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May 8, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
41:24
James Lindsay: ESG - Corporate Manipulation and National Security Threats | The TRUTH Podcast #23
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so i'm back with
my friend james lindsey and uh he's just recovering from some covet but uh fortunately a man with as much brain power as he has when it sort of you know gets a little bit covet brained for a couple of days is still a man with a lot of brain power so So we're going to talk about something.
He caught my attention when he was tweeting, James, welcome back to the podcast.
Let's just...
I'm going to chat a little bit about a couple of themes that you've been tweeting about I've not been paying attention to.
What the heck is going on in our country when a mentally, I'm just going to say it, right?
Like a mentally ill individual, and there's nothing wrong with being mentally ill.
Mentally ill means you need help.
But the mentally ill person who needs help is actually getting endorsement deals and being turned into a cultural icon because of their mental illness.
I'm talking about Dylan Mulvaney and the rest of the country that believes it's a cool thing to think of yourself as being born into the wrong gender body type world.
Like, what's going on there?
I mean, I have my views on this, but you've been all over this thing, man.
So, give me your thesis, and I'll give you mine, and we'll have at it.
I mean, there's a lot of things going on.
He's...
As for why this is happening, but there are a lot of features that are part of why I think we're seeing this kind of fall from the great brand ambassadors like Michael Jordan for Nike back in the day to Dylan Mulvaney now.
And one of those factors seems to be, in their own admission, we just saw a video, I guess, went viral around social media that is one of the...
I'm not exactly sure what her title is, but marketing people at Bud Light or Anheuser-Busch came out and said, well, we were trying to figure out how to reach a new demographic.
The Bud Light brand was going to die, so we're trying to figure out how to reach to a different demographic.
So this, I don't know, 30-something woman sitting there in a corporate environment saying that it was her brainchild was to try to reach to a different demographic because the brand was going to die out.
And what are millennials into?
Apparently, millennials are into a, as you said, blatantly mentally ill man pretending not to be a woman, but a girl, which is an extra layer of strange, right?
And so there is this...
organic component to it, which is that for some reason there is a significant swath of the population that is moved by the value, the kind of very synthetic value of inclusivity that's been pushed upon them as a core value for what the future should the kind of very synthetic value of inclusivity that's been pushed upon And there is a kind of organic push to feed into that.
I don't think it's as organic as all of that.
I think that in fact, as a synthetic value, there's sort of the same kind of things that have been seen in regimes, and I use that word quite intentionally in the past, where only the people who have the new values are the ones who count as the people who are interesting and everybody else can be alienated or to where only the people who have the new values are the ones who count as use are the ones who count as the people who are interesting and everybody else can be alienated or to be quite blunt about it.
You know, when we look at a place like North Korea and it calls itself the People's Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Korea, the only people who count as the people are the people who are on board with the program and nobody else is the people.
So this was a feature in China.
This was a feature in the Soviet Union that when you get kind of this totalizing ideology being pressed from the top, there's a tendency to decide that there are the people who are on board and then there are deplorables who are not.
And And the deplorables can basically be discounted and ignored and so on.
Let's just talk about that for a second.
Are you drawing an analogy to other totalitarian regimes in the past there or you think that's more of a specific to American context?
I don't think that there's a whole lot of daylight in between the regimes of the past and the direction of America right now actually.
I think that if you read Mao, as I have spent much of the past several months doing in some detail, that you find a very similar blueprint to the way that things have been evolving in the United States.
So, in this case, I actually think that when you hear their excuses that they make, Larry Fink made similar excuses talking about this kind of transformation of the market recently.
He said, well, there's a huge demand.
The people are demanding more inclusive brands.
They're demanding a more inclusive environment.
I mean, like, let's just, I mean, before, I mean, you and I, we should get to, like, all the made-up BS, astroturf, you know, appearance of this demand side.
It's really just supply-side driven, but forget that for a second.
