Although Mr. Ramaswamy and his devoted followers like to rail against “the elite,” I must give at least some credit to his Harvard College and Yale Law School degrees for producing such a wonderfully written manuscript. It is a captivating and fantastical story worthy of J.K. Rowling. This highly readable 300+ page-turner is full of imagination. In fact, it’s mostly imagination because there is virtually no empirical data to support his argument. Rather, he makes a selective use of a small number of examples, with big tech companies (e.g., Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) being a prime target of his wrath, and then expansively makes sweeping generalizations that take your breath away! Teaser alert: While climate change gets very little attention, double Ivy Mr. Ramaswamy is particularly exorcised about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) when it comes to gender and race.

But what is his argument? It is nicely summarized in the Introduction, “The Woke-Industrial Complex,” where he concisely explains how Wokeness works: “pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” Mr. Ramaswamy darkly warns that there is a conspiracy of business and government maliciously working together to take advantage of the better selves of consumers like you and me. Big asset managers like BlackRock (the author is particularly exorcised by this firm and its Chairman and CEO Larry Fink) and State Street are also complicit in this, perhaps abetting or perhaps forcing Wokeness onto the corporate community. (This part wasn’t clear to me.) It is a conspiracy theory worthy of the master of conspiracy theories, Mr. Alex Jones. In Mr. Ramaswamy’s telling, it gets worse. Wokeness is actually a threat to religious faiths of all kinds. To understand this, must reading is Chapter 10, “Wokeness Is Like a Religion” and Chapter 11, “Actually, Wokeness is Literally a Religion.”

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