Nation of Victims Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence

What's it, Vivek Ramaswamy, who was also there, who's running for president based on his book. Anti-woke platform.

I wrote a book a couple years ago called Nation of Victims.

I come from the vantage point of having authored actually a letter to Disney's board of directors and to Bob Chappick earlier this year, questioning certain of their business decisions from a shareholder perspective.

I've written about this extensively in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

I wrote a book about it a little over a year ago. I did not expect to have to write a sequel. SBF actually provides the telltale story of a sequel.

But this pattern repeats itself where the problem with virtue signaling is that at some point signaling your virtue becomes more important than the act of actually being virtuous.

It's something to be alarmed about. It's not just hypocritical. Exactly. It is how the game works. You pretend like you care about something other than profit and power precisely to gain more profit and power.

Victimhood has become America's new national identity.

It is the reason why most immigrants come to this country. It is the reason why my parents came to this country. But the path from one to the other is a complicated one and it runs through some uncomfortable places.

The path from victimhood to excellence runs through forgiveness.

When somebody gets a competitive advantage from seeing themselves or describing themselves and holding themselves out as a victim through an affirmative action program to get into college, whatever the case may be, everyone loses out.

The path from victimhood to excellence runs through forgiveness.

Vivek has another book coming out. It's called Nation of Victims. It comes out later this year. You can preorder it right now. And you should the subtitle is identity politics, the death of merit, and the path back to excellence.

In 2022, he co-founded Strive Asset Management with Anson Frericks, which focuses on an alternative to the now-pushed ESG investment framework. That same year Ramaswamy published "Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence"

I had traveled the country, I had been to most states in this union as a consequence of my business activities across the books I had written.

In 2022, he co-founded Strive Asset Management with Anson Frericks, which focuses on an alternative to the now-pushed ESG investment framework. That same year Ramaswamy published "Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence." and has since been deemed one of the "Intellectual Godfathers of the anti-woke movement."

He wrote another book about nation of victims, kind of outlining his philosophy.

I believe I would be best making my contributions if I weren't the U.S. president through the private sector, where I've been doing it already, both through my books as well as through the businesses that I've built and can continue to build.

My first book is about a lot of this, my second book is about a lot of this Woking nation of victims, here's what's wrong with that vision of identity grounded on your genetic attributes.

and this September just came out the sequel to Woke Inc. which is Nation of Victims.

You quote my predecessor Charlie Sykes quite a bit at length because he wrote a book in 1993 called "Nation of Victims."

His book nation of victims explains a lot of this really, really fabulously.

That's the one that we're talking about now.

And so the second book is really about the underlying flyer, the fire, the conflagration on which corporations threw that fuel.

And that's the heart of this whole new book you know, that's why I wrote the book is someone who needed to expose this in some ways as a first generation American looking at this not as somebody who inherited America but whose parents came to this country voluntarily with their two feet to be part of that national identity.

And so I think that, you know, it's not a sort of a cheesy humans respond to incentives kind of argument all the way down, but it's really a part of the story that makes it less surprising than you'd otherwise think.