Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - The Art of the Culture War with James Lindsay

00:00:02.000 So there's an analogy between what's going on in our politics and our culture and the way you might play with a water balloon.

00:00:30.000 Look, I'll tell you what I mean.

00:00:32.000 Grab a water balloon, you squeeze it in one spot, what happens?

00:00:35.000 The water shows up in a different spot.

00:00:37.000 Squeeze in the other spot, great, it bulges in the middle.

00:00:40.000 It's still the same water.

00:00:41.000 There's the same water, it just flows to a different place.

00:00:46.000 We forget that, especially Republican politicians.

00:00:49.000 More than any other group of political or cultural actors or leaders on the planet, Republican politicians fail to understand that basic principle when it comes to the so-called culture war.

00:01:01.000 What do I mean?

00:01:02.000 They latch on to some solution.

00:01:05.000 Okay, first of all, they don't really understand the nature of the culture war.

00:01:09.000 They just say the words that they're taught to say woke was the last four letter word that they learned and they'll utter it, you know, till we're all blue in the face without having any sense of what it actually means.

00:01:17.000 They're like billiard balls, you hit it, they go in whatever direction they're hit without knowing why they're even going in that direction.

00:01:22.000 That's much of the Republican establishment.

00:01:23.000 But the problem with that approach is that if the other side is actually understanding how to aim where they're hitting the billiard balls, you're always going to be on the losing side of that game.

00:01:33.000 And so that's exactly what's happened in the rise of one of my core topics over the last year, the rise of the ESG movement, where we debated through the front door for 35 years, 40 years, the perils of big government, when the other side said, okay, you guys said you like capitalism, great, we're just going to go through the back door to get done through your system, What you thought we couldn't get done through the front door under the Constitution.

00:01:58.000 So that's, you know, we squeeze the water balloon in one place, big government.

00:02:02.000 Great.

00:02:02.000 The water just flows to the part that we weren't paying attention to because we thought it was our home turf.

00:02:08.000 Capitalism itself, capital markets itself, and it flows over there.

00:02:12.000 Now, even in the realm of capitalism, a lot of Friedmanite conservatives, what would they say?

00:02:16.000 They would say that the CEO of a company has to carry out the wishes of the shareholders.

00:02:22.000 So we would say in 1980, if the CEO wants to unilaterally impose a political agenda using shareholder money on whoever, his stakeholders or his customers, the CEO can't do that because the CEO reports to the shareholders.

00:02:36.000 Again, what do they do?

00:02:38.000 The water just flows to a different place.

00:02:40.000 They say, OK, OK, fine.

00:02:41.000 We can play that game.

00:02:43.000 We'll just say that we are the shareholders.

00:02:45.000 That is the rise of BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard and Invesco and the rest of the ESG industrial complex that then shows up as the shareholders of top companies across corporate America, even though they're not the actual capital owners.

00:03:00.000 Why?

00:03:00.000 Because Republicans latched on to first the free market as an alternative to government, then to shareholder primacy as the solution within free market capitalism.

00:03:09.000 But again, the word shareholder itself becomes co-opted to something the other side's ahead of because they know what they're actually trying to do.

00:03:16.000 While our side mostly consists of a bunch of billiard balls that just go in whatever direction we're hit, it's the other side that's actually doing the aiming.

00:03:23.000 Okay, and so what happens?

00:03:23.000 It's like a hydraulic pump system.

00:03:25.000 It's like a water balloon.

00:03:25.000 We keep squeezing in one place.

00:03:27.000 The same water's in the system.

00:03:28.000 What do you have to do?

00:03:29.000 You have to puncture the balloon itself.

00:03:30.000 You have to drain the entire system of the poisonous water that's in it in the first place.

00:03:36.000 That's the only way out.

00:03:37.000 You can't play this game of thinking you're solving one problem and then fetishizing it, turning that into a slogan.

00:03:46.000 Another one we'll talk about, school choice, whatever it is, the free market.

00:03:50.000 Without realizing the why.

00:03:52.000 Why is it that you're doing what you're doing?

00:03:54.000 And I think that's some of the one things we're missing in our movement.

00:03:56.000 It's one of the reasons I'm in this race is not just to ask, forget the question of the who, not even the what.

00:04:02.000 The what is meaningless without understanding the why.

00:04:05.000 You might even be doing the right thing at a given moment.

00:04:09.000 But if you don't understand why you're doing it, then in the next moment, the thing you're doing is actually going to be the wrong thing because the other side is one step ahead.

00:04:16.000 And so whether that's in the rise of ESG and capital markets or even whether that's in the rise of other ways in which the left is preying on the minds of young children, not just in public schools, but even in private schools through mechanisms that are invisible today to the conservative movement. but even in private schools through mechanisms that are invisible What happens is you say that, OK, the public schools with funding from the Department of Education or otherwise are foisting this woke ideology, poisonous race and critical race and critical gender theory on young children.

00:04:46.000 The right way to do that is to achieve school choice.

00:04:49.000 I say this is someone I love the free market and shareholder primacy as much as the next guy, just as much as I love school choice as a step forward.

00:04:56.000 But it's not a panacea.

00:04:58.000 It's not an end-all, be-all goal.

00:05:00.000 It is a means to the end of achieving a goal.

00:05:02.000 And if we treat it as a panacea, what does the other side do?

00:05:06.000 They take over the indirect means of influencing the private schools themselves through, say, the accreditation bodies of Which have to accredit a school in order for that school to be eligible as the recipient for those educational saving account dollars, for those school choice dollars.

00:05:24.000 So they're always one step ahead because we're not asking the question of why it is we're doing what we're doing.

00:05:32.000 And I'm joined today by one of the few people in our movement who actually asks that question.

00:05:40.000 The why.

00:05:42.000 I met him before I actually met him.

00:05:45.000 I think one of the best ways to get to know somebody is actually to read a thing they've written.

00:05:49.000 My 11th grade English teacher taught me that if you can't write something down, you probably don't know what you have to say.

00:05:56.000 She was right about that.

00:05:58.000 But the flip side of that is if you can consistently write down what you think, you probably do have a pretty good sense of what you want to say.

00:06:03.000 And I first came across James Lindsay when I read his co-authored book, Cynical Theories.

00:06:09.000 I was impressed.

00:06:10.000 And that was the beginning of a journey of my beginning to study his work more.

00:06:13.000 And then eventually, through crisscrossing as we traveled the country, a few places where we spoke and shared a stage, began the beginning of a friendship and intellectual alliance, I would say, that hopefully has its best days.

00:06:28.000 Still ahead of it.

00:06:29.000 And I'm grateful, James, for you flying to Columbus to be with us today on the podcast.

00:06:34.000 Welcome to the podcast, and I'm looking forward to diving in with you about the why.

00:06:41.000 Understanding, maybe start with some issues that are near and dear to your heart as it relates to education, but some of the same principles apply to the areas where I've built the last phase of my career in fighting against ESG. And, you know, I think what's at the heart of both of those is What's really the future of the conservative movement all about?

00:07:00.000 I think we're lost in the desert, but I think we can find our way to the promised land, and it's going to be people like you who actually have real intellect and real heft and an understanding of why we go through the motions we do that help get us there.

00:07:12.000 So anyway, thanks a lot for joining.

00:07:13.000 Yeah, my pleasure.

00:07:14.000 It's kind of funny you say lost in the desert.

00:07:16.000 Watching the conservative movements grapple with this over the past few years, I frequently think of the story of Moses in Exodus going up and finds the burning bush that doesn't get consumed, and he talks to the bush, and he gets the commandments, and he comes down, and what have they done?

00:07:30.000 They built an idol.

00:07:31.000 And he's like, the golden calf.

00:07:36.000 Two days or whatever.

00:07:37.000 What have you done?

00:07:38.000 I feel like I watch the conservative movement make this.

00:07:42.000 Building their golden calf.

00:07:43.000 One at a time.

00:07:44.000 Whatever it is, one at a time.

00:07:45.000 You put your finger on it when you use the water balloon analogy because the left thinks operationally.

00:07:53.000 They're not smarter than conservatives.

00:07:55.000 They're obviously not necessarily grounded in reality.

00:07:58.000 In fact, they're projecting the reality they want to bring into the world.

00:08:01.000 But they're very operational.

00:08:03.000 And people on the right tend not to answer with operational thought.

00:08:08.000 They don't understand that what's happening in our society again and again is that water balloon sitting out there and the left grabs it right in the middle so both sides bulge.

00:08:16.000 And they don't care which one you decide to play with.

00:08:19.000 That's how they're going to exploit you.

00:08:21.000 This is a win-win.

00:08:22.000 It's a win-win for them.

00:08:23.000 That's right.

00:08:24.000 In the martial arts, they would say, if you don't block, you're getting hit.

00:08:29.000 If you do block, you're getting thrown.

00:08:31.000 They set you up like that.

00:08:32.000 It's called mid-level violence.

00:08:34.000 It's a unconventional warfare tactic, and they're very good at it.

00:08:37.000 They're trained at it.

00:08:38.000 How does that work?

00:08:38.000 Are you a martial arts guy?

00:08:39.000 Yeah, I am.

00:08:40.000 I'm not touching you.

00:08:41.000 I'm not touching you.

00:08:42.000 I'm not touching you is kind of the standard little kid provocation.

00:08:46.000 Or Antifa showing up, and they got police.

00:08:49.000 They're standing there just safeguarding the protest, right?

00:08:53.000 Of course, we know with Antifa, it's not going to be a protest.

00:08:55.000 It's going to be something wild eventually.

00:08:57.000 But they have to provoke...

00:09:00.000 The opening to become wild.

00:09:01.000 And so what they do is, why you got your riot gear?

00:09:05.000 We don't see no riot here.

00:09:07.000 Why you got your riot gear?

00:09:08.000 We don't see no riot here.

00:09:09.000 Until somebody overreacts.

00:09:10.000 They're squeezing the balloon in the middle.

00:09:12.000 And if you don't do anything, they get to run roughshod.

00:09:15.000 They run over you.

00:09:16.000 And if you do respond, they carefully frame it out so that you've overreacted.

00:09:21.000 They're using strategies, and we can stay in this martial arts world a little bit.

00:09:26.000 Okay.

00:09:27.000 To think operationally so that they trick and trap conservatives over and over and over again.

00:09:34.000 It's actually a principle in their literature.

00:09:35.000 I don't know if you've seen.

00:09:36.000 They have a tactics manual.

