. It was a cultural cancer, not a biological cancer, and it was a cancer that threatened to kill that dream that I really cared about, and that was, of course the cancer that I that we all call woke culture. And I basically think the essence of woke culture is that it's about waking us up from the American dream. And that's what happened over

the course of the last decade. We woke up. And the problem when you wake up from a dream is it pretty soon you forget what it was doing about. You might remember how it felt to be in it, and let enough time pass, you forget how how it felt to be in the dream too, And that's the phase that I think we're in. I don't think it's

irreversible quite yet. I think that if the tens were about celebrating our diversity and our differences, at nauseum, in my opinion, ought to be about reviving our shared sense about who we are as a people. But like I said, you only get a little bit of time once you've woken up from a dream to go back to remembering what it was all about. And I think that's the

period that we're in. So I felt some sense of urgency to be able to speak out actually to make a pretty tough decision earlier this year, when I stepped down as CEO of my company to do it. I do think that when a lot of left leaning ceo is like Mark Benioff or whoever write books about their own politics, it tends to help their businesses. But the reality of the world we live in is that that standard isn't applied evenly. And it was really important for me to practice what I preached by the way I

think business and politics should be kept apart. I definitely uh endeavored to never use the business to foist my political views on anyone. I was always only speaking up as a citizen, But as I really entered the public sphere with the book and a lot of other initiatives I'm working on, I wanted to practice what I preached, and you know, in order to really protect the company's voice as separate from my own, I stepped down as from my role as CEO, so I could really speak

not as a CEO but as a citizen. But the flip side of that is I'm going to speak with candor in an unvarnished way, and I really lay out a lot in the book that's probably gonna take a lot of people by surprise that is going to leave me with fewer friends at elite ski conferences and fancy ski towns that I might have otherwise had. But I do think that that's the kind of sacrifice that people in my position are gonna have to be willing to make if we're going to turn this cultural tide. So

it was the least that I could do. Can you give us a highlight from that? I mean, now you piqued my interest? Yeah, well, um, well, look it's it's in the final stages of being touched up in a books available for pre order now. It comes out mid August.

But you know, look I talked a little bit about some of my experiences in in you know, seeing this firsthand, and I guess, having been the CEO of a company, actually am and really actually pretty sympathetic to the younger generation of workers who want to join a company who does more than just print a buck by making products

that matter. In fact, that was part of our pitch as a biotech company, is that you don't want to be part of a generation that's just looking at turning you know, a lot of cash into a bigger wad of cash by going to All Street. And I, by the way, I've done that or tonangement for a while, Or you don't really want to be programming an app that allows you to click one millisecond faster on some guy with a mustache, on an app that disappears via text message. Whatever it is. You want to be applying

your talents to something that matters. Come do it at a place that allows you to make medicines or patients who need them by fixing a broken industry. So that was actually one of the pitches for recruiting employees early in the early days of when I even started my company back. So I think that it's a good thing when capitalism works by making products that matter for people

who really need them. Where I think it goes awry is one of these businesses espouse social values that have nothing to do with their businesses as a way of signaling their virtue, but in ways that actually serve as a distraction from the essence of what those businesses ought to be about, not just for themselves, but a distraction for our democracy. And I guess one of the things that I talked about in the book is some of my experiences in dealing with the next generation of talent.

Right if from a millennial, you know, the gen Z talent pool, looking to enter the workforce. One of the things I've learned is they're actually really hungry for a cause, hungry for a sense of purpose, if I may say it, hungry for identity. And I think we live in a moment where we have to recognize that, you know, religion has nearly disappeared, Patriotism is on the decline, and human beings,

especially young human beings, are hungry for a cause. And that black hole, that vacuum for purpose and identity and meaning, that's actually the void that wokeness is filling. It's become

the equivalent of the modern opioid for the masses. And I think that that has our work cut out for us in fighting this, not to not to just go superficially, as many on the right seemed prone to do and countering wokenness, but rather to do the harder work of rebuilding a shared vision of not only what it means to be a conservative, but what it means to be an American, which we lack a good answer to that

question today. I think rebuilding that answer and revising a new brand of Americanism as that same sense of shared purpose could actually be the cultural cure that we need.

And one of the things I talked about in the book and some of my first stand experience is the first becoming really frustrated and sort of wringing my hands in the air with what exactly happened over the last ten years that allowed our private sector to become as defeat as it has with respect to the pursuit of these flimsy social causes and values, to really reflecting more deeply on the fact that actually a lot of these people, and I probably grew more sympathetic to it because many

of them have worked for me over time, are really well motivated, talented if they're given the right mission, even hard working people, but who need to have their hunger for purpose and hunger for change, and hunger for identity and hunger for a cause satisfied with the cause. That's far more meaningful than the skin deep attributes that corporations

and elite institutions are selling them today. I think the equivalent of Virginia Slims advertising the insecure teenagers back in the that's effectively what war corporations are doing today to the next generation of Americans. But what impact does it have on companies in the sense, you know, one of the biggest things I hear from a lot of people in corporate America is there's just this intense, intense desire. It's all about diversity. Diversity, you know, skin color, meeting quotas, etcetera.