Like, the inclusivity, it's just an interesting framing, right?
Because I think in the name of being inclusive, there's a new culture of exclusion where somebody who has a different point of view, where in this Dylan Mulvaney thing, a grown man acting like a girl in a way that's effectively making fun of women is not all that inclusive to women. a grown man acting like a girl in a way But let's just start with that, let alone the majority of Americans who recognize that gender dysphoria, as it's been recognized for most of our country's history, is a mental health condition that deserves to be treated.
But like, how do we square that with this idea that she's taking the best possible argument year for why that inclusivity would that that version of inclusivity would help Bud Light increase its market share?
I just think it is destined to not have that effect, which gets me back to the question of what the heck is going on here.
Well, I mean, the biggest – the best argument – so let's do the steel man approach to this.
The best argument is that the culture has changed.
The culture in America throughout the West has changed.
It looks back at the past where we were exclusive of LGBT or gays and trans people in general that we saw them as different or weird or unacceptable or sinful or whatever the different thing is.
And that the young people in particular, the generations 45 and under, so really us and everybody younger than us coming up, refuse to participate in a world that's like the world used to be.
And so it's not so much that the demand across the board is one way or another.
It's the changing demographics indicate that the changing demand says that we have to behave in a different way.
And inclusion is the value that they've picked up.
Now, I don't think this is comprehensible.
This is why I invoked Mao, which is a heavy name to throw onto the table, I fully admit.
I don't think this is comprehensible, this concept of inclusivity, which clearly, as you said, it doesn't seem to include women.
It makes fun of them.
It doesn't seem to include most Americans.
It certainly isn't inclusive of the so-called straight white male or whatever else.
I think it has to be understood in terms of the way that Mao laid out his formula to transform China in the 1940s.
In 1942, he expressed the formula that he was going to use to transform China, which was called unity criticism unity.
And so what you do is you create, in his words, the desire for unity.
You put forth a standard of unity and say, we're going to unify as a country around this.
And then you start to criticize people who don't live up to that standard of unity.
And you get them to start to criticize themselves.
They're not inclusive enough in today's parlance.
We just want a place where everybody feels welcome, like they belong.
That's sort of the creating that desire for unity.
And then he says on the other side of this, after the criticism, you have unity under a new standard.
And so what you're doing is a – what he's doing with his formula is a deliberate shift in what the culture accepts and doesn't accept.
And it's done through this approach to what will the society include and what will the society exclude with criticism.
You know, we're going to have a new inclusive society.
Well, you're transphobic, so you're not part of that, so we're going to criticize you and teach you to criticize yourself.
Now, for Mao, the new standard, he called it socialist discipline.
But I think for us, it's sustainability and inclusion unquestionably as the new value system.
We're not so interested in the West and so-called socialist discipline.
But sustainability and inclusion sound really good.
And so when we see events like this and we say, well, we're looking for a more inclusive future, which is a buzzword we hear all the time.
I think that this is the concept that we're seeing put into play.
And I would be surprised if it's not, you know, with self-awareness by some of the people putting it into action that this is the formula Mao used to transform China in the 1940s and 1950s.
Here's the thing.
I mean, what was the version...
I think that there are versions of the identity and then criticism that might even make sense.
I'm not saying they're good, but they're coherent.
I think the version that's grounded is inclusiveness.
Is itself kind of circular because once it's achieved, you no longer have the inclusiveness as a rallying cry anymore because the excluded or the allegedly excluded has already internalized and become included.
And I think that there was a point in our history where that actually might have been a powerful galvanizing tool, right?
The Civil Rights Revolution was all about that, right?
And there were people of certain races that were not included in the literal sense.
They couldn't walk into a diner in certain parts of this country and sit in the same part of the restaurant, right?
I mean, there were certain periods of time, you know, until even relatively recently, a decade or so ago, where people couldn't get married to a person of the same sex or whatever.