00:09:38.000 Everybody should actually look at this.

00:09:39.000 It takes this problem seriously.

00:09:40.000 It's called Beautiful Trouble.

00:09:42.000 You'll hear...

00:09:44.000 Like, this is a real book?

00:09:45.000 It's a real book.

00:09:46.000 It's also available completely online for free.

00:09:49.000 That, I'm not entirely sure of who wrote it.

00:09:50.000 It's just like an open-source online thing.

00:09:52.000 It's open-source, yeah.

00:09:53.000 But you'll hear Beautiful Trouble.

00:09:56.000 It's at beautifultrouble.org.

00:09:58.000 And one of their key principles...

00:10:00.000 Well, first, you'll hear Democratic politicians say it's an extension of their activist concept of good trouble.

00:10:06.000 And you'll hear...

00:10:08.000 Politicians like AOC or Kamala Harris or so-and-so go up on there and say, we're going to make good trouble.

00:10:12.000 We're going to make good trouble.

00:10:13.000 Well, Beautiful Trouble is the update to Rules for Radicals from Saul Alinsky for the digital and mediator.

00:10:19.000 It's like a modern version.

00:10:21.000 They explicitly say that it is.

00:10:23.000 It's an update of Rules for Radicals.

00:10:24.000 It is.

00:10:25.000 And so one of their core principles is that your real action is your target's reaction.

00:10:31.000 So this is exactly what you're talking about.

00:10:33.000 They get you to go ahead and grab a side of the water balloon.

00:10:36.000 That's your reaction.

00:10:37.000 And they know how to take advantage of that.

00:10:38.000 It's almost like the Sun Tzu.

00:10:39.000 A little bit of Sun Tzu in there.

00:10:41.000 That's what I was going to say.

00:10:42.000 Really?

00:10:43.000 I remember reading that in high school.

00:10:45.000 So your real goal, what did they say?

00:10:49.000 Your real action is your target's reaction.

00:10:52.000 Oh, I love, I mean, I don't love the way they use it, but I love the fact that you're aware of this.

00:10:57.000 That is operational thinking.

00:10:59.000 They are trying to provoke you into reacting a particular way so they can frame that reaction or use that reaction to gain their advantage.

00:11:06.000 Exactly like you said with ESG, you know, we're going to go hard, hard, hard into free market, free market, free market, so now we're going to go ahead and do some corporate communism and capture that from the inside.

00:11:16.000 Sort of like a feigned retreat a little bit.

00:11:18.000 Yeah.

00:11:18.000 As a principle of lead them over there when we're ready for understanding their game better than they do themselves.

00:11:22.000 And then with other policies, since you brought up Sun Tzu, there's a principle in The Art of War, in Chapter 7, where Sun Tzu says that if you want to defeat your enemy, you don't surround the whole army, because the army will fight to the death.

00:11:39.000 So you surround them on three sides and give them a way out.

00:11:43.000 He says when they see a path to life, they'll take it.

00:11:46.000 If you surround them entirely, they'll fight to the death because they see no path to life.

00:11:49.000 But they'll take the path to life.

00:11:51.000 So if you give them the path to life, they'll take it.

00:11:55.000 And that's when you hit them.

00:11:56.000 That's when you strike.

00:11:57.000 So you surround them on three sides and then kill them on the fourth as they take the retreat.

00:12:02.000 Absolutely.

00:12:03.000 So you're conditioning their retreat.

00:12:04.000 And you can see, once you understand that they're thinking operational...

00:12:07.000 That's exactly what's...

00:12:09.000 It's interesting.

00:12:10.000 What I would say is I did not have a—and I want to hear more about this.

00:12:14.000 The way I see it, I get frustrated watching conservatives march into that fourth path, right?

00:12:21.000 They're surrounded by—and then they're marching to their death, effectively.

00:12:24.000 It ends with a guillotine.

00:12:25.000 That's right.

00:12:26.000 And I get frustrated with conservatives, you know, many people in the presidential race, many politicians, whatever, doing such a thing, going through the motions.

00:12:32.000 I didn't have a good sense of the intentionality.

00:12:36.000 Oh yeah, they know what they're doing.

00:12:38.000 We underestimate our opponents to our peril.

00:12:41.000 Again, I don't think they're smarter.

00:12:43.000 Maybe they are smarter.

00:12:45.000 Not genetically smarter, but inherently smarter.

00:12:48.000 They are more strategic.

00:12:49.000 They have a 50-year, a 20-year, etc.

00:12:52.000 agenda.

00:12:53.000 They don't want to just be left alone.

00:12:54.000 They want to take over the world.

00:12:55.000 And people who just want to be left alone want to do other things.

00:12:58.000 And so they have a very focused and purposed intensity to them.

00:13:01.000 So you look at these different things.

00:13:02.000 School choice.

00:13:03.000 You're surrounded on all sides in the schools except one.

00:13:07.000 And so here becomes the magic held out solution to all your problems.

00:13:11.000 And it becomes a litmus test for conservatives by certain activists that go out and push this idea.

00:13:16.000 And so now, all of a sudden, you have great conservative legislators at the state level, even the federal level, getting primaried because they were wrong on this particular issue.

00:13:25.000 That's not how...

00:13:26.000 It's a false idol.

00:13:26.000 It's a golden calf.

00:13:27.000 That's exactly right.

00:13:29.000 I mean, like, I have nothing against school choice any more than I have it against the free market, but the fetishization, right, the idolization of the...

00:13:35.000 Yeah, and you can see this again and again and again.

00:13:38.000 We always are getting surrounded, and then we're given...

00:13:40.000 Only one option.

00:13:41.000 Oh no.

00:13:42.000 They've got every institution.

00:13:44.000 What's left?

00:13:45.000 National divorce.

00:13:46.000 Balkanize the country.

00:13:48.000 It's the only thing left.

00:13:49.000 It's already too late.

00:13:50.000 It's all we can do.

00:13:51.000 And they get this doomsday mentality and then hold out a path to life.

00:13:56.000 The so-called black pill.

00:13:58.000 What does that mean?

00:13:59.000 The black pill?

00:14:00.000 Okay, so there's all those pills, right?

00:14:01.000 We all have pills now after the Matrix.

00:14:03.000 So in the Matrix, we'll have to go back for all the normies out there and for the boomers.

00:14:07.000 And so in the Matrix, which came out in like the 90s, Fun story, by the way.

00:14:11.000 How dorky am I? The second Matrix movie was the last time I saw a movie in the movie theater until my family dragged me like two years ago.

00:14:18.000 That's it.

00:14:18.000 I'm done.

00:14:19.000 Oh really?

00:14:20.000 That's a long time ago.

00:14:21.000 It was like 20 years.

00:14:22.000 But yeah, so Morpheus comes out.

00:14:25.000 He's got Neo.

00:14:26.000 This is before he gets taken out of the Matrix for the first time.

00:14:28.000 And he tells him, the world is not what you think it is.

00:14:31.000 Here's this pill.

00:14:32.000 It's blue if you take it.

00:14:33.000 You go to sleep.

00:14:34.000 You wake up in your bed.

00:14:35.000 You had a weird dream.

00:14:36.000 Nothing ever happened.

00:14:37.000 Here's the red pill.

00:14:38.000 You take the red pill.

00:14:39.000 And we'll see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

00:14:41.000 In other words, we're going to show you the truth.

00:14:42.000 And he gets ejected from the Matrix, sees the world wasn't as he thought.

00:14:45.000 So the red pill means being awakened to reality.

00:14:47.000 The blue pill means being conditioned to accept the hyper-real or propaganda false reality.

00:14:57.000 The pseudo-reality being projected by the media, by the narrative, as we're starting to all call it.

00:15:03.000 Well, then there's these other pills that have become derivatives.

00:15:06.000 So there's the white pill and the black pill.

00:15:08.000 White pill means you see hope for the future.

00:15:10.000 Black pill means you see no more hope.

00:15:12.000 You've gone to doomsday.

00:15:13.000 You're fatalistic.

00:15:14.000 It's all over.

00:15:15.000 We've already lost.

00:15:16.000 There's nothing we can do.

00:15:18.000 And so a strategic maneuver would be to get people to feel that way.

00:15:22.000 It's called demoralization, an actual communist tactic.

00:15:26.000 You get people to feel like there's no hope left.

00:15:29.000 That's the feed them a black pill, and then you give them a little bit of a white pill.

00:15:32.000 By the way, maybe school choice will save us.

00:15:34.000 Maybe if we balkanize, maybe if we have a national divorce, we escape these traps that have been set for us, not realizing that stepping in those directions is the trap.

00:15:45.000 And they're trying to...

00:15:47.000 There's a meme that they're exhausting your creativity for other solutions, which is why I'm really glad you're in this race, because you seem to have an inexhaustible amount of that.

00:15:55.000 But they exhaust your creativity.

00:15:58.000 And there's a meme that shows some Republicans or whatever, and it says, we've tried absolutely nothing and we're all out of ideas.

00:16:05.000 And that's where I get so frustrated.

00:16:07.000 They don't know they're getting played operationally.

00:16:09.000 They don't know that the left is...

00:16:11.000 You know when you play pool?

00:16:13.000 So you said with the billiards...

00:16:14.000 You don't just, I don't, I'm not good at it, so I just watched some on TV when I was younger and picked up the idea.

00:16:21.000 The goal isn't to hit the ball and put the other ball in the pocket.

00:16:25.000 That's actually not the goal of Billiards.

00:16:27.000 If you want to win, you have to hit the ball and put the ball in the pocket and make the cue ball roll so that it sets up your next shot too.

00:16:34.000 Yes, yes, I like that.

00:16:36.000 And you have to do that again and again and again.

00:16:37.000 And the left is doing that and the right is not doing that.

00:16:41.000 Yeah.

00:16:42.000 My analogy is they are the billiard balls.

00:16:45.000 That's what they are.

00:16:46.000 So they're getting hustled.

00:16:48.000 Even the ones who think they're aiming are just thinking one step at a time.

00:16:50.000 That's right.

00:16:51.000 And these principles of operations are key.

00:16:55.000 Let's talk about the school choice example a little bit.

00:16:57.000 I mean, just for the purpose of using it as an example of how this game always evolves one step ahead.

00:17:06.000 So the basic thought here, and I can admit, I was saying stuff like this years ago myself, because there's truth to it, right?

00:17:17.000 You have a centralization problem.

00:17:19.000 You have monopolies on education in the public schools.

