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April 4, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:11:26
The Art of the Culture War with James Lindsay | The TRUTH Podcast #4
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So there's an analogy between what's going on in our politics and our culture and the way you might play with a water balloon.
Look, I'll tell you what I mean.
Grab a water balloon, you squeeze it in one spot, what happens?
The water shows up in a different spot.
Squeeze in the other spot, great, it bulges in the middle.
It's still the same water.
There's the same water, it just flows to a different place.
We forget that, especially Republican politicians.
More than any other group of political or cultural actors or leaders on the planet, Republican politicians fail to understand that basic principle when it comes to the so-called culture war.
What do I mean?
They latch on to some solution.
Okay, first of all, they don't really understand the nature of the culture war.
They just say the words that they're taught to say woke was the last four letter word that they learned and they'll utter it, you know, till we're all blue in the face without having any sense of what it actually means.
They're like billiard balls, you hit it, they go in whatever direction they're hit without knowing why they're even going in that direction.
That's much of the Republican establishment.
But the problem with that approach is that if the other side is actually understanding how to aim where they're hitting the billiard balls, you're always going to be on the losing side of that game.
And so that's exactly what's happened in the rise of one of my core topics over the last year, the rise of the ESG movement, where we debated through the front door for 35 years, 40 years, the perils of big government, when the other side said, okay, you guys said you like capitalism, great, we're just going to go through the back door to get done through your system, What you thought we couldn't get done through the front door under the Constitution.
So that's, you know, we squeeze the water balloon in one place, big government.
Great.
The water just flows to the part that we weren't paying attention to because we thought it was our home turf.
Capitalism itself, capital markets itself, and it flows over there.
Now, even in the realm of capitalism, a lot of Friedmanite conservatives, what would they say?
They would say that the CEO of a company has to carry out the wishes of the shareholders.
So we would say in 1980, if the CEO wants to unilaterally impose a political agenda using shareholder money on whoever, his stakeholders or his customers, the CEO can't do that because the CEO reports to the shareholders.
Again, what do they do?
The water just flows to a different place.
They say, OK, OK, fine.
We can play that game.
We'll just say that we are the shareholders.
That is the rise of BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard and Invesco and the rest of the ESG industrial complex that then shows up as the shareholders of top companies across corporate America, even though they're not the actual capital owners.
Why?
Because Republicans latched on to first the free market as an alternative to government, then to shareholder primacy as the solution within free market capitalism.
But again, the word shareholder itself becomes co-opted to something the other side's ahead of because they know what they're actually trying to do.
While our side mostly consists of a bunch of billiard balls that just go in whatever direction we're hit, it's the other side that's actually doing the aiming.
Okay, and so what happens?
It's like a hydraulic pump system.
It's like a water balloon.
We keep squeezing in one place.
The same water's in the system.
What do you have to do?
You have to puncture the balloon itself.
You have to drain the entire system of the poisonous water that's in it in the first place.
That's the only way out.
You can't play this game of thinking you're solving one problem and then fetishizing it, turning that into a slogan.
Another one we'll talk about, school choice, whatever it is, the free market.
Without realizing the why.
Why is it that you're doing what you're doing?
And I think that's some of the one things we're missing in our movement.
It's one of the reasons I'm in this race is not just to ask, forget the question of the who, not even the what.
The what is meaningless without understanding the why.
You might even be doing the right thing at a given moment.
But if you don't understand why you're doing it, then in the next moment, the thing you're doing is actually going to be the wrong thing because the other side is one step ahead.
And so whether that's in the rise of ESG and capital markets or even whether that's in the rise of other ways in which the left is preying on the minds of young children, not just in public schools, but even in private schools through mechanisms that are invisible today to the conservative movement. but even in private schools through mechanisms that are invisible What happens is you say that, OK, the public schools with funding from the Department of Education or otherwise are foisting this woke ideology, poisonous race and critical race and critical gender theory on young children.
The right way to do that is to achieve school choice.
I say this is someone I love the free market and shareholder primacy as much as the next guy, just as much as I love school choice as a step forward.
But it's not a panacea.
It's not an end-all, be-all goal.
It is a means to the end of achieving a goal.
And if we treat it as a panacea, what does the other side do?
They take over the indirect means of influencing the private schools themselves through, say, the accreditation bodies of Which have to accredit a school in order for that school to be eligible as the recipient for those educational saving account dollars, for those school choice dollars.
So they're always one step ahead because we're not asking the question of why it is we're doing what we're doing.
And I'm joined today by one of the few people in our movement who actually asks that question.
The why.
I met him before I actually met him.
I think one of the best ways to get to know somebody is actually to read a thing they've written.
My 11th grade English teacher taught me that if you can't write something down, you probably don't know what you have to say.
She was right about that.
But the flip side of that is if you can consistently write down what you think, you probably do have a pretty good sense of what you want to say.
And I first came across James Lindsay when I read his co-authored book, Cynical Theories.
I was impressed.
And that was the beginning of a journey of my beginning to study his work more.
And then eventually, through crisscrossing as we traveled the country, a few places where we spoke and shared a stage, began the beginning of a friendship and intellectual alliance, I would say, that hopefully has its best days.
Still ahead of it.
And I'm grateful, James, for you flying to Columbus to be with us today on the podcast.
Welcome to the podcast, and I'm looking forward to diving in with you about the why.
Understanding, maybe start with some issues that are near and dear to your heart as it relates to education, but some of the same principles apply to the areas where I've built the last phase of my career in fighting against ESG. And, you know, I think what's at the heart of both of those is What's really the future of the conservative movement all about?
I think we're lost in the desert, but I think we can find our way to the promised land, and it's going to be people like you who actually have real intellect and real heft and an understanding of why we go through the motions we do that help get us there.
So anyway, thanks a lot for joining.
Yeah, my pleasure.
It's kind of funny you say lost in the desert.
Watching the conservative movements grapple with this over the past few years, I frequently think of the story of Moses in Exodus going up and finds the burning bush that doesn't get consumed, and he talks to the bush, and he gets the commandments, and he comes down, and what have they done?
They built an idol.
And he's like, the golden calf.
Two days or whatever.
What have you done?
I feel like I watch the conservative movement make this.
Building their golden calf.
One at a time.
Whatever it is, one at a time.
You put your finger on it when you use the water balloon analogy because the left thinks operationally.
They're not smarter than conservatives.
They're obviously not necessarily grounded in reality.
In fact, they're projecting the reality they want to bring into the world.
But they're very operational.
And people on the right tend not to answer with operational thought.
They don't understand that what's happening in our society again and again is that water balloon sitting out there and the left grabs it right in the middle so both sides bulge.
And they don't care which one you decide to play with.
That's how they're going to exploit you.
This is a win-win.
It's a win-win for them.
That's right.
In the martial arts, they would say, if you don't block, you're getting hit.
If you do block, you're getting thrown.
They set you up like that.
It's called mid-level violence.
It's a unconventional warfare tactic, and they're very good at it.
They're trained at it.
How does that work?
Are you a martial arts guy?
Yeah, I am.
I'm not touching you.
I'm not touching you.
I'm not touching you is kind of the standard little kid provocation.
Or Antifa showing up, and they got police.
They're standing there just safeguarding the protest, right?
Of course, we know with Antifa, it's not going to be a protest.
It's going to be something wild eventually.
But they have to provoke...
The opening to become wild.
And so what they do is, why you got your riot gear?
We don't see no riot here.
Why you got your riot gear?
We don't see no riot here.
Until somebody overreacts.
They're squeezing the balloon in the middle.
And if you don't do anything, they get to run roughshod.
