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Aug. 16, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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BIDEN’S DISHONEST GENERALS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep154
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How is it possible that a U.S.-trained Afghan army over 20 years just got up and ran away?
I'll answer that question.
Also, the betrayal of the generals.
Entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy joins me to talk about his book, Woke Inc.
It's all about woke corporations.
And I'll continue my discussion of the book of Job by focusing on God's answer to Job.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
If you've been following the scenes coming out of Afghanistan, you can see that it's Saigon all over again and maybe even worse.
And I realize for you some young people, a name like Saigon, the helicopter airlift, the US humiliation in Vietnam all seems like ancient history.
But for those of us who lived through it, now I came to America shortly after all this, but these images were seared in my mind and we're seeing it play out again.
Now here's a scene, just a brief glimpse of the scene at Kabul airport and it is total chaos.
Listen.
You have a hasty airlift, literally people falling off the plane to their deaths, and all of this suggesting the humiliation of the superpower of America.
The Biden people seem to be in hiding.
They literally have put up a kind of auto-response if journalists contact the White House, saying, we're on vacation.
Well, we can't be reached.
Call some other guy. That's Jen Psaki's email.
So this is all very creepy, and I think it has long-term implications because what it means is that not only do we see an 11th century group of primitives return to power in Afghanistan, not only will we see China start to move in, build its proposed railroad all the way from China through Afghanistan, through Pakistan, But U.S. allies around the world are going to feel like, well, we can't really count on the United States.
Think of how the Taiwanese are feeling right about now.
A small country that is unable on its own to defend against China.
Think of how the Chinese appetite for aggression is already going up.
So all of this is the ruinous long-term implication of what we're seeing in front of our eyes.
Now, one question I want to ask is, how is it possible that when the United States spent $88 billion, so close to $100 billion to train this Afghan army, we've been doing it for 20 years, how is it possible that when you put the Afghan army into the field, it basically gets up and runs away?
The Taliban have taken over the country at lightning speed.
First Herat, then Kandahar, and now basically Kabul.
This is it. It's kind of over.
Now, as late as July, Biden said, quote, overrunning everything was, quote, highly unlikely.
Biden also said that the Afghan security forces are, have the capacity to, quote, sufficiently fight and defend the country.
So, how is it that Biden could be so inept, get things so disastrously wrong, And now, the left, looking at what's happening, these horrific images, are trying to immediately shift blame onto Trump.
And what they're saying is, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Wasn't it Trump who talked about withdrawing?
Wasn't Trump saying we don't need any more wars?
Biden was only continuing Trump's policy.
So this is the predictable and shameful attempt to avoid taking responsibility, which is what people do when they are in a very bad situation.
But we have to make a distinction here, a distinction between was the Afghan war a good idea and should America withdraw?
That is a whole separate question from how the withdrawal was organized, planned, and orchestrated.
You can tell with the Biden people there was really no planning at all.
In fact, apparently the U.S. commander at Bagram Air Force Base woke up in the morning and the U.S. was gone.
Absolutely out of there.
And he didn't even know about it.
So this is all very, this is all suggestive of the kind of incompetence that we see.
We saw it with Jimmy Carter with the hostage crisis.
We saw it with Clinton in his refusal to get bin Laden.
But let's focus in a little bit on the Afghan army here a little bit, because there's a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal by Yaroslav Tromifov.
It's called, How the Taliban Overran the Afghan Army.
And I want to read a couple sentences because they're very telling.
The Afghan army fighting alongside American troops was molded to match the way the Americans operate.
The US military, the world's most advanced, relies heavily on combining ground operations with air power, using aircraft to resupply outposts, strike targets, ferry the wounded and collect reconnaissance and intelligence.
What's he saying? What he's basically saying is that we never trained the Afghan army to fight independently as an army.
Instead, what happened is operating out of the Bagram Air Force Base with U.S. coordination, U.S. decision-making, The Afghan soldiers were integrated into U.S. operations.
So it's like, hey guys, go fight the Taliban.
By the way, if you get any trouble, make a phone call.
We'll send some air cover.
We'll blow those guys to smithereens.
So this coordinated American military approach, the Afghans came to rely on.
They never could fight on their own.
They were never trained to fight on their own.
Their whole thing was, help, help, help!
Come in, America! And so America would show up, bombard those guys.
So it wasn't even a fair fight on the ground.
It was the incompetent Afghans supported by U.S. air power against the Taliban.
And even then the Taliban were holding their own.
So the moment the United States picked up, and I want to pick up the article again...
In the wake of Biden's decision to withdraw, the US pulled its air support, intelligence, and contractors servicing Afghan planes and helicopters.
That meant the Afghan military simply couldn't operate anymore.
So they gave up.
They ran away. And that was the end of it all.
Now... The worst thing about all this is this is all reminiscent of what happened in Vietnam.
In other words, it's not just that the United States didn't learn from other people's mistakes.
Let's remember the British were once in Afghanistan and they were pushed out.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
It was pushed out. So one might say the United States was sort of short-sighted and not taking a page or learning from the experience of other countries, but the problem is worse.
The Biden administration didn't learn from our own experience in Vietnam.
There, too, we had propped up a South Vietnamese army that was reliant on U.S. support, U.S. coordination.
So the moment the United States began to pull back, the South Vietnamese army essentially collapsed.
Now, here's a photo. I want you to take a look at it.