00:17:23.000 Give people the choice.

00:17:25.000 Combine that with transparency.

00:17:26.000 There's a couple different objectives we solve for here.

00:17:28.000 One is just educational quality on just learning, reading, writing, math.

00:17:33.000 But there's this cultural component to this too, making sure that kids aren't being wrongfully indoctrinated by poisonous philosophies perpetuated by a centralized body called government.

00:17:44.000 We instead empower those parents to choose where their kids get to go to school.

00:17:47.000 Good thing on its face, right?

00:17:49.000 And what I would say is further pair that with, and this is where I go a little bit further where they get helps, is if you pair that with total transparency, total transparency plus choice can get you to a pretty good place.

00:18:03.000 However, what we then see is, okay, now that we have school choice bills passing and becoming the law of the land in states across the country, those parents then have the opportunity to send their kids to any number of accredited private schools, including even Christian schools.

00:18:21.000 What happens then?

00:18:22.000 Well, I mean, obviously they capture the accrediting bodies.

00:18:24.000 In fact, they've pre-captured the accrediting bodies.

00:18:28.000 Every professional association in the country, more or less, is already captured.

00:18:33.000 It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the NAIS, the National Association of Independent Schools.

00:18:38.000 It doesn't matter if we're talking about the Christian equivalent.

00:18:42.000 I just did a thread on Twitter recently about this, how they are completely in on the diversity, equity, inclusion program.

00:18:49.000 That's your Christian schools.

00:18:50.000 And it doesn't matter if it's, you know, other accrediting bodies.

00:18:53.000 American Bar Association.

00:18:54.000 Bar Association, American Medical Association, you name it.

00:18:59.000 American Physical Union, even physics, you know.

00:19:01.000 So American Mathematical Society that I, you know, used to have connection with.

00:19:07.000 Everything.

00:19:08.000 These professional societies are the choke point.

00:19:10.000 What's the mechanism of that takeover?

00:19:13.000 Sociology.

00:19:14.000 I tried to describe this a couple of years ago.

00:19:17.000 They know they can't conquer, say, physics or law directly.

00:19:20.000 No way.

00:19:21.000 No way.

00:19:23.000 Certainly not something like engineering.

00:19:25.000 You know, again, a couple more.

00:19:27.000 A-C-E-E and A-C-S-E or whatever they are.

00:19:31.000 The different A-S-C-E. That's what it is.

00:19:33.000 Sorry.

00:19:33.000 The engineering accrediting bodies.

00:19:37.000 So, how are they going to convince engineers?

00:19:40.000 Engineers, by and large, are not woke.

00:19:42.000 Well, they don't.

00:19:43.000 They don't come in and change engineering.

00:19:45.000 They go in and they say, well, the conference circuit's very masculine.

00:19:48.000 The conference circuit has a little racism in it.

00:19:51.000 The society where we're, you know, the AMS itself, as a mathematical society, has some issues.

00:19:57.000 It seems to be that there aren't enough women here.

00:19:59.000 There's not enough diversity or whatever else.

00:20:02.000 Race, sex, gender, sexuality, whatever.

00:20:05.000 It seems awfully exclusive.

00:20:07.000 And so they start twisting the society, and what they start doing is a technique, another operational technique, which is called entryism.

00:20:13.000 They slowly find the worst offenders, the people who have actually made gaffes or who are actually sometimes a bit of a problem.

00:20:21.000 They make examples of them.

00:20:24.000 They end up pushing those people out.

00:20:25.000 Other people leave in disgust, and they bring in people who are adherent to the ideology so that the community changes.

00:20:31.000 When the community gets saturated enough with activists, which doesn't take that many, a few percent, Then they set community guidelines.

00:20:38.000 So now, to be a member of the society, you have to have these different policies.

00:20:42.000 The community guidelines set everything up.

00:20:44.000 They dictate who can be and how they're going to be in that society.

00:20:48.000 And then they start asking questions like, oh, well, if the AMS, if the American Mathematical Society was so...

00:20:56.000 Toxically masculine or whatever the buzzword happens to be so systemically racist.

00:21:01.000 What is it about mathematics that leads it to be that way?

00:21:04.000 What is it about medicine that leads it to become poison?

00:21:06.000 That's actually an interesting one.

00:21:06.000 Thank you for...

00:21:07.000 I mean, you're saying the stuff that automatically leads to where we are.

00:21:10.000 So, let's just, like, walk through the waterfall, right?

00:21:13.000 Yeah.

00:21:13.000 Let's also be a little operational about at least the diagnosis here.

00:21:17.000 Yeah.

00:21:18.000 So, there's a body.

00:21:20.000 Activists are out here swarming around looking for institutions to sort of affect, saying that, OK, government's over there.

00:21:27.000 That's the feigned retreat.

00:21:29.000 OK, they went and went and fight the battle there.

00:21:32.000 We got our boring Democratic politicians doing that.

00:21:35.000 So let them wage that battle.

00:21:37.000 But we're going to identify what other frontiers they're necessarily coming to.

00:21:43.000 They're going to come for these private institutions, all of which are sort of quasi governed by these nonprofit accreditation bodies.

00:21:51.000 Let's go show up and start what?

00:21:54.000 Picking at their insecurities and leveling accusations against them that get us a seat at the table.

00:21:59.000 Yeah.

00:22:00.000 Maybe that's step one.

00:22:01.000 Right.

00:22:01.000 And start feeding our language in.

00:22:03.000 That's so important.

00:22:04.000 Then they join the boards.

00:22:05.000 They become hired on the staff, et cetera, because the guy who was minding his own business, being some boring professor who was in some accreditation body, says, okay, well, I'm open to hearing these ideas.

00:22:17.000 Great.

00:22:18.000 So then they're in the door.

00:22:20.000 Then they start saying, well, here's the results on the basis of race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever other boring criteria they care about, and say, hey, here's the inequity.

00:22:34.000 Now, what does that say about the discipline itself?

00:22:37.000 That's kind of the basic move, right?

00:22:39.000 That's right.

00:22:39.000 That's the basic move.

00:22:40.000 And, you know, I like how you said a body and there's actors who want to affect.

00:22:44.000 I'm going to change the word and say infect.

00:22:46.000 And I don't do that cruelly.

00:22:48.000 I don't think that we should be— Well, it's their word.

00:22:52.000 It's actually their word.

00:22:53.000 They actually have written papers saying that viruses are the ideal metaphor for their approach, that they have their ideology, and they have to instill it into people who are going to become professionals, but activists at the same time.

00:23:04.000 And they say that the goal, taking the virus as their metaphor, is to go and infect the new institutional bodies.

00:23:10.000 And even just being really biological and technical about this, it's not just bacteria or anything else.

00:23:15.000 The thing about a virus...

00:23:16.000 Is it co-opt the machinery of the host itself to propagate more of the virus, which is different than like a bacteria, which is just like, okay, it goes in and kills it.

00:23:26.000 That's boring.

00:23:27.000 The virus actually has a different way of working, and that pretty much exactly describes what they're doing here.

00:23:33.000 The only part I didn't know is their own literature actually says these things, which then makes it much more like that's the new thing for me out of this conversation.

00:23:40.000 I mean, their literature has been suggesting this technique since the 60s.

00:23:44.000 I mean, this is what Rudy Deutschki called the long march through the institutions.

00:23:47.000 Herbert Marcuse in 72 in his book Counter-Revolution and Revolt says, we need to stop being outsiders.

00:23:53.000 We need to go in and bring our ideology with us.

00:23:56.000 And he says at all levels of education and into the computer programming and everything.

00:24:00.000 We're going to go be the thing.

00:24:02.000 We're going to stop resisting and we're going to go be the thing and subvert from within.

00:24:06.000 But then in 2014, two researchers at Arizona State University published a paper titled Women's Studies as a Virus and explicitly said the virus becomes the ideal metaphor, compare themselves favorably to HIV, to Ebola.

00:24:19.000 That women's studies itself is a virus.

00:24:21.000 Yes.

00:24:22.000 That then infects...

00:24:23.000 And co-opts other institutions.

00:24:25.000 Right.

00:24:25.000 They give the example of taking male biology students at the undergraduate level, having them take some women's studies courses to get the ideology into them, and then when they go to grad school, they can infect the department at the new college that they go to by bringing the activism to that social circle of the graduate student union or whatever it happens to be, the biology department itself.

00:24:45.000 And they start leveling these accusations to kind of infect that new cell to co-opt it so that its cellular machinery, if you will, produces viral proteins.

00:24:55.000 That that organization produces more, yeah.

00:24:56.000 That's exactly their model.

00:24:58.000 So let me just, like, take the other side of this for a second.

00:25:01.000 Not the other side, but just to sort of scrutinize something that may not make sense, or if it does make sense, it's disappointing, is that The thing they're infecting is still comprised of, you would think, free, autonomous, thinking human beings.

00:25:24.000 Moral human beings.

00:25:25.000 Exactly, moral human beings who have their own sense of agency and virtue and values.

00:25:32.000 But this infection game only works if you have an unhealthy host, an unhealthy cell that was susceptible to infection in the first place.

00:25:43.000 That's right.

00:25:43.000 And I do feel, I mean, this is a big part of the, I don't know how much you saw about my candidacy and coming out or whatever, but a big part of this is looking in the mirror and asking ourselves, what is that void of purpose and meaning that leads us to be so susceptible to infection? what is that void of purpose and meaning that leads And I wonder if that's a question we don't ask enough.

00:26:04.000 Well, it is because it's what has left us uncertain that our values are good and fine as they are, that we don't have to kind of give into these accusations that through some kind of very arcane and esoteric pathways that we've somehow contributed to or behaved in secretly racist ways that we have to hire a consultant that we don't have to kind of give into these accusations that through some kind of very arcane and esoteric pathways that And pay them.

00:26:26.000 And pay them through the eyeballs to do it, yeah.

00:26:30.000 And that's why, yeah. yeah.

00:26:52.000 Is that where that term comes from?

00:26:53.000 I thought it was just like an online slang thing.

00:26:55.000 No, it is not where it actually comes from, but that's how I conceptualize it because of my background in the martial arts when I first heard the term.

00:27:00.000 I like it though.

00:27:01.000 I started thinking about it.

00:27:02.000 It's just like online slang, right?

00:27:03.000 Yeah, I used to do some judo, and if you don't want to get thrown, you have to have base.

00:27:07.000 Yeah, so we get based.

