Federal, state and municipal governments relentlessly pursue workplace discrimination, but none of them address the most pervasive form of workplace discrimination in America.
Political discrimination or viewpoint discrimination is everywhere.
And yet at a time when workplaces impose unconscious bias tests to target racial prejudice and other forms of discrimination, few corporations look for viewpoint discrimination. Some even mandate it in their HR procedures which systematically discriminate against conservatives.
Meanwhile the problem appears to have worsened over the last 4 years.
A 2019 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that a third of workers believe their employer is intolerant of differing political views. A Perceptyx survey in 2020 found that nearly half of employees expressed concern that they would be mistreated if they disagreed with their manager’s politics and 53% thought it would negatively impact their careers.
Even though numbers like these point to a much higher incidence of workplace discrimination than most of the identity politics metrics that government employment protection groups focus on, viewpoint discrimination is still not being addressed either by legislators or officials even though projecting some of these numbers would indicate that it affects tens of millions of people.
The cancel culture crisis that began on college campuses has spread into the workplace.
In our recent breakdown of the crisis at universities, the David Horowitz Freedom Center cited statistics showing the degree to which college students feel intimidated into keeping quiet.
At MIT, 68% of students were afraid to disagree with a professor about a controversial topic and 40% of faculty members were keeping quiet to avoid getting into trouble. A majority of students at the University of Wisconsin have stayed quiet in class and 37%, mostly conservative, felt pressured to agree with an instructor’s position. But, as we pointed out, the nation has become one giant college campus, and workplaces have become the next front in the woke culture wars.
This survey from the Alliance Defending Freedom drills down to show how the campus iron curtain has fallen on workplaces and gets hard numbers on who is being intimidated into keeping quiet about their political views. The survey shows that conservatives are being disproportionately impacted by workplace viewpoint discrimination which also implies that leftists are responsible for much of viewpoint discrimination in the workplace.
The numbers shown in the ADF survey are significantly higher in some regards than the 2019 and 2020 surveys, implying that workplace viewpoint discrimination is worsening every year.
The ADF survey notes that, “large majorities (60% and 64%) say that respectfully expressing religious or political viewpoints would likely or somewhat likely carry negative consequences on their employment.”
What’s really disturbing is that people are not just afraid to express their views at work, which are arguably not places for political or religious debates, but on their own time as “54% say they are concerned that sharing political content on their own social media accounts could result in negative consequences in the workplace.” That’s a majority of Americans who are self-censoring their own views full time because they exist in a social media panopticon.
Is all of this hypothetical? Are people making a big deal over perceptions and empty fears?
“1 in 4 say they know someone who has experienced negative consequences for respectfully expressing their political viewpoints (27%) or religious viewpoints (25%).” 44% of the workers who were worried about it were conservative, 26% moderate and only 28% liberal.
Of those who described negative consequences for expressing political views, 44% were conservative, another 28% were moderate and only 26% were liberal. That strongly suggests that workplace discrimination over political affiliation disproportionately affects non-leftists (72%). It also follows that for workplace viewpoint discrimination is mostly practiced by leftists against non-leftists. And indeed, virtually every high-profile case of someone being fired over their politics in the last 3 years involves Americans falling afoul of leftist companies.
The survey reports that 147 workers were fired for discussing their political views. Of those, 82 were conservative, 35 were moderate and only 31 were liberal. Another 163 were demoted, 181 were excluded from professional development, 274 faced hostile treatment at work, and another 81 suffered all of the above.
Considering that this was a survey of 3,000 workers, that is a sizable number.
25% or 753 workers said that they knew someone who had “experienced negative treatment or discrimination at work for respectfully communicating a religious viewpoint?” 332 of those fellow workers were conservative, 234 were moderate, 229 were liberal. 177 workers were fired, 181 were demoted, 226 were excluded from professional development and 322 faced hostile treatment.
This is a civil rights crisis of workplace discrimination that has been ignored for too long.
