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00:01:20.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:44.000We have a great guest with us right now.
00:01:47.000He is an expert on really what's happening in the corporate space.
00:01:51.000There's an entire corporate war happening that gets some coverage.
00:01:55.000It gets a lot of coverage in the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, but it doesn't always get covered on political channels or on programs that are just kind of talking with the news of the day.
00:02:04.000But if we do not stop this incredibly insidious campaign called ESG, we're going to have a corporate landscape that is not just not competitive, but it's almost like a social credit score for companies.
00:02:18.000It's a little bit of a complicated topic, but it's incredibly important for our nation.
00:02:23.000So joining us right now is Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:02:37.000Vivek, can you walk us through what is ESG?
00:02:42.000Yeah, that is a great question to ask because the proponents of this movement have made it impossibly difficult to actually define.
00:02:49.000One of the things I've been doing is holding that movement to task for what it actually stands for.
00:02:54.000So the short answer is it stands for environmental, social, and governance factors that are supposed to influence how capital is invested in the economy.
00:03:04.000It's anyone's guess, but what it has come to mean in practice is that there is one political end of the spectrum that is representing its Its views in corporate America using the investments of everyday Americans to do it.
00:03:16.000So, I'll make it really specific for you.
00:03:18.000What's basically happening is a small group of asset managers who pledge allegiance to this philosophy, ESG, firms like BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, three of the largest asset managers in the world right there, together managing over $20 trillion.
00:03:32.000That's more than the GDP of the United States.
00:03:34.000What they do is they aggregate the money of everyday citizens.
00:03:37.000Probably many of the listeners of your program included in that.
00:03:41.000And what they do is they take our money, but then they invest in monies in companies across corporate America and tell those companies that you have to abide by these climate goals, that you have to abide by these emissions caps, that you have to abide by these diversity, equity, inclusion standards, and racial quota systems in your boardrooms.
00:04:00.000And if you don't, then we're going to fire you as CEO, then we're going to take seats on your board, then we're going to cut your pay.
00:04:07.000And that's the lurking variable behind the woke capitalist epidemic, which is really the capital behind the scenes that's forcing companies through shareholder pressure to adopt these one-sided politicized agendas.
00:04:19.000So there's a lot more to the story, but at a high level, Charlie, that's how just to kind of boil it all down.
00:04:25.000So ESG is something that is supported by the World Economic Forum and by the Davos crowd.
00:04:33.000And effectively, on its surface, it sounds really good: environmental, social, and corporate governance.
00:04:39.000And I heard somebody in some clip recently, I was watching some advertisement, and it was really weird.
00:04:44.000In the first 10 seconds, they said, We all know that business needs to play its role in trying to make the world a better place.
00:04:52.000I thought you're in the role to just sell products and kind of turn profits.
00:04:56.000I didn't think of you as a social activism organization.
00:05:00.000And it's kind of been this bifurcation of mission.
00:05:03.000I believe because of cheap money policies and the hyper corporate influence in our government, these companies have so much time on their hands and extra money.
00:05:11.000They're like, Oh, yeah, okay, we'll do $200 million towards this.
00:05:15.000But it's even more insidious than that, isn't it?
00:05:18.000Because I guess, yeah, please, your thoughts.
00:05:20.000I was just because it is a lot more insidious than that.
00:05:22.000I agree with you that easy money policies have played a role.
00:05:25.000That's why I wrote my last book all about was woke ink.
00:05:27.000But, you know, look, I think it's more insidious.
00:05:29.000And this is what I want to point out: what's really happening here, Charlie, is that you have lurking state action behind the scene.
00:05:35.000So, what the ESG movement has allowed, effectively, the progressive movement to do in this country is to allow government actors to do through the back door what they could not get done through the front door.
00:05:47.000Let's take the Green New Deal, for example.
00:05:49.000There was not enough political support to get the Green New Deal done through the front door of Congress.
00:05:55.000So, what they did is they deputized companies like BlackRock.
00:05:59.000Just like they do to big tech, by the way, but to force asset managers to enforce these values through the back door.
00:06:05.000So, it is politics, but it's politics in the avatar of the free market.
00:06:11.000And this is a threat to both capitalism and democracy, right?
00:06:14.000A lot of Milton Friedmanites, and I'm sympathetic to this.
00:06:17.000I agree with it to some extent, worry that this makes companies less effective.
