From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Fighting Back Against Woke Capitalism ft. Vivek Ramaswamy

Episode Date: October 16, 2021

This week Sean and Rachel invite Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam to The Kitchen Table to discuss how woke capitalism has pervaded every aspect of society from the classroom to the boardroom.    Ramaswamy gives an inside look on how the “woke industrial complex” grew rapidly after the 2008 financial crash.  Plus, he gives insight into how U.S.-China relations fit into the picture.     Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, interrupting their playlist to talk about Defying Gravity, are we? That's right, Newton. With a Bronco in Bronco Sport, gravity has met its match. Huh. Maybe that apple hit me a little harder than I thought. Yeah, you should get that checked out. With standard 4x4 capability, Broncos keep going up and up. Now get up to $6,000 in rebates on eligible 2024 Bronco family models. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca. Hey everybody, welcome to From the Kitchen Table.

I am your host, Sean Duffy, along with my co-partner for the podcast, but also my partner in life, Rachel Campos Duffy. Thank you, Sean. We're having another great podcast today because I've been wanting this guest on for a while. He's someone that Tucker Carlson calls probably, he says he's probably one of the best people at explaining this whole culture that we're living in right now, all the craziness. He says that Vivek Ramaswamy's explanatory powers surpass anyone he's ever interviewed. So, of course, we have to have him on because we talk about these issues all the time. We're trying to get to the bottom of it, Sean.

Absolutely. Vivek is an entrepreneur. By the way, if you watch Fox News, you know exactly who he is. But if you don't watch Fox News, as much as our loyal listeners do, he's an entrepreneur. He's the founder of Roivant Sciences. He's a New York Times bestselling author of an incredible book. If you haven't read it, you must. I have it.

It's Woke, Inc. So please welcome Vivek. Vivek, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. You're having a virtual cup of coffee with me and Sean right now. I'm enjoying it already. Thanks for having me. So we have so much to talk to you about. I don't even know where to start. Sean, you want to take the first stab at it? This is Vivek. I think it's interesting just on the background side. Listen, obviously, you're well-educated, a Harvard grad, a business entrepreneur. You're someone who should actually be in line with all of the woke politics of today's age. But you've been one who's been

studying this issue, kind of saying, listen, this is a cancer that's been growing in the country, and it's going to undermine the idea of freedom and free speech and free enterprise kind of give us that your state of even the american dream shot i mean it's just undermining everything we thought america was about kind of tell us where you think we're at um with where woke politics have come into american culture and business and business absolutely and business and culture are integrally linked, Rachel, as you know. I just remember when my parents first came to this country, they came to Southwest Ohio. And I remember a moment in 1993 when I was in second grade and I heard Martin Luther King's, I have

a dream speech for the first time. And that was the speech where he said, I hope my four children grow up in a country where they're judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. And I'll tell you, that dream stuck with me. It meant something to me because it was the dream that actually allowed me to do all the things that you said, go in a single generation from being the kid of Indian immigrants who came to this country with almost no money to becoming the founder of a multi-billion dollar biotech company. I had to make a decision earlier this year, though, about what I was going to do to address a new cultural threat to that dream. I had developed drugs, including one that was an FDA approved drug today for prostate cancer that I'm probably most proud of.

But I decided to step down from my job as a CEO in January to now work on this different kind of cancer, not a biological cancer, but a cultural cancer that I thought threatened to kill that dream that Martin Luther King had, the dream that allowed me to achieve everything I ever had. And that's what I'm writing about in my book. It's the new culture of wokeness or woke culture in the United States, which says that your identity is governed by your race, your gender, and your sexual orientation, that if you're a certain skin color, you're inherently disadvantaged, that if you're white, you're inherently privileged, no matter your economic background or your upbringing, that your race and your gender govern who you are and the thoughts and ideas you're allowed to have.