Very interesting photo. I'm going to hold it up.
It shows a bunch of Taliban guys.
In the presidential palace in Kabul, which basically means the country has fallen.
Taliban spokesman said the Afghan war is over.
I think he's basically right.
Now, what's amusing about this photograph, Debbie pointed this out to me.
I think it's very interesting. If you look closely at the photo itself, you see a bunch of guys in kind of 11th century outfits.
And behind them is a painting, which is obviously a very old painting, of some sort of Muslim scholars, maybe a Muslim teacher instructing an audience.
And those guys are in 11th century outfits, so very clearly you can see that the Taliban is essentially trying to keep...
No, for them, there's no progress.
Things were actually at their peak in the 7th century when Muhammad lived, and that's the world that they want to recreate.
Now, while all of this is going on, and this is what makes the whole thing really sick, the Biden administration, far from dealing with the situation, was making videos of a obviously gay intern in Jen Psaki's office, prancing around the West Wing, taking selfies, showing himself giggling and smiling.
And to me, the message that's conveyed, at least in retrospect, is, you know what, we might have gotten our butts kicked, but we got our butts kicked really in style.
We know how to lose.
So this is the disgrace.
It's one thing to lose.
It's another thing to lose and laugh.
And what we're seeing here is basically what you get when you put Democrats in charge.
You get the world on fire.
You get America seriously jeopardizing its own position in the world.
I'm not even sure you can say anymore that America is the world's superpower.
But what I will say is that with this kind of leadership, we don't deserve to be.
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In the context of the disaster in Afghanistan I want to talk about the betrayal of the generals and the betrayal of the intelligence community.
Here's an article from the New York Times which points out, this is just today, that as late as June, US intelligence agencies were estimating that even if the Taliban continued to gain strength, it would be, quote, at least a year and a half before Kabul itself would be threatened.
Think of how preposterously wrong that is.
Now, here's General Mark Milley from July 21, 2021.
So, just from about three weeks ago.
The Afghan security forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country.
Here's Millie saying, no problem.
We can get out.
And we've now trained this army.
They're going to take over. So part of what I want to get at here is that these generals, these intelligence officials, have been lying to us for 20 years.
They have been telling us that there's an ongoing operation.
All these funds and all these resources we're deploying are going to a long-term purpose, which is to cultivate an indigenous Afghan army.
But all along, they knew this was not the case.
So then the obvious question becomes, why would they say it?
Why would they say it? Well, the answer is that for the generals and for the intelligence community, they were undertaking an intelligence operation, but not of the kind we think.
We think that their intelligence operation was finding out what's happening on the ground in Afghanistan.
No. There was relatively little even interest in that.
Their intelligence operation was different, convincing the American people to keep funding an operation that had lost not only its original rationale, but any rationale at all.
And then the question becomes, why would people, if these are good people and they love their country, why would they actually be lying to us for such a long period of time until ultimately their lives become unsustainable and the Taliban exposes their fraud?
Now, some people think that this is primarily because the military has gone woke.
And I, too, have been ridiculing the wokeness of the military.
This idea that, you know, gee, if you only put a few more men in high heels, you just have some more transgender surgeries in the platoons.
You have a few more courses in white rage for General Milley.
The guy should be studying Taliban rage, not white rage.
A little more critical race theory will put things right.
So, it's easy to be contemptuous of that kind of woke nonsense.
But I think the problem is a lot deeper than that.
The problem is this, and that is that you've got people who are going into the military and becoming leaders of the military, and you've got people who are going into the intelligence agencies who are careerists.
And by careerists, what I mean is these aren't fighters.
They aren't even strategists.
They view the military as a way to make money.
You have to remember, in our society, there are lots of people who do not have entrepreneurial skills.
They're very ambitious. They want to become millionaires, but they don't know how to create products.
They're not inventive.
They can't organize a business.
They don't know how to market and find a consumer base.
None of it. So what they do is they make money off of politics.
And the way to understand the military today and the intelligence community is it's an extension of politics.
These are not really professionals.
These are not really fighters.
They don't really read Sun Tzu.
What they do is they read the tea leaves.
And let's think about what they're aiming for.
Well, let's look at a couple of interesting details here.
The current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, He left the military before he was called back by Biden.
He made $7 million in the time he was out.
James Mattis. Mad Dog Mattis.
You know, tough guy.
Well, he's not so much a tough guy as he's a rich guy.
He's essentially worth over $5 million by serving on the boards of what?
Various types of defense-related industries.
So this is the game that these guys are playing.
Eisenhower used the term the military-industrial complex.
And these guys have realized, listen, this is the way that we can advance.
Who cares about what's going on in Afghanistan?
We just want to keep the dollars flowing.
And if we keep the dollars flowing, the defense contractors that supply all this materiel will be really happy with us.
That's why when we resign, we will get nice pensions and that comes from really kissing the right butts, keeping the political people happy so that you stay in your position.
But the moment you leave...
You go to the very defense contractors who bidding you've been doing.
And this is what it's about.
It's really not about Afghanistan at all.
They could care less whether or not we're making advances against the Taliban.
No one is sitting back and saying, but why?
What was our original goal and was that even valid?
None of this is really going on.
You've created this complex of politicians and Cooperative intelligence analysts who are not intelligent themselves, nor do they know anything that you and I don't know.
But what they do know is how to massage data in a way that makes it palatable to tell people, political people, what they want to hear.
