Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - James Lindsay: ESG - Corporate Manipulation and National Security Threats | The TRUTH Podcast #23

00:00:02.000 so i'm back with

00:00:21.000 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.

00:00:43.000 He caught my attention when he was tweeting, James, welcome back to the podcast.

00:00:47.000 Let's just...

00:00:48.000 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.

00:00:55.000 What the heck is going on in our country when a mentally, I'm just going to say it, right? 0.95

00:01:02.000 Like a mentally ill individual, and there's nothing wrong with being mentally ill. 0.99

00:01:08.000 Mentally ill means you need help. 0.98

00:01:09.000 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. 0.94

00:01:18.000 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.

00:01:31.000 Like, what's going on there?

00:01:33.000 I mean, I have my views on this, but you've been all over this thing, man.

00:01:35.000 So, give me your thesis, and I'll give you mine, and we'll have at it.

00:01:39.000 I mean, there's a lot of things going on.

00:01:42.000 He's...

00:01:43.000 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.

00:02:03.000 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...

00:02:14.000 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.

00:02:24.000 The Bud Light brand was going to die, so we're trying to figure out how to reach to a different demographic.

00:02:29.000 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. 1.00

00:02:42.000 And what are millennials into? 0.60

00:02:44.000 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? 0.93

00:02:55.000 And so there is this...

00:03:00.000 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.

00:03:23.000 I don't think it's as organic as all of that.

00:03:26.000 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.

00:03:46.000 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.

00:03:58.000 So this was a feature in China.

00:04:00.000 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.

00:04:17.000 And And the deplorables can basically be discounted and ignored and so on.

00:04:21.000 Let's just talk about that for a second.

00:04:23.000 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?

00:04:30.000 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.

00:04:38.000 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.

00:04:54.000 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.

00:05:06.000 He said, well, there's a huge demand.

00:05:08.000 The people are demanding more inclusive brands.

00:05:11.000 They're demanding a more inclusive environment.

00:05:14.000 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.

00:05:24.000 It's really just supply-side driven, but forget that for a second.

00:05:28.000 Like, the inclusivity, it's just an interesting framing, right?

00:05:33.000 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.

00:06:03.000 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?

00:06:16.000 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.

00:06:22.000 Well, I mean, the biggest – the best argument – so let's do the steel man approach to this.

00:06:27.000 The best argument is that the culture has changed.

00:06:30.000 The culture in America throughout the West has changed.

00:06:33.000 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.

00:06:47.000 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.

00:07:02.000 And so it's not so much that the demand across the board is one way or another.

00:07:08.000 It's the changing demographics indicate that the changing demand says that we have to behave in a different way.

00:07:14.000 And inclusion is the value that they've picked up.

00:07:17.000 Now, I don't think this is comprehensible.

00:07:19.000 This is why I invoked Mao, which is a heavy name to throw onto the table, I fully admit.

00:07:24.000 I don't think this is comprehensible, this concept of inclusivity, which clearly, as you said, it doesn't seem to include women.

00:07:30.000 It makes fun of them.

00:07:31.000 It doesn't seem to include most Americans.

00:07:34.000 It certainly isn't inclusive of the so-called straight white male or whatever else.

00:07:41.000 I think it has to be understood in terms of the way that Mao laid out his formula to transform China in the 1940s.

00:07:47.000 In 1942, he expressed the formula that he was going to use to transform China, which was called unity criticism unity.

00:07:55.000 And so what you do is you create, in his words, the desire for unity.

00:07:59.000 You put forth a standard of unity and say, we're going to unify as a country around this.

00:08:04.000 And then you start to criticize people who don't live up to that standard of unity.

00:08:08.000 And you get them to start to criticize themselves.

00:08:10.000 They're not inclusive enough in today's parlance.

00:08:13.000 We just want a place where everybody feels welcome, like they belong.

00:08:17.000 That's sort of the creating that desire for unity.

00:08:19.000 And then he says on the other side of this, after the criticism, you have unity under a new standard.

00:08:25.000 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.

00:08:33.000 And it's done through this approach to what will the society include and what will the society exclude with criticism.

00:08:42.000 You know, we're going to have a new inclusive society.

00:08:44.000 Well, you're transphobic, so you're not part of that, so we're going to criticize you and teach you to criticize yourself.

00:08:49.000 Now, for Mao, the new standard, he called it socialist discipline.

00:08:53.000 But I think for us, it's sustainability and inclusion unquestionably as the new value system.

00:08:59.000 We're not so interested in the West and so-called socialist discipline.

00:09:03.000 But sustainability and inclusion sound really good.

00:09:05.000 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.