00:27:08.000 Yeah, so we get based so that we get based on our own values.

00:27:12.000 Yeah, the antidote to woke is based.

00:27:14.000 I like that.

00:27:15.000 That's right, it is.

00:27:16.000 It really, in a deep sense, is actually.

00:27:18.000 It is.

00:27:19.000 Because they are not susceptible to infection.

00:27:21.000 Right.

00:27:21.000 And these people that work in these professional and accrediting and so on bodies, very insecure.

00:27:27.000 Yeah, there's almost a selection bias of the kinds of people.

00:27:30.000 It's a good point where...

00:27:33.000 The host, I mean, I think we should be precise about it.

00:27:36.000 I think in the way this works, you know, push back on me, but the host, to me, is less often a human being than it is some kind of apparatus, like an organizational apparatus that has a managerial machinery to it.

00:27:51.000 That's right.

00:27:53.000 And I think that sets up for two things.

00:27:55.000 One is there's a machinery to perpetuate the virus, the, you know, it's called the woke mind virus by analogy here.

00:28:02.000 But it also selects for the kinds of human beings that tend to be on a committee or whatever.

00:28:08.000 Like, let's just think about that for a second.

00:28:10.000 I think they tend to be...

00:28:12.000 If you're going to join a committee or whatever, what does that say?

00:28:17.000 Overgeneralize here, but partially generalized.

00:28:19.000 What does that say about you?

00:28:21.000 It means you're devoting time to a body that makes decisions by consensus.

00:28:28.000 that selects for the kind of human being who opted to spend their time that way, which in turn says something about their own need for fulfillment and meaning through something that is unlikely to provide it, a committee or a title on that committee or chairmanship which in turn says something about their own need for fulfillment and meaning through something that is unlikely to provide it, a committee or a title on that committee

00:28:57.000 They're insecure people.

00:28:59.000 I think there's a trait to committee types, to committee folk, if you will, that's also been left out of that discussion so far, which is deferral of responsibility.

00:29:08.000 By making decisions through consensus, it's never really your fault.

00:29:12.000 We decided.

00:29:13.000 I didn't decide.

00:29:13.000 We did.

00:29:14.000 Somebody above me said I have to.

00:29:16.000 So, Somebody below me demanded it.

00:29:17.000 So nobody's ever actually responsible for anything.

00:29:20.000 They're not based in their own accountability or responsibility either.

00:29:23.000 And you'll see this when you go to the schools.

00:29:25.000 Why did you implement this terrible woke policy that's damaging our kids?

00:29:28.000 Well, the kids demanded it or the superintendent told me I had to.

00:29:33.000 It's never anybody's fault.

00:29:35.000 And so since nobody can take—you know, how do you answer this?

00:29:38.000 Who would you say sue for damages if damages are—well, nobody's actually responsible.

00:29:43.000 So there's no point of responsibility in homo comitius or whatever.

00:29:49.000 Purposeful diffusion of accountability.

00:29:51.000 That's right.

00:29:52.000 Now, this just makes me curious in the sociology of this.

00:29:56.000 I can imagine that now that you've opened my eyes to this, either that too was in their Bibles and intentional plans.

00:30:03.000 The beautifultrouble.org has that vision.

00:30:09.000 You have to find psychologically insecure managerial diffuse accountability types.

00:30:15.000 Either they did it by design, or it was almost by process of elimination that they tried it everywhere, the other ones didn't work, and it was sort of a natural selection of these kinds of institutions.

00:30:23.000 Which do you think it was?

00:30:24.000 Any evidence that they were this smart on this issue, too?

00:30:27.000 Well, I mean, maybe a little bit, because communism always tends toward bureaucracies, and they occupy bureaucracies, so they know they have tons of advantages and bureaucratic structures.

00:30:37.000 But when you're doing mid-level violence again and again and again, just from a natural selection kind of perspective, the place that you're going to have the largest success rate, the targets that are going to give you the biggest reward for your efforts are always going to be these kinds of people.

00:30:51.000 So people who aren't willing to take a lot of responsibility, people who don't want to be on the hook for things, people who have this kind of deferral of responsibility and they're unsure of themselves are the ones.

00:31:04.000 Mostly what you're going to be able to do is roll over.

00:31:07.000 If you squeeze that water balloon in the middle and you have underreact and overreact are the two places the water flows.

00:31:13.000 They're the underreactors.

00:31:14.000 So that's a lot of bang for very little buck.

00:31:18.000 There's very little risk in causing somebody to roll over over and over and over again.

00:31:22.000 So there's selection pressure to target institutions that will roll over over and over and over again.

00:31:28.000 But, I mean, there's other aspects.

00:31:29.000 Yeah, fine.

00:31:30.000 McCall, I mean, this is more the nerdy side of me that's trying to fight it.

00:31:33.000 But you say it's probably a selection pressure bias towards because those are the only places that it could manage to infect anyway.

00:31:39.000 Maybe they have a natural bias towards and an affinity towards bureaucratic settings anyhow because that's the largest way.

00:31:46.000 And bureaucratic choke points.

00:31:47.000 And bureaucratic choke points.

00:31:48.000 Yeah, it's also like leverage, right?

00:31:49.000 Because they can get more effect, more juice out of the squeeze if they take over an entire organization.

00:31:56.000 Organizations are often run by bureaucrats.

00:31:58.000 I don't want to go too into the weeds of postmodern literature, but if we go read, and I really should do a whole discussion on this at some point, if I go read, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote The Postmodern Condition in 1979. He's not saying that we should live in a postmodern world, he's saying what the postmodern world works like.

00:32:16.000 And why it's miserable.

00:32:18.000 And so one of the things he talks about, and he does it wrongly in my opinion, I don't agree with the point he's actually making, but he talks about this concept, it has this fancy academic name called legitimation by pyrology.

00:32:28.000 By what?

00:32:30.000 Pyrology.

00:32:31.000 Paralogy.

00:32:32.000 Parallel.

00:32:33.000 Parallel logic.

00:32:34.000 Oh, parallel.

00:32:35.000 Okay, fine, fine.

00:32:35.000 And so legitimation, how do we determine if something's legitimate or valid?

00:32:40.000 And he's saying it's occurring in the postmodern condition that we find ourselves in through false logic.

00:32:46.000 But what he actually, if you boil it down, what he's saying is it's through consensus.

00:32:51.000 It's through kind of ginned up consensus.

00:32:54.000 And so what you...

00:32:56.000 What I have to understand is that the left over the past 40, 50 years has figured out how to take these critical theories, these postmodern theories, and weaponize them.

00:33:05.000 So what they know is that if they can create that moral consensus, that social consensus that this is the good thing to do, the right thing to do, they can falsely legitimize their own ideas.

00:33:15.000 And then that gets the strength of bureaucratic, you know, or administrative or managerial weight behind it.

00:33:23.000 Legitimacy, also.

00:33:24.000 And it becomes a...

00:33:26.000 I always picture...

00:33:27.000 But what was...

00:33:28.000 I want to understand the parallel logic part.

00:33:29.000 I didn't follow that part.

00:33:30.000 I understand the managerial legitimization.

00:33:33.000 Parology is, for Lyotard, is...

00:33:36.000 He's just using a big word to mean consensus.

00:33:38.000 Okay.

00:33:39.000 It's the logic of the group.

00:33:41.000 Just creates some kind of group that creates...

00:33:44.000 There's momentum behind it through groupthink, but then the bureaucracy just sort of gives it the imprimatur of also bureaucratic legitimization.

00:33:51.000 Correct.

00:33:51.000 And so they know that if they capture things that have monopolies of influence, whether it's over an institution or whether it's over a corporation or whether it's over a government body, if they can capture something that has a monopoly of influence, then they can influence everything downstream from that.

00:34:08.000 If they can get that...

00:34:11.000 Consensus-based or groupthink-based, which is usually morally twisted to their advantage, in the accrediting body, in the licensing body or whatever, everything downstream from that follows.

00:34:25.000 And that's the logic.

00:34:26.000 That's the places that they target.

00:34:28.000 We also overestimate, by the way, how many of these activists it takes to topple our society.

00:34:33.000 They actually only have to grab a number of choke points.

00:34:36.000 We're talking, you know, a few thousand as opposed to with what?

00:34:40.000 Four out of seven people on each board.

00:34:42.000 We're not talking about needing, you know, 52 or 60 percent of the population.

00:34:47.000 You need very few people just strategically hitting those choke points.

00:34:51.000 So they're thinking operationally, no.

00:34:53.000 If we were in war, right, if this was World War II, we'd be looking at, oh, we've got to do something with that bridge.

00:34:59.000 We've got to do something with that factory.

00:35:01.000 Because this is where they're building their tanks.

00:35:02.000 This is how they deliver their materials.

00:35:04.000 This is how we disrupt their supply chain.

00:35:06.000 They're saying, what's the supply chain for the intellectual and cultural property of society?

00:35:11.000 Let's control that.

00:35:12.000 Let's take that.

00:35:13.000 And that's these accrediting bodies and so on.

00:35:15.000 And then sadly though, since we got here by school choice, just to kind of circle it back to that so we don't lose it, the accrediting body part is only one small part of that issue's kind of three-sided trap with the strike on the outside.

00:35:31.000 The solution itself, or the appearance of a solution, breeds complacency.

00:35:35.000 That's that will to live instead of to fight.

00:35:38.000 So rather than suing your kid's school for harming them, now you're thinking...

00:35:42.000 I'm just going to go somewhere else.

00:35:44.000 I'll vote with my feet.

00:35:45.000 I'll just leave the problem and walk away from it, which is a tendency conservatives way too often have.

00:35:49.000 They're harming your kids fight back legally, obviously.

00:35:53.000 And also you're paying your taxes that actually fund that school and you have voting rights that go along with it.

00:35:58.000 And this is where these two issues that you brought up that are kind of parallels, where they tie together though, where ESG and school choice become the same issue.

00:36:08.000 Because conservatives also have this tendency to think outside of scale.

00:36:13.000 That's right.

00:36:14.000 They do not think in scale.

00:36:15.000 You talk to the school choice advocates and they say, I could open a micro school.

00:36:19.000 Yeah, that's cool.

00:36:20.000 Yeah.

00:36:21.000 A micro school.

00:36:22.000 It's micro.

00:36:23.000 That's right.

00:36:23.000 Where are the scaling factors going to be?

00:36:25.000 It's going to be large corporations.

