WOKE, INC. -- Drawing Back the Curtain on Corporate America’s Social
Justice Scam
The Harvard educated
founder and CEO of a successful Pharma start-up, Roivant, found himself on the
wrong side of a Woke uprising in his own company and decided that resignation,
reflection, and a careful, multi-pronged literary response was the better part
of valor. Vivek Ramaswamy’s book, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s
Social Justice Scam, is evidence that he made the right decision.
Seldom does a book
provide as many insights as Woke, Inc.,
starting with the threat to democracy posed by stakeholder capitalism, a
seemingly altruistic corporate posture that expands business goals to include external
priorities like “equity” and the environment.
In reality this expanded list destroys the beneficent limits set by
stockholder capitalism, which bind these institutions to strictly financial objectives.
The gigantic financial power and
technical reach attained by corporate behemoths like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter,
and Google now bestow up these businesses an enormous ability to shape America’s
political and moral decisions -- powers that
were never part of the liability concession given to corporate stockholders. This monumental anti-democratic clout was clearly
demonstrated during the 2020 Presidential election when the aforementioned tech
giants conspired to deny voters crucial information about Hunter and Joe Biden
by silencing a blockbuster New York Post
story. Ramaswamy argues that limiting a
corporation’s purpose to its original financial purpose would help transfer
democratic power back to individual voters and away from a handful of multi-billionaires
whose egos reach beyond unimaginable wealth to near absolute social power.
Another segment of
Ramaswamy’s analysis exposes the shell game played by Woke corporations whose
BLM and other Woke declamations deflect attention from their own morally
vacuous pursuit of profits. Nike, for
example, embraced Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protest against a supposedly racist
nation while aggressively marketing expensive sneakers manufactured by children
in Southeast Asian sweatshops to young black Americans. Meanwhile various corporations funded BLM’s
racist portrait of America while kowtowing to a Chinese dictator who commits
unspeakable atrocities against the nation’s Uighur population. This Woke grandstanding not only diverts
attention from a Faustian access-to-Chinese-markets bargain, it also provides
China’s Communist leaders a race card to play against the United States, thus suggesting
a false moral equivalence between the two nations. Even worse, as the author demonstrates, these
corporations (e.g. Disney and the NBA) allow the Chinese to tailor to their
totalitarian taste corporate messages that are sent worldwide -- no defense of
Hong Kong democracy, no reference to an independent Tibet or Taiwan, and no Tech
stamp of approval on the lab origin of the Wuhan Virus.
A third major focus
of Woke, Inc. is the assertion that
“Wokism” (based on actual Supreme Court opinions) has the same status as a
religion. The significance of this
assertion, if actually put into practice, is that a secular corporation could
not legally fire an employee for opposing dogmatic Woke beliefs (e.g.
trans-women are the same as biological women) any more than a business manager
with traditional religious beliefs can now fire an employee of an essentially
secular corporation for not adhering to his own particular spiritual
tenets. This novel idea is argued with
the kind of attention to detail one would expect of a diligent attorney -- or of
an author who actually possesses a legal degree from Yale.
Some of the other
topics covered in Ramaswamy’s analysis of corporate culture include the
author’s take on Congress’s 230 liability exemptions given to tech companies. These organizations, acting with a special
government privilege not given to publishers, should thus be held to the same
First Amendment standards that apply to the federal government. A jaw-dropping factoid related amid the
author’s analysis of outsized corporate censorship power was the convenient
coincidence of extended COVID lockdowns and a trillion dollars in extra market
capitalization that big-tech companies enjoyed as a consequence. Ramaswamy also stresses the destructiveness
of valuing group identity over individual uniqueness -- of judging diversity
based solely on race and sex categories rather than on diversity of thought and
experience. Another theme emphasized throughout
the book is the common practice of doing, or pretending to do, charitable works
in order to bolster a resume or burnish a corporation’s image. The author relates a personal Goldman-Sachs “tree
planting” excursion to Harlem that ended with these words and no trees planted,
“Let’s take some pictures and get out of here!”
Ramaswamy’s concluding
universal public service proposal for bringing Americans together (a program
aimed at summertime teens) seemed surprisingly naïve given the author’s perceptive
analysis of corporate, personal, and governmental duplicity. A couple of ill-considered jabs at Mike
Lindell and at President Trump’s presumed failure to adequately address the COVID pandemic were brief enough to put aside for
the wealth of corporate, legal, social, and even psychological insights
provided by WOKE Inc.