00:09:14.000 I think that this is the concept that we're seeing put into play.

00:09:20.000 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.

00:09:33.000 Here's the thing.

00:09:34.000 I mean, what was the version...

00:09:36.000 I think that there are versions of the identity and then criticism that might even make sense.

00:09:45.000 I'm not saying they're good, but they're coherent.

00:09:47.000 I think the version that's grounded is inclusiveness.

00:09:51.000 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.

00:10:09.000 And I think that there was a point in our history where that actually might have been a powerful galvanizing tool, right?

00:10:14.000 The Civil Rights Revolution was all about that, right? 0.52

00:10:18.000 And there were people of certain races that were not included in the literal sense.

00:10:22.000 They couldn't walk into a diner in certain parts of this country and sit in the same part of the restaurant, right?

00:10:29.000 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.

00:10:40.000 But the thing that's interesting about the moment we live in right now, and my friend Douglas Murray, your dad was right, right?

00:10:48.000 Yeah.

00:10:49.000 I think he's the one who was, we have all others who have pointed this out.

00:10:52.000 I've pointed this out and chatted about it too.

00:10:55.000 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...

00:11:08.000 I don't want to say it's uniquely American.

00:11:10.000 Maybe it's actually, you know, a pattern that repeats itself through human history.

00:11:14.000 But it was when the stated civil rights movement reached its own stated goals.

00:11:23.000 That it started making up new civil rights instead.

00:11:26.000 Which weirdly, because inclusivity in some ways is a part of a zero-sum whole.

00:11:34.000 You want to get everyone into that hole.

00:11:35.000 The process of once you've done it, then still running on the same engine.

00:11:42.000 It's like an immune system that's on overdrive.

00:11:44.000 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.

00:12:02.000 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.

00:12:19.000 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.

00:12:29.000 That was what the gay rights inclusiveness movement was all about.

00:12:32.000 We had to be inclusive.

00:12:33.000 Because someone was hardwired this way, it's an unfair thing to penalize the movement.

00:12:38.000 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.

00:12:47.000 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.

00:12:57.000 It stops being the promised land because you have to wreck it to continue in your never-ending march towards inclusivity.

00:13:06.000 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.

00:13:19.000 It seems like that would be much more effective for even unifying a group of people, even if it's towards a bad end.

00:13:26.000 That even this model, which just sort of crumbles under the weight of its own incoherence.

00:13:33.000 You sort of see what I'm saying there?

00:13:34.000 I do, but I think there is a pretty simple explanation for this.

00:13:38.000 And just to stay within the realm of organic movements without having to say...

00:13:42.000 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.

00:13:51.000 So I think there is an organic explanation here.

00:13:54.000 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.

00:14:03.000 And that is that in any given movement, not to speak too statistically, but there is a distribution of different types of activists involved.

00:14:10.000 There are people who say within say, let's just stick with the gay civil rights movement.

00:14:15.000 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.

00:14:26.000 And when they reach the promised land, as you said, what are they going to do?

00:14:31.000 Well, they're going to go live their lives.

00:14:32.000 They're going to go home.

00:14:33.000 They're not going to continue to be activists.

00:14:34.000 They're going to go home.

00:14:35.000 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.

00:14:45.000 You know, is it people that are going to march just for gay civil rights or do we have to include fetish at pride?

00:14:50.000 Do we have to have somebody dressed up in a costume?

00:14:53.000 Do we have to have drag queens? 1.00

00:14:54.000 All of these different things.

00:14:56.000 And those people are not...

00:15:00.000 asking for the same thing.

00:15:02.000 And so when society broadly accepts the movement, in other words, the promised land is achieved and says, yeah, you know what?

00:15:08.000 You're like us.

00:15:10.000 Everything's fine.

00:15:12.000 Let's go ahead.

00:15:12.000 Let's extend you civil rights.

00:15:14.000 We should have all along.

00:15:15.000 We apologize.

00:15:16.000 You know, let's move forward.

00:15:18.000 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.

00:15:25.000 I mean, that's quite literally a demand written in the queer theory literature is that people should be...

00:15:30.000 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.

00:15:35.000 And people are going to judge you for this.

00:15:38.000 And this is still going to be excluded.

00:15:40.000 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.

00:15:49.000 The people who are the most committed.

00:15:51.000 But also the people who are still actually outside of the bounds of acceptability.

00:15:55.000 So the only place the movement can go, if it continues, is crazy.

00:16:00.000 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.

00:16:09.000 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.

00:16:17.000 You only say so because I'm gay.

00:16:19.000 You only say so because of my identity factor.

00:16:21.000 When, in fact, everybody's kind of confused and upset and saying, no, this is not the case.