00:36:27.000 What corporation is going to be able to scale to build a significant portion of market capture without being ESG compliant right now?

00:36:36.000 And that S in ESG is code for DEI. Of course it is.

00:36:40.000 And so it's all coming in.

00:36:41.000 The environmental program, everything's coming back in.

00:36:43.000 So let me just, I mean, I know you followed this, but just to explain the...

00:36:48.000 ESG aspect of this in detail.

00:36:51.000 It's a great parallel where school choice and ESG, where the counter-divest movement is the equivalent of the school choice movement, which is, oh, well, I don't like that Disney's behaving this way, or fill-in-the-blank, Chevron, Apple adopting a racial equity audit, whatever it is.

00:37:13.000 I'm just going to sell my Disney stock or my Apple stock or my Chevron stock or whatever.

00:37:20.000 Okay, and put it where exactly?

00:37:23.000 In Paramount Pictures?

00:37:26.000 Is that that much better?

00:37:27.000 Or in Exxon or in Microsoft?

00:37:29.000 Is that that much better to Apple or Disney or Chevron?

00:37:32.000 Oh, well, what's going on there?

00:37:33.000 Well, then I'm just going to remove my money from the market And then do what?

00:37:38.000 A new startup Disney?

00:37:40.000 A new startup Microsoft?

00:37:41.000 So that's like the divest movement.

00:37:42.000 And by the way, every time you divest, this is in the markets here.

00:37:47.000 What does that mean?

00:37:48.000 It means you're selling your share to somebody else who's buying it at an incrementally lower price because you're selling it.

00:37:53.000 That's right.

00:37:55.000 Versus recognizing that actually if you own a share of a company...

00:38:00.000 There's three things that come with that.

00:38:01.000 One is the financial entitlement, the right to receive the dividends, the future profits that that company pays out.

00:38:07.000 But the second is a voting right.

00:38:10.000 You have the right to vote your shares.

00:38:11.000 And the third is a voice that you get to informally exercise as your shareholder that's backstopped by your vote.

00:38:17.000 So why would you sell that in virtue of No alternative, really.

00:38:23.000 Versus engaging to maximize the value of your investment, which means purging these toxic values that are otherwise in the boardroom, using your voice and vote to do it.

00:38:35.000 Who's the other person buying your share most of the time, by the way?

00:38:39.000 For a better price, right?

00:38:40.000 Because the profit stream is still the same.

00:38:42.000 They're just getting it for a lower price because you're selling it.

00:38:44.000 I think you know this.

00:38:45.000 This was the whole premise behind my founding Strive.

00:38:47.000 So Strive's whole point was not playing the divestment game, which, virtuous as that might sound, has literally no effect at best.

00:38:59.000 But instead to use shareholder engagement to actually drive change at the companies like Disney and Chevron and Apple, all three of whom, too, last year back when I was running Strive, wrote direct shareholder letters to.

00:39:15.000 And actually hopefully they're driving consequent changes in corporate behavior.

00:39:19.000 It's kind of the same analogy with respect to public schools and school choice.

00:39:23.000 I think the school choice piece is, I think, at least a little more defensible than divesting from a company in a liquid capital market.

00:39:29.000 It is.

00:39:29.000 It's literally infinitesimally tiny, at a zero impact by selling a share.

00:39:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:34.000 Whereas school choice, you know, I think is a different impact, but there's a great parallel.

00:39:38.000 There is a great parallel.

00:39:39.000 This tendency to divest, to walk away from trouble rather than to turn around and confront trouble, the school shouldn't be abusing your kids.

00:39:47.000 And the corporation, or the banks, I should say, the big investment firms should not be doing impact investing with your money.

00:39:54.000 That you don't really want them doing.

00:39:56.000 So if you decide you're just going to walk away, you're just going to walk and walk and walk until you're in a ghetto.

00:40:03.000 You know, not a literal, well maybe, but probably not a literal ghetto, but you're going to ghettoize yourself by stepping away from the problem and it's going to gobble up more of the territory and give you less and less and less until you're in your uncomfortable, unhappy little corner of the world and they have all the spoils.

00:40:22.000 But that issue of scale, It matters with school choice because we have to understand that most of the market will not go to micro schools and it's not even necessarily here about accrediting and it's not necessarily even about whether or not the government will change its mind down the road and put strings that weren't necessarily there, which by the way they always do.

00:40:43.000 It's actually about the fact that the largest sector of the market, the market capture is going to go very heavily to large firms that are going to be ESG compliant.

00:40:54.000 If your reasoning for school choice is a principled desire for academic freedom, go ahead and support it.

00:41:00.000 If your reason is, I want options to get my kid out of woke schools, you're walking into the...

00:41:05.000 Which means you've got to know the why.

00:41:06.000 That's right.

00:41:07.000 Which means you've got to know the why, rather than just going through the motions.

00:41:11.000 What's your sense of...

00:41:14.000 Whether most Republican politicians who uttered the words school choice are thinking about the why or not.

00:41:19.000 I don't think most of them are, and I think that that's really unfortunate.

00:41:25.000 And I don't think they, more importantly, and I hate to just drag it back to ESG, but ESG is so important.

00:41:31.000 I don't think they understand.

00:41:32.000 I think that there's so much kind of old, I know you always bring up the 1980s, thought about the market, the market, the market, that they don't realize that we're actually operating under a cartel.

00:41:44.000 Of course.

00:41:45.000 We do not operate in a market with market competition.

00:41:48.000 We have every large corporation is beholden to ESG. They're chasing after their corporate equality index score and doing all these crazy things.

00:41:58.000 I just actually ran into an example.

00:42:01.000 Somebody reached out to me from GEHA, a large insurer in Kansas City, Missouri, and they are actually giving workplace trainings to get their employees to go and Lobby the state legislature.

00:42:15.000 Write your legislators.

00:42:16.000 Here are the bills.

00:42:17.000 Here are the things.

00:42:17.000 These are anti-LGBT in our view, blah, blah, blah.

00:42:20.000 It's not even like lobbying for them to get like con government contracts or something.

00:42:24.000 No.

00:42:24.000 Which is cronyism, which I don't love either, but that's a separate point.

00:42:26.000 It's not even that.

00:42:27.000 To go do these politics for us.

00:42:28.000 I don't know that it's specifically their CEI, but last year, the company, GEHA, or however it's pronounced, GEHA, signs onto the Corporate Equality Index, starts putting on their website how proud they are that they got their score up to a 90, it goes up to 100. They're chasing that number, and that number...

00:42:45.000 In many industries and many companies, they send people from the Human Rights Campaign publishes it.

00:42:51.000 They come in and they tell you, these are the activist demands you have to do.

00:42:54.000 And if you do them, we'll let you keep or raise your score.

00:42:58.000 But that first part's really dirty, right?

00:42:59.000 We'll let you keep your score if you do all this new stuff.

00:43:02.000 That's an extortion racket.

00:43:04.000 And that's what's actually running this market.

00:43:06.000 So when you look at an issue like school choice and you realize large corporate franchise of things that look like charter schools are going to fill most of the market, they're going to be under that same thumb.

00:43:16.000 When you look at the insurance market, they're under that same thumb.

00:43:19.000 So I say, for example, there's no school choice in an ESG economy.

00:43:23.000 There's no free market under an ESG economy.

00:43:27.000 Therefore, there can be no free market school choice under an ESG economy.

00:43:31.000 And I don't think Republicans are thinking this way because when I've sat down and talked with Republican lawmakers in D.C. and at state levels both, but especially the ones in D.C., I was frequently the first person to broach the concept of ESG to them and how ESG actually works and how much power has.

00:43:46.000 Oh, believe you me.

00:43:47.000 Yeah, and we're talking last year, and they're like, I've never heard of that.

00:43:51.000 And you're like, oh no.

00:43:52.000 The biggest influence that state elected officials or in the executive branch certainly have on the culture is through the hundreds of billions, collectively tens of trillions of dollars that they invest.

00:44:07.000 That's right.

00:44:08.000 And if they don't know how this works, they can't be thinking of the why would you be doing it.

00:44:13.000 It's the why precedes the how.

00:44:16.000 know the how you can't know why and then some people try to skip to the how without ever understanding the what or the why which is much of what you see exactly in the gop today that's part of why i'm in this race man I think people just have to start to think, we'll fight to the death over Ronna McDaniel or somebody else or Kevin McCarthy or somebody else without actually asking the question of what the heck it is we're trying to advance, why we stand for it, and then get to the question of who and how.

00:44:44.000 But we're going in that order in this campaign.

00:44:49.000 That's why I'm thrilled to be here and thrilled you're doing this.

00:44:51.000 But it's interesting how you think about I mean, School Choice or ESG, it's just...

00:44:56.000 They're just examples.

00:44:59.000 That's right.

00:45:00.000 Of a broader superstructure, a broader trend.

00:45:03.000 You know, now they're already changing the name.

00:45:05.000 I mean, one of the versions of the water balloon squeezes, then they change the name, which is also something that kind of frequently comes up, right?

00:45:13.000 So now ESG, right?

00:45:14.000 When, thanks to efforts of people like yourself, and I believe I played some part in this in the last couple of years...

00:45:22.000 Have highlighted awareness of ESG as an issue right when, guess what, BlackRock, many of the blue states along with them, have stopped calling it ESG. They're going to change it to sustainable finance instead.

00:45:35.000 That's right, of course, yeah.

00:45:36.000 And so then it's that feigned retreat again.

00:45:38.000 Okay, we get them to go down the direction of a three-letter acronym, and then we say, that's not fill-in-the-blank of three-letter acronym.

00:45:46.000 That's not ESG. Sound familiar?

00:45:48.000 That's not CRT. It's the same thing.

00:45:52.000 Because you're fighting an opponent who worships the golden calf, who's an idol worshiper, who's a slogan reciter.

00:45:58.000 Great, get them to recite the slogan, take the slogan out from under them, make them look like a fool, and then you actually capture the castle.

00:46:04.000 Same game.

00:46:05.000 CRT in schools.

00:46:06.000 I mean, you know this story well.

00:46:07.000 Maybe you should tell it.

00:46:08.000 But that's exactly the whole game they played is critical race theory.

00:46:11.000 It's in schools.

00:46:12.000 It's in schools and schools.

00:46:13.000 And then kind of use slightly different language.

00:46:15.000 Say it's not Kimberly Crenshaw or Derrick Bell.

00:46:17.000 And okay, fine.

00:46:18.000 You're not citing Derrick Bell to a third grader.