They run over you.
And if you do respond, they carefully frame it out so that you've overreacted.
They're using strategies, and we can stay in this martial arts world a little bit.
Okay.
To think operationally so that they trick and trap conservatives over and over and over again.
It's actually a principle in their literature.
I don't know if you've seen.
They have a tactics manual.
Everybody should actually look at this.
It takes this problem seriously.
It's called Beautiful Trouble.
You'll hear...
Like, this is a real book?
It's a real book.
It's also available completely online for free.
That, I'm not entirely sure of who wrote it.
It's just like an open-source online thing.
It's open-source, yeah.
But you'll hear Beautiful Trouble.
It's at beautifultrouble.org.
And one of their key principles...
Well, first, you'll hear Democratic politicians say it's an extension of their activist concept of good trouble.
And you'll hear...
Politicians like AOC or Kamala Harris or so-and-so go up on there and say, we're going to make good trouble.
We're going to make good trouble.
Well, Beautiful Trouble is the update to Rules for Radicals from Saul Alinsky for the digital and mediator.
It's like a modern version.
They explicitly say that it is.
It's an update of Rules for Radicals.
It is.
And so one of their core principles is that your real action is your target's reaction.
So this is exactly what you're talking about.
They get you to go ahead and grab a side of the water balloon.
That's your reaction.
And they know how to take advantage of that.
It's almost like the Sun Tzu.
A little bit of Sun Tzu in there.
That's what I was going to say.
Really?
I remember reading that in high school.
So your real goal, what did they say?
Your real action is your target's reaction.
Oh, I love, I mean, I don't love the way they use it, but I love the fact that you're aware of this.
That is operational thinking.
They are trying to provoke you into reacting a particular way so they can frame that reaction or use that reaction to gain their advantage.
Exactly like you said with ESG, you know, we're going to go hard, hard, hard into free market, free market, free market, so now we're going to go ahead and do some corporate communism and capture that from the inside.
Sort of like a feigned retreat a little bit.
Yeah.
As a principle of lead them over there when we're ready for understanding their game better than they do themselves.
And then with other policies, since you brought up Sun Tzu, there's a principle in The Art of War, in Chapter 7, where Sun Tzu says that if you want to defeat your enemy, you don't surround the whole army, because the army will fight to the death.
So you surround them on three sides and give them a way out.
He says when they see a path to life, they'll take it.
If you surround them entirely, they'll fight to the death because they see no path to life.
But they'll take the path to life.
So if you give them the path to life, they'll take it.
And that's when you hit them.
That's when you strike.
So you surround them on three sides and then kill them on the fourth as they take the retreat.
Absolutely.
So you're conditioning their retreat.
And you can see, once you understand that they're thinking operational...
That's exactly what's...
It's interesting.
What I would say is I did not have a—and I want to hear more about this.
The way I see it, I get frustrated watching conservatives march into that fourth path, right?
They're surrounded by—and then they're marching to their death, effectively.
It ends with a guillotine.
That's right.
And I get frustrated with conservatives, you know, many people in the presidential race, many politicians, whatever, doing such a thing, going through the motions.
I didn't have a good sense of the intentionality.
Oh yeah, they know what they're doing.
We underestimate our opponents to our peril.
Again, I don't think they're smarter.
Maybe they are smarter.
Not genetically smarter, but inherently smarter.
They are more strategic.
They have a 50-year, a 20-year, etc.
agenda.
They don't want to just be left alone.
They want to take over the world.
And people who just want to be left alone want to do other things.
And so they have a very focused and purposed intensity to them.
So you look at these different things.
School choice.
You're surrounded on all sides in the schools except one.
And so here becomes the magic held out solution to all your problems.
And it becomes a litmus test for conservatives by certain activists that go out and push this idea.
And so now, all of a sudden, you have great conservative legislators at the state level, even the federal level, getting primaried because they were wrong on this particular issue.
That's not how...
It's a false idol.
It's a golden calf.
That's exactly right.
I mean, like, I have nothing against school choice any more than I have it against the free market, but the fetishization, right, the idolization of the...
Yeah, and you can see this again and again and again.
We always are getting surrounded, and then we're given...
Only one option.
Oh no.
They've got every institution.
What's left?
National divorce.
Balkanize the country.
It's the only thing left.
It's already too late.
It's all we can do.
And they get this doomsday mentality and then hold out a path to life.
The so-called black pill.
What does that mean?
The black pill?
Okay, so there's all those pills, right?
We all have pills now after the Matrix.
So in the Matrix, we'll have to go back for all the normies out there and for the boomers.
And so in the Matrix, which came out in like the 90s, Fun story, by the way.
How dorky am I? The second Matrix movie was the last time I saw a movie in the movie theater until my family dragged me like two years ago.
That's it.
I'm done.
Oh really?
That's a long time ago.
It was like 20 years.
But yeah, so Morpheus comes out.
He's got Neo.
This is before he gets taken out of the Matrix for the first time.
And he tells him, the world is not what you think it is.
Here's this pill.
It's blue if you take it.
You go to sleep.
You wake up in your bed.
You had a weird dream.
Nothing ever happened.
Here's the red pill.
You take the red pill.
And we'll see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
In other words, we're going to show you the truth.
And he gets ejected from the Matrix, sees the world wasn't as he thought.
So the red pill means being awakened to reality.
The blue pill means being conditioned to accept the hyper-real or propaganda false reality.
The pseudo-reality being projected by the media, by the narrative, as we're starting to all call it.
Well, then there's these other pills that have become derivatives.
So there's the white pill and the black pill.
White pill means you see hope for the future.
Black pill means you see no more hope.
You've gone to doomsday.
You're fatalistic.
It's all over.
We've already lost.
There's nothing we can do.
And so a strategic maneuver would be to get people to feel that way.
It's called demoralization, an actual communist tactic.
You get people to feel like there's no hope left.
That's the feed them a black pill, and then you give them a little bit of a white pill.
By the way, maybe school choice will save us.
Maybe if we balkanize, maybe if we have a national divorce, we escape these traps that have been set for us, not realizing that stepping in those directions is the trap.
And they're trying to...
There's a meme that they're exhausting your creativity for other solutions, which is why I'm really glad you're in this race, because you seem to have an inexhaustible amount of that.
But they exhaust your creativity.
And there's a meme that shows some Republicans or whatever, and it says, we've tried absolutely nothing and we're all out of ideas.
And that's where I get so frustrated.
They don't know they're getting played operationally.
They don't know that the left is...
You know when you play pool?
So you said with the billiards...
You don't just, I don't, I'm not good at it, so I just watched some on TV when I was younger and picked up the idea.
The goal isn't to hit the ball and put the other ball in the pocket.
That's actually not the goal of Billiards.
If you want to win, you have to hit the ball and put the ball in the pocket and make the cue ball roll so that it sets up your next shot too.
Yes, yes, I like that.
And you have to do that again and again and again.
And the left is doing that and the right is not doing that.
Yeah.
My analogy is they are the billiard balls.
That's what they are.
So they're getting hustled.
Even the ones who think they're aiming are just thinking one step at a time.
That's right.
That's right.
And these principles of operations are key.
Let's talk about the school choice example a little bit.
I mean, just for the purpose of using it as an example of how this game always evolves one step ahead.
So the basic thought here, and I can admit, I was saying stuff like this years ago myself, because there's truth to it, right?
You have a centralization problem.
You have monopolies on education in the public schools.
Give people the choice.
Combine that with transparency.
There's a couple different objectives we solve for here.
One is just educational quality on just learning, reading, writing, math.