But the thing that's interesting about the moment we live in right now, and my friend Douglas Murray, your dad was right, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think he's the one who was, we have all others who have pointed this out.
I've pointed this out and chatted about it too.
It's sort of a weird thing when it's precisely when that movement reached its promised land that it went most haywire, which is...
I don't want to say it's uniquely American.
Maybe it's actually, you know, a pattern that repeats itself through human history.
But it was when the stated civil rights movement reached its own stated goals.
That it started making up new civil rights instead.
Which weirdly, because inclusivity in some ways is a part of a zero-sum whole.
You want to get everyone into that hole.
The process of once you've done it, then still running on the same engine.
It's like an immune system that's on overdrive.
Is you start then killing the host, where here, the way you do it is some of the people you took that much trouble to include inclusively, say, with it, are now trampled under the weight of actually denying the existence of womanhood.
Or either not denying it or fetishizing it through effectively the likes of Dylan Mulaney, who then gets showered on with lucrative endorsement deals to actually trample on the vision of femininity that 70 years ago or 30 years ago was the product of inclusion of including women.
Or this trans movement that now says that rejects the premise of the gay rights movement that the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born.
That was what the gay rights inclusiveness movement was all about.
We had to be inclusive.
Because someone was hardwired this way, it's an unfair thing to penalize the movement.
Now, to make the exact opposite move, to say, no, no, no, forget we ever said that, your own biological sex and sexuality is entirely fluid over the course of your own lifetime.
And so it's sort of this weird thing where when you reach the promised land, what your own belief system says is the promised land.
It stops being the promised land because you have to wreck it to continue in your never-ending march towards inclusivity.
And so that's why that seems like a weirdly unachievable goal versus at least a raw nationalistic water, even one that's grounded in ethnic homogeneity, our ethnicity good, someone else's ethnicity bad.
It seems like that would be much more effective for even unifying a group of people, even if it's towards a bad end.
That even this model, which just sort of crumbles under the weight of its own incoherence.
You sort of see what I'm saying there?
I do, but I think there is a pretty simple explanation for this.
And just to stay within the realm of organic movements without having to say...
You know, as you articulated in Woke Inc, that some big financiers figured out that this is a powerful tool they can fund and use.
So I think there is an organic explanation here.
We don't even have to invoke any of the kind of, you know, these companies have figured out that they can use this like you wrote about in Woke Inc as a tool.
And that is that in any given movement, not to speak too statistically, but there is a distribution of different types of activists involved.
There are people who say within say, let's just stick with the gay civil rights movement.
There are people whose goal it is to say achieve marriage equality and to be able to live their life, no criminalization of homosexuality, you know, just very basic civil rights.
And when they reach the promised land, as you said, what are they going to do?
Well, they're going to go live their lives.
They're going to go home.
They're not going to continue to be activists.
They're going to go home.
And then there are going to be people who are more at the margins of that movement, who are more into, you know, whether it's with pride, there's just been this debate.
You know, is it people that are going to march just for gay civil rights or do we have to include fetish at pride?
Do we have to have somebody dressed up in a costume?
Do we have to have drag queens?
All of these different things.
And those people are not...
asking for the same thing.
And so when society broadly accepts the movement, in other words, the promised land is achieved and says, yeah, you know what?
You're like us.
Everything's fine.
Let's go ahead.
Let's extend you civil rights.
We should have all along.
We apologize.
You know, let's move forward.
Together, you have a group of people who still are outside of the acceptable, the people who want to show up to work in fetish gear or whatever else.
I mean, that's quite literally a demand written in the queer theory literature is that people should be...
Gail Rubin's Thinking Sex talks about how people should be able to come to work in fetish gear and not be judged for it.
And people are going to judge you for this.
And this is still going to be excluded.
And so what you end up with is in some sense a remnant after the success of a movement where the only people left are the people who are kind of the most radical.
The people who are the most committed.
But also the people who are still actually outside of the bounds of acceptability.