What impact does it have on a company when that's the focus versus just a meritocracy who's best for the job regardless of their skin color? And and also that's sort of belittling to think that someone can't the job based off of you know, meritocracy and just based off of you know, skill sets, and it has to be

focused purely on race. I agree with you. I mean, if you just look at United Airlines in the last month, for example, said that the pilots in the cockpit had to be women or persons of color by the way, an expression that I detest, taking a hundred fifty cultures and lumping them into one new culture, which we call

of color. But anyway, so they said women are people of color in the cockpit, had even if that meant throwing out the tests that they used to use to test for the competence of their pilots, and that reveals the essence of what's going on is today, in the name of diversity, we have actually sacrificed excellence itself, the pursuit of excellence. And you know, make no mistake, I think diversity is a good thing. Diversity of thought is

what it's supposed to be about. And I think diversity of thought is a means to the end of achieving excellence. But now, in the name of diversity, we have sacrificed both diversity of thought as well as our pursuit of excellence. And so I think that's how it impacts our companies. I think that's how it impacts are our educational institutions. But there's there's a separate impact to which is in the other direction, which I think is maybe even more important.

Is not just the way in which these new political values infect private enterprises to operate less efficiently than they otherwise would, which is a real problem, but Milton Friedman could have told you about that fifty years ago when he wrote his first critique of stakehold capitalism. In No, the problem today is actually perhaps even greater in the other direction, the way in which woke businesses are actually

infecting American democracy. And that's actually what makes me even more worried, not as a CEO or a leader of former CEO, or a leader of a business, but as an American citizen worried about corporate overreach where we're actually creating a modern version of old world Europe, where a small group of institutional elites get in the back room deal determining what the common ideals for society ought to be, when in fact, America was supposed to be a rejection

of corporatism, a rejection of corporate ocracy, to create a world in which, on our most important moral questions we decided on the basis of a one vote, one person, one vote system rather than a one dollar, one vote system. And I think that's actually the more most dangerous trend of all, where corporations become the new moral arbiters. We then effectively live in a one dollar, one vote system where corporations use their market power to actually influence the

marketplace of ideas. And that's something that really concerns me this year when you see you know, Major League Baseball leaving Atlanta in protests over a new voting law in Georgia. These used to be the a political institutions that brought us together, irrespective of whether we were democratic republican, and irrespective of whether we were black or white, we could still get together in an a political space like a

baseball stadium and come together. And the foundation for democracy depends on actually certain common spaces where we could all come together that are a political And I'm worried that we're actually, in the name of protecting democracy in the case of Georgia voting law, we're actually eroting the true foundation for democracy itself in terms of the real free speech and open debate, where every citizen's always actually counts equally, rather than some corporation having a special say. How do

you reign that in? Though? Yeah, So I talked about some legal solutions in the book that I think, in the short term are pretty important. Um, how technical do you? How technical are you open to getting? Least because I could I could lay a couple No, I mean, I'm I'm a nerd. So I like it. Okay, so so, so I'm gonna go on, and you're gonna have to stop me. But but let me, let me, let me give you a Let me give you a couple simple

legal solutions, all right. The simplest one is that I think we need to add political belief as a protected class right up next to race, sex, sexual orientation post Bostock last year, the Supreme Court ruling in that case in religion in the Title seven of the Civil Rights Act, there's no good reason why a corporation should be able to fire someone for their political belief when they can't fire them for their religious belief, for their race, or

their sex. And my own view is that the last thing we would want to do in general is to apply another constraint to what private businesses can can't do. That's the libertarian side of my brain says, that's what I would have told you ten years ago. But my general view today is in the legal code, you can't have it both ways. Where we say we don't trust the market to police certain forms of discrimination, but we unquestioningly trust the market to police other forms of discrimination.

And the punchline is, if you can't fire somebody from their job just because they're black or Muslim or gay, or you can't d platform somebody because they're brown or Muslim, are gay or whatever, then you shouldn't be able to fire them or de platform them just because they're an outspoken conservative either, and that's not a theoretical issue anymore. If it can happen to the forty president of the

United States, it can happen to anybody. So so those are the kinds of some of the kinds of solutions I talked about in the book, generally of the of the mold that you can't have it both ways. Political belief as a as a protected class alongside the other protected classes Section to thirty Reform by the way, which says that actually normal private companies ought to be a to determine what shows up on their websites and what doesn't.