00:16:26.000 You're actually just acting badly.

00:16:28.000 You know, you're storming in Tennessee.

00:16:29.000 Tennessee, we've just had these so-called Tennessee Three storm the floor of the Capitol.

00:16:34.000 They bring bullhorns.

00:16:36.000 They act badly.

00:16:36.000 They get expelled from two of them anyway, got expelled from the state legislature.

00:16:41.000 And immediately they say, well, you expelled us because of race where the violation of House decorum was quite explicit.

00:16:48.000 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.

00:16:56.000 He actually assaulted the previous speaker of the House in 2019 and was banned from the floor of the House entirely.

00:17:04.000 I mean, I think the reality is it's the opposite.

00:17:07.000 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? 1.00

00:17:17.000 I mean, just think about what happened on January 6th in the Capitol.

00:17:21.000 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.

00:17:47.000 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.

00:18:02.000 And look, I think the Title IX is not...

00:18:04.000 It should not be uncontroversial.

00:18:07.000 I mean, if there are more boys who wish to participate in sports than girls, I think there was a legitimate debate.

00:18:15.000 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...

00:18:26.000 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.

00:18:33.000 But that ship has sailed.

00:18:35.000 And so what was that?

00:18:38.000 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.

00:18:53.000 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.

00:19:05.000 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. 1.00

00:19:11.000 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.

00:19:18.000 And then somebody shows up wearing fetish gear.

00:19:21.000 Well, that's not...

00:19:22.000 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.

00:19:34.000 It's just that once the inclusivity umbrella...

00:19:38.000 It becomes a dogma in its own right.

00:19:40.000 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.

00:19:52.000 There's this side issue that I was just thinking about over the weekend where it almost doesn't work on its own terms.

00:19:59.000 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.

00:20:22.000 Actually, I'm curious if somebody else has brought this point up, James.

00:20:25.000 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?

00:20:40.000 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.

00:20:49.000 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...

00:20:59.000 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. 0.53

00:21:08.000 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.

00:21:21.000 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.

00:21:36.000 Like, it just doesn't work on its own terms.

00:21:39.000 It's not coherent.

00:21:40.000 You see what I'm saying?

00:21:41.000 Yeah, and so how do you make something work that doesn't work on its own terms?

00:21:47.000 Well, I mean, that's where you have to start...

00:21:51.000 That's where you have to start creating incentive structures.

00:21:53.000 And I think that that's the other side of this.

00:21:54.000 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.

00:22:07.000 Technically, you sign up for the scoring system.

00:22:10.000 You're not forced into this.

00:22:11.000 You sign up to join what they call their corporate equality index scoring.

00:22:16.000 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.

00:22:33.000 Every year there's new things added if you wish to maintain your score.

00:22:37.000 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.

00:22:56.000 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.

00:23:12.000 So there's this scoring system, though.

00:23:14.000 And for some reason, corporations are very proud of this score.

00:23:18.000 Who wrote the scoring system?

00:23:19.000 Was the Human Rights Campaign?

00:23:20.000 The Human Rights Campaign writes it, yeah.

00:23:23.000 It's completely done in-house.

00:23:25.000 The open question, as far as my level of being able to dig into this goes, is why does anybody care about this score?

00:23:34.000 I don't know the answer to that question.

00:23:36.000 I mean, it's a simple thing to guess.

00:23:40.000 I think this is literally...

00:23:42.000 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.

00:24:11.000 I mean, the anti-carbon framework is itself based on a flawed premise.

00:24:15.000 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. 1.00

00:24:26.000 But suffice to say, though, there's been a rigorous standard created for that.

00:24:31.000 There again, the equivalent of the Human Rights Campaign is the Climate Action 100 Plus Network, which was founded by CalPERS.

00:24:37.000 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.

00:24:45.000 Why do they do it?

00:24:46.000 Well, if Trace is back up, that's what their top shareholders are told to do.

00:24:48.000 Why do their top shareholders do it?

00:24:50.000 Well, they're not really the shareholders.

00:24:51.000 They're just people who pretend to be the shareholders.

00:24:53.000 Why do they do it?

00:24:54.000 Because that's what it takes for CalPERS to give them money.

00:24:56.000 Why does CalPERS do it?

00:24:57.000 It's because CalPERS in the state of California doesn't care about maximizing the value of its retirees' funds.

00:25:01.000 They care about implementing a political agenda.

00:25:03.000 Why do they care about doing that? 0.90

00:25:04.000 So the governor of California says, why does the governor of California say that?

00:25:07.000 We have a culture that elects that person to put in that office. 0.53

00:25:09.000 So that's the cascade you sort of trace all the way up to that chain.