So the only place the movement can go, if it continues, is crazy.
And what we see with kind of leftist activism very commonly, with this identity activism very commonly, is we see them engaging in egregious bad behavior.
And then when somebody says that's egregious bad behavior and we don't want you to do egregious bad behavior, they say, you're doing – you only say so because of my race.
You only say so because I'm gay.
You only say so because of my identity factor.
When, in fact, everybody's kind of confused and upset and saying, no, this is not the case.
You're actually just acting badly.
You know, you're storming in Tennessee.
Tennessee, we've just had these so-called Tennessee Three storm the floor of the Capitol.
They bring bullhorns.
They act badly.
They get expelled from two of them anyway, got expelled from the state legislature.
And immediately they say, well, you expelled us because of race where the violation of House decorum was quite explicit.
We find that the guys have histories of causing at least one of the guys, the Justin Jones guy, has a history of causing problems.
He actually assaulted the previous speaker of the House in 2019 and was banned from the floor of the House entirely.
I mean, I think the reality is it's the opposite.
If they were black, I think there's a decent chance the investigation would have actually been far more aggressive than just a legislative procedure, right?
I mean, just think about what happened on January 6th in the Capitol.
And in the way that was treated by the federal police state, I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making an analogous observation that, if anything, it's actually these identitarian labels are a shield against how people actually are held to account for The way they would have been treated regardless of the color of their skin or regardless of their sexuality.
And, you know, the interesting thing is we are reaching a breaking point, though, where the very people who fought vehemently, a breakpoint in coherence, I would say, is even on the left, where the very people who fought for Title IX saying that there had to be equal funding.
And look, I think the Title IX is not...
It should not be uncontroversial.
I mean, if there are more boys who wish to participate in sports than girls, I think there was a legitimate debate.
It's not an issue that I'm particularly passionate about, but I could see reasonable debate to say that, well, it should be at least ratably...
actually want to participate in sports versus girls, as opposed to saying it has to be 50-50, even if four times as many boys actually want to participate in sports versus girls.
But that ship has sailed.
And so what was that?
The progressive left won on that movement only to now have that same progressive left unwind the coherence of its stance or just take something from the other side of the world with respect to Islamophobia.
You say anything that's critical of Islam And you may be Islamophobic, and yet look at what Islam has to say about gay people, let alone the modern version of queer.
Those butt up against each other as you have, like, let's just say a devout Muslim who needs to pray five times a day in the workplace.
You have to make accommodations in the workplace for that person to be able to do it, according to civil rights laws, etc., reasonable accommodations.
And then somebody shows up wearing fetish gear.
Well, that's not...
Like, those two things don't work at the same time if they're supposed to sit next to each other at work because one runs against the fundamental religious precept of the guy who has to go to the prayer room five times a day because the civil rights laws demand it.
It's just that once the inclusivity umbrella...
It becomes a dogma in its own right.
Forget the criticisms that people like you and I would have for what it does to national character, or the fact that it's not even inherently inclusive at all, or it's not inclusive of a majority of Americans, which I think is the essence of the issue.
There's this side issue that I was just thinking about over the weekend where it almost doesn't work on its own terms.
If you look at it for the last 30 years, you can't have It is at once Islamophobic to say that that Islamic included person should not be offended by this fact, as it is to say it's not inclusive of women to deny the existence of women's sports that the same progressive women fought a bunch of time fighting for.
Actually, I'm curious if somebody else has brought this point up, James.
You're much more on the bleeding edge of this stuff, but I was thinking about this over the weekend, where you've heard this term, let me get it right, neurotypical Was it exclusion?
It sort of basically says that, like, we have this exclusive culture with respect to people with mental illness, that we're not inclusive enough of mental illness.
You know, we could have that debate, but the people who found it really offensive when people like you or I say that trans is a mental illness...
More often than not, if you believe you're born into the wrong body and that your gender doesn't match your biological sex, more often than not, that's indicative of a mental health disorder.