I agree with that, But the private companies today that are doing it in Silicon Valley are effectively acting as

instruments of the state. Because if you notice, this has actually gone up a lot over the course of the last year after Democrats took control of not only the House, but then the Senate and then the White House, and they call these companies up to testify every few months, and they say, hey, if you don't take down hate speech, and you don't take down misinformation, and you don't take down content that we, by the way, disagree with, as

Democrats in Washington, d C. Then we're gonna come after you. We're gonna regulate you, we're gonna break you up, we're gonna make it swift, we're gonna make it punitive. And so these guys get back on their private jets, fly back to the other coast and do exactly what their

government overlords told them to do. But the problem with that is it's just a reverse form of chrony capitalism, where government agents today are doing indirectly through the back door, using private companies to accomplish what they directly can't do

under the Constitution, namely under the First Amendment. And so my view is, if you find yourself in a situation today when private companies are being used as pawns, especially by this new administration, to do indirectly what government could not directly do through the front door, then those private companies, when they're engaging in those narrow sets of activities, should be bound by the same constraints as the federal government itself.

And guess what, in the case of big Tech and and all internet companies, by the way, there's Section to thirty immunity to give them live freedom from state liability when they go out and do exactly that. So my own view is that again, you can't have it both ways. Either you're a private company that behaves as a private company does, or if you're operating a behest of liberals in control as the party in power, and by the way,

you're immunized by section to immunity to do it. Then you can opt into getting that federal immunity, but if you do, you're bound by the same constraints as the federal government itself, namely the U. S Constitution and the First Amendment. So those are some of the bigger picture ideas.

I can also get into some granular ideas relating to the business Judgment rule relating to rollbacks unlimited less shareholder liability for a lot of these woke capitalists or woke investors that are using corporations as pawns to advance their social agendas, that in my opinion, is actually an abuse of the corporate form and abuse of limited liability that

we ought to police. On the flip side, I think when their CEOs who are gone rogue and are are ultimately using shareholder resources to advance social goals, there's right now are legal doctrine that protects them called the Business Judgment rule which says that executives can't be sued for making good business judgments. That should only apply in so far as they're actually making business judgments, not social judgments.

And shareholders should be able to ultimately bring suit against executives who have gone rogue in using their seats of power and a corporation to be able to push their own personal values. So those are the kind of solutions I talk about in the book that get uh severally more and more technical, but I go from you know, all the ways in the big picture ideas down to some regular ideas that can I think, stop woke capitalism

as we know it in its tracks. But at least at the end of the day, I will be the first person to say that still these legal solutions are really just a form of symptomatic therapy. As I said earlier, what we really need is a cultural cure, a new vision of what it actually the means to be an American irrespective of the color of your skin, or your race, or your gender, your sexual orientation, in a way that you know, in a way that really dilutes woke ism

to irrelevance. And that's actually gonna be even harder work than implementing some of these legal solutions. But in the short term, I do think we're in a bit of an emergency here. We do need some legal solutions to at least serve as that symptomatic therapy the vehic. Let's hold it right there. We got to take a quick break. Let's say I get fired for being conservative? What can I do now about it? From a legal perspective? So so, actually,

you bring up a really good point. My ideal fix in most of these cases would be a statutory fix amending Title seven a Civil Rights Act, amending section two thirds. That would also take Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to get at is what is available now under the law for recourse. Actually, you bring up a really good point. I think people can bring legal action now in federal court. Let's take the big text censorship example first, and then I'll go to the woke employee firings, uh, the world

corporations firing right wing employees in a second. So let's talk about the big text censorship. Actually, there is good Supreme Court case law today which actually says the obvious what you would expect it to say, that the government cannot deputize private actors to do indirectly what the government

is prohibited from doing under the Constitution. There's a great case, it's called Bantam Books from from the nineties sixties, I believe, where there was a bookstore owner that wanted to sell a lot of books and there was a local prosecutor that didn't want him. They didn't like one of the books that he was selling, and so he came to the bookstore owner and he said, you know what, if you don't stop selling these books, I'm gonna come after you and I'm gonna prosecute you so for some other

unrelated crime. So the books are owner, of course, came to the pressure and stopped selling the book. Well, somebody else wanted to buy the book, and they brought the case and they said, hey, I know, you're a bookstore owner and normally you can choose what book you sell and what book you don't. But this wasn't a bookstore owner making that decision as a proprietor. It was actually