But there's this cultural component to this too, making sure that kids aren't being wrongfully indoctrinated by poisonous philosophies perpetuated by a centralized body called government.
We instead empower those parents to choose where their kids get to go to school.
Good thing on its face, right?
And what I would say is further pair that with, and this is where I go a little bit further where they get helps, is if you pair that with total transparency, total transparency plus choice can get you to a pretty good place.
However, what we then see is, okay, now that we have school choice bills passing and becoming the law of the land in states across the country, those parents then have the opportunity to send their kids to any number of accredited private schools, including even Christian schools.
What happens then?
Well, I mean, obviously they capture the accrediting bodies.
In fact, they've pre-captured the accrediting bodies.
Every professional association in the country, more or less, is already captured.
It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the NAIS, the National Association of Independent Schools.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about the Christian equivalent.
I just did a thread on Twitter recently about this, how they are completely in on the diversity, equity, inclusion program.
That's your Christian schools.
And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, other accrediting bodies.
American Bar Association.
Bar Association, American Medical Association, you name it.
American Physical Union, even physics, you know.
So American Mathematical Society that I, you know, used to have connection with.
Everything.
These professional societies are the choke point.
What's the mechanism of that takeover?
Sociology.
I tried to describe this a couple of years ago.
They know they can't conquer, say, physics or law directly.
No way.
No way.
Certainly not something like engineering.
You know, again, a couple more.
A-C-E-E and A-C-S-E or whatever they are.
The different A-S-C-E. That's what it is.
Sorry.
The engineering accrediting bodies.
So, how are they going to convince engineers?
Engineers, by and large, are not woke.
Well, they don't.
They don't come in and change engineering.
They go in and they say, well, the conference circuit's very masculine.
The conference circuit has a little racism in it.
The society where we're, you know, the AMS itself, as a mathematical society, has some issues.
It seems to be that there aren't enough women here.
There's not enough diversity or whatever else.
Race, sex, gender, sexuality, whatever.
It seems awfully exclusive.
And so they start twisting the society, and what they start doing is a technique, another operational technique, which is called entryism.
They slowly find the worst offenders, the people who have actually made gaffes or who are actually sometimes a bit of a problem.
They make examples of them.
They end up pushing those people out.
Other people leave in disgust, and they bring in people who are adherent to the ideology so that the community changes.
When the community gets saturated enough with activists, which doesn't take that many, a few percent, Then they set community guidelines.
So now, to be a member of the society, you have to have these different policies.
The community guidelines set everything up.
They dictate who can be and how they're going to be in that society.
And then they start asking questions like, oh, well, if the AMS, if the American Mathematical Society was so...
Toxically masculine or whatever the buzzword happens to be so systemically racist.
What is it about mathematics that leads it to be that way?
What is it about medicine that leads it to become poison?
That's actually an interesting one.
Thank you for...
I mean, you're saying the stuff that automatically leads to where we are.
So, let's just, like, walk through the waterfall, right?
Yeah.
Let's also be a little operational about at least the diagnosis here.
Yeah.
So, there's a body.
Activists are out here swarming around looking for institutions to sort of affect, saying that, OK, government's over there.
That's the feigned retreat.
OK, they went and went and fight the battle there.
We got our boring Democratic politicians doing that.
So let them wage that battle.
But we're going to identify what other frontiers they're necessarily coming to.
They're going to come for these private institutions, all of which are sort of quasi governed by these nonprofit accreditation bodies.
Let's go show up and start what?
Picking at their insecurities and leveling accusations against them that get us a seat at the table.
Yeah.
Maybe that's step one.
Right.
And start feeding our language in.
That's so important.
Then they join the boards.
They become hired on the staff, et cetera, because the guy who was minding his own business, being some boring professor who was in some accreditation body, says, okay, well, I'm open to hearing these ideas.
Great.
So then they're in the door.
Then they start saying, well, here's the results on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever other boring criteria they care about, and say, hey, here's the inequity.
Now, what does that say about the discipline itself?
That's kind of the basic move, right?
That's right.
That's the basic move.
And, you know, I like how you said a body and there's actors who want to affect.
I'm going to change the word and say infect.
And I don't do that cruelly.
I don't think that we should be— Well, it's their word.
It's actually their word.
They actually have written papers saying that viruses are the ideal metaphor for their approach, that they have their ideology, and they have to instill it into people who are going to become professionals, but activists at the same time.
And they say that the goal, taking the virus as their metaphor, is to go and infect the new institutional bodies.
And even just being really biological and technical about this, it's not just bacteria or anything else.
The thing about a virus...
Is it co-opt the machinery of the host itself to propagate more of the virus, which is different than like a bacteria, which is just like, okay, it goes in and kills it.
That's boring.
The virus actually has a different way of working, and that pretty much exactly describes what they're doing here.
The only part I didn't know is their own literature actually says these things, which then makes it much more like that's the new thing for me out of this conversation.
I mean, their literature has been suggesting this technique since the 60s.
I mean, this is what Rudy Deutschki called the long march through the institutions.
Herbert Marcuse in 72 in his book Counter-Revolution and Revolt says, we need to stop being outsiders.
We need to go in and bring our ideology with us.
And he says at all levels of education and into the computer programming and everything.
We're going to go be the thing.
We're going to stop resisting and we're going to go be the thing and subvert from within.
But then in 2014, two researchers at Arizona State University published a paper titled Women's Studies as a Virus and explicitly said the virus becomes the ideal metaphor, compare themselves favorably to HIV, to Ebola.
That women's studies itself is a virus.
Yes.
That then infects...
And co-opts other institutions.
Right.
They give the example of taking male biology students at the undergraduate level, having them take some women's studies courses to get the ideology into them, and then when they go to grad school, they can infect the department at the new college that they go to by bringing the activism to that social circle of the graduate student union or whatever it happens to be, the biology department itself.
And they start leveling these accusations to kind of infect that new cell to co-opt it so that its cellular machinery, if you will, produces viral proteins.
That that organization produces more, yeah.
That's exactly their model.
So let me just, like, take the other side of this for a second.
Not the other side, but just to sort of scrutinize something that may not make sense, or if it does make sense, it's disappointing, is that The thing they're infecting is still comprised of, you would think, free, autonomous, thinking human beings.
Moral human beings.
Exactly, moral human beings who have their own sense of agency and virtue and values.
But this infection game only works if you have an unhealthy host, an unhealthy cell that was susceptible to infection in the first place.
That's right.
And I do feel, I mean, this is a big part of the, I don't know how much you saw about my candidacy and coming out or whatever, but a big part of this is looking in the mirror and asking ourselves, what is that void of purpose and meaning that leads us to be so susceptible to infection? what is that void of purpose and meaning that leads And I wonder if that's a question we don't ask enough.
Well, it is because it's what has left us uncertain that our values are good and fine as they are, that we don't have to kind of give into these accusations that through some kind of very arcane and esoteric pathways that we've somehow contributed to or behaved in secretly racist ways that we have to hire a consultant that we don't have to kind of give into these accusations that through some kind of very arcane and esoteric pathways that And pay them.
And pay them through the eyeballs to do it, yeah.
And that's why, yeah. yeah.
Is that where that term comes from?
I thought it was just like an online slang thing.
No, it is not where it actually comes from, but that's how I conceptualize it because of my background in the martial arts when I first heard the term.
I like it though.
I started thinking about it.
It's just like online slang, right?
Yeah, I used to do some judo, and if you don't want to get thrown, you have to have base.
Yeah, so we get based.
Yeah, so we get based so that we get based on our own values.
Yeah, the antidote to woke is based.
I like that.
That's right, it is.