The people who find that offensive are themselves guilty of, what should we say, neurotypical-ism, which is neurotypical ableism, we could call it that.
That's, I think, a term that you sometimes use, which is to say that if you find the characterization of Gender dysphoria as a mental illness, if you find that characterization offensive, that isn't that offensive to the next person that needs to be included with the mentally ill.
Like, it just doesn't work on its own terms.
It's not coherent.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, and so how do you make something work that doesn't work on its own terms?
Well, I mean, that's where you have to start...
That's where you have to start creating incentive structures.
And I think that that's the other side of this.
And I'm pretty sure that's part of why you wanted to have this conversation with me is because I pointed out that there was a – on Twitter that there was a phenomenon out there that the human rights campaign has a scoring system.
Technically, you sign up for the scoring system.
You're not forced into this.
You sign up to join what they call their corporate equality index scoring.
And corporations, I think there's thousands of them are involved now, are given a score from zero to 100 based on how LGBTQ inclusive they are according to the standards set by the human rights campaign, which happened to also change every year.
Every year there's new things added if you wish to maintain your score.
Some 840 corporations in the United States have a perfect 100. Some have had that since the inception in 2002. American Airlines for example has had I've very proudly bragged that they've had a 100 since 2002. Others have had it less amount of time.
Anheuser-Busch has a 100 CEI. And so it turns out, I think, so does Molson Coors and so do basically all of the major competitors that one might try to switch out Bud Light for something else or All the major airlines have it.
So there's this scoring system, though.
And for some reason, corporations are very proud of this score.
Who wrote the scoring system?
Was the Human Rights Campaign?
The Human Rights Campaign writes it, yeah.
It's completely done in-house.
The open question, as far as my level of being able to dig into this goes, is why does anybody care about this score?
I don't know the answer to that question.
I mean, it's a simple thing to guess.
I think this is literally...
So, I mean, you and I, we, you know, are kind of hovering over similar targets here and have been for a couple of years, but they're kind of doing to the S prong of ESG what's already been quantified for the E. So for the E, you have, like, actual hard data points, scope 3 emissions, net zero pledges by 2050. Forget whether you're measuring the right thing.
I mean, the anti-carbon framework is itself based on a flawed premise.
Another thing that I think is an unspeakable truth, as it's even more unspeakable than the stuff we're talking about moving to the trans movement.
But suffice to say, though, there's been a rigorous standard created for that.
There again, the equivalent of the Human Rights Campaign is the Climate Action 100 Plus Network, which was founded by CalPERS.
CalPERS is the California State Pension Fund, which then sort of, you know, cascades down the chain for what that, you know, means for how corporations behave.
Why do they do it?
Well, if Trace is back up, that's what their top shareholders are told to do.
Why do their top shareholders do it?
Well, they're not really the shareholders.
They're just people who pretend to be the shareholders.
Why do they do it?
Because that's what it takes for CalPERS to give them money.
Why does CalPERS do it?
It's because CalPERS in the state of California doesn't care about maximizing the value of its retirees' funds.
They care about implementing a political agenda.
Why do they care about doing that?
So the governor of California says, why does the governor of California say that?
We have a culture that elects that person to put in that office.
So that's the cascade you sort of trace all the way up to that chain.
This stuff with the Human Rights Campaign, so effectively HRC, Human Rights Campaign, creates CEI, Corporate Equality Index, which is a subset of ESG, sort of part of the alphabetist superstition of social norms.
This is doing to the S prong of ESG bringing a level of rigor that was missing by comparison to what they had done to the E already.
And so the way this tale plays out is that the Black Rocks of the world effectively then import that as an input to give themselves rigor to either the ESG scores that they apply...
Or even if not ESG scores, inputs to know how they're supposed to vote on a corporate proposals related to executive pay or whatever of a company that scored really poorly on the corporate equality index.