state act in the guard of private enterprise. And you know what, they won that case which said that actually, if the bookstorer was just responding to a threat from a prosecutor, who's really a public figure. Then actually the thing that we have is state action that ought to be governed by the First Amendment, and so that's actually just one example among many, But there's good Supreme Court

doctrine on this. I actually made an argument to this effect in the Wall Street Journal in January of this year, and I'm proud to say that that argument was referenced by Clarence Thomas in a recent opinion that he wrote. I think he's actually thrown the gauntlet inviting the right

plaintiff to bring that case personally. I think one of those planets could be President Donald Trump himself bringing potentially the iconic case of our time, saying that actually what Facebook and Twitter did in the platforming him was actually a version of political censorship that might be allowed if

these were operating as normal private companies. But if they're doing it as instruments of the state of the party in power, responsive to their threats, and by the way, immunized by the federal government in the former Section to thirty to do it, then that's actually just a federal carrot and stick that makes this state like action in the mantle of private enterprise, which still means that the First Amendment applies, and so I personally think at President

Trump could bring that case and take it all the way to the real Supreme Court, not the fake sham Facebook corporate Supreme Court thing that we heard about last week, but the real US Supreme Court and have a pretty good legal grounds to be able to win. And I think Clarence Thomas has already you know, played his cards a little bit about where he's coming out on that set of issues. I'd be interesting seeing where the rest

of the justices come out as well. But I think it could be the iconic defining case of our time that's on big tech answorship. Think he hasn't well look, I mean I don't. I don't know him, uh, and I can't really speak to that, but I think that if I were in his shoes, I would be bringing that case absolutely, and I wouldn't be doing it for myself. He could presumably start a media network of his own, he has access to be able to get his opinions

out to the American people if he wants to. I would do it on behalf of the people that don't enjoy that position of authority that he might enjoy that position of accessing the American people through other means. This is happening every day where people who are being d platformed aren't the people who actually have alternative networks that

they could go on. There are people whose voice has literally been suppressed because they are forced to choose between the First Amendment and the American Dream, between speaking up and saying what they actually believe and keeping their job and putting food on the dinner table. And to me, America is not a place that makes you to choose between the First Amendment and American Dream. You get to have both. And so if I were President Trump, I think that one of the most impactful things that he

could do is to bring that case in. If I were him, I would say, you know what, once I get my account restored, which should be the damages here, I don't want to make any money off this. I'm actually gonna leave the network voluntarily. But I'm doing this on behalf of people who don't have the privilege and position that I do to be able to reach people in a different way because this is actually a defining

issue of free speech in our time. So whether it's him or whether it's somebody else, has beend platform for the wrong reason. I think that this theory of combining state action with the actions of private companies is a winning legal theory in my opinion that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. So that's on big

text sworship. I can give you a separate one, Lisa, where I think employees who are fired for their political beliefs also have a legal theory that they could bring under current existing legal doctorates too, which is again using Supreme Court jurisprudence about religion. So, according to Title seven and the Civil Rights Act, you can't discriminate on the

basis of religious beliefs. And usually people think about that as meaning, correctly, you can't discriminate against an employee for their religion, you can't fire an employee for belonging to a certain religion. But often forgotten is that it equally means that an employer can't enforce their religion and force it down the throats of their employees. They can't force them to bow down to a cross, they can't force them to pray to the pray on behalf of the

Koran or whatever. And guess what. That then raises the question of whether wokeness today meets the legal standard for a religion, and I think if you look at the core tenets of wokeness today in the United States, it meets the Supreme Courts test in space. Supreme Courts actually

even said that's secular humanism counts as a religion. It said that well in in a funny case a number of years ago, a religion called Creativity, in my opinion, a rather goofy religion which says that white supremacy is its guiding principle, where what is good for white people is ultimately what achieves you salvation, and what is bad

for white people is ultimately a form of sin. It's not a religion I subscribe to, but it's definitely a religion in the case of the Supreme Court, in a case called Peterson that the Supreme Court heard, which said that this religion, professing white supremacy is its coretenant, counted as a religion for the purpose of Title seven. If white supremacy counts as a religion, then anti white supremacy,

which is welcomes today, counts as a religion too. And employers can't, like Disney for example, just see what we saw last week, can't force that religion down the throats of their employees any more than they could force any other religion down the throats of their employees as well. And so I too think that is a well grounded, legally well founded case that any employee who's fired for their political beliefs can really take all the way to

the Supreme Court. And I think the Supreme Court would likely saw with this on the side of the correct plane, if that the facts were correct, and that could be done even without Republicans doing what I think Republicans ought to do, which is step up and amend the Civil Rights Act nineteen four by adding political belief as a protected class. If they fall short of doing that, as as I think Republicans are prone to do, you know,