It really, in a deep sense, is actually.
It is.
Because they are not susceptible to infection.
Right.
And these people that work in these professional and accrediting and so on bodies, very insecure.
Yeah, there's almost a selection bias of the kinds of people.
It's a good point where...
The host, I mean, I think we should be precise about it.
I think in the way this works, you know, push back on me, but the host, to me, is less often a human being than it is some kind of apparatus, like an organizational apparatus that has a managerial machinery to it.
That's right.
And I think that sets up for two things.
One is there's a machinery to perpetuate the virus, the, you know, it's called the woke mind virus by analogy here.
But it also selects for the kinds of human beings that tend to be on a committee or whatever.
Like, let's just think about that for a second.
I think they tend to be...
If you're going to join a committee or whatever, what does that say?
Overgeneralize here, but partially generalized.
What does that say about you?
It means you're devoting time to a body that makes decisions by consensus.
that selects for the kind of human being who opted to spend their time that way, which in turn says something about their own need for fulfillment and meaning through something that is unlikely to provide it, a committee or a title on that committee or chairmanship which in turn says something about their own need for fulfillment and meaning through something that is unlikely to provide it, a committee or a title on that committee
They're insecure people.
I think there's a trait to committee types, to committee folk, if you will, that's also been left out of that discussion so far, which is deferral of responsibility.
By making decisions through consensus, it's never really your fault.
We decided.
I didn't decide.
We did.
Somebody above me said I have to.
So, Somebody below me demanded it.
So nobody's ever actually responsible for anything.
They're not based in their own accountability or responsibility either.
And you'll see this when you go to the schools.
Why did you implement this terrible woke policy that's damaging our kids?
Well, the kids demanded it or the superintendent told me I had to.
It's never anybody's fault.
And so since nobody can take—you know, how do you answer this?
Who would you say sue for damages if damages are—well, nobody's actually responsible.
So there's no point of responsibility in homo comitius or whatever.
Purposeful diffusion of accountability.
That's right.
Now, this just makes me curious in the sociology of this.
I can imagine that now that you've opened my eyes to this, either that too was in their Bibles and intentional plans.
The beautifultrouble.org has that vision.
You have to find psychologically insecure managerial diffuse accountability types.
Either they did it by design, or it was almost by process of elimination that they tried it everywhere, the other ones didn't work, and it was sort of a natural selection of these kinds of institutions.
Which do you think it was?
Any evidence that they were this smart on this issue, too?
Well, I mean, maybe a little bit, because communism always tends toward bureaucracies, and they occupy bureaucracies, so they know they have tons of advantages and bureaucratic structures.
But when you're doing mid-level violence again and again and again, just from a natural selection kind of perspective, the place that you're going to have the largest success rate, the targets that are going to give you the biggest reward for your efforts are always going to be these kinds of people.
So people who aren't willing to take a lot of responsibility, people who don't want to be on the hook for things, people who have this kind of deferral of responsibility and they're unsure of themselves are the ones.
Mostly what you're going to be able to do is roll over.
If you squeeze that water balloon in the middle and you have underreact and overreact are the two places the water flows.
They're the underreactors.
So that's a lot of bang for very little buck.
There's very little risk in causing somebody to roll over over and over and over again.
So there's selection pressure to target institutions that will roll over over and over and over again.
But, I mean, there's other aspects.
Yeah, fine.
McCall, I mean, this is more the nerdy side of me that's trying to fight it.
But you say it's probably a selection pressure bias towards because those are the only places that it could manage to infect anyway.
Maybe they have a natural bias towards and an affinity towards bureaucratic settings anyhow because that's the largest way.
And bureaucratic choke points.
And bureaucratic choke points.
Yeah, it's also like leverage, right?
Because they can get more effect, more juice out of the squeeze if they take over an entire organization.
Organizations are often run by bureaucrats.
I don't want to go too into the weeds of postmodern literature, but if we go read, and I really should do a whole discussion on this at some point, if I go read, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition in 1979. He's not saying that we should live in a postmodern world, he's saying what the postmodern world works like.
And why it's miserable.
And so one of the things he talks about, and he does it wrongly in my opinion, I don't agree with the point he's actually making, but he talks about this concept, it has this fancy academic name called legitimation by pyrology.
By what?
Pyrology.
Paralogy.
Parallel.
Parallel logic.
Oh, parallel.
Okay, fine, fine.
And so legitimation, how do we determine if something's legitimate or valid?
And he's saying it's occurring in the postmodern condition that we find ourselves in through false logic.
But what he actually, if you boil it down, what he's saying is it's through consensus.
It's through kind of ginned up consensus.
And so what you...
What I have to understand is that the left over the past 40, 50 years has figured out how to take these critical theories, these postmodern theories, and weaponize them.
So what they know is that if they can create that moral consensus, that social consensus that this is the good thing to do, the right thing to do, they can falsely legitimize their own ideas.
And then that gets the strength of bureaucratic, you know, or administrative or managerial weight behind it.
Legitimacy, also.
And it becomes a...
I always picture...
But what was...
I want to understand the parallel logic part.
I didn't follow that part.
I understand the managerial legitimization.
Parology is, for Lyotard, is...
He's just using a big word to mean consensus.
Okay.
It's the logic of the group.
Just creates some kind of group that creates...
There's momentum behind it through groupthink, but then the bureaucracy just sort of gives it the imprimatur of also bureaucratic legitimization.
Correct.
And so they know that if they capture things that have monopolies of influence, whether it's over an institution or whether it's over a corporation or whether it's over a government body, if they can capture something that has a monopoly of influence, then they can influence everything downstream from that.
If they can get that...
Consensus-based or groupthink-based, which is usually morally twisted to their advantage, in the accrediting body, in the licensing body or whatever, everything downstream from that follows.
And that's the logic.
That's the places that they target.
We also overestimate, by the way, how many of these activists it takes to topple our society.
They actually only have to grab a number of choke points.
We're talking, you know, a few thousand as opposed to with what?
Four out of seven people on each board.
We're not talking about needing, you know, 52 or 60 percent of the population.
You need very few people just strategically hitting those choke points.
So they're thinking operationally, no.
If we were in war, right, if this was World War II, we'd be looking at, oh, we've got to do something with that bridge.
We've got to do something with that factory.
Because this is where they're building their tanks.
This is how they deliver their materials.
This is how we disrupt their supply chain.
They're saying, what's the supply chain for the intellectual and cultural property of society?
Let's control that.
Let's take that.
And that's these accrediting bodies and so on.
And then sadly though, since we got here by school choice, just to kind of circle it back to that so we don't lose it, the accrediting body part is only one small part of that issue's kind of three-sided trap with the strike on the outside.
The solution itself, or the appearance of a solution, breeds complacency.
That's that will to live instead of to fight.
So rather than suing your kid's school for harming them, now you're thinking...
I'm just going to go somewhere else.
I'll vote with my feet.
I'll just leave the problem and walk away from it, which is a tendency conservatives way too often have.
They're harming your kids fight back legally, obviously.
And also you're paying your taxes that actually fund that school and you have voting rights that go along with it.
And this is where these two issues that you brought up that are kind of parallels, where they tie together though, where ESG and school choice become the same issue.
Because conservatives also have this tendency to think outside of scale.
That's right.
They do not think in scale.
You talk to the school choice advocates and they say, I could open a micro school.
Yeah, that's cool.
Yeah.
A micro school.
It's micro.
That's right.
Where are the scaling factors going to be?
It's going to be large corporations.
What corporation is going to be able to scale to build a significant portion of market capture without being ESG compliant right now?