So anyway, to answer your question, why does anyone care?
I think that that's a big part of the story is it relates to literally executive compensation in part relates to ESG goals.
The number of companies that have executive comp tied to ESG goals is growing.
It's a significant number.
Then the question of the boardroom becomes, well, how do we, if executive pay depends on if we need rigor, they have the rigor on the E, they don't have it on the S.
So this is providing some of the stuff for that, which is in the shadow of why those companies begin to care.
Because even if it hasn't been included, they know when something is measured this rigorously and amusing rigorously air quotes, then, you know, they understand that that's where their future bread will be buttered in terms of directors elected to the board, executive compensation being pegged to it, et cetera.
Why did the shareholders demand that?
Because CalPERS demands that.
Why does CalPERS demand it?
Because it's a government institution.
So I think that's a big part of the story there.
Yeah, I think that's probably right.
It's certainly acting as a proxy for the S-score in ESG. And the problem with it, though, is like everything else under ESG is that it operates like an extortion racket.
You know, every year they say that you've got your corporation and you've had your 100 for five or six years.
Well, how do you keep your 100?
Do you just keep doing the same thing?
No, of course not.
You know, one of the requirements is that you're doing stuff to promote LGBT visibility.
And so HRC comes along and tells you some things that you can do this year to promote LGBTQ visibility.
And I don't know that the Dylan Mulvaney brand ambassador was a particular demand of the HRC in particular, but...
For instance, last year, I've heard, at least in the Whisper network, that the airlines were pressured to fly activists to Pride events for discounted airline ticket prices or free airline ticket prices.
So that they could have more people visible for the gigantic push for pride that they did through June and July last year.
And so they come along and ask you to do more things each year in order to maintain your score.
And they also have a negative scoring system built into the CEI, where if you fall afoul somehow of whatever they don't like, they can give you up to negative 25 points.
So, you know, you check off this box, you get 5 points, you check off that box, you get 10 points.
But if you, say, contribute money to a cause that they deem as anti-LGBTQ, as Chick-fil-A got in trouble for however many years ago, for example, they might dock you some of your points, and then you're no longer listed as an LGBTQ best place to work.
And whatever seat at the table that you get for having your 100 gets revoked from you, Until you recover your lost points one way or another.
And so what you have is kind of a carrot stick mechanism being wielded by the HRC and because very likely because of its connection to the, as you said, the kind of rigor is a rigorous as Asian or whatever, making rigorous the S scoring in ESG.
You have a mechanism by which, like you said, corporate leaders are extremely sensitive to this to the point where they don't seem to care that much how many customers they're alienating.
We can speculate what will happen with Anheuser-Busch or Bud Light and we see the backlash already and we see vendors denying, rejecting Bud Light and refusing to stock it and all of this.
But we don't have to speculate with what happened to Disney.
Disney lost massive amounts of shareholder value.
It's something like a third.
There was a video that went around on social media a few days ago where it was a call, a shareholder meeting call.
where the shareholder was speaking with the CEO and was saying, you know, this is supposed to be a company of family values and fun.
Go back to that.
Stop all this.
You know, this is it's cost a third of our stock value, so on and so forth.
And the CEO more or less came back and said, you know, well, we're just going to do this anyway.
To put it very politely, we're just we're glad you care.
shut up was the vibe of the answer that he got.
And the reason is when you see this kind of behavior, the reason must be that they're beholden to something else.
And this is a problem in my opinion, and I don't think it's just my opinion, for American industry.
I think our American industry has to be rescued from this kind of ESG cartel, frankly, in order for it to be able to do business.
And this isn't just to free up American innovation and American production.
When we start talking about American production, it's also a severe matter.
It sounds silly to think Dylan Mulvaney is a threat to national security.
But this is a severe national security threat because if we start to look at how things are heating up now with China and with Russia, this BRICS nation thing, and you think, well, primary manufacturing really does need to come back to the United States, at least for essential goods and services.