00:06:22.000I've seen that firsthand, and I have a concern about it.
00:06:25.000But the real problem is that it is a threat to democracy.
00:06:29.000And that's the part that the left especially misses, but the left and the right both miss.
00:06:33.000Because what this says is the questions that we should be sorting out through free speech and open debate in the public square as citizens in a democracy, whatever we think those right answers are, we should sort them out through the political process.
00:06:45.000We're instead working it out through force, using capital as a vehicle of force in the private sector to decide on one monolithic view of how to fight systemic racism or how to fight environmental challenges like global climate change by enforcing one orthodoxy and using capital as the vector to do it.
00:07:17.000But never in any of their literature do they talk about how an economic climate could then actually have state-like power and totalitarian impulses.
00:07:28.000I mean, this is more of a philosophical question, but it's a stunning new development, isn't it?
00:07:33.000It's a uniquely 21st-century version of this problem.
00:07:36.000And as I often say, I used to call myself a libertarian, too, Charlie.
00:07:40.000Nor do I. Part of the reason why is that the free market cannot fix what it is not free to fix.
00:07:46.000Right now, what you have is lurking state action, the SEC, the Department of Labor, tilting the scales of what companies can and can't do.
00:07:55.000And then when companies then respond to those regulations by enforcing a one-sided agenda, using market power and market force to do it, the other side says, hey, you guys wanted free market capitalism all along.
00:08:06.000This isn't the government delivering those solutions.
00:08:16.000And I think the thing that's missed is that they have taken on the avatar of capitalism itself as the vehicle for pushing a political agenda, even though state action is the lurking demon behind the scenes.
00:08:27.000And I think they dupe both sides into submission.
00:08:30.000See, liberals used to be skeptical of corporate power.
00:08:33.000Think about Citizens United, et cetera, 10, 15 years ago, 12 years ago.
00:08:39.000They used to be skeptical of corporate power, but what they said is, no, no, no, don't worry about it, guys.
00:08:42.000We're going to use that corporate power to advance the neo-progressive identity politic climate change obsessed philosophy that you guys love.
00:08:58.000And we see the rise of this new leviathan that is far more powerful than what Hobbes envisioned, than what George Washington envisioned, than what Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman envisioned.
00:09:07.000This is a uniquely 21st century problem that demands new dogmas to address this uniquely modern demon.
00:09:15.000And I think that that's a big part of what I've been focused on is providing clarity to say we can't just recite slogans we memorized in 1980 when the unique problem we face is not just government, but a unique hybrid of government and the market that together can do what neither one can do on its own.
00:09:28.000That's the real threat that the conservative movement needs to wake up to.
00:09:31.000Yeah, I don't think Jack Welch hated America.
00:09:33.000I do think Jeffrey Ymelt hates America.
00:10:19.000And someone 20 years ago, either intentionally or unintentionally, realized they said, oh my goodness, the corporations are actually more powerful than the federal bureaucracy.
00:10:28.000So if we can infiltrate and take over the corporations, it's running the whole country.
00:10:33.000And it's one thing to take over the FBI and the CIA.
00:10:42.000So look, I think that, you know, the issue here is that you have this waterfall of political accountability, all right?
00:10:50.000We were talking about how the state is really using private companies to do through the back door what they couldn't do through the front door.
00:10:56.000Back in 1980, the 1980s, the problem was they used to delegate it to the three-letter acronyms like you were citing before the break, right?
00:11:05.000What's happened is back in 1980, this is what Ronald Reagan tried to fix, was the delegation of congressional lawmaking authority to this alphabet soup of the federal government, FBI, DOJ, SEC, FTC, FDA, FCC, the list goes on.
00:11:18.000What we're seeing today is actually the governmental delegation of power to a new alphabet soup, G-O-O-G, F-B, B-L-K, GS, the kinds of AMZN, MSFT, the kinds of companies that actually are escalated from political accountability.
00:11:35.000So the question is, how do we solve this problem, right?
00:11:37.000You know, I've spent time writing books about this.
00:11:48.000I think there are legal solutions, right?
00:11:50.000I think if people bring cases in court claiming state action when the government has goaded a private company to do something that the government couldn't do, there's actually really good Supreme Court doctrine.
00:11:59.000And I know you like to go deep on this stuff so we can talk about some of the Supreme Court doctrines that say that if it is state action in disguise, then actually the Constitution still applies.
