Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam | Vivek Ramaswamy

Jason Hartman invites New York Times Bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy to speak about his book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam.

Today’s economic landscape is rife with companies using economic force as a substitute for free speech and open debate to settle political and social questions. Vivek Ramaswamy is concerned with this new cancer, both in our culture and in our private sector, which threatens to kill the dream that Martin Luther King Jr. had 60 years ago.

This new philosophy that says that your identity is based on your race, sex, religion, or your sexual orientation is reductive. It takes the true diversity of voices in our country, the true diversity of perspectives within each of us and reduces us to nothing more than the embodiment of a group identity.

As the child of immigrants who came to this country with almost no money, Vivek is now the founder of a successful company and served as CEO of a biotech firm for seven years. There are certain conditions that require that story to be possible: conditions of meritocracy, where politicians stay out of business and businesses stay out of the business of politics. This new cultural cancer, this combination of political forces, even in the private sector, infecting the system of American capitalism itself, threatens to betray the dream that made a story like his possible.

After the public bailout in the last financial crisis, there was a demand for a new form and reinvention of capitalism. There was a tradeoff from talking about systemic financial risk to talking about systemic racism. But the bottom line is that the free market does not exist when it's been co-opted to advance a political agenda

Vivek makes the case to separate capitalism and democracy in order to preserve the integrity of both.