Because, say, China could turn off the spigot at any point and put us in a very vulnerable position.
Then you say, well, okay, let's fire up the factory.
How do we do it?
And you find out that ESG makes it prohibitively expensive or just outright disallowed.
You find that that leaves America in a very vulnerable position.
So ESG becomes a gigantic national security threat by virtue of the fact that it blocks American interests from being able to do primary manufacturing at a rate where they can afford to do it whatsoever, if they can even get around the regulatory apparatuses that prevent it from being able to get off the ground entirely.
And so this is a very serious issue that is a lot deeper than a strange decision to put Dylan Mulvaney's face on the can of beer to make everybody in America mad about it.
There's also something very interesting going on where all of the ESG unfriendly activity is literally just moving like a magnet, like metal to a magnet.
To parts of the world where those same ESG constraints don't apply.
It's like a closed system, right?
If you press on it over here, it's literally going to go over there.
And in some ways, this is part of China's plan.
This is a little bit off topic, but one of the things that I tweeted about it over the weekend was...
Yeah, I was a little concerned watching Elon Musk's Shanghai, what they call Master Plan 3, is literally what their name of it was, was for production of a bunch of the mega-pack batteries that are designed to eventually power an electric grid in Shanghai.
I love what Elon is...
I would say doing.
I'm going to caveat that and say trying to do at Twitter.
I think it's been imperfect at best.
But, you know, I'm not going to criticize good effort there that's made some progress.
I love that.
But that, I think, causes, I think, even a lot of Conservatives or whatever to then fall into hero worship complexes to actually miss the plot where, in the same way, the woke weapon is unrestricted warfare.
And I love how you draw the analogies to Mao.
Xi Jinping draws some analogies to Mao too.
His own term is unrestricted warfare.
What does that mean?
It's every means, every mechanism, not just war is war.
Everything is war.
Capital markets are war.
come beholden to China.
And I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China.
To do so in ways that they understand are socially popular in the US.
So Tesla's not a woke company by any stretch, but BlackRock and Apple are.
So they use that social popularity over there to sort of cover up for the way in which we have them beholden and holding them by the next Here, but Tesla's popular in a different way here because of the cult around Elon, but actually is effectively beholding to China in a different way.
That's just an example of unrestricted warfare to say that if China then pulls the rug or even threatens to pull the rug out, all of those people turn into pawns.
Tim Cook jumps like a circus monkey.
Every other American CEO jumps like a circus monkey.
I have no reason to think of Elon.
Don't jump like a circus monkey when she should pay calls in the hour of need as well.
And by the way, all of this is for an electric vehicle movement that is about actually, in part, subsidizing a form of behavior in the United States that leaves the U.S. less competitive when it comes to fossil fuel production as well as fossil fuel utilization.
By the way, constraints that don't apply in China in the same way.
And, you know, it's sort of interesting, you know, you and I were criticized the left a lot, but it's sort of funny, not funny in a great way, but funny in a sardonic and sad kind of way.
The way in which I think the conservative movement can fall into its own version of the same trap when, you know, the left is duped into submission by its own addiction to these causes that are being put, missing the national security erosion.
But I kind of see, you know, with the hero worship culture on the right, you know, more or less the same thing pop up and it could be Elon Musk doing the same thing for China in an unrestricted warfare mode.
And that somehow is something that conservatives decide how to pay attention to, at least for the time being.
It's sort of a game whose principles can apply outside of the left, too.
And I think more of us would be better to wake up to it.
Yeah, I mean, it kind of harkens back to our previous conversation that we had where we talked about how operationally, we were talking about how the left moves operationally and the right often isn't aware of that.
But like you're saying, China moves far more operationally than the left even.
I mean, China's China's kind of running the board right now.
I read a quote at some point from the 90s, maybe a year or two ago, that it was some Chinese analysts had said that Americans' capacity for political warfare had degraded so far as to be non-existent.
