Daniel Greenfield October 27, 2021
Workplace
chat software like Slack is probably the single most effective tool for
making companies go woke. Organizing workers was a difficult challenge
in companies that did not have unions. But while companies closely
monitored union organizing, they actively encouraged the use of
workplace chat software that made it all too easy for leftists to
network, identify opponents, get them fired, and use those incidents to
radicalize the company.
The second most effective tool is the identity politics affinity group.
Affinity
groups or ERGs have become a popular tool by HR departments to organize
internal woke caucuses. Corporate affinity groups are a counterpart of
campus student groups and were promoted as a way to enable the same kind
of experience in the workplace. Identity politics student groups,
usually dominated by students and faculty from identity politics studies
departments, were the biggest players in campus radicalization and
protests. Affinity groups replicated black, Latino, and gay student
groups in corporations with executives as their faculty sponsors. The
executives were often picked based on their own student activist
backgrounds.
During the campus wars, some conservatives had
dismissed the student protests as an unreal university bubble. “Just
wait until they get into the real world and have to find jobs,” they
said.
But campus radicalism had always been meant as a training
ground for institutional radicalization. The student activists were
being taught how to take over government agencies, companies, and any
organization they become part of using internal networking and political
pressure. The students didn’t change to accommodate the workplace,
instead workplaces changed to accommodate them, making the activist
culture a part of corporate culture.
The same system that had
ousted conservative faculty, intimidated conservative speakers, and
transformed courses had been copied and pasted into the corporate
workplace. On college campuses, students were the customers, but
workplace affinity group members were employees. Except that
corporations began treating the affinity groups as stakeholders who
became more important than the actual customers. Affinity groups applied
internal pressure that ousted conservative employees and dropped
conservative customers and businesses.
Much as student groups had
advocated defunding investments in oil companies or Israel on college
campuses, affinity groups pressured banks to drop firearms manufacturers
and Republicans. Companies that refused faced internal revolts, staged
resignations, and pressure on key investors and shareholders that would
claim the jobs of CEOs and principled leaders.
The conquest of
corporations was swift and effective because it utilized existing
leftist revolutionary organizational principles that exploited new
technologies while their victims, often liberal and conservative, failed
to understand that the discontent, the demands, and the new entities
and language invading the workplace were not some odd millennial trend,
but part of a plan. Even now the backlash against wokeness has hardly
come to terms with the infrastructure behind it, touching mainly on the
stories of individuals who were purged for political offenses.
What the testimony of the victims neglects is an understanding of the machinery of the purges.
The
affinity groups were not truly new, but their spread and pervasiveness
has been breathtaking. Black, Latino, gay, and other identity politics
affinity groups not only exist in most corporations but,
as revealed in the Freedom Center’s recent booklet,
Disloyal, in the military. They’ve become ubiquitous in the non-profit sector and across all levels of the government.
Officially,
racial and sexual affinity groups are meant to make minorities more
comfortable in the workplace, provide mentoring, and the favorable
treatment that enables “diversity”. In practice affinity groups are
widely used to advocate for political issues in the same way as minority
leaders. Essentially, affinity groups embedded a Sharpton in every
company and institution.
Affinity groups claim that they are
structurally disadvantaged and that certain corporate moves make them
feel “unsafe” or “threatened”. A key affinity group tactic is pressuring
executives to state that the company suffers from “systemic racism” and
that minorities are at risk. This is the familiar campus safe space
ethos transplanted to some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies.
Once
the affinity groups have established the need for corporate safe
spaces, they begin pressuring companies to impose political tests on all
employees and fire those who disagree. Affinity groups begin by
establishing their oppressed credentials before pivoting to become the
oppressors. Once executives begin surrendering to them, they’ve
established that the company is a dangerous environment for an identity
politics group and the leadership “needs to do better.”
While
affinity groups typically tend to claim that they represent black,
female, or gay employees, they’re just another embedded leftist front
group which silences or suppresses those employees who are there for
mentorship or work instead of politics. Where unions at least had
democratic vestiges, affinity groups have little to none. Like the
NAACP, the HRC, or any number of advocacy groups that claim to represent
the voices of a group, which has no way of ratifying or removing their
representation, affinity groups claim to represent a people as a
political group.
And since affinity groups typically have the
support of HR and executives, few employees are willing to dissent or
speak out against them. Fortune 500 companies now routinely pressure
their employees to join affinity groups, including pushing white
employees into “white allies” groups for maximum political
indoctrination in the workplace. This setup, not at all coincidentally,
resembles the old “soviets” which the Bolsheviks began to use as their
political power base.