there's still legal action available in the courts. But I guess my concern is if conservatives are awake enough because I look at, you know, as you're talking about with some of this critical race theory and what's happening in corporations and the rest of America that you know, time

is of the essence. You look at the past few months with COVID lockdowns and the authoritarian nature of the left just shutting down businesses, denying people the opportunity to go to church to worship, deciding who gets to exercise their First Amendment rights and who doesn't. It's fine to go out in protest among thousands, but you can't go to church, or there's limitations on how many people can go. Uh. And then you know, on on top of it, you look at some of these things that the left wants

to do with, you know, HR one, etcetera. Uh, And then you look at what happened to President Trump, as you pointed out, getting kicked off of social media, certain

banks not doing business with him, etcetera. But I guess it doesn't feel to me that people are awake enough looking at collectively all these different things I've mentioned, or even looking the muted reaction to President Trump getting kicked off Twitter, like, it doesn't seem like conservatives are as weak as they need to for the fight that's ahead of us. Well, I think the Republican Party is not awake to it that much. I can say for sure in that we are we I say we. I don't

I have self identified now as conservative. I don't even really identify as a Republican. I don't know what I

always have. But you know, more But but I think Republicans appeared to be not really well cut to that task today because they're shackled by the dogmas of nineteen eighty where Ronald Reagan, by the way, one of my heroes, identified the real threat to liberty and prosperity in his era, which was big government, and he came in and slashed regulations, cut taxes, did what he needed to do to protect American liberty and prosperity from the biggest threat of his

day in nineteen eighty. But as Dorothy might have said to Tote in the Wizard of Us, we're not in night anymore. And actually another great to quote another great Republican from a hundred six years ago, if I may Abraham Lincoln, the dogmas of a quiet past, he's that at the time are inadequate to the stormy present. I think the dogmas of eight are inadequate to meet the challenges of one. And the free market that we idealize as conservatives, we have to recognized that that does not

exist today. The new market that exists is actually a figment of other actors who are manipulating that market to meet their own goals, including big government itself. In ways that I described earlier, and so the solutions that we need in the twenty one century in the year are different than just reciting some slogan that we memorized in nineteen eighty. We need actual solutions that meet the moment of where we are today now. I don't think that

everyday conservatives are blind to that. I do think that they're disempowered right now to be able to fight back against this movement. Because the legal system is stacked certain protect certain classes are protected. You can't discriminate the basis of a whole range of criteria, but you can discriminate on the basis of your political belief and today that means if you're a conservative, you have to send your kids to the public schools and accept a certain dogma

because that's where they got to be educated. But public schools have been completely overrun by this new infectious religion. It's a secular religion, but religion nonetheless that's been established as the religion that's ultimately being indoctrinated. Think that our kids are being indoctrinated by so I think that they're disempowered to be able to address it. I think it is the job of a leading political party in our country to at least be at the forefront of that debate.

But I think the problem with the current Republican Party is it doesn't really understand the issues, or if it understands the issues, is dormant in dealing with them. And what we really need is a new north star for the conservative movement that recognizes that the real enemy to liberty and prosperity today is not just big government that is half the equation, but it is this new hybrid of big government in big business. It's what I call

the Wolke industrial complex. That is the new leviathan that is far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbs and vision four centuries and it is far more powerful than what either big government or big business could do alone. They've entered into a marriage. It's an unholy alliance. It is not a marriage of love, by the way, it's a

marriage of convenience. It is more like mutual prostitution. But they have together birth this new, uniquely twenty one century monster that's far more powerful than anything we've seen in the course of American history. And it is up to the conservative movement to step up and recognize that. And I don't think the Republican Party has proven itself up

to that task. But I do think that that our work is cut out for us in the next couple of years, because I do think we're in an era, as I said in the very beginning, where if we don't take action pretty soon, the damage is going to become irreversible. Well, and the arty is the stupidity of the direction or country is heading in. And we're a lot of these quote unquote anti racists are the racists themselves.

I mean, the idea is blatantly just disgusting, the concept that somehow minority kids can't do math, so somehow you have to dumb it down for them. That's inherently racist. Or you've got companies like or you've got companies like Disney, uh telling employees to recognize their white privilege. That's inherently racist. And so the irony of where we've arrived is all these people who are you know, quote unquote putting them in the anti racist bucket, are actually just a bunch

of racists. Well, I think anti racism, LISA is the single greatest form of institutionalized systemic racism now in the United States has taken hold of every major institution as we know it, and it starts as this form of anti white racism. You put your finger on it where you're if you're white, you're inherently stained with the guilt, white guilt and white privilege at the point of your birth,