00:25:13.000 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.

00:25:28.000 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.

00:25:37.000 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... 0.92

00:25:49.000 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.

00:26:02.000 So anyway, to answer your question, why does anyone care?

00:26:03.000 I think that that's a big part of the story is it relates to literally executive compensation in part relates to ESG goals.

00:26:11.000 The number of companies that have executive comp tied to ESG goals is growing.

00:26:17.000 It's a significant number.

00:26:19.000 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.

00:26:27.000 So this is providing some of the stuff for that, which is in the shadow of why those companies begin to care.

00:26:33.000 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.

00:26:49.000 Why did the shareholders demand that?

00:26:51.000 Because CalPERS demands that.

00:26:52.000 Why does CalPERS demand it?

00:26:53.000 Because it's a government institution.

00:26:54.000 So I think that's a big part of the story there.

00:26:57.000 Yeah, I think that's probably right.

00:26:59.000 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.

00:27:11.000 You know, every year they say that you've got your corporation and you've had your 100 for five or six years.

00:27:16.000 Well, how do you keep your 100?

00:27:18.000 Do you just keep doing the same thing?

00:27:19.000 No, of course not.

00:27:20.000 You know, one of the requirements is that you're doing stuff to promote LGBT visibility.

00:27:25.000 And so HRC comes along and tells you some things that you can do this year to promote LGBTQ visibility.

00:27:33.000 And I don't know that the Dylan Mulvaney brand ambassador was a particular demand of the HRC in particular, but...

00:27:43.000 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.

00:28:01.000 So that they could have more people visible for the gigantic push for pride that they did through June and July last year.

00:28:08.000 And so they come along and ask you to do more things each year in order to maintain your score.

00:28:15.000 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.

00:28:27.000 So, you know, you check off this box, you get 5 points, you check off that box, you get 10 points.

00:28:31.000 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.

00:28:47.000 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.

00:28:59.000 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.

00:29:16.000 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.

00:29:28.000 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.

00:29:41.000 But we don't have to speculate with what happened to Disney.

00:29:44.000 Disney lost massive amounts of shareholder value.

00:29:48.000 It's something like a third.

00:29:49.000 There was a video that went around on social media a few days ago where it was a call, a shareholder meeting call.

00:29:57.000 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.

00:30:04.000 Go back to that.

00:30:05.000 Stop all this.

00:30:06.000 You know, this is it's cost a third of our stock value, so on and so forth.

00:30:10.000 And the CEO more or less came back and said, you know, well, we're just going to do this anyway.

00:30:14.000 To put it very politely, we're just we're glad you care.

00:30:19.000 shut up was the vibe of the answer that he got.

00:30:24.000 And the reason is when you see this kind of behavior, the reason must be that they're beholden to something else.

00:30:29.000 And this is a problem in my opinion, and I don't think it's just my opinion, for American industry.

00:30:36.000 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.

00:30:47.000 And this isn't just to free up American innovation and American production.

00:30:50.000 When we start talking about American production, it's also a severe matter.

00:30:54.000 It sounds silly to think Dylan Mulvaney is a threat to national security.

00:30:58.000 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. 0.64

00:31:14.000 Because, say, China could turn off the spigot at any point and put us in a very vulnerable position.

00:31:20.000 Then you say, well, okay, let's fire up the factory.

00:31:22.000 How do we do it?

00:31:23.000 And you find out that ESG makes it prohibitively expensive or just outright disallowed.

00:31:28.000 You find that that leaves America in a very vulnerable position.

00:31:31.000 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.

00:31:54.000 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.

00:32:08.000 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.

00:32:21.000 To parts of the world where those same ESG constraints don't apply.

00:32:25.000 It's like a closed system, right?

00:32:28.000 If you press on it over here, it's literally going to go over there.

00:32:32.000 And in some ways, this is part of China's plan.

00:32:38.000 This is a little bit off topic, but one of the things that I tweeted about it over the weekend was...

00:32:46.000 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.

00:33:04.000 I love what Elon is...

00:33:06.000 I would say doing.

00:33:07.000 I'm going to caveat that and say trying to do at Twitter.

00:33:11.000 I think it's been imperfect at best.

00:33:13.000 But, you know, I'm not going to criticize good effort there that's made some progress.

00:33:16.000 I love that.

00:33:17.000 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.

00:33:33.000 And I love how you draw the analogies to Mao.

00:33:35.000 Xi Jinping draws some analogies to Mao too.

00:33:37.000 His own term is unrestricted warfare.

00:33:40.000 What does that mean?