And that S in ESG is code for DEI. Of course it is.
And so it's all coming in.
The environmental program, everything's coming back in.
So let me just, I mean, I know you followed this, but just to explain the...
ESG aspect of this in detail.
It's a great parallel where school choice and ESG, where the counter-divest movement is the equivalent of the school choice movement, which is, oh, well, I don't like that Disney's behaving this way, or fill-in-the-blank, Chevron, Apple adopting a racial equity audit, whatever it is.
I'm just going to sell my Disney stock or my Apple stock or my Chevron stock or whatever.
Okay, and put it where exactly?
In Paramount Pictures?
Is that that much better?
Or in Exxon or in Microsoft?
Is that that much better to Apple or Disney or Chevron?
Oh, well, what's going on there?
Well, then I'm just going to remove my money from the market And then do what?
A new startup Disney?
A new startup Microsoft?
So that's like the divest movement.
And by the way, every time you divest, this is in the markets here.
What does that mean?
It means you're selling your share to somebody else who's buying it at an incrementally lower price because you're selling it.
That's right.
Versus recognizing that actually if you own a share of a company...
There's three things that come with that.
One is the financial entitlement, the right to receive the dividends, the future profits that that company pays out.
But the second is a voting right.
You have the right to vote your shares.
And the third is a voice that you get to informally exercise as your shareholder that's backstopped by your vote.
So why would you sell that in virtue of No alternative, really.
Versus engaging to maximize the value of your investment, which means purging these toxic values that are otherwise in the boardroom, using your voice and vote to do it.
Who's the other person buying your share most of the time, by the way?
For a better price, right?
Because the profit stream is still the same.
They're just getting it for a lower price because you're selling it.
I think you know this.
This was the whole premise behind my founding Strive.
So Strive's whole point was not playing the divestment game, which, virtuous as that might sound, has literally no effect at best.
But instead to use shareholder engagement to actually drive change at the companies like Disney and Chevron and Apple, all three of whom, too, last year back when I was running Strive, wrote direct shareholder letters to.
And actually hopefully they're driving consequent changes in corporate behavior.
It's kind of the same analogy with respect to public schools and school choice.
I think the school choice piece is, I think, at least a little more defensible than divesting from a company in a liquid capital market.
It is.
It's literally infinitesimally tiny, at a zero impact by selling a share.
Yeah, yeah.
Whereas school choice, you know, I think is a different impact, but there's a great parallel.
There is a great parallel.
This tendency to divest, to walk away from trouble rather than to turn around and confront trouble, the school shouldn't be abusing your kids.
And the corporation, or the banks, I should say, the big investment firms should not be doing impact investing with your money.
That you don't really want them doing.
So if you decide you're just going to walk away, you're just going to walk and walk and walk until you're in a ghetto.
You know, not a literal, well maybe, but probably not a literal ghetto, but you're going to ghettoize yourself by stepping away from the problem and it's going to gobble up more of the territory and give you less and less and less until you're in your uncomfortable, unhappy little corner of the world and they have all the spoils.
But that issue of scale, It matters with school choice because we have to understand that most of the market will not go to micro schools and it's not even necessarily here about accrediting and it's not necessarily even about whether or not the government will change its mind down the road and put strings that weren't necessarily there, which by the way they always do.
It's actually about the fact that the largest sector of the market, the market capture is going to go very heavily to large firms that are going to be ESG compliant.
If your reasoning for school choice is a principled desire for academic freedom, go ahead and support it.
If your reason is, I want options to get my kid out of woke schools, you're walking into the...
Which means you've got to know the why.
That's right.
Which means you've got to know the why, rather than just going through the motions.
What's your sense of...
Whether most Republican politicians who uttered the words school choice are thinking about the why or not.
I don't think most of them are, and I think that that's really unfortunate.
And I don't think they, more importantly, and I hate to just drag it back to ESG, but ESG is so important.
I don't think they understand.
I think that there's so much kind of old, I know you always bring up the 1980s, thought about the market, the market, the market, that they don't realize that we're actually operating under a cartel.
Of course.
We do not operate in a market with market competition.
We have every large corporation is beholden to ESG. They're chasing after their corporate equality index score and doing all these crazy things.
I just actually ran into an example.
Somebody reached out to me from GEHA, a large insurer in Kansas City, Missouri, and they are actually giving workplace trainings to get their employees to go and Lobby the state legislature.
Write your legislators.
Here are the bills.
Here are the things.
These are anti-LGBT in our view, blah, blah, blah.
It's not even like lobbying for them to get like con government contracts or something.
No.
Which is cronyism, which I don't love either, but that's a separate point.
It's not even that.
To go do these politics for us.
I don't know that it's specifically their CEI, but last year, the company, GEHA, or however it's pronounced, GEHA, signs onto the Corporate Equality Index, starts putting on their website how proud they are that they got their score up to a 90, it goes up to 100. They're chasing that number, and that number...
In many industries and many companies, they send people from the Human Rights Campaign publishes it.
They come in and they tell you, these are the activist demands you have to do.
And if you do them, we'll let you keep or raise your score.
But that first part's really dirty, right?
We'll let you keep your score if you do all this new stuff.
That's an extortion racket.
And that's what's actually running this market.
So when you look at an issue like school choice and you realize large corporate franchise of things that look like charter schools are going to fill most of the market, they're going to be under that same thumb.
When you look at the insurance market, they're under that same thumb.
So I say, for example, there's no school choice in an ESG economy.
There's no free market under an ESG economy.
Therefore, there can be no free market school choice under an ESG economy.
And I don't think Republicans are thinking this way because when I've sat down and talked with Republican lawmakers in D.C. and at state levels both, but especially the ones in D.C., I was frequently the first person to broach the concept of ESG to them and how ESG actually works and how much power has.
Oh, believe you me.
Yeah, and we're talking last year, and they're like, I've never heard of that.
And you're like, oh no.
The biggest influence that state elected officials or in the executive branch certainly have on the culture is through the hundreds of billions, collectively tens of trillions of dollars that they invest.
That's right.
And if they don't know how this works, they can't be thinking of the why would you be doing it.
It's the why precedes the how.
know the how you can't know why and then some people try to skip to the how without ever understanding the what or the why which is much of what you see exactly in the gop today that's part of why i'm in this race man I think people just have to start to think, we'll fight to the death over Ronna McDaniel or somebody else or Kevin McCarthy or somebody else without actually asking the question of what the heck it is we're trying to advance, why we stand for it, and then get to the question of who and how.
But we're going in that order in this campaign.
That's why I'm thrilled to be here and thrilled you're doing this.
But it's interesting how you think about I mean, School Choice or ESG, it's just...
They're just examples.
That's right.
Of a broader superstructure, a broader trend.
You know, now they're already changing the name.
I mean, one of the versions of the water balloon squeezes, then they change the name, which is also something that kind of frequently comes up, right?
So now ESG, right?
When, thanks to efforts of people like yourself, and I believe I played some part in this in the last couple of years...
Have highlighted awareness of ESG as an issue right when, guess what, BlackRock, many of the blue states along with them, have stopped calling it ESG. They're going to change it to sustainable finance instead.
That's right, of course, yeah.
And so then it's that feigned retreat again.
Okay, we get them to go down the direction of a three-letter acronym, and then we say, that's not fill-in-the-blank of three-letter acronym.
That's not ESG. Sound familiar?
That's not CRT. It's the same thing.
Because you're fighting an opponent who worships the golden calf, who's an idol worshiper, who's a slogan reciter.
Great, get them to recite the slogan, take the slogan out from under them, make them look like a fool, and then you actually capture the castle.