And I think that's a dangerous ideology that threatens to not only kill the American dream, but threatens to pit us against one another on the basis of our genetically inherited attributes. And the last thing I'll say just to kick it off here is that you got to understand the cancer at its roots. That's one of the things you do in medicine and in biology. I think the root causes of this cultural cancer run pretty deep too. If I think about the two most dangerous ideologies of the 20th century, they were German Nazism, which was identity politics on steroids, and it was Soviet Marxism, which was an oppressor oppressed narrative on steroids. You combine the two, and you get their love child here on American soil. That's modern wokeism. And I think it's the moment that wokeism got mixed up with

capitalism, that it became unstoppable. And I'm happy to talk about that. Yeah, you know, you you made made this analogy once that really stuck with me, Vivek, which is you said that, you know, the leftists, the Marxists, the wokest, right? And corporate America had this, you know, arranged marriage. They kind of hate each other, but they got married because they can kind of help each other. And then you said there was this threesome that gotten, you know, the Chinese got in the bed too, right? And they have their own, you know, interest that they want in this arranged marriage. And so can you break that down a little bit?

Because I think it's so confusing for a lot of Americans, especially conservative Americans, who thought like, hey, you know, I support free markets. And we used to all kind of support what corporate America was doing because we thought it, hey, you know, I support free markets and we used to all kind of kind of support what corporate America was doing because we thought it was just, you know, about, you know, the business of America's business. Right. But now we see that the business of America, the corporate heads of America are the ones who are funding these this this Marxist cultural Marxist ideology that's so antithetical to what you talked about earlier, which is that idea that we're all, you know, created equal, that we should be judged by the content of our character and not our color. And so why why explain that that weird marriage that you talk about? Sure. Yeah. So I think that one of the root causes of

it is actually the 2008 financial crisis. And Rachel, I'll tell you, I saw this with the front row seat. I got my first job in New York City as an investor at a hedge fund in the fall of 2007, right before the 08 crisis. I lived in New York City at the time. I saw this unfold. And what happened after the 08 financial crisis is that a lot of people on the left and on the right And what happened after the 08 financial crisis is that a lot of people on the left and on the right were upset with capitalist leaders because you had these ignominious government bailouts for bankers who made great money when times were good, but got bailed out by the public when times were bad. And I think that that was a stain on our history, if you ask me. But in the back of that crisis, what you then saw was big business was the target of the left in America. And what the old left wanted to do was to take money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and redistribute it to poor people to help poor people. Agree or not, that is what the old left had to say.

That was why Occupy Wall Street happened. They were occupying Wall Street, literally. And the thing is, if you're in big business in 2008, Occupy Wall Street is a pretty tough pill to swallow. But there was the birth of this new identity politics obsessed wing of the left, the new woke left, that said actually the real problem wasn't quite economic injustice or poverty. It was instead racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry. And that was actually a lifeline to big business in this country, because they were able to seize on that and say, we could go from being the bad guys to being the good guys if we just say the right things. Applaud diversity and inclusion, put some token minorities on your boards, muse about the racially disparate impact of climate

change after you fly in a private jet to a fancy ski town. This was actually pretty easy to do. And so that was the birth of this new arranged marriage where you had a bunch of woke millennials get in bed with a bunch of big banks. Together, they birthed woke capitalism. And they used that to put Occupy Wall Street up for adoption. And the trade worked so well for both sides that the rest of big business in this country started copying the act. Silicon Valley says that we're going to moderate content online.

That's their code word for censor content online that the new woke left doesn't want to see on the internet. But again, they don't do it for free. They effectively expect that the new party in power, that the newly ascendant left, look the other way when it comes to leaving their monopoly power intact. So that's the way this arranged marriage works. It is not a marriage of love. It is more like mutual prostitution. And I think the net result was the illegitimate birth of what I call this woke industrial complex, a new monster that's actually far more powerful than big government alone, or far more powerful than big business. It's a hybrid of the two that can do the dirty work of each one that each one can't do on its own. And that's how you got to where we are

where Coca Cola would rather issue statements about a new voting law in Georgia, than to talk about the nationwide impact of its own products on diabetes and obesity, including by the way, in the black community that it professes to care so much about Nike criticizing slavery 250 years ago, all the while doing nothing to reduce their reliance on slave labor today to get $250 sneakers that they sell to black kids in the inner city who can't afford to buy books for school. That is how this new game is played. And the American public is duped because of the do-good smoke screen that they dress it up with in the veneer of progressivism. And I haven't even said the part about China yet. We'll have more of this conversation after this. The score bet app here with trusted stats and real-time sports news. Yeah. Hey, have more of this conversation after this. The Scorebet. Trusted sports content. Seamless sports betting. Download today.