00:46:20.000 Yeah, this isn't CRT. But then the conservatives say they're against critical race theory.

00:46:24.000 They say, oh, that's not critical race theory.

00:46:25.000 Checkmate, we win.

00:46:26.000 And conservatives don't know exactly why they're going through the motions.

00:46:28.000 They lose.

00:46:29.000 Yeah, it's culturally relevant teaching.

00:46:30.000 It's not that CRT. You just walk through that a little bit.

00:46:32.000 You know that journey as well as I do, if not better.

00:46:35.000 I mean, yeah, it's really straightforward.

00:46:37.000 They have the name.

00:46:38.000 They change the name a little bit.

00:46:39.000 Or they have another thing that it's embedded within.

00:46:41.000 In this case...

00:46:42.000 We said, you know, you got CRT going on in schools.

00:46:45.000 Actually, we said, you're teaching CRT. And they pulled a technicality on us.

00:46:48.000 No, no, no, we're not teaching CRT. We're not teaching.

00:46:51.000 That's a law school topic.

00:46:53.000 That's advanced graduate.

00:46:54.000 It's only a few seminars.

00:46:55.000 In fact, we don't have enough of it in law schools.

00:46:57.000 We need more of it, by the way.

00:46:58.000 Deflection into some other irrelevant.

00:47:00.000 But then how would we be teaching third graders that?

00:47:03.000 Well, the fact is that they're not actually teaching CRT. So they aren't lying.

00:47:07.000 They're practicing CRT with children.

00:47:08.000 They're teaching children to practice CRT as a religion, really, as a mode, a worldview of seeing the world.

00:47:16.000 Relatedly, by the way, I don't know if you just saw in the news Greta Thunberg, I know it's climate rather than CRT, but these are all these religions that you talked about.

00:47:23.000 They just gave her an honorary doctorate of theology.

00:47:26.000 Well, that's accurate.

00:47:27.000 It's completely accurate.

00:47:29.000 I don't have a problem with that.

00:47:32.000 Anyone who invents a new cult that's lasted more than 10 years, or even pioneers one, I don't mind them being recognized as theologists.

00:47:41.000 Well, that's right.

00:47:42.000 Because that's exactly what she's a practitioner of.

00:47:44.000 That's exactly what she is.

00:47:45.000 Joan of Arc, modern Joan d'Arc here.

00:47:48.000 Yeah, that's wonderful.

00:47:50.000 But yeah, so then they come up with something else.

00:47:52.000 CRT is being, the vehicle that was moving it into the schools was called culturally relevant teaching or culturally relevant pedagogy.

00:47:58.000 So they say, no, no, no, we're just doing this other thing.

00:48:00.000 And now you have to go read a bunch of papers and learn a bunch of new terms, and it's a lot of syllables, and nobody wants to take the time.

00:48:06.000 And it is intentionally confusing to realize that CRT is the operative thing that makes the CRP work, which is...

00:48:15.000 Exactly the thing you were accusing them of in the first place.

00:48:18.000 And they just play this kind of shell game.

00:48:20.000 And then it changes to, well, it's just honest history.

00:48:22.000 It's just these nice-sounding things.

00:48:24.000 And that's what we see with these ESG now.

00:48:26.000 Oh, no, it's sustainability investing.

00:48:27.000 What we should be calling is impact corporations.

00:48:30.000 They're not S-Corps.

00:48:31.000 They're not C-Corps because they aren't serving individual proprietor or shareholder value.

00:48:37.000 They're impact corps.

00:48:38.000 That's right.

00:48:38.000 B-Corps.

00:48:40.000 There's such a special designation.

00:48:41.000 B-Corps.

00:48:42.000 Well, these corps should not...

00:48:44.000 Say, have all the privileges that the other corps have.

00:48:46.000 Totally.

00:48:47.000 Business judgment rule, for example, applies as the assumption in court.

00:48:50.000 Is it behind you?

00:48:51.000 Woking?

00:48:51.000 Yep, there it is.

00:48:52.000 Yeah, it's like chapter three in there.

00:48:53.000 It's like, I read your book or something.

00:48:55.000 It's supposed to go to people's sleep.

00:48:56.000 No, no, but exactly.

00:48:57.000 You actually raise a really good point, though, because the existence of a B Corp, which Patagonia reorganized itself into a similar kind of corporation, is the exception that proves the rule that...

00:49:13.000 If that had to be a separate legal category, either it was totally superfluous, which is not a way you generally read laws, or that you believe that law exists for a reason to create that separate category of corporation, because all the other ones had a different constraining principle.

00:49:32.000 And the constraining principle is that you stay out of advancing the political agendas that are best left to the civic sphere of our lives.

00:49:40.000 And so what do they do?

00:49:41.000 But it's this one step ahead-ism.

00:49:43.000 That's right.

00:49:43.000 Where they say that, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

00:49:45.000 Even though we said for years, and they did, that businesses have to earn their social license to operate.

00:49:53.000 That if government leaders won't step up to address global climate change and global inequity, then business leaders must do it instead.

00:50:01.000 Even though they said that like 24 months ago.

00:50:03.000 Yeah.

00:50:04.000 When called out on this distinction.

00:50:06.000 That's right.

00:50:07.000 We'll say...

00:50:09.000 Silly you.

00:50:10.000 You don't realize that we're just talking about long-run shareholder value.

00:50:16.000 That's right.

00:50:16.000 They captured the concept.

00:50:17.000 It's long-run shareholder value.

00:50:19.000 Exactly.

00:50:19.000 They infiltrated and undermined the concept of fiduciary responsibility, and then they created the condition so that in some perverted, weird sense that nobody really means, it is your fiduciary responsibility to do all of the ESG stuff, because otherwise BlackRock will crush you, which is not...

00:50:36.000 Responsible behavior to get crushed by the bank.

00:50:38.000 But what they've done is they've captured this thing.

00:50:40.000 So if we were to force them to identify as the kind of corporation that they are, to use their favorite I word, identify.

00:50:47.000 Identify.

00:50:48.000 I like that.

00:50:48.000 They're B Corps, I guess, that identify as C Corps.

00:50:52.000 It's actually kind of funny, actually.

00:50:53.000 And so they're trans corps.

00:50:56.000 But things like these different privileges, like, again, the business judgment rule, which assumes that they are pursuing maximum shareholder return, It doesn't apply necessarily to other types of incorporated entities.

00:51:11.000 So there are solutions here where we could turn and fight, and there are ways to beat them at these tricks, but you must understand how they're doing them.

00:51:18.000 Now, we talked about changing the names, though.

00:51:20.000 I'll just point out...

00:51:21.000 Words like sustainable and inclusion, they're pretty married to.

00:51:26.000 I don't think they're easily going to get away from sustainability and inclusion.

00:51:29.000 And those words have a long pedigree in their literature as well.

00:51:33.000 I mean, they can make up new words, but it is called, you know, the United Nations has their Sustainable Development Goals Agenda.

00:51:39.000 SDGs.

00:51:40.000 Yeah.

00:51:41.000 They're a little married to that.

00:51:43.000 That's kind of everywhere.

00:51:44.000 It's kind of on everything.

00:51:46.000 But that actually, if you don't know, just for people who don't realize this, because this is my typical job, isn't to just speak about these, it's to read the old literature.

00:51:53.000 This was the question that was being asked in the 1960s by the neo-Marxist thinkers, Herbert Marcuse, in his very famous, very influential book, What millions of people read in the 60s called One Dimensional Man.

00:52:05.000 If you read the second and ninth chapters, you can kind of see what he's doing.

00:52:08.000 He's saying that capitalism and socialism are kind of—they're more like brothers than they are, you know, two enemies.

00:52:16.000 And they are each doing things that are right.

00:52:18.000 So if we could somehow mix them together, we could somehow get the productive capacity of capitalism— Without sacrificing the ideology and the humanism of socialism, we could somehow, which can't produce, we could somehow mix them together so we'd have a productive socialism on the one hand, and we would have a sustainable capitalism, because that's what he says is wrong with capitalism.

00:52:41.000 It's not that it doesn't deliver the goods.

00:52:42.000 He says explicitly in his own words, it does deliver the goods.

00:52:45.000 It delivers a better life, but not a socialist life.

00:52:49.000 And so what you have to do is figure out what's wrong with it.

00:52:51.000 And what's wrong with it?

00:52:52.000 It's not sustainable.

00:52:53.000 It will burn itself out.

00:52:55.000 It will exhaust the world's resources.

00:52:57.000 It will create false needs upon false needs upon false needs and forever chase its own tail and eventually run us all dry.

00:53:05.000 So if you could somehow make capitalism be sustainable...

00:53:10.000 It would be very much like a productive socialism, and you could merge the two systems.

00:53:13.000 And I think that that's exactly the roadmap that we followed for 50 years without people realizing, since 1964, so getting on 60 years, without people realizing that's what's happened.

00:53:22.000 I think they pioneered it in China.

00:53:23.000 I think they opened up capitalist markets in a socialist environment so that they could start experimenting with how to blend the systems.

00:53:30.000 And what does it look like?

00:53:32.000 China looks very productive.

00:53:33.000 It seems to be producing.

00:53:35.000 It seems to be delivering the goods.

00:53:36.000 You've got crazy rich Asians, Chinese billionaires and oligarchs all over the place, money coming out of an eight-figure check, no big deal, here you go.

00:53:44.000 You know, they've got—it seems to be working.

00:53:47.000 They seem to have productive socialism.

00:53:49.000 So what does the West have to do now?

00:53:50.000 Well, we have to look at that.

00:53:52.000 We have to learn from that.

00:53:53.000 And what do we need to do?

00:53:53.000 Well, we need to be more sustainable.

00:53:55.000 We need sustainable capitalism.

00:53:57.000 How do we manage that?

00:53:58.000 With stakeholders who understand sustainability theory.

00:54:01.000 So we'll create a council of stakeholders and do sustainable theory from there and tell the corporations how they have to work.

00:54:08.000 And ESG was created this way.

00:54:10.000 The World Economic Forum says explicitly, Klaus Schwab in his book last year, The Great Narrative for a Better Future, it's hard to not say that with a German accent, Is that what his name of his book was?

00:54:21.000 The Great Reset for a Better Future.

00:54:23.000 Yeah, no kidding.

00:54:23.000 The Great Reset for a Better Future.

00:54:25.000 No, The Great Narrative, sorry.