Same game.
CRT in schools.
I mean, you know this story well.
Maybe you should tell it.
But that's exactly the whole game they played is critical race theory.
It's in schools.
It's in schools and schools.
And then kind of use slightly different language.
Say it's not Kimberly Crenshaw or Derrick Bell.
And okay, fine.
You're not citing Derrick Bell to a third grader.
Yeah, this isn't CRT. But then the conservatives say they're against critical race theory.
They say, oh, that's not critical race theory.
Checkmate, we win.
And conservatives don't know exactly why they're going through the motions.
They lose.
Yeah, it's culturally relevant teaching.
It's not that CRT. You just walk through that a little bit.
You know that journey as well as I do, if not better.
I mean, yeah, it's really straightforward.
They have the name.
They change the name a little bit.
Or they have another thing that it's embedded within.
In this case...
We said, you know, you got CRT going on in schools.
Actually, we said, you're teaching CRT. And they pulled a technicality on us.
No, no, no, we're not teaching CRT. We're not teaching.
That's a law school topic.
That's advanced graduate.
It's only a few seminars.
In fact, we don't have enough of it in law schools.
We need more of it, by the way.
Deflection into some other irrelevant.
But then how would we be teaching third graders that?
Well, the fact is that they're not actually teaching CRT. So they aren't lying.
They're practicing CRT with children.
They're teaching children to practice CRT as a religion, really, as a mode, a worldview of seeing the world.
Relatedly, by the way, I don't know if you just saw in the news Greta Thunberg, I know it's climate rather than CRT, but these are all these religions that you talked about.
They just gave her an honorary doctorate of theology.
Well, that's accurate.
It's completely accurate.
I don't have a problem with that.
Anyone who invents a new cult that's lasted more than 10 years, or even pioneers one, I don't mind them being recognized as theologists.
Well, that's right.
Because that's exactly what she's a practitioner of.
That's exactly what she is.
Joan of Arc, modern Joan d'Arc here.
Yeah, that's wonderful.
But yeah, so then they come up with something else.
CRT is being, the vehicle that was moving it into the schools was called culturally relevant teaching or culturally relevant pedagogy.
So they say, no, no, no, we're just doing this other thing.
And now you have to go read a bunch of papers and learn a bunch of new terms, and it's a lot of syllables, and nobody wants to take the time.
And it is intentionally confusing to realize that CRT is the operative thing that makes the CRP work, which is...
Exactly the thing you were accusing them of in the first place.
And they just play this kind of shell game.
And then it changes to, well, it's just honest history.
It's just these nice-sounding things.
And that's what we see with these ESG now.
Oh, no, it's sustainability investing.
What we should be calling is impact corporations.
They're not S-Corps.
They're not C-Corps because they aren't serving individual proprietor or shareholder value.
They're impact corps.
That's right.
B-Corps.
There's such a special designation.
B-Corps.
Well, these corps should not...
Say, have all the privileges that the other corps have.
Totally.
Business judgment rule, for example, applies as the assumption in court.
Is it behind you?
Woking?
Yep, there it is.
Yeah, it's like chapter three in there.
It's like, I read your book or something.
It's supposed to go to people's sleep.
No, no, but exactly.
You actually raise a really good point, though, because the existence of a B Corp, which Patagonia reorganized itself into a similar kind of corporation, is the exception that proves the rule that...
If that had to be a separate legal category, either it was totally superfluous, which is not a way you generally read laws, or that you believe that law exists for a reason to create that separate category of corporation, because all the other ones had a different constraining principle.
And the constraining principle is that you stay out of advancing the political agendas that are best left to the civic sphere of our lives.
And so what do they do?
But it's this one step ahead-ism.
That's right.
Where they say that, oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Even though we said for years, and they did, that businesses have to earn their social license to operate.
That if government leaders won't step up to address global climate change and global inequity, then business leaders must do it instead.
Even though they said that like 24 months ago.
Yeah.
When called out on this distinction.
That's right.
We'll say...
Silly you.
You don't realize that we're just talking about long-run shareholder value.
That's right.
They captured the concept.
It's long-run shareholder value.
Exactly.
They infiltrated and undermined the concept of fiduciary responsibility, and then they created the condition so that in some perverted, weird sense that nobody really means, it is your fiduciary responsibility to do all of the ESG stuff, because otherwise BlackRock will crush you, which is not...
Responsible behavior to get crushed by the bank.
But what they've done is they've captured this thing.
So if we were to force them to identify as the kind of corporation that they are, to use their favorite I word, identify.
Identify.
I like that.
They're B Corps, I guess, that identify as C Corps.
It's actually kind of funny, actually.
And so they're trans corps.
But things like these different privileges, like, again, the business judgment rule, which assumes that they are pursuing maximum shareholder return, It doesn't apply necessarily to other types of incorporated entities.
So there are solutions here where we could turn and fight, and there are ways to beat them at these tricks, but you must understand how they're doing them.
Now, we talked about changing the names, though.
I'll just point out...
Words like sustainable and inclusion, they're pretty married to.
I don't think they're easily going to get away from sustainability and inclusion.
And those words have a long pedigree in their literature as well.
I mean, they can make up new words, but it is called, you know, the United Nations has their Sustainable Development Goals Agenda.
SDGs.
Yeah.
They're a little married to that.
That's kind of everywhere.
It's kind of on everything.
But that actually, if you don't know, just for people who don't realize this, because this is my typical job, isn't to just speak about these, it's to read the old literature.
This was the question that was being asked in the 1960s by the neo-Marxist thinkers, Herbert Marcuse, in his very famous, very influential book, What millions of people read in the 60s called One Dimensional Man.
If you read the second and ninth chapters, you can kind of see what he's doing.
He's saying that capitalism and socialism are kind of—they're more like brothers than they are, you know, two enemies.
And they are each doing things that are right.
So if we could somehow mix them together, we could somehow get the productive capacity of capitalism— Without sacrificing the ideology and the humanism of socialism, we could somehow, which can't produce, we could somehow mix them together so we'd have a productive socialism on the one hand, and we would have a sustainable capitalism, because that's what he says is wrong with capitalism.
It's not that it doesn't deliver the goods.
He says explicitly in his own words, it does deliver the goods.
It delivers a better life, but not a socialist life.
And so what you have to do is figure out what's wrong with it.
And what's wrong with it?
It's not sustainable.
It will burn itself out.
It will exhaust the world's resources.
It will create false needs upon false needs upon false needs and forever chase its own tail and eventually run us all dry.
So if you could somehow make capitalism be sustainable...
It would be very much like a productive socialism, and you could merge the two systems.
And I think that that's exactly the roadmap that we followed for 50 years without people realizing, since 1964, so getting on 60 years, without people realizing that's what's happened.
I think they pioneered it in China.
I think they opened up capitalist markets in a socialist environment so that they could start experimenting with how to blend the systems.
And what does it look like?
China looks very productive.
It seems to be producing.
It seems to be delivering the goods.
You've got crazy rich Asians, Chinese billionaires and oligarchs all over the place, money coming out of an eight-figure check, no big deal, here you go.
You know, they've got—it seems to be working.
They seem to have productive socialism.
So what does the West have to do now?
Well, we have to look at that.
We have to learn from that.
And what do we need to do?
Well, we need to be more sustainable.
We need sustainable capitalism.
How do we manage that?
With stakeholders who understand sustainability theory.
So we'll create a council of stakeholders and do sustainable theory from there and tell the corporations how they have to work.
And ESG was created this way.
The World Economic Forum says explicitly, Klaus Schwab in his book last year, The Great Narrative for a Better Future, it's hard to not say that with a German accent, Is that what his name of his book was?