19 plus. Ontario only. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to ConnexOntario.ca. And to that point, I spent almost nine years in the Congress and obviously Republicans or conservatives. And I don't want to make this political on one side or the other, but we do believe in free enterprise and we wanted to give businesses, big and small, the opportunity to expand and grow, create, innovate, and sell their products, not just in America, but around the world and create jobs for their communities and their country. And that was the idea. And I think you've seen this change over the course of the last, you know, probably four or five years, where more politicians are seeing that China's in line, I'm sorry, our companies are in line with China. They

would rather sell out the American worker and the American dream for access to other markets, including China's. And when you talk about Wall Street, you know, what I see, and I was on the financial services committee, and you have the regulators who are pushing – I don't know if you've heard of Operation Chokepoint, but for our listeners, Operation Chokepoint was our regulators pushing enhanced regulation to our banks if they were lending to institutions that the regulators didn't like, like gun stores or gun manufacturers or smoke shops. And that enhanced regulation for a bank will make the bank not actually lend to those lines of business. And now you just see big banks on Wall Street say, again, yeah, we're not going to bank an abortion clinic. We're not going to bank a gun manufacturer. You mean a crisis pregnancy. Right.

I'm sorry. Or a drilling company. Or a drilling company. That's right. And I think, and I want crisis pregnancy? Right. I'm sorry. Or a drilling company. Or a drilling company. That's right. And I think, and I want your take on this, I think what's going to happen is there's a flip-flop of politics. You see the Republican Party kind of supporting the working men and women, and you now see corporatist liberals side with big business.

I think, I mean, you talk about there's this unique relationship between a corporation. It's a created entity in the tax code and in regulation, but also banks are chartered. You might see Republicans, and I've heard them talk about this, go, hey, listen, in Congress, we're going to have bills to start pulling charters. Now, I don't know that's going to happen, but it's going to scare the hell out of banks if there's Republicans talking about pulling their charters, which in essence put them out of business. Your take? Sean, you're spot on because I think that what Republicans and conservatives miss over the last 40 years is that the free market system that they idealize doesn't actually exist today when state action is commingled with the actions of a business. when state action is commingled with the actions of a business. I'll tell you another story. Speaking of banks, after the 08 financial crisis,

this is actually during the Obama years, what you then saw was the Obama administration announced these giant settlements with big banks to the tunes of billions or tens of billions of dollars. Oh, Vivek, I have to tell you this. I know the story you're going to tell. I want you to finish it, but I want you to know that when Sean was on financial services, he was screaming as loud as he could about this deal that was being made.

Oh, thank you. Someone needed to be doing it. But the media wouldn't do anything about it. They didn't care about the story. So tell the story. Lay this out for us. I'm sorry. I got so excited there, Revaque, because my poor husband was trying to raise the red flag on this.

I mean, it makes your blood boil when you hear it. But the question is what we do about it. But just so people have a clear-eyed view of the problem, this is just one example among many, by the way. Very little of those billions of dollars that the banks owed to the DOJ actually got paid to the public fisc. Because what happened was the Obama administration wanted to fund a lot of these newly woke left- wing nonprofits, La Raza, National Urban League, and so on. And Congress, in my opinion, doing its job said no. Now, if you're a Democrat, you may say that's obstructionist in the Tea Party movement or whatever. That's life in a two party system. It's the way our constitutional system of governance works. Well, guess what the Obama administration does is they

go to the DOJ and they say, you know what? We'll get you big banks in the back room here. And we'll say, all right, if you give a certain amount of dollars to these left-wing nonprofits that Congress refused to fund, we'll give you a discount. For every dollar you give there, we'll give you $2 off the amount you owe the American people. Now, banks love this, being fond of money. They like paying less money. But even better, they get to issue a press release that say they gave to some left-wing nonprofit rather than

settling with the DOJ. If they're a 501c3, you get a tax deduction for it too, ergo saving more money. And what you have is everyone winning in this game and getting to wet their beak. The Obama administration wins, big banks win, left-wing nonprofits win. But the real losers of this game, quite literally, were the American people who are owed money in their public fisc that they did not get. That is how this game is played, where each party between big government and big business is able to use the other to accomplish what they couldn't directly. And that is crony capitalism 2.0. 100%.