Biden’s EEOC claims the right to protect men who claim to be women (despite the lack of any law allowing it to do any such thing) along with every possible identity politics, but offers no protection for workers suffering from the pervasive crisis of viewpoint discrimination.
The failure of agencies, commissions and officials to protect workers discriminated against due to their viewpoints shows how outdated forms of civil rights legislation no longer address the forms of discrimination that workers face today. Federal and state administrations and legislatures need to step up and take action to fight this most pervasive form of discrimination.
That means ensuring that workplace rules on political discourse and identification should be even-handed and not discriminatory. That means workplaces cannot permit, let alone promote, Black Lives Matter, while barring viewpoints and perspectives that differ from the racist movement. Similarly employees should be able to promote all political candidates or none.
Finally workers should not fear that their private speech outside the workplace should impact their employment. In recent years workers who were targeted by woke cancel culture were fired even when the activities that some found offensive consisted of personal opinions expressed on their own time. Most jobs do not require ‘moral clauses’ and clear cases of viewpoint discrimination like these deserve civil rights protections.
The Constitution offers protection first and foremost to political viewpoints, not identities. America was founded on defending political dissent, rather than race, sexuality or any such thing. The failure to fight viewpoint discrimination betrays the founding legacy of America.
Viewpoint discrimination is a good way of describing it. Contradict the prevailing group opinion and get ostracized. I’ve noticed that a lot and even fallen prey to it on occasion. Even (or especially) when the group viewpoint is absurd.
Another tangent is when evil persons manipulate the opinion of the group against a scapegoat. A flat earther did that to me once, with major life consequences for me.
Another instance was trying to explain Newton’s principle of inertia to a close group of supposedly well-educated associates (they mostly had master’s degrees anyway, which shows the puffed up resumes of SVB banks culprits and such showing their university degrees is meaningless, such as risk officers who studied undergrad economics and nearly brought down the world economy), none of which of my associates understood Newton’s theory, and to this day think I was a fool saying ridiculous things, and that they were right, even though they had no clue.
What was their opposition to Newton’s principle of inertia?
Sounds interesting.
They didn’t understand it. For one thing they have momentum confused with inertia. After the incident I started paying attention to the way normal people use the term inertia, and generally they misuse it.
If you have time, I think you might enjoy listening to or reading James Lindsey, whose thinking has logic and power. He is devoted to fighting wokeism.
I have puzzled over the woke phenomenon, not understanding its appeal. Yesterday, the clouds broke and the sun shone on my little noggin when I listened to one of his short podcasts. What we are enduring is a return of Lysenkoism. He explains in one of his short bullet podcasts here:
“ shows how outdated forms of civil rights legislation no longer address the forms of discrimination”
It also shows how badly written the legislation was, but it keeps the lawyers and lawmakers rich.
I worked for years as a Administrator for School Districts across the country and my conservative perspective was not welcome but I Got the Job Done every time I was involved. I didn’t fail but they did over and over with their emotions based solutions.
In my experience, they don’t mind letting conservatives do the heavy lifting but don’t want them in decision-making positions.
It is why I never take secession off the table. They need us and will collapse without us. They can be re-absorbed if and when they are ready to return to civilization and be more than parasites.
I don’t want to be a slave to them. I don’t want my children to live under their ugly boots.
I do believe that the calculated extinction of a moral, just, God-fearing society as we are witnessing and experiencing in every facet of human existence is due to a meticulously crafted plan conceived for the purpose of completing what the Holocaust did not finish. How else to explain the parallel global explosion of anti-Semitism?
Watch the movie The Boys from Brazil.
The only way I can think of de-activating these most vicious abusers of humanity is that, when you speak to someone about anything, anywhere, you look into that person’s face and imagine you are looking at a reflection of yourself.
i agree with your first paragraph.
it is my consistent impression that non-leftists, when they’re not avoiding political topics, are gentle, respectful and mostly imparting information. In that sense, non-leftists do see the humanity (as you say see their own face ) in the person they’re talking to.
I have found the opposite to be true when leftists speak.
Perhaps, this is what you meant.