The Great Reset for a Better Future.
Yeah, no kidding.
The Great Reset for a Better Future.
No, The Great Narrative, sorry.
The Great Reset came before COVID-19.
That's right.
The Great Reset.
Well, the subtitle is The Great Reset Book 2. Oh, I see, I see.
But The Great Narrative is there's always...
I thought The Great Reset was a conspiracy theory.
Oh yeah, obviously, with a start date announced by the now King of England.
What a conspiracy theory.
It has an official start date.
Unbelievable.
But the book, the great narrative is there's all these existential crises, so we need global cooperation centered under our control, of course, to solve these problems.
And he says, how are we going to do it?
Well, with the corporations and with the governments, we're going to create public-private partnerships, and we're going to enforce them with ESG. And he says, well, some people won't want to do that, so how are we going to get around that?
Well, we're going to take the younger generation and we're going to instill these new values in them through education so that they will demand ESG compliance out of their corporations that they work for, that they buy from, etc.
Through the accreditation bodies.
And meanwhile, we're going to rewrite the social contract to be sustainable and inclusive for a better future.
And that's what his three-part plan is, to transform the world.
To define the three parts, the...
Top-down ESG. Stakeholder capitalism.
That's right.
Bottom-up is going to be the educational system to transform the younger generations.
So they've got supply top-down.
They're going to create demand bottom-up.
And then meanwhile, they're going to rewrite the social fabric.
He spends a lot of time in the book for Klaus on rewriting the social fabric, a new social contract that we all agree to.
The name of that, we've got ESG and the education system.
It's called social-emotional learning is the tool they're using to do this.
Yes, social-emotional learning.
Emotional learning.
That's right.
Brainwashing.
And so the name though for the social contract is global citizenship.
Those are the three big targets right now.
Global citizenship, social emotional learning, and ESG are the three big targets of this agenda.
And you can understand how they work together because Klaus lays it out in a few paragraphs in the middle of the great narrative for a better future.
Top down, bottom up, and then rewrite the inside out of society.
Which you'll call, sorry, the middle, the battleground or the intermediating glue, ESG, social-emotional learning, and then you'd call it global citizenship.
Yeah, and do you know how global citizenship is defined?
First of all, it's a nonsense term.
Let me just say that.
Of course it is.
Yeah, I'm a citizen of a nation.
I'm not a citizen.
That's right.
Citizenship is a relationship between a ruler and the subjects.
There's no relationship between any global body.
Between an individual and a nation.
Until you will one into existence to make good on the deal people believe they've already made.
See how they trick you?
They get you to believe yourself a global citizen.
Say, well, what do I get for that?
And they'll say, well, we'll set up a governing body that gives you what you get.
And they explicitly tell you that global citizenship, this is in a book called Global Citizenship Education I just read.
They tell you, well, it's not that interested in rights.
Right.
It's actually interested in responsibilities, what your responsibilities are.
But a global citizen in global citizenship education, which is pushed heavily and funded heavily through the UN, is explicitly supporting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
That's how you define a global citizen.
So we're going to raise our children to be global citizens with a new social contract.
Who defines it that way and where?
In some document?
Klaus Schwab?
Or we win?
I mean...
The UN. It's all through the UN. If you spend a few minutes looking up global citizenship education and just read any of the mind-numbing problem that they put out about it, you'll see again and again and again that what it means to be a global citizen is to be compliant and in pursuit of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of Conspiracy Theory Agenda 2030. And so that's how they're defining it.
And what do they teach in, say, social-emotional learning?
Well, one of the five core competency areas they teach is responsible decision-making.
Well, how do you know if you're being responsible in your decision-making?
Well, are they meeting the 17 sustainable development goals?
It's pretty nefarious.
I mean, even one of the things, you probably saw some of this.
So my experience with Klaus Schwab, never met him.
But my only experience with the World Economic Forum...
was being contacted by them to either attend the conference in Davos, which I have never done and know I'm interested in doing, and then being extended the offer to become one of their young global leaders.
I turned it down.
I said, no, I don't think it's a good fit.
They said, you may be a good opportunity to promote your upcoming book.
I was like, my upcoming book is called Woking, and it takes direct aim at this.
I don't think that's a good fit.
No, thank you.
Months later, I get the announcement.
Oh, I don't get the announcement.
I get a bunch of text messages congratulating me from random people I haven't seen in years.
I saw you made the Young Global Leaders list.
I'm just like, are you kidding me?
That's really funny.
There you are on the website, right?
And there I am on the website.
Mid-level violence.
And turns out, Elon Musk had the same experience.
Glenn Beck has had the same experience.
So it's sort of this...
And the funny thing is, so I then declare for President of the United States, and then a bunch of people from really our movement, or at least people who are, I'm grateful, interested in the ideas that you and I have been trying to educate the public on for the last five years.
Are saying, what?
How could that be?
You're a young global fellow.
You're actually a plant.
You're actually some sort of Trojan horse.
In a certain way, this is how Klaus Schwab and the likes of them play the game.
They're going to exercise dominion one way or another.
They grab the middle of the balloon.
Exactly.
They grab the middle of the balloon.
And then we fall for it.
Yeah.
And then we fall for it.
Our people fall for it.
We all fall for it.
So, I mean, I'm glad the people in the movement are attentive to that and care about that now.
Absolutely.
But on the other hand...
But they're being exploited one step ahead.
Yeah, that's right.
Exactly right.
So now we get somebody who...
I mean, I don't want to say that I'm not boasting about myself.
It's just I've made it the objective of my career to take this on.
And what do they do?
They make sure they kneecap the person who's best positioned to do that because they're always one step ahead.
That's right.
It's like the same move from calling ESG, call it sustainable.
Great.
You're going to get a warrior from your side who's actually the biggest risk to take us on.
We're going to actually undermine the support you give them by actually wrapping the veneer of exactly the young global leader around them.
That's right.
And it's amazing.
It's just another example of one step aheadism that the other side has mastered.
And I'm not upset at our people for being skeptical.
We should be.
If we've learned one thing about the last 10 years about this infection complex, it's that you got to be skeptical.
Skepticism is the only way out.
But in the same way they co-opted the free market itself, now they've co-opted skepticism.
Yeah, exactly.
I wonder if that's in the plan too.
Probably is.
Probably somewhere in there.
I mean, they are very operational.
And if people don't take anything else away from our dialogue today, they've got to understand that the left is operational.
They are thinking in terms of strategic operations.
And unless we think in terms of answering those strategic operations, understanding them, then we can't.
Typically, this can be done merely...
It's merely by pointing out that A, an operation is occurring, and B, it has an objective, and this is what it is.
If you say they're manipulating you, and here's their objective, that's enough to break the spell for large numbers of people that will then not fall for it, will not go along with it.
It's like if I did a magic trick, if I pull out a deck of cards.
I actually saw an Instagram reel the other day, very relatable.
Where the guy was showing the magic trick from his side.
It's the one where you tear the corner off of the card.
And what it is is he's got the torn corner already in the box.
I'm not supposed to tell how magic tricks work.
And he's flipping up the next card because the corner's missing.
And then he finally gets to the place and he does the whole thing.
And he tricks this poor person into thinking that if you know how the trick works though, it's not magic anymore.
It's ruined.
It's over for you.
And what they're doing are these magic tricks.
One Step Aheadism is actually them doing a magic trick.
If they can get you to fight about whether you are a young global leader, now you're fighting about this, and they're making a strategic advance in another direction.
Divide and conquer is just another part of the tactic of staying, it's the One Step Aheadism.