Crony capitalism 1.0 is actually pretty easy by comparison. You're Goldman Sachs, you pay off some lobbyists to get some favorable laws passed, you put your alumnus in the seat of US Treasury Secretary, a longstanding tradition over the last couple of decades in this country, that's easy. The harder thing to see is actually chronic capitalism 2.0, where government does the bribe in reverse. They bribe private companies to do indirectly through the back door what government could not directly do through the front door under the Constitution. They saw it with the big banks. That's exactly what you're seeing with big tech censorship today, by the way.

There's hate speech and misinformation as defined by the party in power in the United States that they can't censor directly because there's this pesky thing called the First Amendment. But what they do instead is threaten these companies, induce these companies. In many ways, I think, indirectly bribe these companies and give them a special form of immunity in the form of Section 230 C2, to be able to do indirectly through the back door, what government cannot do through the front door. And the part of the argument I make is that if it is state action in disguise, then guess what, the Constitution still applies. If companies are doing the bidding of the government to censor political content, well, guess what? They ought to be bound by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's what I think the conservative

movement, and by the way, liberals need to wake up to as well, is liberals love it because they happen to be pushing the causes that they like today, recognizing that actually the winds could blow in just the other direction tomorrow. And conservatives look the other way because their inner conscience tells them that the free market can do no wrong when both sides are then blinded to the rise of this new woke industrial monster that is actually far more powerful than what either government or big business could do on its own. And Vivek, I think that's a really good point. So I was a prosecutor too for almost 10 years. And just to break this down for our listeners, when the government can't do certain things because of the constitution, because of the rule of law, they can't say, well, I'm going to get around the

rule of law and the constitution by outsourcing, partnering with a third party and have them do it for me. To your point, if the government is enlisting an agent to do the work for them so they can get around the law and the Constitution. Our law is very clear that they're an agent of the government and are bound by the same rules as the government. And so to your point with Facebook, if the government can't limit speech, the government can't partner with Facebook to limit our speech on their behalf. It's unlawful. Totally correct.

Right. But I brought this up once on TV, Guth, when this was a month ago, but you're the only other person who I've heard talk about the agency connection between big tech and the government. So that's the right track to focus on, Sean, because I think the corporate breakups, I think it's a little bit of a smokescreen for dealing with the real issue here, which is the nexus of state action in the disguise of private enterprise. It's not just the corporate power for its own sake. If you break up four big tech titans into 40 smaller ones, but they all still adhere to the same ideological cartel in concert with the government, as I believe you see with the emergence of smaller companies and so convalidating venture capitalists, it doesn't solve the real problem while creating other costs of its own. The real thing to do is to go after that linkage between state action behind the scene, playing a role as a puppet master to be able to use these companies as pawns. By the way, much as the Chinese government does too. The Chinese government

does the same thing. I'm sorry to say we're now seeing the same thing on US soil as well. And I'm glad you're out there on this voice, because I think, Sean, a lot of people on the conservative movement have missed that finding state action in the guise of private enterprise is really going to be the right way forward for conservative policy solutions, because it's happening all the time. It's John Kerry bragging about it and saying that he's leaning on his relationship with big bank CEOs to be able to get them to adhere to a climate pledge that effectuates many of the same policy goals indirectly that they wanted to pass through the Green New Deal, which at least so far, they haven't been able to get through Congress.

And the best part about it is the likes of Jen Psaki and John Kerry aren't even trying to hide it anymore. They're actually boasting about it. So this isn't, you know, when I first started running about this stuff a year ago, people called this a conspiracy theory. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's not only a reality even. It's a reality that actually much of the West is proud of and bragging about for how they're able to use private industry to be able to accomplish their own goals. That's what the conservative movement needs to wake up to. That may be the Chinese way of state capitalism.