The whole thing is a sick racket.
And it shows you how corroded these institutions have become and how if we're going to be the world's superpower, if we're going to retain our status in the world, we have to clean these organizations I won't say from the ground up.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the ordinary soldier, the ordinary guy who signs up for the CIA. We've got to clean out the leadership.
We've got to detoxify and, if necessary, fumigate the place.
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The Daily Mail in London reports, and we have to turn to the foreign press for this kind of reporting, 74 people on Martha's Vineyard have tested positive for COVID-19 right after the Obama super spreader bash.
Now, of course, you've got to measure this against what happened before, and it turns out that there were cases in Martha's Vineyard, but not very many.
I mean, there were 48, for example, before that, and now we've seen a big spike.
They say, quote, No one has done the contract tracing to say, oh yeah, well, this guy was at the Obama party.
But it is clear that Obama had this kind of big bash, four to five hundred people.
And sure, when it was first reported, Obama said, well, you know what, I'm going to be responsible.
I'm limited to family and friends.
Well, what turns out what he did was he found all the people, kind of all the political operatives who helped him get ahead.
But he thought, you know, I'm done with them now.
So like David Axelrod, disinvited.
Rob Emanuel, disinvited.
Caroline Kennedy, disinvited.
But all the Hollywood types were kind of kept on the list.
And so, it turns out when you look more closely, and I didn't know this, I thought it was a single party, but it turns out it was sort of like a series of parties.
Obama, it says, had a bash at the Barn Bowl and Bistro.
Then he had a larger kickoff at the Winnetka Oceanside Resort.
Then he had a Sunday brunch at the Beach Road Restaurant.
So the party was just the culmination of all these kind of other parties.
It almost reminds me of like an Indian wedding, which takes like a week.
And Obama was doing this to do what?
Really to kind of show off.
Now, he pretended like he's taking COVID seriously.
He apparently hired a COVID coordinator, basically to provide a certain kind of moral cover for what he was doing.
And with the exception of Maureen Dowd, who I have to credit, she's on the left, she's a progressive, but she wrote a stinging column in the New York Times.
It's called, Behold Barack Antoinette.
Perfect title. Basically saying, here's a hypocrite.
Here's a guy who says one thing and does another.
Here's a guy who wants to live by a different set of rules.
But for most of the left, there's a kind of attempt to cover for Obama.
And you might remember, I think it was the people on CNN or MSNBC. They're like, well, this is a party of sophisticated people.
As if the virus, you know, the virus, well, those are sophisticated people.
Let's avoid them.
The problem with this Obama business is that he's become something of a secular saint.
You know, he's like Saint Peter.
And so, these guys on the left are like, ooh, you can't say anything bad about Obama.
You know, you're peeing on Saint Peter.
So, it's whatever the guy does.
I mean, the guy can do pretty much anything.
Violate the COVID rules.
Essentially, say one thing and do another.
It doesn't matter how hypocritical he is.
You know, There's lots of problems in the inner cities, guys.
He's never shown up in the inner city even once.
So here's a guy luxuriating with Hollywood types, collecting money right and left.
Hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.
Essentially, it's let them eat cake.
That's the beauty of the Marie Antoinette analogy.
But meanwhile, he's got these sycophantic defenders who will defend him to the hilt.
Because after all, if Obama's image, if the great Obama, if this statue is pulled down, ultimately, what do these poor pathetic fools have left?
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Really happy to welcome to the podcast Vivek Ramaswamy, fellow Indian American, obviously a smart guy.
And the author, well, he's an entrepreneur.
He's the founder of a company called Royvent Sciences.
And he is also the author of an important new book.
I'm holding it up here. It's called Woke Inc.
And to be honest, I've...
I've only read a part of it.
Debbie knows I usually try to allocate about 15 minutes to read a book because I spend about three seconds on a page.
But Vivek, your book was unusual because I found myself just being drawn in.
You have so many good anecdotes as well as conclusions that you draw from them.
I've got to say it's very arresting.
It's a fun read. I'm looking forward to keep going, but I'm only a little bit of the way through.
But let me start by welcoming you to the podcast and also having you tell a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your story.
Sure. No, thanks, Nesh. It's a pleasure to join.
So I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, born and raised there.
Live in Columbus, Ohio today, not too far from where I grew up.
My parents were immigrants from India, so I think you know a little bit about something about that journey.
My dad came over in the late 70s.
My mom came in the early 80s.
And it's funny, we used to ask my dad as kids, why did you come to Ohio, of all places?
And he said it's because his sister was in Indiana.
I said, why did she go to Indiana halfway across the world to Fort Wayne, Indiana?
And he said that, well, it's the only U.S. state that has the word India in the name of the state.
I see. That's the joke we tell.
Very interesting. Very interesting.
But anyway, I went to Harvard for college, thought I was going to study, be a scientist.
I studied molecular biology.
I was a nerdy guy, graduated near the top of my class.
Ended up going in a different direction.
Got into biotech investing.
Thought it was the coolest thing ever.
But three years in, I had this itch to study law and political philosophy, something I'd never really done before because I'd been so science-centric.
So I went to law school at Yale.
My boss has let me keep my job.
So I continued managing a portfolio for the hedge fund where I worked while I went to Yale Law School.
Graduated in 2013.
And then that's when I came back to my job as an investor.
I saw the pharma industry I thought was broken in a lot of ways.