irrespective of who you are, what your attitudes are. But it doesn't stop there, because once you engage in that form of anti white racism, that actually triggers a new wave of anti black racism in response, and then that actually breaks us into tribes and ultimately sets us on a spiral all the way to the bottom. And so in the name of anti racism, we're actually becoming a more racist country in a way that makes me makes me sad. Actually, as I watched this every day pollute

the minds of our next generation. We say math is racist because there's somehow racially unequal outcomes. Math isn't racist. But I'll tell you what might be is failing to open the schools for poor kids in the inner city who may not be able to learn math in schools. We can talk about whether that's racist, and that actually reveals the heart of what's going on, which is using this mantle of wokeness as a way to deflect accountability for failed policies that were supposedly helping the very they

were supposed to help, the very people that they're failing today. Now, I gotta you brought up Disney, and I would be remiss if I didn't comment on this too, because I think it's something that that a lot of us have missed, which is that there's another actor on the scene in recent years that took this unholy alliance right between big business and big government, and if I may say, it turned into a threesome. And that new actor is the

Communist Party of China. Right. They understand this game far more deeply than any of us do. There's a there's an even a Chinese word now for woke white people in the United States. It's called bite school literally refers to woke white people in the United States, and they use it to laugh at us. And more than laughing at us, they're now using wokeism as a geopolitical tool

to erode our moral standing on the global stage. And if you have any doubt about that, I encourage you to just look at what they are saying at every diplomatic meeting over the last year. Last year, the EU presses Jin Ping on the weaker human rights crisis, where by the way, we're talking about a million weakers in concentration camps, who, by the way, Apple uses a slave labor to make their iPhones, and they don't tell you

that that's a separate point. The first thing that Jan Think says in response is that black lives matter, so that the United States is no better. And then you look at his deputy, Yang jh their top diplomat, comes to the Alaska summit last month and lectures us in this opening statements of fifteen minutes on how the United States is his word, slaughtering black Americans and that China hey help with the China hopes that the United States does better on human rights and that would be laughable.

But you ask yourself how they're able to get away with this, and it comes back to companies like Disney. Actually, no, I'll tell you how. Where Disney criticizes white privilege in its training for him ways this month two years ago, it says it can't film in the state of Georgia if Georgia passes the equivalent of a heartbeat bill in new anti abortion law. And yet last year, it films Mulan in the Shanjang Province of China without saying a peep.

That is ground zero, the epicenter of the weaker human rights crisis until the very end they decided to speak up after they filmed it, when they said, we thank you the CCP and the local authorities in shan Jang for allowing us the privilege of filming here. And you know, the NBA is even worse so when these corporations become the new multinational moral arbiters, but apply their moral arbitration unevenly. The guys who are known for criticizing injustice here in

the United States stay silent in China. That actually creates a false moral equivalence between Chinese nihilism and American idealism, between China and the United States. And in my view, that's actually the real Chinese virus that we need to fight. It is not a biological virus. It is a cultural virus whose consequences could be far reaching, far beyond this year.

And I think few people on both sides of the political aisle have actually put their finger on this pulse in the way in which woke ism is now not just infecting capitalism, it's infecting geopolitics in a way that actually might erode our standing visa EA China and even in more limited ways visa be Russia. You saw Navalny being accused by Russia of being a racist, and that's why he actually had to be silenced. They're catching onto these new tools and playing it back against US China.

You know, they're playing us like a Chinese mandolin, if I'm to say it, by using those woke values as a way of advancing their own agenda at our expense. So that thought quick break back on the other side. My favorite line from if you remember the monologue that Ricky Gervais did. I think it was a Golden Globes and he was like, if Isis started a streaming service, you would call your agents, which is really underscores what hypocrites all these people are. As you just laid out

with corporate America, we saw with the NBA. You know, the list goes on, movies, etcetera. You know, they're all a bunch of hypocrites. But but I think you know, and having this conversation with you, and I have every only had conversations with Maximo Alvera is a Cuban exile, and it seems to all come down to communism. And you look at critical race theory, it's a Marxist idea and it really all comes down to communism. And one thing that you know, he was talking about is how

the you know, communist government. What they wanted to do was to put you know, farmers against you know, people that live in the city pitt the city city dwellers against the farmers, rich first, poor poor verse, Uh, you know, rich right first, but you know, I mean, the list goes on, and it's all about creating these divisions in America. It seems that's where we are right now. I think there's a there's truth in what you say. If it's

even worse, I think this is worse than communism. And the reason is communism was based in the intellectual heritage of Marxism, where agree with it or not and I don't but agree with it or not. At least it was based on the foundation of economic injustice that you if you were economically disempowered, that was the real injustice. It wasn't so much about the color of your skin. You could bring people together across different nationalities, across different