It is not the American way, and we need to wake up to that. Yeah. You know, Vic, I call conspiracy theories spoiler alerts now. That's where we've come. That's true. Yeah, no. It's true because it fosters this crisis of institutional mistrust where, you know, when I started writing about this woke capitalism stuff, I was initially worried, I have to admit, about, you know, employees stuffing this D.I. orthodoxy down the, employers stuffing

that D.I. orthodoxy down the throats of their employees and pitting them against one another on the basis of their race. And I have to admit, while I think that that is the real problem in our schools today, and I definitely worry that in our schools, that's not actually the real problem I actually think on reflection exists in corporate America. Because most of what happens is when people go into these silly DEI training sessions, they're not really taking it seriously in terms of what they hear. It's in one ear, out the other. They know the people who are speaking to them are being paid to do it. They know their CEO is reciting some sort of catechism, and he doesn't mean it either. And we've grown so accustomed to people who are in positions of leadership, be it government leadership or the private sector, literally saying streams of verses that they don't even believe.

And everyone recognizes that they don't believe it too. Well, I think you're right. But here's where I think you could be, and maybe you've thought about this too. I believe that everyone my age and up who has a position of power is, as you say, speaking this catechism. They don't believe this stuff. But I do believe our young people believe it. I do believe there's been some level of indoctrination that you know sean and i talk

all the time as parents like what will america look like for them and what scares us is that it's the young people in those corporations it's the young people coming out of these universities out of our high schools that are the most evangelical. I mean, they're the fundamentalists of the woke religion. They're the ones turning in their professors. The only distinction I would draw is that I think most of that damage is already done by the time they're leaving the universities, such that when they come to corporate America, it's not actually starting that problem anew. The problem's already there by the time they arrive on their first job. No, no, that's what I'm saying, 100%. But I definitely agree with you in the heart of what you're saying. I'm optimistic.

Sean, if I could just go off on an optimistic note on what Rachel said, which is a possibility that at least gives me some hope is there's something about being 19 or 20 or 21 years old that makes you want to challenge the system you're in. I mean, I think that's a big part of why people my age, right? I'm a millennial, I'm in the mid 30s. Why we, you know, not me personally, but why a lot of my peers may have found wokeism appealing when we did over the course of the last decade is it's a way of standing up to the system, standing up to the man, standing up to orthodoxy. Well, now as this woke agenda has become so institutionalized and pervasive, I'm hopeful that people who are 19 or 20 or 21 years old will see that that's the system

and their contrarian impulses will say, you want to be a hippie? You want to be countercultural? You want to stand up to the man? Actually, joining the conservative movement might be the one way to do that today in standing up to the new orthodoxy. I wish I believed that. I wish I believed that. There's a powerful undercurrent there that hopefully we can tap into to be able to shift the tide. We haven't done it yet, but I think we might be just a hair's trigger away from being able to tap into that contrarian reserve in the mind of any 19-year-old. It just may tip the other way this time. Wait right there. We'll have more of this conversation next. Some things require a lot of work to grow, like plants, hair, babies, or your savings. right there. We'll have more of this conversation next. for the first six months. Before you know it, your savings will grow without you even noticing. Ooh, which reminds me,

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Well, as evidence to your point, the chance across football stadiums in America of F. Joe Biden or Let's Go Brandon might be a sign of that. And I think you're right. The 19, 18-year-old is countercultural. So I know we only have a little bit of time left, but I want to ask you

how, so this is the environment, the wokeism has taken over everything, in my opinion, except rural America where I come from. So the question is, how do you actually fight back? And a lot of people say, well, I don't have – I'm not a congressman. I'm not a rich CEO. What can I do? I don't have FU money where I can just say, hey, I can say whatever I want. I don't care if I lose my job. Right.