Started a company to fix some of the ways in which it was broken.
That company is Roivant, which you mentioned.
I've led the company as CEO for seven years, but stepped down as CEO earlier this year.
I'm still the chairman of the company, but I stepped down as CEO as I began to write about the kinds of topics that I discuss in my book, the infection of woke culture through corporate institutions and other institutions of importance throughout America, something that I felt I needed to be able to talk about in a candid way and in a way that I couldn't do if I was still the sitting CEO of a major company.
So that's a bit about my story in a nutshell, but happy to tell you more.
Well, you know, what I think is interesting, Vivek, is you're not just some guy on the outside peeking in and railing about a phenomenon that you're observing from a distance.
What I found interesting, and this was what drew me into the book, is you've been in these boardrooms, you know these guys, you've been at their conferences, you've been at their events, you've seen their kind of social preening on display.
Let's begin by talking about an experience that you had when you were...
An intern, I believe, or maybe at Goldman Sachs.
Now, Goldman Sachs, you were an intern at Goldman Sachs.
And, you know, Goldman, we all know, you know, Ivy League grads is the place to be.
You make a wry comment to the effect that you don't go to Goldman Sachs to earn money.
You go to Goldman Sachs to say, I worked at Goldman Sachs.
So this is sort of getting your credentials.
But I want you to talk about, first of all, talk a little bit about the vice president at Goldman Sachs, the guy who would constantly run to the restroom.
Describe why he did that.
Yeah, you know, so I got to work, and I had gotten into biotech investing, actually, my first exposure to that the prior summer, where I had worked at this really edgy hedge fund called Amaranth, which has a storied history of its own.
It famously imploded years later.
And this is all in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, Dinesh, which really shaped my views of capitalism.
But the following summer, I ended up working, and so this is after my junior year at Harvard, I ended up working at Goldman Sachs.
And, you know, I show up to work, you know, the places where I've worked in the past, it didn't matter how you dress.
They said, no, my shoes weren't quite fancy enough.
So those were the kinds of things that I learned.
I thought I was going to learn about companies.
Instead, I learned about how to dress.
But there was a guy who I could see he would sit diagonally across from me.
He would surf the internet all day.
But somehow when it came to using the restroom, he was in a rush to dash off to the restroom and really make a scene of it to come back to his desk to show everyone how busy he was, only to go back to surfing the internet, which I thought was a bit of a funny display of something that became more eye-opening later on, where people higher up in the food chain, the so-called managing directors, people who would be his bosses, They had this unique practice of wearing expensive tailored-made suits and shirts.
But instead of wearing Rolexes, like you might if you worked at a lesser and less elite investment bank than Goldman Sachs, which is the top of the food chain, these guys wore a cheap digital watch, the kind with these black rubber wrist straps.
And they would always show it, too.
They were particularly proud of it.
And to me, that was a That was a telling glimpse into what the culture of these elite institutions was becoming and became in the post-2008 period.
This new apologist model of capitalism, which is completely inauthentic, by the way, at its core, for forward-thinking firms like Goldman Sachs began right around the time that they were leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
And so the incident that I remember the most vividly was...
One of the heads of the group was supposed to lead us to a service day where we would plant trees in Harlem.
And you know what? I was sick of my internship by that point in time.
I was excited to go get some breath of fresh air out of the office.
We showed up in t-shirts and shorts.
We were supposed to plant trees.
The only mysterious part of that is when I showed up on the scene, nobody was really planting trees.
They were catching up on office gossip.
They were one-upping each other on investment deal war stories.
And the head of the group that was supposed to lead the way was nowhere to be found until he came in an hour late and he showed up, slim fit Gucci boots, suits, nicely dressed, not like what you'd expect for a day to spend in planting trees in Harlem.
And the thing he said is, alright guys, like he was going to discipline everybody because we were all kind of just standing around.
He says, alright everybody. Let's take some pictures and get out of here.
That's what we did. Everybody laughed.
We go to a bar nearby, sit down, pitchers of beer are already ready on the table and all.
And, you know, I turned to one of the younger associates sitting next to me and I said, look, if we wanted to have a social day, that's cool.
Just call it a social day.
Why call it service day? And he looked back at me and he said, look, you do what the boss says.
And, hey, man, have you ever heard of the golden rule?
I've been educated in a Catholic school.
I said, sure, it's treat others like you want to be treated.
And he said, no, the golden rule is this.
He who has the gold makes the rules.
And I will tell you, that was the most valuable lesson that I learned that summer.
After all, I called it the Goldman rule and the echoes of the Goldman rule continue to echo through the corridors of American capitalism and American democracy.
To this day, in a sense, that's the heart of what my book is all about.
When we come back, I want to explore, get to the core of the meaning of this woke display, because we used the word display a little early, and I think that's what you're saying.
That's what this is sort of all about.
But to what end? What is the real motive of this display?
We'll explore that when we come back.
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And back with Vivek Ramaswamy, author of terrific new book, Woke Inc.
I'm making my way through the book and I'm delighted to have Vivek on the show.
Vivek, we were talking a little bit about Goldman Sachs and let's...
Pursue that a little bit further.
I want to talk about January 2020, World Economic Forum, which we know is a chic get-together in Davos, Switzerland.
World leaders come to it, Bill Gates goes, those kinds of people.
And Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon is there, and he says that his company, Goldman, is going to refuse to take companies public unless they have, quote, diversity on their board.