Seeing the humanity is more important than arguing the woke ideology.
Woke issues are meant to create chaos, in order for anti-Semitism to take hold.
Make people so enraged, confused, frustrated and unhappy.
I see those who buy into the woke as actually being mani-
pulated by the diabolical creators of woke.
I have to say that I’m surprised that only, ““1 in 4 say they know someone who has experienced negative consequences for respectfully expressing their political viewpoints (27%) or religious viewpoints (25%).” In my experience, it is pervasive. I was known at work to be conservative (although I wasn’t outspoken about it) and was told there were subject areas I wouldn’t be allowed to work on, was denied deserved promotions and even had a Division Chief who told someone I knew (who told me) that, if he found he had a Republican working for him he would “find a way of getting rid” of such person. Oh, did I mention that this was in the federal government over a forty year period.
You know the score and are honest about it. Most people in the government sector seem to think they are hard done by and life is easy for those in private companies.
I didn’t think that. I thought most in the private sector in similar positions had it much harder. However, despite what you might see in the media, professionals in the federal government are typically paid much less than their private sector counterparts. Government workers have much better job protections but are paid less. After40 years as an attorney in the government I was being paid less than a first year associate at a large D.C. firm. I worked fewer hours, had comparable or better benefits, had much more job security to be true. But it was offset by way lower pay. In clerical and support positions government pay is better than the private sector but it isn’t a one size fits all situation.
It should be possible to address such discrimination under existing civil rights laws.
While ostensibly framed in a manner that does not discriminate on the basis of a protected class, it almost always involves disparate treatment that corresponds to protected classes. (Classic of examples of this would be whited individuals fired for allegedly using a racial slur outside work while non-white individuals do so without punishment; another common example would be a Christian being punished for praying or posting bible verses while Muslims are given a pass for similar actions. All of these could easily be framed as disparate treatment on the basis of a protected class). And even when there is no easily documented cases of disparate treatment, it is inevitable that viewpoint discrimination will have a predictable disparate impact on the basis of a protected class. A policy that allows people to be fired for pro-life activity for example is likely to impact 90%+ Catholics and evangelical Christians. Much smaller disparate impacts have been the basis of huge penalties and settlements in other settings and while everyone know that civil rights laws are not equally applied, the theories and precedents that dominate civil rights laws at the moment would certainly be sufficient to address viewpoint discrimination if rigorously applied.
Those are good arguments, but we still do need viewpoint discrimination. There are plenty of liberal Christians and Jews and white people to weaken religious discrimination arguments and racial arguments. There’s still disproportionate impact, but when a sizable percentage the group, anywhere from 30 to 40% is actively not on board, the argument becomes harder to make.
Preferences for gender, race and age are standard mandates.
Nailing down thoughts and opinions is a challenge posed by those poisoned with scruples.
Offering rewards for anonymous tips can only go so far.
It’s time to get serious and employ scopolomine and interrogation under duress. Child Protective Services and summary asset forfeiture are productive tools proven useful recently.
Nothing is “off the table” when it comes to protecting democracy.
Political discrimination happens to you only if you have even the slightest moderately conservative views. I once expressed (a few years ago) at work that I agreed with Israel’s right to exist. That’s all I said. You should have heard the flack!!! Yet, since then, employees who work for the same organization as I do have publicly said how much they hated Trump, and they almost got accolades for their courage to “speak up”.
That’s unfortunately what happens when leftists coordinate and then seize control of workplaces.
Any company or Employer who prophibits the guns and means Armed Customers should be allowed to bring Lawsuit against the place
Company rules that Ban guns should be declared Unconstitutional and defendants in a Lawsuit
Older children could bring weapons to school during my lifetime. I remember seeing them. Some kids would hunt after class.
Link did not work.
Website is “Historyopolis Project” and the article is “Back in the Day, You Could Bring Your Guns to School.”
Great old photos showing examples of this in Minneapolis. Excellent article. Minneapolis public schools had greater enrollment in 1923 than today. That was a shocker.