And so what I – Which is what VVAC has. I keep telling people, listen, I think what's important is when someone is attacked by the woke mob, you have to stand with them. There's more of us than them. Stand up, fight back, push back, stand together. Don't let one person stand up and be fried, executed. If more people stand with them and push back against the mob, that's the way you defeat the woke mob. But I'm interested in your take. Moving forward, how do we get America back? How do we kill this cancerous woke movement in the country if we are going to kill it? So look, I think the right way to kill it is to dilute it to irrelevance rather than trying to

use a hammer because that's actually going to just make the problem worse. And what do I say by dilute it to irrelevance? I think the thing we're missing right now is a national identity. What does it mean to be American? We don't have a good answer to that question. We need to revive a good answer to that question. And I think when you have a vacuum that runs that deep, that's when poison begins to fill the void. I think wokeism is opium for the American soul is what I call it because it fills the moral void that used to be filled by things like faith and patriotism and hard work. As those have receded in public life, especially in the minds of my generation and younger, that's really what makes

wokeism the new inhabitant of that vacuum. And so how do we do that? I'm not going to let our politicians off the hook. I think there is a role that public policy can play here. It's not the end all be all. It's going to have to be a change in our culture. But I think some simple legal and policy changes can help create the conditions for that cultural revival. I'll give you one example. I think that we need to add political belief and political expression as a civil right, right up there next to race, sex, religion, national origin in the civil rights statutes in this country. To say that if you can't discriminate against somebody or fire somebody or de-platform somebody because they're black or gay or Muslim or white or Christian or Jewish or whatever. You should not be able to fire them

just because they're an outspoken conservative or an outspoken liberal for that matter either. This is not a country that forces you to choose between, as you said, Rachel, putting food on the dinner table and speaking your mind freely between the American dream and the First Amendment. We are the quintessential nation that allows you to enjoy both of those goods at the same time. That is part of what it means to be American. That is part of reviving our national identity. And I'm disappointed in actually leaders in the conservative movement who have been too meek to take on simple, low-hanging fruit causes like this that actually ought to bring together a country across political boundaries to revive our identity

of who we really are. And then that creates the condition, Sean, to be able to do the thing that you actually are suggesting, which is to start talking openly again. And I think that's the right answer to fighting the woke pandemic. So can I tell you, can I tell you an idea that Sean had? So when Sean was in Congress, he had this idea, and everything— I'm wondering what my idea was here for a second. Everything Tank, his staff, went to to talk about this idea. They said, you can't do it. If you're a conservative, you cannot do this.

This is terrible. This is a horrible idea. But here was Sean saying, Sean, if I don't explain it right, you jump in. OK, so what we worry about is the universities. And by the way, all the stuff that we saw at the universities, as you know, Vivek, has gone down to the elementary. I mean, our kindergartners are now getting indoctrinated. But we thought at the university level, you know, so many people are paying taxes to, you know, state universities. We were in Wisconsin. So you're looking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Super liberal, woke. I mean, if you're conservative there, you feel like an abused child there. And so we thought, these are our tax dollars. They have all these requirements, as we talked about, for race and sex and blah, blah, blah, blah, that they should be required, blah, that they should be required professors and the university should be required to have ideological diversity at the university through the faculty. And so the issue with this is that we have a diversity of races and sexes and sexual

preferences and religions. But the only thing we don't have on campus is the diversity of political thought, right? And so, but the problem in Congress is you actually have to think through legislation in a way that doesn't have it backfire on you where you're doing something that you think is good that turns out to be actually really bad. And so I've tried to bring some smart people around me to go, help me think through this. How do we do this in a way that still matches principle, but still guarantees freedom of thought and expression and a diversity of viewpoints? Because that's what kids are going to school for, right? We want to be exposed to all kinds of ideas

until we can come up with our own. We don't want to indoctrinate kids. We want to expose them. And I never did it because I couldn't wrap my head around how to get it done. But if you don't have diversity of thought on campus, you get out of campus and everybody is a little woke left Marxist. I got kids who say, I want to live in a commune now. A commune. I'm like, read about the 60s and 70s communes and see how well communes went. And you're not going to want to live in a commune. But this is the garbage these kids think right now. They're never exposed to conservatism at all.