Now, they don't say very clearly what they mean by diversity, but let's talk about What is Goldman's motive here?
Because it's not the obvious motive.
It's not like this guy suddenly decided, well, I've been looking at society.
I think the shape of society is not what it should be.
We at Goldman need to do our part.
There's something else going on, isn't there?
What is that? That's right.
So the essence of 21st century woke capitalism is this.
You pretend like you care about something other than the pursuit of profit and power precisely to gain more of each.
And this is just part of the magic trick.
It is the Goldman rule that I talked about before with you, inaction.
Which is to say that Goldman Sachs issues these edicts from the mountaintops of Davos because they would rather not be talking about the other business practices of Goldman Sachs that otherwise would have attracted their attention.
It is no coincidence in my opinion that this happened at the same time that Goldman Sachs was under scrutiny For its role in a Malaysian financial scandal of the highest order on the order of five billion plus dollars.
It's also the time that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were at the top of the front runner list for the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States.
And you see, Goldman Sachs had actually mastered in the pre-2008 era how you'd work with Republicans, how crony capitalism 1.0 would work, which is what they would do is place their alumnus in the seat of U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Worked pretty well for him.
Put Hank Paulson there before 2008.
There comes the 2008 financial crisis.
He's in the seat of U.S. Treasury Secretary, decides who to bail out and who not to bail out.
The U.S. government picking favorites.
I think one of the most ignominious acts of crony capitalism.
He picks Goldman Sachs and lets his old competitor Lehman Brothers go bankrupt, hang out to dry.
That's simple enough. You use money, you use lobbying, you use placements in government.
That's crony capitalism 1.0.
But now there's this newly ascendant wing of the left, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, where they're probably not going to appoint a Goldman Sachs alumnus in the seat of U.S. Treasury Secretary, and they actually weren't taking their contributions.
So they had to play a new game instead, which was supplicating to this new temple of identity politics, wherein they say, we are going to use our market power, our status as a member of a small oligopoly that gets to decide which companies go public in the To say that we get to decide what conception of diversity you ought to use when composing your board.
And I can assure you they did not mean diversity of thought.
They meant skin-deep attributes like race and gender, which they later clarified.
So that's how this game is played.
Hank Paulson's outmoded by comparison.
The new CEO's woker than woke, or crucially, at least appears to be, to codify Goldman's status in crony capitalism 2.0.
You alluded, Vivek, to the Malaysian scandal.
Aren't we talking about a scandal in which essentially corrupt politicians in Malaysia are ripping off the Malaysian people right and left with the help of Goldman Sachs?
So in other words, while Goldman Sachs is playing, you know, putting on the woke pirouette, at the same time, it is actually hurting brown and black people around the world through these nefarious deals, these money deals that enrich an oligopoly over there in Malaysia in this case, but at the expense of the Malaysian people, right?
Dinesh, welcome to the woke industrial complex.
This is how it works.
They blow woke smoke to cover up their actual business practices that they would rather not you see and rather not you talk about.
And I will tell you that it's not just Goldman Sachs.
It is Amazon.
It is BlackRock.
It is Coca-Cola.
It is Nike. The first commandment of woke capitalism, Dinesh, is this.
Ultimately, the more ruthless your business is, the more woke you have to act to be able to distract the public.
And I'm sorry to say that it's actually working.
Jeff Bezos declaring that he wants Walmart to pay its employees $15 an hour after he treats his workers awfully over decades of building his business— We should learn to just sit back and chuckle when he makes a declaration like that because we should just know that it is Jeff Bezos doing what he does best, undermining his competitors when they're most vulnerable.
It is Coca-Cola, rather, teaching their employees how to be less white than it is to talk about their own role in fueling a nationwide epidemic of diabetes and obesity issues.
Including in the very Black community that they profess to care so much about.
So that's how this game is played.
And one of the solutions, I think, is really putting some sunlight on it so consumers, and more importantly, citizens, are no longer duped by the scam.
Let's focus on Coca-Cola a little bit, because you make an interesting observation.
You say, look, you're not saying that these corporations shouldn't have a conscience.
But if they're going to have a conscience, you think Coca-Cola would say, well, listen, we're putting out this expensive sugar water all over the world.
It's obviously not good for people.
Not good for people in the United States.
It's not good for people anywhere.
It's taking a huge toll in terms of health casualties.
And so we're doing this.
So maybe what we should do is re-examine how we can change our ingredients.
Not essentially put out this poison, this liquid poison into the world.
But Coke doesn't want to do that.
They don't even want to begin that enterprise, do they?
Yeah, you know, I'm even a little bit easier on them than you.
I would just say you can't have it both ways.
Either you're just a company that sells products, you don't have any particular cloak of morality or moral high ground, and consumers can just decide whether they like the taste of your product or not, whether they ultimately want to get diabetes but enjoy the taste of Coke along the process.
Great. Leave it that way. The American system works pretty well when consumers and citizens know exactly what to expect.
Or you could be a company that really cares about the impact of your business on the health and well-being of your consumers and our society at large, and you could do what you said.
But you shouldn't have it both ways, because that's really how you trick and dupe the American system into otherwise failing to detect the essence of what's going on.
And I think it's like the equivalent of tampering with the smoke detector in an airplane lavatory, which, by the way, is a federal crime.