Well, it's like Flatland.
It's two-dimensional to three-dimensional.
They keep you fighting down here on the table while they play in 3D in advance.
And if you got your science, you can do the right-hand rule I got made fun of on the internet for saying it works like electric current.
You get the magnetic field going in a circle, the electric current goes perpendicular to it.
And the current is the flow of their activism.
So when you can understand that and say, wait a minute, I see where this is going.
I understand why you're doing this.
I understand, for example, that Drag Queen Story Hour, while it might, middle of the balloon, it might roll over a bunch of kids, it might allow us to do whatever it is that the, you know, obvious direct purpose of it is, the other end of the balloon is it's a provocation.
And if we can trigger an act of violence as retaliation to this provocation, then they're going to exploit the violence.
And they know that sooner or later they're going to get that.
I called that kind of hilariously And Operation Drag Floyd to try to spark a George Floyd moment in the country by creating a martyr, by provoking the violence that they'll then exploit.
They'll happily sacrifice one of their own.
Why not?
Oh, yeah, of course.
Well, I mean, ultimately, their philosophy is based on Hegel, and Hegel said history uses people and then discards them.
And so, yeah, sacrificing for the movement is exactly your purpose.
Upon sacrifice, yeah.
That's right.
Yeah, pawn sacrifice makes it even worse.
But if you can say, here's the point though.
The point is, and then what did you do?
I put this out.
Media Matters wrote an article about me.
I said it on a stage at Turning Point at AmericaFest.
We were both there last year.
And I said it on stage.
Before I got off stage, the article was already published.
That fast.
I got back to my room and found it later that night.
Somebody sent it to me.
And the timestamp, I was still on stage.
Unbelievable.
So they reacted to this very quickly.
And then all these articles started to come out about it.
And what did every article say?
Elon Musk let these people back on Twitter.
Libs of TikTok, blah blah blah, me, Matt Walsh, whoever the characters are, lets these people who say this transphobic stuff, anti-drag stuff, anti-LGBTQ hate, he lets them on Twitter so you know their target.
Their target isn't me.
Their target isn't Libs of TikTok.
Their target is Elon Musk and Twitter.
Their target is to regain control over a social media space they've lost control of.
If you learn to read what they're saying operationally, it can shut down their operation in advance.
And if the right would learn this— It takes discipline.
It takes thinking on the timescales of history and not on the timescales of the next 10 minutes.
You know, that's big stuff.
It takes bothering to take the time to read their words.
I tell people a lot of times, if I have a superpower, it's one and only one, is I read their literature and believe them.
When they say we want a revolution, I believe they want a revolution.
When they say we're going to be like viruses and infect institutions, I believe they're going to act like viruses and infect institutions.
When they say we're going to go into the thing and carry our idea, I believe they are.
When they say we're going to use top-down and bottom-up and social contract inside-out tactics to transform the society, I believe that that's actually what they intend to do.
And I get called naive for this, but I don't think that it's naivety.
I think it's key.
So reading how they think, learning that they think operationally, putting those two things together, you don't have to read a lot of it.
You don't have to go back and read 100,000 articles like that.
This is doable.
People can do this.
Educate yourself.
Listen to even people like you, at least, who are fronting the workload.
That's right.
At least allow this to push that out.
I mean, I have a book coming out later this year on ESG just because it hasn't been written yet, right?
A proper book on this.
So it's coming out actually probably in the next couple months.
Their ideology is not actually complicated, which means if you learn a little bit of it, these moves, these operational steps are predictable.
You can get them, and this is not rocket science.
They're putting two dots down, and the third dot at the point of the triangle, you can guess pretty close to where it's going to be once you learn kind of how they think.
You figure out what the two dots are.
It's like I said, you come out with this Operation Drag Floyd narrative, they flip out, they write a bunch of articles complaining and saying, I'm obviously like this...
Terrible character.
Trying to discredit what I've said so people won't pay attention to it.
But every article mentions Elon Musk?
They're showing their hand.
These people are playing poker with their cards turned backwards and nobody, you know, the right wing, God bless them, is like, well, it would be impolite to look at their cards.
Right, right, right, right.
Well, no, they're showing you the cards.
Let's actually take them at their word.
I like that.
You know, James, it's really interesting.
I mean, these topics from critical theory to, you know, ESG to the infection of capital markets, the long march through the institutions...
It's rare that I'll sit down and have a conversation and be on the learning end of it.
But that's why I brought you here.
Because you're one of the people who's actually been at the forefront of this even longer than I have.
And your insight remains at the bleeding edge even still.
And so, you know, this is going to be hopefully something that you and I continue.
We didn't actually even get to touch a topic that I think you and I have an interest in.
So we'll save that for next time, which is China's role or the dynamic role.
And how that codependent relationship works between the neo-Marxist left in the United States and the, you know, let's just say Maoist Marxist objective in history of China.
So we'll bookmark that for...
I will say one thing on that, though.
Yeah, because it's so critical.
We're at a very, very large risk right now that China—everybody's starting to wake up to the fact that China's not necessarily our friend.
Not necessarily our friend, kindly put.
Yeah.
Understatement is a gift.
They also control a very large amount of our primary manufacturing, including for essential things.
And so now you see this.
The economic sort of damocles hanging over our neck, right?
Exactly.
And so we have this kind of awakening I'm seeing on the conservative.
Oh, well, we've got to start bringing back essential manufacturing, primary manufacturing.
Ladies and gentlemen, under the ESG economy, you will not.
It's too expensive, and it's too prohibited, and it's against every possible regulatory violation you can imagine.
The ESG economy is preventing us from being able to escape China.
Exactly.
These things work hand in glove.
That's right.
And here, this is the one where I know you've been taking them at their word.
I play that same principle to the Chinese.
This is part of a long plan put into motion decades, half a century ago, and it is working and it has worked.
Probably deserves an hour plus discussion on its own.
So if you're open to it.
Let's do that, actually, because I think that's in one where people need to understand and see the essence of what's happening.
And I'll tell you, one of the reasons I'm in this presidential campaign is to create the counter framework.
On one hand, the counter to ESG, engagement on the economy.
The counter to the social-emotional learning, engagement on the schools.
Opting out ain't going to be just a sole way forward.
You have to change the institutions of scale from within.
There's no easy way out other than through.
But in the middle, the pathway of global citizenship, and this is the essence of the political campaign of this.
That's right.
Is actually the revival of capital C citizenship itself.
The idea that I am a proud citizen of this nation.
And it so happens that this nation, our nation, America, is the nation that actually has the ideals that make us based.
And I think that if the opposite of woke is based, then the opposite of woke is actually America and the essence of what we stand for ourselves.
And that's why I've become, I wasn't always this way, but I've become an unapologetic American nationalist around America.
The ideals that define what America was born on in the first place.
It's not something we need to apologize for.
I think it's actually going to be an important part of our way out.
So that's what this whole project's about, and I think you get that better than most.
Absolutely.
We've got to realize that Americanism, American values, the American founding experiment, the American focus on taking responsibility instead of expecting somebody else to do it for us, is the American dependence on merit, as you often point out, is the exact opposite of woke.
It is the exact opposite of what's being pushed on us from all of these different forces, and it is the path of Out of this.
Next time they tell you to define woke, do it.
Then tell them to define merit.
You get a blank stare and response.
Well, there's the opportunity and the path to our own version of offense.
Pray on that vacuum.
Actually, fill that vacuum.
I think that's the way forward, and we're trying to do that.
I think we're going to.
So, anyway, man, thanks for coming and to be continued on the China front in a few weeks.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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