We have college kids now, but this is what they believe, and you're right to Rachel's point, they're not exposed to a different set of ideas. I'm with you guys on this, and I don't think the right answer is banning out of existence the idea of being exposed to Marxism. Great, we call Marx, I'm fine with that, as long as you're fully exposed to actually the real history

of how that experiment has turned out in the rest of the world where it's been tried, let's actually get the real marketplace of ideas back. It's really funny what you said, Sean. It's spot on where in the name of diversity, the thing we've actually sacrificed is true diversity of thought. And it's not just ironic. They're actually causally linked to one another. There's a great story from Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor, where he tells about Christ coming back to earth in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition. The head of the church, the Grand Inquisitor, spots Christ on the streets of Seville, has him arrested, sentences him to execution, and says that actually we, the church, don't

need you anymore. In fact, your presence here is impeding our church's work. That's why I'm sentencing you to execution. In a certain way, the church of diversity has actually taken its true God of diversity of thought and sacrificed it at the altar, all in the name of diversity itself. There's a really funny story even the last few months. Okay. So NASDAQ says it's going to adopt these exchange listing requirements and say that you'll be listed as a company if you don't provide a sufficient explanation for why your board doesn't have sufficient diversity along the axes of race,

gender, and sexual orientation. But in order for the SEC to adopt those rules as actual rules, which is the SEC's role to do as a regulator, one of the things that they have to do is take public comment. It's one of the procedures that you have to go through as an agency enacting rules. Well, one of the comments that comes up to the NASDAQ rule is the idea that, hey, maybe we should also add veteran status and disability status and a couple of other metrics that might be even better proxies for true diversity of thought, which was their justification for adopting these diversity characteristics. They say they don't want groupthink on corporate boards. Well, guess what they say? After evaluation, NASDAQ says, the counterintuitive effect of these proposals would actually be to reduce the desired forms of diversity by including more metrics of diversity

in the process. Just in recent months, that is laughable. The idea that actually including veteran status or disability status, which are different experiences that people may have had true diversity of experience that begets diversity of thought may reduce the desired forms of diversity on the axes of race or gender or sexual orientation. This is laughable, but also reveals. Right. So revealing, right? Like they're not really interested in diversity. They're only interested in this one point of view. It brings me back to why race is so important. For one, race is immutable, right? So if we base everything on victimhood and all these grievances on race, I can't ever change my race.

I'm Hispanic. That's who I am. And they have this perpetual thing where it's like when they used to base it on class, right? You can move around in your class, right? right but you can't move around in race and again just on a very practical level sean and i interracial couple met on reality television i don't know if you know that vivek i didn't know that no we met on reality tv the first reality tv couple and and we amazing well we so we we when we met we never really i, I don't ever remember us talking about our races other than like, you know, Mexican food, maybe. I mean, like who doesn't like Mexican food? Right. But other than that, it was such a non issue.

And then something happened. And I hate to say it, but around the time Barack Obama was elected, everything became obsessed with race, which is so ironic because we just elected twice, you know, this the first black president. And and all of a sudden, you know, you can't even have The Bachelor anymore because, you know, everything's racist on there. And they brought in these diversity coaches that screwed up the whole, you know, season the last season when they had the first black guy. I was forced to watch that. Yeah. It was painful.

I don't know if you had to watch that. Hopefully your wife did not make you watch the last season of The Bachelor. I think it happens during the 2008 financial crisis. Barack Obama was elected right at the same time.

By the way, that's also right when you're in the middle of this other issue which we haven't talked about which is the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history

from baby boomers to millennials. And when you're on the receiving end of that generational wealth transfer, you have this gilded guilt that you have to express in some new way. And that's the confluence for the birth of this new toxic world culture. But at the end of the day, you can't satisfy that deeper moral hunger with the equivalent of fast food, which is mixing morality with your commercialism and going woke. You have to

fill that moral hunger with more substantial fare. And that's, I think, what we need to do a better job of on the right is to revive kind of that national identity and fill that hunger for a cause and that hunger for meaning and purpose in a generation with something that's actually more meaningful than wokeness, and it dilutes the agenda to irrelevance. That's what I think leaders in the conservative movement need to do. I think they've mostly fallen short of it. I don't even see very many who I see as being up to the task today, but I think it's going to be what we're going to need because America had an identity crisis at the end of the 1970s, and we had Reagan to save the day. And I worry, I think Jerry Baker in the Wall Street Journal has written about this,

we might be at our version of the end of the 70s. What happens if we don't have Reagan or some sort of cultural revival? I see it a little bit in J.D. Vance. I'm seeing some pieces of that, but essentially that identity you're talking about is faith, family, patriotism. And those are the things that last, Vivek. And those are the things that people recognize. I mean, I don't think that... They make you fulfilled. They make you happy. And people are attracted to it.