That's what these corporations are doing, by preying on our moral insecurities, especially people who are my age, millennials and younger, our moral insecurities of an entire generation.
It's like the equivalent of what a Virginia Slims manufacturer might have done in generations prior to insecure teenage girls.
That's what they're doing to an entire insecure, morally insecure generation by selling us these skin-deep social causes and identities as a way of making an extra buck for themselves and accreting extra power, but at the end of the day, being hypocrites in the process.
And I think the worst hypocrisies of all, Dinesh, which I'm happy to talk about, are in some of these companies, the way they do business in China without saying a peep about real human rights atrocities while criticizing so-called microaggressions here at home.
I think that really reveals the essence of what's going on here.
And part of what's happened, isn't it, Vivek, is that in America, you have had the emergence of a kind of woke industry.
And what I mean here is an industry of suppliers to these companies.
These are sort of racial activists who have turned race and wokeness into a business.
They're not in it for social justice either, right?
I mean, these are guys who basically use race to pay the mortgage.
If racism were to disappear overnight, they'd be out of a job.
So you it's almost like you've got two groups of corrupt actors on the one side the Ibram Kendi's of the world who present themselves as sort of you could almost call them the you know kind of racial wise men Who show up right? I'll conduct your seminar the high priest. That's right And then the corporations are happy to do business with them and send a little money their way Even as they're using that to cover far worse things that they're doing and they're hoping that you look over here instead of over there
Absolutely, and I'm not talking about this I'm talking about this based on my personal experiences, right?
I've worked in elite hedge funds.
I have built companies.
I've led a company as CEO. I have seen this from the inside and the way in which they're effectively playing a game of hostage with people who are in, there's total shakedowns where the Ibram Kendi's of the world either call you a racist if you don't adhere to their dogma, Or avoid the label of being a racist by bending the knee, but part of bending the knee involves paying a buck.
And that is how this woke industrial complex works.
And one of the things I reveal that actually a lot of Americans, including myself, really didn't know until I really studied this and put some light on this in context of the book, was even how government is now getting in on the act.
Where we talked about the 2008 financial crisis.
After the financial crisis, the Obama administration announces tens of billions of dollars with settlements with the peers of Goldman Sachs for their misdeeds leading up to the 08 crisis.
Yet very little of that money got paid to the public fisc.
You wanna know why?
Because the Obama administration had tried to get Congress to fund through nonprofits like La Raza and the National Urban League that pushed this woke nonsense.
Congress said no.
So they went through the back door and what they did was the Department of Justice settled with these companies and said that for every dollar that you give to La Raza or the National Urban League, we'll give you $2 off on how much you owe to the US Treasury.
And guess what? You get to issue a press release saying you donated to nonprofits.
Rather than settling with the US Treasury, you get a tax deduction in the process, and you pay less money, and the public doesn't even know about it.
So to me, this is a defining scam where everybody gets to wet their beak.
The government wets their beak.
The Chinese Communist Party wets their beak, which I'm happy to talk about more.
The woke activists wet their beak.
The National Urban League and La Raza wet their beak.
The real losers of this game Are the American people and American democracy itself.
And it comes down to telling these stories from the inside to really see how pernicious it really is.
If you think it's bad, it's not nearly as bad as you think.
And I think that that's one of the reasons that I wrote the book and really detail some of my personal experiences in the process.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Vivek to sum up whether we're dealing here with a phenomenon that could, with clinical accuracy, be called American fascism.
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I'm back with entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy.
I'm in the middle of reading his terrific book, Woke Inc.
You should check it out. It's really very awesome and breaks new ground on an important topic.
Vivek, you're talking about the ways in which the government and the private sector coordinate with each other, the government, the corporate sector, so the government is able to get corporations to do things that the government couldn't perhaps directly do itself.
Now, isn't this kind of government-private collaboration, I'm not going to use the word Nazism, because Nazism has all kinds of separate connotations, anti-Semitism and so on, but fascism, fascism referring to the marriage of the government and the private sector toward a collectivist end.
Is that an exaggerated description of what's going on?
It's not an exaggerated description.
I think it's actually a pretty accurate description and it is bone chilling when you read about some of the stories that I lay out in the book, some of them from personal experience and some of them through research.
What you're seeing today is the biggest threat to the liberty of everyday Americans is not just big government.
Maybe that was the case in 1980.
It isn't today. It is this new hybrid of big government and big business.
It's an arranged marriage.
It's more like mutual prostitution because each side gets something out of the trade.
But the net result of that act of prostitution has been the illegitimate birth of a Leviathan that is far more powerful than what Thomas Hobbes envisioned 400 years ago.
It is the woke industrial complex.
It is more powerful than either big government or big business alone because it can do what each one cannot do on its own.
And one of the best examples of that is what we see with big tech censorship today.
Where the conventional mantra is that these are private companies and they should be free to remove what does and doesn't show up on their websites.
Well, guess what? We now know that these companies are acting at the direction of the party in power to remove hate speech and misinformation that the government cannot remove directly.
And while the founding fathers had enough foresight to say that we're going to create a constitutional system of checks and balances with the First Amendment that prevents them from doing that, They couldn't have imagined what we see today, which are companies that are effectively doing the dirty work outside of the bounds of constitutional constraint as the unspoken fourth branch of government.
And what I argue in the book and lay out both the legal and cultural case for this is that if it is state action in disguise, then actually the Constitution still applies.