Modern wokes are using the same basic
methodology as 19th century revolutionaries but with the added benefit
of the internet and smart devices to provide them with far superior
coordination. The underlying objective though remains the familiar
process of horizontal consolidation of power within an organization, a
group of organizations, and then an entire industry, and vertical
consolidation across different organizations and industries.
Horizontal
consolidation is how leftists took over specific university
departments, entire fields of study, academic organizations, and then
entire universities, and much of academia. The same process was also
used to consolidate the field of education, and is being replicated
everywhere from Big Tech to medicine. And, as discussed in
Disloyal: the United States military.
Vertical
consolidation might use the media, medical experts, and government
officials to advance a particular program, or academia, Wall Street, and
the clergy for another.
The basis for the mass censorship of
conservatives was coordinated between the Justice Department, the media,
and Big Tech. Such improbable alliances only seem unlikely until you
understand that vertical consolidation transforms culturally
incompatible organizations and industries into the components of a
single machine whose true mission is that of the Left.
Leftists
create cells within each organization. The members of those cells see
themselves as members of the “resistance”, the term they embraced during
the Trump administration, “working within the system” to achieve a
total takeover of society. The old dream, the one advanced by Communist
organizations, got a shot in the arm from the new possibilities for
organizing and coordinating operatives. Before the internet,
communications were a problem requiring in-person meetings, magazines
and newsletters, but the rise of the internet, and then social media,
and finally workplace chat enabled this brave new world and its social
credit system.
The affinity groups merge traditional identity
politics organizing with corporate workplaces. The Left has abandoned
its old working class politics to focus on the upper middle class and it
has accompanied its new base through student identity politics to their
workplaces. The stereotypes of dysfunctional millennials unable to cope
with adulthood led corporations to create frictionless workplaces that
made the transition from college to corporate life as smooth as
possible.
It’s also no coincidence that Big Tech, the arena where
the top talent was guided into corporate campuses meant to replicate
their old college campuses, is also the epicenter of safe spaces,
radical politics, and affinity groups. The college dropouts who built
Silicon Valley aimed to extend the college experience to the workplace
with a casual atmosphere, free food, and all-night working hours. It’s
no wonder Big Tech became the first corporate casualty of the Left.
But not the last. Corporate America, eager to jump on a new trend, is succumbing to the virus.
Conservatives
were behind the curve on campus organizing. They’ve made up a great
deal of ground on college campuses even as the generation that was
organized is taking over the corporate workplace. And conservatives are
once again behind on organizing the opposition.
Making matters
more difficult is the insistence that identity politics affinity groups
are apolitical, that their messages, whether Black Lives Matter or Trans
Inclusion, are “above politics”, and that implementing these groups is
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion which many organizations, from
Kellogg’s cereal to the United States Space Force, have defined as
central to their mission.
And so it will take a good deal more to crack workplace organizing than calls for equal time.
Workplace
civil rights is about more than the right of employees to be free of
political tests and indoctrination, it’s about more than denying the
Left a space to organize and recruit. These initial considerations have
to give way to the realization that an organization hijacked by the Left
will horizontally and vertically consolidate to conquer organizations,
industries, and the country.
A company will funnel money to
leftist causes and deny services to conservatives. It will coordinate
with other companies and create industry-wide standards that act as
cartels. That means firearms manufacturers and gun stores will be denied
loans and payment options, conservative candidates will be prevented
from being heard on social media and accepting donations. Vocal
conservatives won’t be able to buy or sell, have a bank account or a
credit card, not to mention a job, or access any services that are
mediated by major corporations.
The variety of companies that
appear to be making independent decisions to deplatform, fire, and break
ties with conservatives are actually acting as one nationwide woke
cartel.
That’s not an alarmist prediction, but a growing everyday reality.
Corporations
have adopted critical race theory, anti-racism, equity, and inclusion
which, despite its name, insists that it is not enough to include if you
do not also exclude. Exclusion, from the marketplace of ideas, from
public and private spaces, from employment and finally life, has been
equated to safety for the “oppressed” who cannot be safe without the
power to oppress.
That is how the social credit system comes to America.
It
took conservatives a while to embrace student free speech rights. The
shift came with the delayed realization that campuses were no longer in a
struggle between moderate administrations and student radicals, but
radical administrations and student conservatives. Making that same
shift with woke corporations purging conservative employees and
customers may be a more painful process. And yet it is an absolutely
necessary existential matter.
Conservatives could survive woke academia, but not a woke economy.
Tags:
Corporate America,
Racism,
recent
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