I look at Chip and Joanna Gaines. What do people see there? They see a happy, beautiful couple, having kids, living on a farm, working hard, making a business, making America better. Why is that the number one show, this couple from Waco, Texas?

Because it's attractive, because it's real. Because families are attractive. Because people want families, people want love, people want marriage, and people want faith and family. And I think you're right. We need to represent this in an attractive way. People have to see it. And you're right, you can't fight fire with fire.

We have to fight it to the end. You're right. I got to roll after this too, but this is so fun. I'm having so much fun with you guys. The one thing I would just say is we all want to believe in something higher than ourselves, and that's a big part of what we've lost. But I'm also worried, as you said, Rachel, about fighting fire with fire. The problem with that is if you fight jihadism with more jihadism in return, you lose the thing you're fighting for. And that's true whether you're fighting jihadists in the Middle East or you're fighting intellectual terrorists here at home. And I'm worried there's a way this culture war could end, not with a bang, but with a whimper,

where the right gets infected by the progressive woke left without recognizing it, adopting cancel culture in return. I actually worry about it with respect to victimhood culture too. And I'm unafraid about talking about this openly. I think there is a problem of Black victimhood culture in the United States. It's something that a lot of people are afraid to say out loud. I think we need to be talking about these issues out in the open. But I also worry about the emergence now of a new white victimhood culture in response, where we enter the new victimhood Olympics about who was the bigger victim. And by the way, second generation Asian kids now being taught to not pursue math and science in the classroom and be number one in the classroom, but instead to create some sort of story of disempowerment of how they're a person of color or whatever to try to act like they're also disempowered. We have this new victimhood Olympics across our different subcultures in the United States where we're each bringing each other down rather than lifting one another up. And I think on the right and on the left, I think we need to move beyond this victimhood

culture to reviving the pursuit of excellence in this country. And I think I said this with you on air when we were chatting a little bit ago, Rachel, on TV, but when people said, we want to make America great again and rally behind that cry, I don't think they just hunger for Donald Trump or one person. They hunger for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence itself. That's going to be part of what brings us together as a country. And which is what as parents we want for our kids. We want them to pursue excellence, not victim status. And I know we're going to wrap this podcast up. You have to go. But I want to do this again with you because I've been promoting the idea that we should actually have a conservative cancel culture. But, you know, conservatives are canceled, but then conservatives go out and will go to Disney, will go to every liberal. Send our kids to fancy, woke colleges.

And so you fund the left who hates you. I always talk about if you ever see a liberal car with a coexist bumper sticker with all the different, you know, religious symbols on the back coexist, they do not want to coexist with you. They want to destroy you. Why are you funding them in their destruction of your beliefs and your ideas and your love for America? I don't want to give them my money because they use my money to attack and kill me. I think we will, our next discussion is going to have to be about a healthy debate about how we

do it. And I think I, you're right that it can infect you and can destroy the movement as well. And we can also talk about Congress and what happens in bills and money that goes to disadvantaged communities or women and how I stopped doing those bills after one year in Congress because I saw the destructive nature of it. But Vivek, listen, thank you for joining us. We love how you've taken this topic, which is so serious. And I didn't realize that you were in comedy at one point in your life. And you have such a great spirit. You're a happy warrior talking about a serious issue and how we can win back America and destroy this. It's a really important voice and very thoughtful nature in which you've attacked

it. We are grateful for it. Everyone who cares about freedom should be glad that you're part of this freedom movement because you really articulate what so many of us are thinking and help us put it into a digestible way that we can kind of process all these crazy things that are going on in culture and business and government and how it's all intersecting. So Vivek, thanks so much for joining us at the kitchen table. We look forward to having a real cup of coffee with you one of these days. Amen. I'll be there. All right.

Take care. Thank you so much, Vivek, for joining us at the kitchen table. And if we've enjoyed the conversation, if you did too, let us know. Subscribe, rate, review this podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. We hope to see you around the kitchen table next week. Streaming now on Fox Nation. You believe you were sent by God?

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