And in those cases, the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ought to apply to big tech.
Those are the kinds of solutions that we need for the 21st century rather than for 1980.
I mean, Vivek, think about the fact that our public square, our public discussion, which, by the way, doesn't occur in the governmental sector.
It occurs in newspapers and magazines and on social media, is essentially being run by a handful of complete nerds, the kind of people that we both went to school with, the kind of people who no one would talk to.
But now they have become the...
The constables, the police, who are able to regulate what can and can't be said.
And so you have, for example, some guy who's 24 years old in a man bun telling Rand Paul, a medical doctor, what he can say about COVID, or telling Ted Cruz what he can say about the Constitution, the former solicitor general of Texas.
Yeah, and to me, it's not even the fact that they're 24 years old or that they're nerdy or whatever.
It's the fact that they're not subject to constitutional constraints.
We have a system in our democracy that says you are accountable to the people.
and in our democracy, everyone's voice and vote counts equally on matters of political and normative importance. In the market, that's fine. You could sort of say that $1 one vote system votes the best products to the top. That's fine. In the sphere of the market, that does not work in the way that we settle our normative and political and moral questions.
That is in the open public square through free speech and open debate in our democracy.
And what you are seeing is that these companies are abusing their market power, their power in the market, by leveraging that and flexing their muscle in the marketplace of ideas.
And that is actually the monopoly of ideas is the most dangerous monopoly of all.
And I think that... You know, the framers understood this.
We did not want the Dutch East India Company here in the United States.
That is why they said there's a fiduciary duty to shareholders.
You have limited liability for shareholders.
But that was the grand bargain is you stay in your lane.
You don't exercise power in other spheres outside the market.
But what we're seeing today is the Dutch East India Company on steroids here in the United States, because even those companies only had private militias and private currencies, which, by the way, Facebook wants now, too.
But even worse, they could not control the thoughts and the ideas you were allowed to discuss.
That is what Twitter and Facebook and Google are able to do today.
And I think it is the single biggest threat to the existence of American democracy as we know it.
That's part of what I lay out in the book.
But I don't just lay out the problem.
Part of what I lay out is, I think, a better way forward and the solution to the problem.
Let's focus on that, because you talk about how really the American public needs to become woke, but in this case, woke in the sense of waking up to this new kind of collaborative tyranny that we're faced with.
Let's say your message, my message, it gets through, people go, wow, I get it.
This is the problem. What do we do about it?
Look, I think the solutions come in three buckets.
There's policy solutions.
There's legal solutions that could be argued in court today, even under existing law.
And then most importantly, there are cultural solutions.
On the policy solution side, look, I think Section 230 reform is high on the list for big tech censorship, saying you can't have it both ways.
Either you get this federal blanket of immunity, and that comes with the constraints of the federal government, including the First Amendment, or you operate as a private company, but you don't get this federal blanket of immunity.
It's not just online, though, Dinesh.
We have to apply the standards evenly offline, too.
A lot of companies today are firing their employees for expressing their political beliefs even on their own time, okay?
So what I say is that if you can't discriminate on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or religion, then you should not be able to discriminate on the basis of somebody's political beliefs either.
And while a libertarian may say that, hey, the market should be able to work these things out, if conservatives are being fired over here, another business could hire them over there, I say that in theory that might make sense, but you can't apply it both ways.
If you have the same prohibitions on race or sex or gender or sexual orientation-based discrimination, then you've got to apply that standard evenly, and either we get rid of protected classes altogether or we add political belief to the list of protected classes in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Those are the kinds of policy solutions I have in mind.
Now, I'm not holding, and you probably aren't either, holding out high hope that we're going to see policymakers actually deliver on that, right, at the federal level.
One of the things I talk about are legal solutions, ways to make arguments today in court.
For example, that wokeness is a religion.
I think it meets the Supreme Court's test for what counts as a religion.
I lay that case out pretty in a detailed way in the book.
But that has consequences because the Civil Rights Act says you can't discriminate based on religion.
That means not only can you not fire an employee for their religion, it means you as an employer cannot force your religion down the throats of your employees.
And that could be Christianity.
It could be wokeism.
And I think today we're seeing a lot more of the wokeism being stuffed down the throats of their employees under the name of diversity and inclusion training session.
So I think there's legal cases that employees could bring to court now.
That's just one of many legal theories that I discuss in the book.
But all of those, Dinesh, are really just a form of symptomatic therapy.
What I think we really need in this country is a cultural cure, a revival of a shared sense of American identity that runs so deep that it dilutes this wokeism to irrelevance.
And that's really where I end the book, is talking more about what these cultural solutions look like, where if the 2010s were our decade of celebrating diversity, we could debate it, but fine, so be it.
That's in the past. I want the 2020s to be our decade of celebrating what still binds us together as one people.
The American ideals like the American dream, e pluribus unum, from many, one, free speech, open debate, democracy, capitalism, reason, faith, free enterprise.
Those are the ideals that bind us together as one people, and that's what we really need to revive in the decade ahead.
Vivek, I couldn't agree more.
This is awesome stuff and it may well be that it's, you know, it's really immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants, people like you and me, my wife Debbie, Venezuela, India, who need to lead this charge because a lot of whites have been browbeaten into thinking that they can't stand up for American exceptionalism because that's somehow unwoke, that's somehow racist. It may be that there are brown-skinned guys like you and me that need to sound the call and the American people will respond.