00:12:08.000If they tell a big tech company to take down content that's First Amendment protected and the government told them to do it, turns out you can actually sue the big tech company as a state actor under theories of state action doctrines developed by the Supreme Court.
00:12:20.000I think you can do something similar with what's going on with BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard with the ESG movement.
00:12:25.000So there's this legal track that I think more people should pay attention to.
00:12:28.000I think there's a lawmaking track that, I mean, I have pounded my head speaking to Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and as well as the House about this.
00:12:36.000And none of them, you know, they all say they love it.
00:12:38.000Very few go on to do anything about it.
00:12:39.000I think that political belief should be considered to be added to the civil rights statutes as a protected class.
00:12:47.000And I would have never said that 10 years ago, my old libertarian version of myself.
00:12:51.000But what I've learned, Charlie, is that actually what happened is the civil rights statutes protecting classes on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, what they did was they were expanded over the years to include claims like hostile workplace environments and harassment, which in turn started to interpret certain viewpoints as being discriminatory to those protected classes.
00:13:15.000So actually, there were an interesting pair of cases.
00:13:18.000You couldn't fire an employee at Whole Foods if they were wearing a BLM mask, but actually you couldn't not fire someone for wearing an all-lives matter mask.
00:13:26.000Say what you will about the underlying philosophies.
00:13:28.000It's actually the civil rights statutes and their expansive interpretations that created the very conditions for the rampant political discrimination we see in the private sector.
00:13:37.000So I say that if you can't fire somebody or de-platform somebody because they're black or gay or Muslim or white or Christian or Jewish or whatever, then you should not be able to fire somebody or de-platform somebody.
00:13:48.000Just because they're an outspoken conservative or an outspoken liberal, let's actually really treat these standards even-handedly.
00:13:54.000Either we get rid of the protected classes altogether, which maybe I could get behind.
00:13:58.000I certainly could have gotten behind, but I think it's not politically feasible, or you apply those standards even-handedly by adding political belief to the list, right?
00:14:05.000So I think that's a conversation we ought to be having.
00:14:08.000Yeah, I mean, the civil rights regime is just so messed up.
00:14:11.000And Caldwell's book, Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement, is the best book on this.
00:14:15.000It's a profound piece of literature that talks about how the civil rights agenda is completely different than what people actually think it is.
00:14:22.000It was different than what people thought they were getting.
00:14:26.000Do Republicans get the threat here or do they just kind of just roll over your thoughts?
00:14:32.000I think you mostly don't get it, but we'll see if we can sort of guide them to focus in the right place.
00:14:37.000I will tell you, though, Charlie, I have hung the jersey on that, forgetting about the legal and political solutions.
00:14:41.000I think one of the most promising paths are actually market solutions.
00:14:44.000So that's why I find it founded this firm that I'm running now, Strive Asset Management, competing directly against BlackRock, because it turns out that most Americans who actually have capital, who have savings in their account, hardworking people who actually have investment and buying power through hard work and their savings, don't want these values represented with their capital.
00:15:03.000They would rather have their capital invested by asset managers exclusively to make products.
00:15:23.000Yeah, and that's a whole we could have an hour discussion about that.
00:15:25.000It's such a broken system with managerial plans.
00:15:28.000But the pension funds are what drive this because you have hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:15:32.000Unless you're completely corrupt or know what you're doing, you're going to get a five to ten percent return, right?
00:15:36.000Just by volume of the assets, you hire enough people that graduate from Princeton with mathematics degrees, you're going to figure it out.
00:15:42.000But if you could get all of a sudden these red states to put their pension funds for their police, their teachers, their firefighters into an asset firm like Strive or whatever, anywhere, just buy municipal bonds.
00:16:52.000So he doesn't have to call every one of those, but he means to tell the court and the world that he's flying in witnesses from around the country and around the world to make his case against Danchenko.
00:17:02.000And so hopefully, we'll get more information as we get closer to trial with the pretrial pleadings and motions that the defense and Durham will file.
00:17:11.000And hopefully, Merrick Garland will allow John Durham to continue his work on other cases, even though I've heard rumblings of otherwise.
00:17:20.000It's been six years since the actions of Peter Struckstroke Smirk and Lisa Page, the lover, the adulterers, have been sending those text messages in the summer of 2016 saying they had a secret plan, a backup plan, an insurance policy, if you will.
00:17:34.000Where are the other indictments, Cash?