skin colors. If you remember the proletariat, you were oppressed by the bourgeoisie, and it was a divide and conquered strategy. To be sure, it was one that was based on a lie of invisible social power structures that didn't really exist. But we're used by communist dictators to be able to use those so called invisible power structures to their own advantage. There's a lot wrong with it, but we don't need

to relitigate that that was done in ninety eighty. I think that and and ultimately culminating in the fallow, the fallow,

the wall in the early nineties. But this is worse because now it's not really about even economic injustice, but it's about this new conception of alleged racial injustice, which says that irrespective of the amount of money you have, irrespective of your upbringing, if you're black, you're inherently disadmanaged, and irrespective of your upbringing, whether you were poor or not,

if you're white, you're inherently privileged. And to me, there's something even more toxic about that philosophy, which says that it is what you were born with. It it's a combination of it's a mutant hybrid between communism and the task syst which says that actually your economics, your long run plight as an agent in the world, is determined not even by your economics standings, but by your genetics, by who you were on the date that you were born.

You are a per prisoner of the color of your skin. That's really at the heart of modern critical race theory and woke ism, which I think bears a lot of similarities to Marxism, but I think it's even worse because it combines it with this notion of inborn caste, where at least in the Marxist world view, somebody who was poor could go on to become a member of the rich bourgeoisie class, and there was some notion of mobility,

even if it was divisive. Here, this says that no matter how rich you are, you could be a black billionaire, you're still ultimately you're ultimately stained with disadvantage versus poor white working class in the opioid rust belt in Ohio. That doesn't matter irrespective of economics. It's race that ultimately

governs whether you enjoy advantage or privilege. Well, I think I probably misrepresented at Maximus point was that this is in the same vein of what the communist did in Cuba in terms of dividing people, but now it's along racial lines in Americas, as you just laid out so eloquently. And what's frustrating to me is a lot of these people who are driving this divide, you know, on the left, primarily, they're not providing solutions for people that would make individuals

lives better. You know, for instance, zip code determines a child's future far too often in the sense of, obviously, have better educational opportunities if you live in a wealthier neighborhood, there's going to be a better school system, even a

better public school system. Or you see a lot of people on the left being against school choice, or even someone like Senator Corey Booker actually used to be for school choice until he started speaking up you know, a higher a national profile, and then he turned on it. And he actually used to work with Betsy Divas and

then gave a scathing speech against her confirmation. But all these people who purport to care about this issue actively work against things that could help minorities or could help children achieve better success in the future. And that's what infuriates me. Yeah. Absolutely, This is really just a way of of achieving greater power for the people who use

the terms right. This isn't about I mean, and that's that's the one of the things that left is actually mastered, the use of terminology to pack in behind that terminology and agenda that has nothing to do with the term itself. Just take Black Lives Matter. It is a Marxist organization that calls for the decimation of the nuclear family structure, and yet I don't know what that has to do with actual protection of black lives and professors to care

about black lives. In fact, it's about some completely orthogonal agenda. This is what we sort of see the Left having mastered, is you come up with the right label, but you pack a lot of a power driven agenda behind it that's actually about empowering and often even enriching the very people who are pushing that philosophy and allows them to evade accountability by creating this new woke smoke screen that ultimately distracts everyone by the things they say rather than

the things that they actually do. And I think that that ought to be part of the calling card for the new conservative movement, too, is to actually counterintuitively recognize the very injustices that the left has monopolized as their causes of concern, economic disparities and access to capital, formation,

access to education. We actually care about these solutions, makes you care about these problems in a way that actually makes us want to deliver actual solutions that address the problem, rather than one that just thrives on a new narrative of victimhood. And I think that victim the left US turned victimhood into this new cultural currency in the United States, and I personally think that that actually hurts the very

people that it was supposed to help. Like all bubbles, and I think victimhood as a currency is now in a bubble of its own. When it bursts, it actually hurts the very people that was supposed to help. Well, I see the same thing with respect of the victimhood of culture that ultimately evades accountability for solving the actual problems that people might face in their in their everyday hardship.

