‘Woke, Inc.’ Author: New ‘Leviathan’ Uses ‘Cronyism 2.0’ to Backdoor Woke Agenda

Vivek Ramaswamy, author of Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, explained how the “woke industrial complex” allows government to circumvent constitutional restraints on its power via co-option of corporations in an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow.

Contemporary “cronyism,” Ramaswamy held, allows the government to evade First Amendment restrictions against direct state-driven censorship of free speech and expression through Big Tech.

He said, “What you see today is not just private companies using government to do what private companies couldn’t do on their own. It is government using private companies to do through the back door what government cannot do directly through the front door under the Constitution. That is the defining feature of today’s crony capitalism.”

The “currency” of purchasing favors from government has changed relative to previous corrupt procurement of state influence, Ramaswamy assessed. He noted that “woke corporations” can court leftist politicians through superficial overtures to “diversity” by implementing hiring quotas based on race, sex, and sexual orientation.

He remarked, “Crony capitalism 2.0 today [is] really different than crony capitalism 1.0. The directionality is bidirectional today and the currency is a little different, too. Crony capitalism 1.0 is really simple. You have executives at Goldman Sachs write nice fat checks, give it to a PAC, give it directly to a campaign, hire some lobbyists, get your alumni placed in the administration — pretty simple system, get political favors in return — everyone gets how that works.”

He continued, “Crony capitalism, 2.0 is different in two respects. One is when the ascendant party in power may not actually accept those political favors through the front door. Say when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were frontrunners of the Democratic primary. Goldman Sachs realizes that it needs to use a new currency.  Elizabeth Warren said she’s not going to take money from them. She said she’s not going appoint any Wall Street alumni into her administration.”

Implementing race-, sex-, and sexual-orientation-based hiring quotas amounts to a new form of political bribery with left-wing politicians, Ramaswamy explained.

Goldman Sachs used “a new trick” to court Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during the 2016 presidential race, Ramaswamy stated. The company made a “declaration from the mountaintops of Davos that Goldman Sachs will not take a company public in the United States if its board is insufficiently diverse.”

He said, “This was just tithing in a new currency, because Elizabeth Warren is obsessed with identity politics. … It is tithing in this new currency where if you can’t use money, you bow to this new temple of identity politics at the altar.”

Ramaswamy determined that “an arranged marriage” between “woke millennials” and “corporate Wall Street” yielded “the illegitimate birth of of this Woke Industrial Complex.”

The “woke industrial complex,” he concluded, “is a force that is far more powerful than either big government or big business, because it’s a hybrid of the two that can do together what neither one of them can do on its own.”