00:17:50.000But, you know, I thought there was going to be two more FBI agents indicted this summer.
00:17:54.000That seemed like the track that John Durham was on.
00:17:58.000And look, I'm, you know, I might be proven wrong by the end of the summer, but it looks like Merrick Garland is weighing in and not astute.
00:19:10.000They want to get a set of impeachment charges, which are ultimately lead to a conviction in the Senate so Donald Trump can never hold office again.
00:19:18.000Their side out for the publicity's sake is: let's gin up in the media possible charges, which is being led by Adam Schiff about this, you know, so-called insurrection.
00:19:29.000But it's legally, it's a legal impossibility.
00:19:31.000Donald Trump authorized, and I was there in the Oval Office as chief of staff, 20,000 National Guards, men and women two days before the January 6th events.
00:19:39.000It is a legal impossibility for the commander-in-chief to authorize the security of the Capitol and at the same time lead an insurrection.
00:20:03.000Do you think we're going to see something soon, or is it just going to kind of be more of the same?
00:20:07.000Or at this point, what crumbs are you seeing that could lead us towards something significant?
00:20:12.000The crumbs are, you know, the trail he left during the prosecution.
00:20:16.000I know the result was terrible in the suspens case, but the reason that we created DurhamWatch.com, it's a database for documents that for anyone that's interested.
00:20:25.000We put all the January 6th documents up there on the Jan 6 vault, all the government documents from the government agencies themselves that they won't show you, all the Durham pleadings.
00:20:33.000And I think we'll get a flurry of action similarly in the Dan Chenko case as we get closer.
00:20:38.000And we'll get the public will at least be educated on the actions of Christopher Steele, even more so, Hillary Clinton and her campaign, Fusion GPS, and other, you know, I call them criminals at the FBI, McCabe, Comey, Strzok, Finn, Glenn Simpson over at Fusion GPS.
00:20:53.000So, you know, the public has owed its, the public is owed accountability in the form of judicial indictments and convictions.
00:21:00.000And at least the only thing we can provide outside of government is the actual paperwork.
00:21:04.000And we're going to continue to put it up for free at durhamwatch.com.
00:22:07.000Look, everything in the Middle East is very murky and gray.
00:22:13.000What do you think, Cash, is the proper approach to American foreign policy in the Middle East?
00:22:19.000It can get, it seems like we can get so ensnarled in this.
00:22:22.000What are we missing from Joe Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia?
00:22:26.000The biggest problem is Joe Biden is putting us back into a Middle East posture from the 90s and the Persian Gulf stages.
00:22:31.000The problem is he started off by annihilating American energy independence that Donald Trump started.
00:22:36.000And that's what you see at the pump every day.
00:22:38.000You don't have to be an oil tycoon to figure this stuff out.
00:22:42.000If gas is costing seven bucks a gallon and it's a direct result of Joe Biden shutting down the Keystone Pipeline, the XL pipeline, and turning on Nord Stream 2, which was built by Russia to give Germany, our biggest ally, basically free energy and access to data, these have direct consequences.
00:22:59.000And when he can't take it anymore over here in America, he, with the hypocrite that he is, after he called MBS a pariah after the Jamal Khashoggi murder, and you know, I remember that familiar.
00:23:10.000I got sent to Riyadh, you know, the next week after that happened to figure out what was going down over there.
00:23:15.000And now everyone in the mainstream media is quiet about Jamal Khashoggi because they are hoping that Biden goes over to MBS and begs for oil for America.
00:23:25.000MBS is in the driver's seat because of our failed diplomacy.
00:23:29.000We are not going to get any cheap gas or oil from MBS.
00:23:32.000He is going to get demands from the rest of the world and probably Russia and Syria, who he's had their dictators visit his country to the detriment of America.
00:23:43.000And we haven't even touched upon how damaging this is when it comes to Iran and their rise in the world through the Middle East powers.
00:23:51.000Look, again, Saudi Arabia has plenty of skeletons in their closet, to say the least, probably behind 9-11, incredibly corrupt through and through.
00:23:59.000The question, operative question always seems to be, what's best for your country?
00:24:03.000And if you keep Saudi Arabia in a neutral position, it could harbor energy production towards China.
00:24:10.000It certainly puts the Iranians on defense.
00:24:13.000And so, but it seems as if there is this, there's this Washington, D.C. consensus traditionally against Saudi Arabia all the time.