00:54:26.000 The Great Reset came before COVID-19.

00:54:28.000 That's right.

00:54:28.000 The Great Reset.

00:54:29.000 Well, the subtitle is The Great Reset Book 2. Oh, I see, I see.

00:54:33.000 But The Great Narrative is there's always...

00:54:35.000 I thought The Great Reset was a conspiracy theory.

00:54:36.000 Oh yeah, obviously, with a start date announced by the now King of England.

00:54:40.000 What a conspiracy theory.

00:54:42.000 It has an official start date.

00:54:43.000 Unbelievable.

00:54:44.000 But the book, the great narrative is there's all these existential crises, so we need global cooperation centered under our control, of course, to solve these problems.

00:54:54.000 And he says, how are we going to do it?

00:54:55.000 Well, with the corporations and with the governments, we're going to create public-private partnerships, and we're going to enforce them with ESG. And he says, well, some people won't want to do that, so how are we going to get around that?

00:55:06.000 Well, we're going to take the younger generation and we're going to instill these new values in them through education so that they will demand ESG compliance out of their corporations that they work for, that they buy from, etc.

00:55:18.000 Through the accreditation bodies.

00:55:19.000 And meanwhile, we're going to rewrite the social contract to be sustainable and inclusive for a better future.

00:55:26.000 And that's what his three-part plan is, to transform the world.

00:55:29.000 To define the three parts, the...

00:55:31.000 Top-down ESG. Stakeholder capitalism.

00:55:34.000 That's right.

00:55:35.000 Bottom-up is going to be the educational system to transform the younger generations.

00:55:39.000 So they've got supply top-down.

00:55:41.000 They're going to create demand bottom-up.

00:55:44.000 And then meanwhile, they're going to rewrite the social fabric.

00:55:46.000 He spends a lot of time in the book for Klaus on rewriting the social fabric, a new social contract that we all agree to.

00:55:54.000 The name of that, we've got ESG and the education system.

00:55:57.000 It's called social-emotional learning is the tool they're using to do this.

00:56:00.000 Yes, social-emotional learning.

00:56:01.000 Emotional learning.

00:56:02.000 That's right.

00:56:03.000 Brainwashing.

00:56:04.000 And so the name though for the social contract is global citizenship.

00:56:07.000 Those are the three big targets right now.

00:56:11.000 Global citizenship, social emotional learning, and ESG are the three big targets of this agenda.

00:56:17.000 And you can understand how they work together because Klaus lays it out in a few paragraphs in the middle of the great narrative for a better future.

00:56:26.000 Top down, bottom up, and then rewrite the inside out of society.

00:56:31.000 Which you'll call, sorry, the middle, the battleground or the intermediating glue, ESG, social-emotional learning, and then you'd call it global citizenship.

00:56:40.000 Yeah, and do you know how global citizenship is defined?

00:56:42.000 First of all, it's a nonsense term.

00:56:43.000 Let me just say that.

00:56:44.000 Of course it is.

00:56:44.000 Yeah, I'm a citizen of a nation.

00:56:45.000 I'm not a citizen.

00:56:46.000 That's right.

00:56:47.000 Citizenship is a relationship between a ruler and the subjects.

00:56:51.000 There's no relationship between any global body.

00:56:53.000 Between an individual and a nation.

00:56:54.000 Until you will one into existence to make good on the deal people believe they've already made.

00:56:58.000 See how they trick you?

00:56:59.000 They get you to believe yourself a global citizen.

00:57:01.000 Say, well, what do I get for that?

00:57:02.000 And they'll say, well, we'll set up a governing body that gives you what you get.

00:57:06.000 And they explicitly tell you that global citizenship, this is in a book called Global Citizenship Education I just read.

00:57:11.000 They tell you, well, it's not that interested in rights.

00:57:13.000 Right.

00:57:14.000 It's actually interested in responsibilities, what your responsibilities are.

00:57:17.000 But a global citizen in global citizenship education, which is pushed heavily and funded heavily through the UN, is explicitly supporting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

00:57:28.000 That's how you define a global citizen.

00:57:30.000 So we're going to raise our children to be global citizens with a new social contract.

00:57:34.000 Who defines it that way and where?

00:57:35.000 In some document?

00:57:37.000 Klaus Schwab?

00:57:37.000 Or we win?

00:57:38.000 I mean...

00:57:39.000 The UN. It's all through the UN. If you spend a few minutes looking up global citizenship education and just read any of the mind-numbing problem that they put out about it, you'll see again and again and again that what it means to be a global citizen is to be compliant and in pursuit of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of Conspiracy Theory Agenda 2030. And so that's how they're defining it.

00:58:03.000 And what do they teach in, say, social-emotional learning?

00:58:05.000 Well, one of the five core competency areas they teach is responsible decision-making.

00:58:11.000 Well, how do you know if you're being responsible in your decision-making?

00:58:13.000 Well, are they meeting the 17 sustainable development goals?

00:58:15.000 It's pretty nefarious.

00:58:16.000 I mean, even one of the things, you probably saw some of this.

00:58:19.000 So my experience with Klaus Schwab, never met him.

00:58:22.000 But my only experience with the World Economic Forum...

00:58:26.000 was being contacted by them to either attend the conference in Davos, which I have never done and know I'm interested in doing, and then being extended the offer to become one of their young global leaders.

00:58:40.000 I turned it down.

00:58:43.000 I said, no, I don't think it's a good fit.

00:58:45.000 They said, you may be a good opportunity to promote your upcoming book.

00:58:47.000 I was like, my upcoming book is called Woking, and it takes direct aim at this.

00:58:51.000 I don't think that's a good fit.

00:58:53.000 No, thank you.

00:58:54.000 Months later, I get the announcement.

00:58:57.000 Oh, I don't get the announcement.

00:58:58.000 I get a bunch of text messages congratulating me from random people I haven't seen in years.

00:59:04.000 I saw you made the Young Global Leaders list.

00:59:06.000 I'm just like, are you kidding me?

00:59:07.000 That's really funny.

00:59:08.000 There you are on the website, right?

00:59:10.000 And there I am on the website.

00:59:11.000 Mid-level violence.

00:59:12.000 And turns out, Elon Musk had the same experience.

00:59:14.000 Glenn Beck has had the same experience.

00:59:15.000 So it's sort of this...

00:59:16.000 And the funny thing is, so I then declare for President of the United States, and then a bunch of people from really our movement, or at least people who are, I'm grateful, interested in the ideas that you and I have been trying to educate the public on for the last five years.

00:59:32.000 Are saying, what?

00:59:33.000 How could that be?

00:59:34.000 You're a young global fellow.

00:59:35.000 You're actually a plant.

00:59:37.000 You're actually some sort of Trojan horse.

00:59:41.000 In a certain way, this is how Klaus Schwab and the likes of them play the game.

00:59:46.000 They're going to exercise dominion one way or another.

00:59:49.000 They grab the middle of the balloon.

00:59:50.000 Exactly.

00:59:51.000 They grab the middle of the balloon.

00:59:52.000 And then we fall for it.

00:59:53.000 Yeah.

00:59:54.000 And then we fall for it.

00:59:54.000 Our people fall for it.

00:59:55.000 We all fall for it.

00:59:56.000 So, I mean, I'm glad the people in the movement are attentive to that and care about that now.

01:00:02.000 Absolutely.

01:00:03.000 But on the other hand...

01:00:04.000 But they're being exploited one step ahead.

01:00:05.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:00:06.000 Exactly right.

01:00:06.000 So now we get somebody who...

01:00:09.000 I mean, I don't want to say that I'm not boasting about myself.

01:00:11.000 It's just I've made it the objective of my career to take this on.

01:00:15.000 And what do they do?

01:00:16.000 They make sure they kneecap the person who's best positioned to do that because they're always one step ahead.

01:00:21.000 That's right.

01:00:22.000 It's like the same move from calling ESG, call it sustainable.

01:00:25.000 Great.

01:00:25.000 You're going to get a warrior from your side who's actually the biggest risk to take us on.

01:00:29.000 We're going to actually undermine the support you give them by actually wrapping the veneer of exactly the young global leader around them.

01:00:36.000 That's right.

01:00:36.000 And it's amazing.

01:00:37.000 It's just another example of one step aheadism that the other side has mastered.

01:00:41.000 And I'm not upset at our people for being skeptical.

01:00:45.000 We should be.

01:00:46.000 If we've learned one thing about the last 10 years about this infection complex, it's that you got to be skeptical.

01:00:53.000 Skepticism is the only way out.

01:00:55.000 But in the same way they co-opted the free market itself, now they've co-opted skepticism.

01:00:59.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:01:00.000 I wonder if that's in the plan too.

01:01:02.000 Probably is.

01:01:03.000 Probably somewhere in there.

01:01:04.000 I mean, they are very operational.

01:01:07.000 And if people don't take anything else away from our dialogue today, they've got to understand that the left is operational.

01:01:13.000 They are thinking in terms of strategic operations.

01:01:16.000 And unless we think in terms of answering those strategic operations, understanding them, then we can't.

01:01:21.000 Typically, this can be done merely...

01:01:24.000 It's merely by pointing out that A, an operation is occurring, and B, it has an objective, and this is what it is.

01:01:31.000 If you say they're manipulating you, and here's their objective, that's enough to break the spell for large numbers of people that will then not fall for it, will not go along with it.

01:01:40.000 It's like if I did a magic trick, if I pull out a deck of cards.

01:01:42.000 I actually saw an Instagram reel the other day, very relatable.

01:01:45.000 Where the guy was showing the magic trick from his side.

01:01:48.000 It's the one where you tear the corner off of the card.

01:01:50.000 And what it is is he's got the torn corner already in the box.

01:01:53.000 I'm not supposed to tell how magic tricks work.

01:01:55.000 And he's flipping up the next card because the corner's missing.

01:01:58.000 And then he finally gets to the place and he does the whole thing.

01:02:01.000 And he tricks this poor person into thinking that if you know how the trick works though, it's not magic anymore.

01:02:08.000 It's ruined.

01:02:09.000 It's over for you.

01:02:10.000 And what they're doing are these magic tricks.

01:02:12.000 One Step Aheadism is actually them doing a magic trick.

01:02:15.000 If they can get you to fight about whether you are a young global leader, now you're fighting about this, and they're making a strategic advance in another direction.

01:02:24.000 Divide and conquer is just another part of the tactic of staying, it's the One Step Aheadism.

01:02:29.000 Well, it's like Flatland.