In essence, the Chinese have realized for a while that they have an advantage over the United States and that the United States doesn't know how I think that
I see the right tends to get very – it's an uncomfortable term for me to use this, but it's almost like they're looking for a messiah figure.
One character, whether it's Donald Trump is going to come in, or maybe it's Ron DeSantis, or Maybe it's going to be, you know, Elon Musk comes in and saves everything, or maybe even for a while a segment was Vladimir Putin.
You know, there's this guy, this one guy, and he's going to solve all of our problems finally.
And then, you know, we saw that, for example, in the midterm elections last year, there's going to be the red wave.
It wasn't this one guy, but the red wave was going to come, and then all of our problems are going to go away.
Then it didn't materialize the way that the right thought that it should.
And what have they done?
They've become dejected.
They're fighting with each other.
They're miserable in the way that you would expect to see somebody become miserable when their hopes get dashed upon rocks.
While they simultaneously miss how many great wins there have been at the local levels, how much energy has kind of been unleashed there at local levels, where the odd outcome in Congress enabled that small group of congressmen, the Freedom Caucus, to put some demands on Speaker McCarthy before he took the gavel and therefore, you know, get some concessions out of him that may be very helpful going forward.
So there are a lot of things where instead of figuring out how to understand the world that we live in and capitalize upon it, they put their hopes in one gigantic basket.
And then, I mean, I can't tell you how many friends I lost by saying that at certain points that I thought that Elon was making some mistakes, especially early on when he took on Twitter.
It was just...
It's just unbelievable.
And so here, you know, Elon can't possibly, he's got to be playing six-dimensional chess against China, and I don't think that that's actually how this works.
It's kind of weird.
It is.
It's not quite reached the level of cultishness on the left.
I mean, every time you think it gets crazy, you add one more letter to the alphabet soup of LGBTQIA+. But you can just put a little plus at the end of how many dimensions of chess Donald Trump or Elon Musk must be played, where you realize that, guys, if you wake up to the reality staring you in the face, it's that if you want to be saved, conservative movement, wake up, maybe we'll wrap with this one, James, and we'll just pick it up.
Like a closing message to land here.
Ain't nobody coming from on high to save us.
Okay, maybe in the religious realm it's different, okay?
But, like, in the political, cultural realm here, nobody's coming from on high to save us.
If you're gonna be saved, we're gonna have to save ourselves.
I'm always thinking of that old aphorism that, you know, it's like the work...
I can't even say it right.
I don't remember how it goes, but it's, you know, the work is made light by a thousand small hands or something like that, or a thousand small hands working together accomplishes a lot or makes the work easy or something.
That's where it really is, is people have got to be willing to get involved, get local, and start, you know, strengthening their families, strengthening their communities, I mean, think of the things that the left wants to attack most vigorously.
And they want to destroy the family.
They want to upset communities.
They want to intervene with children.
So start there.
Start getting involved in protecting those things.
Get involved in your town councils.
Get involved in your school boards.
These things actually matter.
They are the fabric of our country.
And if the fabric of the country is strong, you know, they aren't going to be able to tear it from up above.
And also, though, we do have to understand the playing field.
You know, Dylan Mulvaney is a brand ambassador for Nike, so we're going to boycott Nike because we're conservatives.
And do you not realize that the main market for Nike is in China now?
Have you been to China?
Like, Nike's everywhere.
They call it NIC. It's everywhere.
Yeah.
Take people at their word.
What it was, John Donahue, who was the CEO of Nike, basically said it.
We're a company of and for China.
He always said it during his China trip.
So if you ever make this stuff up, you could just take people at their word for once.
He's right.
Yeah.
Wake up, folks.
Anyway, good stuff, man.
Get some rest.
Your COVID brain sounded like your normal brilliance came across either way, but get some rest and we'll have you back off pretty soon.
Yeah, man.
I'm looking forward to that.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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