What's your vision for America? Well, look, I think that I think my vision for America is the vision for America that we began with two hundred fifty years ago, which is that America isn't even a place, It's just a vision of what a place can be. It is a set of ideas that brought an otherwise divided, polyglot group of people together. And more so than any nation in human history, America wasn't based on a single monarch, or a single religion, or a single ethnicity or a

single language. No, it was based on a set of ideas. And I think that today I don't even have a good answer. We don't have a good answer to the question of what does it mean to be an American in the year one? And I think that absence of an answer to that question is actually the black hole at the center of our nation's soul. And so I think that we need to revive the basic ideals that brought us together in the first place. Idea like the

American Dream eat pluribus from many one. And I think that these are the ideals that one the American Revolution. They're the ideals that reunited us after the Civil War. There the ideals that one World War one and World War two and the Cold War, And I personally think there's still the ideals that give hope to the free world as we know it. And if we can revive our sense of America as an idea deal, then I don't think anybody, not a nation, not a corporation, not

a virus, is going to defeat us. But that is the hard work that we're going to have to do, is to look to our history to identify not perfection, because America has never been a perfect country, never will be a perfect country. Perfection doesn't exist. But more so than any nation in human history, America is the pursuit of perfection. We've said it since the day one, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of liberty, equality and justice for all. It's called the American dream for a reason.

It's not a destination we reach. It's a vision that we aspire to. But reviving those basic ideas, the ideas that no matter who you are, who your parents who are, where you came from, you could achieve anything you want in this country with hard work, ingenuity in your own dedication.

Reviving those ideas. That's part of my vision for America is taking the American idea to mean something more than just being a bunch of higher mammals occupying a common space doing what our iPhones tell us to do on a given day that is not America. America is the set of ideas that brought us together in the first ways,

and I think that it begins with civic education. I think that we're overdue for a not for a conversation about civic service that we implement in the next generation of kids, to satisfy their hunger for a cause, their hunger for what it means to be an American, starting at a young age, starting to reconstruct our history rather than just criticize it and deconstructed, as we're doing in our schools today. So I think civic education plays a

big role in that. I think there's a revival. A civic revival across all of our institutions is really important. I do think that there are some legal solutions that we need in the near term to hold the tide and ultimately hold back the woke epidemic that's infecting all of our institutions, But that's really just the first step. The longer run vision is is a civic revival in this country that reminds us of who we are as Americans in a way that brings us together across all

of these divisive identity politic lines. What are you running for political office? You know, I was. I was in somebody encouraged me to a couple of people I respect, encouraged me to do that. Uh, you know at the start of this year. Actually, well, I thankue. So that means a lot to me. I love listening to you, so that that means a lot to me. I So I I needed to do something first, and that was

actually writing this book that I was working on. The reason that was important is that, I think in the moment we live in today, As I said earlier, big government is a problem, but it's only part of the problem. I think the real cultural problem in America today spreads beyond big government to every institution in the private sector, from our museums to our schools, to our universities, to the companies where we work, to the community centers where

we gather. That is really where the everyday threat to liberty and prosperities playing itself. That that is where the battle line is ultimately being forged, and one side is expanding that battle line further and further as it continues to win in this culture of fear. And so I've been a successful entrepreneur, right, I had been educated in the same elite institutions. I understand how to speak that language.

I influent in that language. I have lived in that world and seen it firsthand for myself, and actually felt a sense of obligation to see through the project that I started over the last year and a half, which was exposing that for what it was, because I think it's important that every American see that game for what it is, so that we can use that as a

first step to forging a better path forward. And so, you know, look, I mean, there was a lot of people were encouraging you to run for the Senate seat that opened up in Ohio. With Rob Portman announcing that he was going to step down. A lot of people

have stepped in to do that. You know. I thought about it for for a hot second, but at the end of the day, I thought it was really more important to focus on this new national movement outside of government, in our culture, in our private sector first, and to really re energize our interest in answering the question of what it means to be American, even outside of government,

in our place of work and in our communities. And that's what I'm focused on with the rollout of the book is building that new that new American movement, and we'll see where that goes. I do think that public service is important. It involves a lot of sacrifice, and

it's something that I'm open to in my future. But I'm not going to really turn to the until after this book is out, after I've really seen to starting this new movement in the private sector, which I think maybe even more important than a movement in government today and everyone go out and get woke. Inc it's out auguste, which is this August obviously and uh wise words incredibly accomplished, man the Vigue. I really appreciate what you said today.

This is a fascinating conversation. You're obviously welcome on anytime. I hope the book is a massive success, and I am. I know I'm looking forward to reading it thankfully. So I appreciate it, and really and with with respect of the book, this isn't a commercial venture for me really any if there's any net profit that comes out of it for me personally, I'm just putting it right back into the underlying agenda and what I really care about

is starting that new American movement this fall. So thanks for having me and we'll keep the conversation going awesome. Take care, Thanks so much. I want to thank the vig Ramaswamy again for such a smart and interesting interview, and I want to thank all of you at home as well for listening. If you're joined today's podcast, please leave us a review and leave us a five star

rating on Apple Podcast. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram and at LESA Rebooth special thanks to our team producer John Cassio, writer Aaron Kleigman, researcher Margaret Smith, and executive producers Debbie Myers and speaker new Gingridge, who are all part of the network and team