Woke, Inc. Quotes

“when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Diversity” has become a term of art, a symbol, one so powerful that the symbol is now more important than the thing it was supposed to represent. Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Goldman Sachs preaching about diversity so it can be at the front of the line for the next government bailout. It’s AstraZeneca waxing eloquent about climate change so it can secure multibillion-dollar government contracts for vaccine production. It’s State Street building feminist statues to detract attention from wage discrimination lawsuits from female employees, all the while marketing its exchange-traded fund with the ticker “SHE.” It’s Chamath Palihapitiya founding a social impact investment fund and criticizing Silicon Valley, even though he and his wealth are products of Silicon Valley, all to cover up for his prior tenure as an executive at Facebook who dreamed out loud about a private corporate military. Those companies and people use their market power to prop up woke causes as a way to accumulate greater political capital—only to later come back and cash in that political capital for more dollars.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“On the back of the government scratching Wall Street’s back with its corrupt bailout, it was corporate America’s turn to return the favor. They did it by directly assuming the responsibilities of democratic government—especially the agendas of liberal politicians who might otherwise have harmfully regulated or penalized big business. Messy debates about racial inequality? Don’t worry: we’ve got it covered. New policies to fight climate change? We’ll take care of that too. Big business volunteered to take on the role of liberal government itself—crucially, on terms that were favorable to its own interests. That’s what woke capitalism is all about. It’s the hip new avatar of old-school crony capitalism.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“When companies make political proclamations, employees who personally disagree with the company’s position face a stark choice: speak up freely and risk your career, or keep your job while keeping your head down. That isn’t how America is supposed to work, yet that is a reality for many Americans today.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“There’s even a new Chinese word for wokeness—baizuo—referring specifically to woke white people. They use it to laugh at America.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“America is becoming less and less like itself and more like a bastardized version of the European model of social progress, where elite executives work hand in hand with the government to do what they think is best for society.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Wokenomics is a powerful weapon for CEOs, which they can readily deploy as a smoke screen to distract from greed, fraud, and malfeasance. It”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“The fundamental problem with wokeness isn’t just that it offers the wrong answer to the question of who we are. The deeper problem is that it forecloses the possibility of shared solidarity as Americans. If we see each other as nothing more than the color of our skin, our gender, our sexual orientation, or the number of digits in our bank accounts, then it becomes impossibly difficult to find commonality with those who don’t share those characteristics. Yet if we define ourselves on a plurality of attributes, then we find our path to true solidarity as a people.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Nike acted in synchrony, pledging “a $40 million commitment over the next four years to support the Black community in the U.S.”27 This followed Nike’s widely aired commercial featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who kneeled during the national anthem in protest of social injustice. The trick? Distracting you from Nike’s practice of employing child labor in sweatshops across southeast Asia or marketing $200 sneakers to inner-city black kids who can’t afford to buy books for school.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“If speech is abhorrent, a democracy like ours is supposed to answer it with more speech, not censorship. That’s one of the things that separates us from the Chinese Communist Party.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“The whole affair exposed a darkly hilarious truth: the NBA and its stars felt duty-bound to criticize America’s president and judicial system but considered it beyond the pale to criticize China’s.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“As imperfect as these solutions may be, one thing is clear to me: mixing ancillary social causes with the pursuit of profit is a bad investment in every sense.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Here’s the issue: woke capitalists often win in the end because they use their do-good smoke screen to capture the government itself. Unfortunately, that often proves to be the most profitable strategy of all: it’s modern crony capitalism, and it “works.” The winning trade may not be to short ESG stocks but to short American democracy.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“SO WHAT GIVES? One very real possibility is that we are in an ESG asset bubble that is ripe to crash—just like the housing bubble in 2008.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“So I’m just proposing that we level the playing field and make those woke shareholders, like BlackRock or Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bear the same liability as any ordinary social activist when they engage in ordinary social activism through the companies that they invest in. Limited shareholder liability was never meant to protect well-heeled woke investors from the consequences of their actions during PR stunts at woke parades.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“You might wonder how this hurts taxpayers, especially if you’re a liberal and you think these nonprofits fight for worthy causes. So here’s the kicker: that $11 billion meant for consumer relief? Not only did a lot of it go to Democratic-favored nonprofits instead, but it ended up being much less than $11 billion. That’s because the DOJ offered banks a huge discount whenever they “donated” that money to those nonprofits. Most of the settlements gave banks double or triple credit toward their fine for every dollar they donated to these nonprofits—for instance, a Bank of America $1.15 million “donation” to the National Urban League counted as $2.6 million toward meeting its settlement obligation, and every $1.5 million to La Raza counted as $3.5 million of consumer relief. This is so mind-boggling that it’s worth summing up: after the financial crisis, the Obama DOJ slammed big banks with massive fines so it could trumpet that it was sending tons of relief to consumers. Then it told banks they could pay less than half that much if they donated the money to Obama’s favorite nonprofits instead. And being fond of money, the banks took the DOJ up on the offer. Now that’s a great quid pro quo—the DOJ gets to look good, the banks get to keep most of their money, and the liberal nonprofits get lots of funding.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“This approach is flawed on multiple levels. First, when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself. Second, this approach empowers entrenched managers to create the visible appearance of diversity in their organizations while avoiding the need to engage with true diversity of thought, including challenges to their incumbency. Third, when a narrow conception of diversity is implemented through affirmative action or other quota-based systems, that fuels racism and sexism by fostering tokenism in the workplace and animus among communities that fail to benefit from these programs.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Service is too often bundled with an ulterior motive in America. Only the best of us pursue it for its own sake. For the rest, including my younger self, it’s frequently packaged with something self-serving to make it more appetizing.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“it is unbecoming for one citizen to use the threat of starvation and homelessness to silence a fellow citizen. It lacks common decency.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“The ugliness of woke consumerism is the way it replaces that invitation with a call to using brute force as punishment instead. It’s a game in which all the players lose.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Social media companies promised to bring people together, but instead they provide echo chambers where like-minded people reinforce each other’s biases.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay, successfully published several purposefully farcical academic papers in peer-reviewed journals in fields like cultural studies, queer studies, fat studies, race and gender studies, and so on.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals. The scapegoat in the case of identity politics is the white heterosexual male who, if purged, supposedly will restore and confirm the cleanliness of all other groups of communities.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Identity politics is a political version of this cleansing for groups rather than for individuals.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“the woke mob is just behaving the way any mob does. First it tars and feathers the enemy; then when the enemy’s supporters reveal themselves, it tars and feathers them too.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“According to corporate America, it’s anti-semitic to compare liberals to Nazis but praiseworthy to compare conservatives to them.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“In practice, universities quickly learned that they could get away with whatever they wanted as long as they chanted “we practice holistic review” at judges whenever they got sued over their affirmative action policies.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

“Imposing an ideological racial purity test on Black men and women is dangerous. It is divide and conquer. It is colonial. But news media companies who purport to be anti-racist are often blind to this reality.”
― Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam