I’ve repeatedly pointed out the unforgivable leadership failures and lack of ethics demonstrated by the many top-level corporate executives who misuse their companies as platforms to push their personal politics.
What do you get when this is allowed to happen again and again? You get employees at all levels of the company with the “correct” politics who become political bullies, expecting (correctly, as it turns out) that they can with impunity mistreat their colleagues who don’t share those politics.
This latest battleground can be seen in this article. An executive at Facebook, Joel Kaplan, has been forced to grovel because he appeared last week in his personal capacity in Washington, DC, to support Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a close personal friend of his.
Left-wing employees have now been supported by other executives in their bullying of Kaplan. Sheryl Sandberg, who routinely pushes her left-wing views from her official corporate perch, publicly dressed Kaplan down for what he did in his private time. Other executives who supported him at first were similarly browbeaten and forced to capitulate to the angry Facebook employee mob. At last telling there was yet another ridiculous company meeting scheduled where, no doubt, the company would plead fealty to the “progressive” cause.
This is where we’re headed when irresponsible, unethical, and bitterly partisan top executives are given free rein to misallocate their corporate resources for their own personal politics. Not only are there now different rules for the corporate elites and lower-level employees, but now there are also different rules for liberal and conservative employees at all levels.
Over at Google, you may have heard, the top executives misused company time and the salaries of a huge number of employees to wail and gnash their teeth about their anger at the results of the 2016 presidential election. A year later, they fired engineer James Damore for daring to express opinions that challenged their lockstep left-wing political orthodoxy, with their VP of “Inclusion” and their CEO brazenly lying about what he wrote at the time to publicly shame him (which should make everyone wonder just where in the hell HR was in all that).
We live in very troubling times. It’s high time more of us started pushing back, and pushing back hard, against this ideological weaponization of public companies.