01:02:30.000 It's two-dimensional to three-dimensional.

01:02:31.000 They keep you fighting down here on the table while they play in 3D in advance.

01:02:37.000 And if you got your science, you can do the right-hand rule I got made fun of on the internet for saying it works like electric current.

01:02:44.000 You get the magnetic field going in a circle, the electric current goes perpendicular to it.

01:02:48.000 And the current is the flow of their activism.

01:02:50.000 So when you can understand that and say, wait a minute, I see where this is going.

01:02:55.000 I understand why you're doing this.

01:02:56.000 I understand, for example, that Drag Queen Story Hour, while it might, middle of the balloon, it might roll over a bunch of kids, it might allow us to do whatever it is that the, you know, obvious direct purpose of it is, the other end of the balloon is it's a provocation.

01:03:10.000 And if we can trigger an act of violence as retaliation to this provocation, then they're going to exploit the violence.

01:03:16.000 And they know that sooner or later they're going to get that.

01:03:19.000 I called that kind of hilariously And Operation Drag Floyd to try to spark a George Floyd moment in the country by creating a martyr, by provoking the violence that they'll then exploit.

01:03:30.000 They'll happily sacrifice one of their own.

01:03:32.000 Why not?

01:03:32.000 Oh, yeah, of course.

01:03:33.000 Well, I mean, ultimately, their philosophy is based on Hegel, and Hegel said history uses people and then discards them.

01:03:39.000 And so, yeah, sacrificing for the movement is exactly your purpose.

01:03:43.000 Upon sacrifice, yeah.

01:03:44.000 That's right.

01:03:45.000 Yeah, pawn sacrifice makes it even worse.

01:03:47.000 But if you can say, here's the point though.

01:03:50.000 The point is, and then what did you do?

01:03:53.000 I put this out.

01:03:54.000 Media Matters wrote an article about me.

01:03:56.000 I said it on a stage at Turning Point at AmericaFest.

01:03:58.000 We were both there last year.

01:03:59.000 And I said it on stage.

01:04:01.000 Before I got off stage, the article was already published.

01:04:05.000 That fast.

01:04:06.000 I got back to my room and found it later that night.

01:04:08.000 Somebody sent it to me.

01:04:09.000 And the timestamp, I was still on stage.

01:04:12.000 Unbelievable.

01:04:13.000 So they reacted to this very quickly.

01:04:16.000 And then all these articles started to come out about it.

01:04:18.000 And what did every article say?

01:04:21.000 Elon Musk let these people back on Twitter.

01:04:27.000 Libs of TikTok, blah blah blah, me, Matt Walsh, whoever the characters are, lets these people who say this transphobic stuff, anti-drag stuff, anti-LGBTQ hate, he lets them on Twitter so you know their target.

01:04:40.000 Their target isn't me.

01:04:42.000 Their target isn't Libs of TikTok.

01:04:43.000 Their target is Elon Musk and Twitter.

01:04:45.000 Their target is to regain control over a social media space they've lost control of.

01:04:49.000 If you learn to read what they're saying operationally, it can shut down their operation in advance.

01:04:54.000 And if the right would learn this— It takes discipline.

01:04:57.000 It takes thinking on the timescales of history and not on the timescales of the next 10 minutes.

01:05:04.000 You know, that's big stuff.

01:05:06.000 It takes bothering to take the time to read their words.

01:05:11.000 I tell people a lot of times, if I have a superpower, it's one and only one, is I read their literature and believe them.

01:05:19.000 When they say we want a revolution, I believe they want a revolution.

01:05:22.000 When they say we're going to be like viruses and infect institutions, I believe they're going to act like viruses and infect institutions.

01:05:29.000 When they say we're going to go into the thing and carry our idea, I believe they are.

01:05:32.000 When they say we're going to use top-down and bottom-up and social contract inside-out tactics to transform the society, I believe that that's actually what they intend to do.

01:05:42.000 And I get called naive for this, but I don't think that it's naivety.

01:05:47.000 I think it's key.

01:05:48.000 So reading how they think, learning that they think operationally, putting those two things together, you don't have to read a lot of it.

01:05:54.000 You don't have to go back and read 100,000 articles like that.

01:05:56.000 This is doable.

01:05:57.000 People can do this.

01:05:58.000 Educate yourself.

01:05:58.000 Listen to even people like you, at least, who are fronting the workload.

01:06:01.000 That's right.

01:06:02.000 At least allow this to push that out.

01:06:04.000 I mean, I have a book coming out later this year on ESG just because it hasn't been written yet, right?

01:06:08.000 A proper book on this.

01:06:09.000 So it's coming out actually probably in the next couple months.

01:06:11.000 Their ideology is not actually complicated, which means if you learn a little bit of it, these moves, these operational steps are predictable.

01:06:17.000 You can get them, and this is not rocket science.

01:06:19.000 They're putting two dots down, and the third dot at the point of the triangle, you can guess pretty close to where it's going to be once you learn kind of how they think.

01:06:27.000 You figure out what the two dots are.

01:06:29.000 It's like I said, you come out with this Operation Drag Floyd narrative, they flip out, they write a bunch of articles complaining and saying, I'm obviously like this...

01:06:36.000 Terrible character.

01:06:37.000 Trying to discredit what I've said so people won't pay attention to it.

01:06:41.000 But every article mentions Elon Musk?

01:06:44.000 They're showing their hand.

01:06:45.000 These people are playing poker with their cards turned backwards and nobody, you know, the right wing, God bless them, is like, well, it would be impolite to look at their cards.

01:06:55.000 Right, right, right, right.

01:06:56.000 Well, no, they're showing you the cards.

01:06:58.000 Let's actually take them at their word.

01:07:01.000 I like that.

01:07:01.000 You know, James, it's really interesting.

01:07:03.000 I mean, these topics from critical theory to, you know, ESG to the infection of capital markets, the long march through the institutions...

01:07:13.000 It's rare that I'll sit down and have a conversation and be on the learning end of it.

01:07:20.000 But that's why I brought you here.

01:07:21.000 Because you're one of the people who's actually been at the forefront of this even longer than I have.

01:07:25.000 And your insight remains at the bleeding edge even still.

01:07:29.000 And so, you know, this is going to be hopefully something that you and I continue.

01:07:33.000 We didn't actually even get to touch a topic that I think you and I have an interest in.

01:07:37.000 So we'll save that for next time, which is China's role or the dynamic role.

01:07:41.000 And how that codependent relationship works between the neo-Marxist left in the United States and the, you know, let's just say Maoist Marxist objective in history of China.

01:07:56.000 So we'll bookmark that for...

01:07:58.000 I will say one thing on that, though.

01:08:00.000 Yeah, because it's so critical.

01:08:01.000 We're at a very, very large risk right now that China—everybody's starting to wake up to the fact that China's not necessarily our friend.

01:08:11.000 Not necessarily our friend, kindly put.

01:08:14.000 Yeah.

01:08:14.000 Understatement is a gift.

01:08:17.000 They also control a very large amount of our primary manufacturing, including for essential things.

01:08:24.000 And so now you see this.

01:08:25.000 The economic sort of damocles hanging over our neck, right?

01:08:28.000 Exactly.

01:08:29.000 And so we have this kind of awakening I'm seeing on the conservative.

01:08:32.000 Oh, well, we've got to start bringing back essential manufacturing, primary manufacturing.

01:08:36.000 Ladies and gentlemen, under the ESG economy, you will not.

01:08:40.000 It's too expensive, and it's too prohibited, and it's against every possible regulatory violation you can imagine.

01:08:46.000 The ESG economy is preventing us from being able to escape China.

01:08:49.000 Exactly.

01:08:49.000 These things work hand in glove.

01:08:51.000 That's right.

01:08:51.000 And here, this is the one where I know you've been taking them at their word.

01:08:55.000 I play that same principle to the Chinese.

01:08:57.000 This is part of a long plan put into motion decades, half a century ago, and it is working and it has worked.

01:09:04.000 Probably deserves an hour plus discussion on its own.

01:09:07.000 So if you're open to it.

01:09:09.000 Let's do that, actually, because I think that's in one where people need to understand and see the essence of what's happening.

01:09:14.000 And I'll tell you, one of the reasons I'm in this presidential campaign is to create the counter framework.

01:09:20.000 On one hand, the counter to ESG, engagement on the economy.

01:09:24.000 The counter to the social-emotional learning, engagement on the schools.

01:09:28.000 Opting out ain't going to be just a sole way forward.

01:09:31.000 You have to change the institutions of scale from within.

01:09:34.000 There's no easy way out other than through.

01:09:37.000 But in the middle, the pathway of global citizenship, and this is the essence of the political campaign of this.

01:09:43.000 That's right.

01:09:44.000 Is actually the revival of capital C citizenship itself.

01:09:48.000 The idea that I am a proud citizen of this nation.

01:09:52.000 And it so happens that this nation, our nation, America, is the nation that actually has the ideals that make us based.

01:10:01.000 And I think that if the opposite of woke is based, then the opposite of woke is actually America and the essence of what we stand for ourselves.

01:10:10.000 And that's why I've become, I wasn't always this way, but I've become an unapologetic American nationalist around America.

01:10:18.000 The ideals that define what America was born on in the first place.

01:10:23.000 It's not something we need to apologize for.

01:10:24.000 I think it's actually going to be an important part of our way out.

01:10:27.000 So that's what this whole project's about, and I think you get that better than most.

01:10:32.000 Absolutely.

01:10:33.000 We've got to realize that Americanism, American values, the American founding experiment, the American focus on taking responsibility instead of expecting somebody else to do it for us, is the American dependence on merit, as you often point out, is the exact opposite of woke.

01:10:53.000 It is the exact opposite of what's being pushed on us from all of these different forces, and it is the path of Out of this.

01:10:59.000 Next time they tell you to define woke, do it.

01:11:02.000 Then tell them to define merit.

01:11:03.000 You get a blank stare and response.

01:11:06.000 Well, there's the opportunity and the path to our own version of offense.

01:11:09.000 Pray on that vacuum.

01:11:10.000 Actually, fill that vacuum.

01:11:12.000 I think that's the way forward, and we're trying to do that.

01:11:14.000 I think we're going to.

01:11:16.000 So, anyway, man, thanks for coming and to be continued on the China front in a few weeks.

01:11:20.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:22.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - April 04, 2023

The Art of the Culture War with James Lindsay | The TRUTH Podcast #4

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