00:33:41.000 It's every means, every mechanism, not just war is war.

00:33:43.000 Everything is war.

00:33:44.000 Capital markets are war.

00:33:49.000 come beholden to China.

00:33:50.000 And I think Tesla is increasingly beholden to China.

00:33:53.000 To do so in ways that they understand are socially popular in the US.

00:33:59.000 So Tesla's not a woke company by any stretch, but BlackRock and Apple are.

00:34:03.000 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.

00:34:21.000 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.

00:34:28.000 Tim Cook jumps like a circus monkey.

00:34:31.000 Every other American CEO jumps like a circus monkey.

00:34:33.000 I have no reason to think of Elon.

00:34:34.000 Don't jump like a circus monkey when she should pay calls in the hour of need as well.

00:34:39.000 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.

00:34:53.000 By the way, constraints that don't apply in China in the same way.

00:34:57.000 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.

00:35:06.000 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.

00:35:22.000 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.

00:35:33.000 And that somehow is something that conservatives decide how to pay attention to, at least for the time being.

00:35:40.000 It's sort of a game whose principles can apply outside of the left, too.

00:35:45.000 And I think more of us would be better to wake up to it.

00:35:48.000 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.

00:35:58.000 But like you're saying, China moves far more operationally than the left even.

00:36:02.000 I mean, China's China's kind of running the board right now. 0.91

00:36:07.000 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.

00:36:22.000 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 0.59

00:36:54.000 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.

00:37:08.000 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.

00:37:20.000 You know, there's this guy, this one guy, and he's going to solve all of our problems finally.

00:37:25.000 And then, you know, we saw that, for example, in the midterm elections last year, there's going to be the red wave.

00:37:29.000 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.

00:37:34.000 Then it didn't materialize the way that the right thought that it should.

00:37:38.000 And what have they done?

00:37:39.000 They've become dejected.

00:37:41.000 They're fighting with each other.

00:37:42.000 They're miserable in the way that you would expect to see somebody become miserable when their hopes get dashed upon rocks.

00:37:49.000 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.

00:38:18.000 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.

00:38:26.000 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.

00:38:39.000 It was just...

00:38:39.000 It's just unbelievable.

00:38:40.000 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.

00:38:49.000 It's kind of weird.

00:38:51.000 It is.

00:38:53.000 It's not quite reached the level of cultishness on the left.

00:38:57.000 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.

00:39:20.000 Like a closing message to land here.

00:39:23.000 Ain't nobody coming from on high to save us.

00:39:26.000 Okay, maybe in the religious realm it's different, okay?

00:39:28.000 But, like, in the political, cultural realm here, nobody's coming from on high to save us.

00:39:33.000 If you're gonna be saved, we're gonna have to save ourselves.

00:39:37.000 I'm always thinking of that old aphorism that, you know, it's like the work...

00:39:43.000 I can't even say it right.

00:39:45.000 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.

00:39:55.000 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.

00:40:11.000 And they want to destroy the family.

00:40:13.000 They want to upset communities.

00:40:14.000 They want to intervene with children.

00:40:15.000 So start there.

00:40:16.000 Start getting involved in protecting those things.

00:40:18.000 Get involved in your town councils.

00:40:20.000 Get involved in your school boards.

00:40:22.000 These things actually matter.

00:40:23.000 They are the fabric of our country.

00:40:25.000 And if the fabric of the country is strong, you know, they aren't going to be able to tear it from up above.

00:40:30.000 And also, though, we do have to understand the playing field.

00:40:34.000 You know, Dylan Mulvaney is a brand ambassador for Nike, so we're going to boycott Nike because we're conservatives.

00:40:40.000 And do you not realize that the main market for Nike is in China now?

00:40:46.000 Have you been to China?

00:40:47.000 Like, Nike's everywhere.

00:40:48.000 They call it NIC. It's everywhere.

00:40:50.000 Yeah.

00:40:51.000 Take people at their word.

00:40:53.000 What it was, John Donahue, who was the CEO of Nike, basically said it.

00:40:57.000 We're a company of and for China.

00:41:00.000 He always said it during his China trip.

00:41:02.000 So if you ever make this stuff up, you could just take people at their word for once.

00:41:05.000 He's right.

00:41:06.000 Yeah.

00:41:07.000 Wake up, folks.

00:41:07.000 Anyway, good stuff, man.

00:41:08.000 Get some rest.

00:41:10.000 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.

00:41:18.000 Yeah, man.

00:41:19.000 I'm looking forward to that.

00:41:20.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - May 08, 2023

James Lindsay: ESG - Corporate Manipulation and National Security Threats | The TRUTH Podcast #23

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