Thanks so much for coming on.
I'd love to have you back. This was really great.
Thanks very much. Thanks Dinesh, appreciate it.
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I want to talk in this segment about not just the book of Job, but God's answer to Job and what it really means for the argument about divine injustice, what it really means for the argument about why God allows all this suffering and even evil in the world.
Now, after Job makes a series of complaints, bitter complaints against God, I noted on Friday that Job never becomes an atheist.
He never takes his wife's advice to curse God and die.
But he doesn't hesitate to rail against God.
Why are you doing this to me?
And God's answer has puzzled people through the centuries because God does, in fact, show up.
And God showing up alone is very significant because it's almost like God is a witness who appears to testify, to testify directly to Job.
But what he says to Job is really what is so baffling and in many ways, to some people, exasperating.
God basically says,"...where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Do you know the laws of the universe?" Is it at your command that the eagle rises to the height to make its nest?
Now, what's going on here?
It appears that God is sort of like, I'm the boss, he's intimidating Job.
But I think that behind all that, God is making a point that often gets missed for people who read this.
What God is basically saying is that, hey Job...
You have a very narrow circle of knowledge investigating why I'm doing what I do.
So, the point here isn't just that God has power, but God is also pointing to the sort of incomprehensibility of the world, the world as a whole.
It's difficult for us as humans to make sense of.
We can make sense of things that are, you could call them local knowledge, knowledge around us.
Why did my friend not repay the hundred dollars I lent him?
I can answer that question.
But if somebody asks me a question like, why is there a universe?
That's a much harder question for any human being to answer.
Now, interestingly, Job is satisfied by what God says because he does submit to God.
He says, in fact, that he sits in dust and ashes and he repents.
He repents kind of for railing against God.
I think Job appreciates the fact that God showed up.
But Job also gets the point.
I'm not God. I don't have the God's eye view of the universe.
I only have the Job's eye view.
Now, this is an absolutely critical point because for a lot of atheists and skeptics and even Christians at times when you're angry at God...
You think that because you don't know the reason why something is happening, therefore they can't be a reason.
Now, this is really what we want to focus on.
There's a famous article that a writer, William Rowe, published many years ago, and he was trying to indict God.
He talked about a fawn, a little deer, dying in a forest fire.
And William Rowe says, is it reasonable to believe that there's some greater good to justify this?
And he goes, quote, so far as we can see, the fawn's intense suffering is pointless.
But I want to highlight the key term here, so far as we can see.
So my point is, that's not very far at all.
What does William Rowe know about how the fawn feels?
What does he know about the ecosystem underlying forest fires and fawns getting...
Their legs trapped in trees.
So philosophers have for many years talked about an argument that is called the no-seum argument.
No-seum is spelled N-O-S-E-E-U-M, the no-seum argument.
It's kind of a funny idea.
It's based on the notion that, see, if someone were to say to me, hey, Dinesh, there's millions of bacteria in your eyes and in your nose and in your ears, I'd be like, what?
What? They'll be like, oh yeah, absolutely.
And I'm like, I no-see-um!
You know, so the idea is that if I don't see it, that can't be true.
But of course it is true.
It's just that I don't have the kind of vision that would enable me to see it.
Now, a no-see-um argument isn't always wrong.
If you say, I don't see something, the question you really have to ask is this.
Am I in a position to have the kind of knowledge that would count, that would be convincing?
Let's say, for example, I'm in a shopping mall.
And I see a car, and it's very hot outside, and the car door is open, and an infant is strapped in a car seat.
I can immediately say, oh my god, there's a negligent mom.
She's not taking care of her kids.
That kid could actually die.
I'm going to call protective services.
I'm going to call the cops.
So I jumped to a conclusion, but of course, I don't really know the circumstances.
I don't know why the mom jumped out of the car.
Maybe it's the case that her husband was in the store and had a heart attack.
She had to run to his aid.
Maybe there was a second child.
And the second child was in trouble, and the mom had to rush to its aid.
So there could be all kinds of reasons why this situation, which appears to me one way, is in fact more correctly described another way.
So the point to make here is this, that we should be a little careful.
It's not to say, I think in fact the reason we have the book of Job is there's nothing wrong in raising these questions.
But the point is this.
There's an epistemic chasm between us and God that is nearly infinite.
It's almost as if we are like a little ant that is creeping into a cathedral or into a library.
And we look around and we say, I don't really see the point of all these books.
Yeah, you don't because you're an ant.
But obviously the people who wrote those books fully understand the point of those books.
Fully understand why they built the gargoyles and why the cathedral is so big.
It's just that that kind of knowledge is unavailable to you.
So, am I saying really here that God's purposes are, quote, mysterious and they elude all explanation?
No, I'm not saying that.
Because think of it, a mystery is essentially something that is, quote, beyond explanation.
A mystery, in a sense, has no answer.
And I'm not saying there's no answer.
I'm saying there is an answer. We just don't know what it is.
There is an answer, but that answer is available to God and not to us.
So, once again, to be very clear about this, this is not an attack on human reason.
It's not a call to suspend our reason in trying to understand the world.
It is a demonstration merely of the narrow compass of human reason.
It is a way of pointing out that human reason operates within limits.
And beyond those limits, there are questions that we would like to answer, that reason suggests the question to ourselves, but reason is unable to provide an answer, an answer that is apparently available only to God.
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