00:24:21.000And now it just seems like all that has really calmed down.
00:24:24.000And Joe Biden has no leverage whatsoever in these conversations, zero, largely because of ideology.
00:24:31.000So, Cash, I want to ask you, there's a lot of elections happening right now.
00:24:38.000Where do you think the America First Agenda has the best chance of success in the kind of, as we're ending the primary season right now?
00:24:44.000Well, let's start with the great state of Arizona.
00:24:46.000Of course, I'm a huge champion and proponent of Kerry Lake, who I've endorsed, my first gubernatorial endorsement.
00:24:53.000I think she's America First candidate, understands border security and the need for national security priorities and putting American citizens first.
00:25:03.000He's going to be the next senator of Arizona.
00:25:04.000We're going to flip that seat with the drive and leadership of Donald Trump to make him his candidacy front and center, just like he did out west in my home state of Nevada to Adam Laxalt.
00:25:15.000We're going to take the West back and we're going to take America back while we do that because we have people who care about the border, people who care about economics, and people who care about tramping down illegal narcotics that are killing our youth at record numbers due to Chinese fentanyl flowing in from Mexico.
00:25:32.000And I know Arizona was excited to have President Trump here, but he had to push it a week because of the loss of his passing of his ex-wife.
00:26:18.000We have been telling you for some time that we believe that there is the new COVID strain that is going to be used as the surprise heading into the midterms.
00:26:30.000Let's play Cut 84, CBS with Nora O'Donnell, the new BA.4 and BA.5 variant, play cut 84.
00:26:38.000The urgency is due to the explosive spread of the latest Omicron variants, BA4 and BA5, now responsible for more than 80% of all new COVID cases.
00:26:48.000BA4 and BA5 are our most immune-evading variants yet.
00:26:54.000The virus is mutating so quickly and rapidly.
00:26:57.000Is changing so dramatically that your immune system will have a harder time fighting off this current wave.
00:27:05.000Do the vaccines have a negative efficacy?
00:27:09.000Why aren't they still talking about therapeutics?
00:27:58.000One of the things that's clear from the data, that even though vaccines, because of the high degree of transmissibility of this virus, don't protect overly well, as it were, against infection.
00:28:27.000If it's a treatment, then why does it get liability protection against adverse events and effects?
00:28:32.000If it doesn't protect against infection, it's the first vaccine that doesn't have the sort of guarantee of 90, 95, 99% protection against infection.
00:28:45.000Stunning official Canadian data now shows vaccines raise the risk of death from COVID.
00:28:51.000Vaccinated people are now more likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID, even after adjusting for the fact they're older than the unvaccinated.
00:28:59.000In May, the most recent months for which figures are available, only 9% of COVID deaths and 14% of hospital admissions in Manitoba occurred among unvaccinated people, even though they're 17% of the population.
00:29:10.000Manitoba, which has about 1.4 million residents, also provides figures that are adjusted for the fact that vaccinated and boosted people tend to be older.
00:29:18.000Those show that in May, vaccinated but unboosted people were 50% more likely to be hospitalized or die of COVID than unvaccinated people.
00:29:28.000People who had received boosters had roughly the same risk of hospitalization or death as the unvaccinated.
00:29:37.000This is from Alex Berenson, Manitoba, Canadian data, May 1st through May 31st.
00:29:43.000And yet we're still kicking people out of the military for not getting this gene-altering therapy that they call a vaccine, even though Canadian data shows that they actually might raise the risk of death from COVID, which, by the way, is perfectly consistent with the predictions made by Dr. Peter McCullough, by Dr. Robert Malone, and Dr. Zelenko.
00:30:10.000Remember, Democrats need crisis and they need emergencies.
00:30:13.000Is this about health or is this about control?
00:30:16.000Is this about an emergency to give an excuse for mass mail and ballots?
00:30:21.000Is this about having an excuse to be able to get a midterm push?
00:30:30.000Thankfully, a judge just blocked the Air Force discipline over vaccine objections.
00:30:35.000But Republicans are too busy wringing their hands.
00:30:37.000To kind of tie this all together from last week, what if Republican governors said, if you're fired by the federal government or discharged from the military based on vaccination status, we'll happily hire you in the Arizona Border Patrol or in the South Dakota National Guard.
00:30:51.000Why are Republican governors going along with this?
00:30:54.000Are they purchased by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson ⁇ Johnson?