May
21
Welcome to the Church of Diversity
I found another section from Vivek Ramaswamy’s book, Woke, Inc., that I wanted to share. This is from Chapter 10, “Wokeness Is Like a Religion”, so it should be pretty obvious where this is going. The author discusses noted cases in the news, from James Damore to J.K. Rowling, in which individuals dared to question some aspect of woke doctrine and/or policy and were anathematized by the “Church of Diversity” for it. Those who were previously accepted as being among the woke were labeled as apostates.
Buckle up…
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“[W]okeness is the new orthodoxy, the new religion, one that disguises itself in secular clothing. Because its disciples worship the secular force of identity rather than any supernatural one, it’s much easier for the Church of Diversity to infiltrate the workplace. For years many universities have been in the process of lurching quite dramatically from the deliberative model to the orthodox one, and now corporations are trending in that direction as well. And they’re firing anyone who doesn’t toe the new party line.
Let’s start with Google’s firing of software engineer James Damore in August 2017, a paradigmatic case of political discrimination. After he attended an internal meeting on Google’s policies on diversity and inclusion, the organizers asked for feedback. He wrote a long memo titled ‘Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber’ and sent it to organizers. Writing that memo and sending it out into the echo chamber would end up being a career-ending mistake.
The memo is relatively innocuous. It acknowledged the discrimination women face in the tech sector, but argued that Google’s employment policies gave too much weight to discrimination when explaining gender disparities in recruitment and promotion. Damore cited a variety of articles and peer-reviewed psychological papers to argue that Google’s preferred explanation didn’t account for innate biological differences between men and women. He recognized that the research he cited only discussed averages, adding ‘So you can’t say anything about an individual… I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology.’
Google’s response ended up proving his point. After hearing nothing back from the diversity seminar’s organizers, Damore shared his memo on Google’s employee message boards. His memo created a firestorm. First it sparked an outcry among many of his fellow employees. Plenty of Damore’s fellow Googlers defended his position, or at least his right to voice it, but once one of his detractors leaked the memo to the media, his time as an engineer was at an end. The firestorm became a public conflagration, and to cover itself, Google torched his career. A nerdy 28-year-old centrist who’d been diagnosed with autism stumbled into the culture wars, expressed a vaguely conservative view, and became Silicon Valley’s favorite pariah, its whipping boy for the evils of the world.
Google had to sacrifice Damore to prove its purity. It had to excommunicate him to avoid being excommunicated itself. This punishment made perfect sense under the tribal logic of woke capitalism, but it didn’t make much sense in light of Google’s explicit commitments to free and open dialogue. Perhaps in recognition of this tension, Google attempted to square the circle with a mealymouthed statement from its CEO Sundar Pichai, who led by asserting, ‘To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not OK,’ but added, ‘At the same time, there are co-workers who are questioning whether they can safely express their views in the workplace (especially those with a minority viewpoint). They too feel under threat, and that is also not OK.’
But this childlike list of what was OK and not OK did nothing to address the underlying contradiction in Google’s commitments — Damore was fired for arguing for a minority view that Google’s own views defined as inherently unacceptable, no matter how well supported his argument was. No one said Google needed to have an internal message board for dialogue on important ideas. But it was trying to get the credit for fostering dialogue through its public verbiage while doing precisely the opposite in practice. To top it off, Damore didn’t even say what was alleged — Pichai’s characterization was inaccurate. It wasn’t enough to fire Damore for his views, Google also slandered him on the way out.
Google recently got back into the game of firing its political enemies and laid off software engineer Kevin Cernekee, allegedly for his political perspectives. But Google’s far from alone. David Shor, a left-leaning data analyst who didn’t lean left enough, was fired by Civis Analytics, a consulting firm, for tweeting in support of a study suggesting that violent protests are counterproductive.
Shor’s case exemplifies yet another category of political firings: the tweets that aren’t woke enough. This new species of political discrimination is especially pernicious. Sadly, there’s a thing called ‘woke Twitter’ now, and it’s just begun stretching its muscles to find out how much power it really has. [Ed. note: This book was written before Elon Musk bought Twitter.]
This progressive Twitter mob tried for months to get actress Gina Carano fired from the show The Mandalorian over her refusal to list her pronouns and her jokes about mask-wearing, and it discovered that persistence pays off. Disney finally fired Carano after she compared Nazi persecution of Jews to the persecution of conservatives in America today. The company called her tweet ‘abhorrent and unacceptable,’ declining to explain why co-star Pedro Pascal remained employed despite his own tweets comparing President Trump’s supporters to Nazis. According to corporate America, it’s anti-semitic to compare liberals to Nazis but praiseworthy to compare conservatives to them. [FYI, I blogged about it here.]
Conservatives aren’t woke Twitter’s only victims or even its favorites. Frequently, as with Shor’s firing, the ultra-vocal, ultra-liberal inhabitants of woke Twitter take it upon themselves to police their own tribe, zealously snuffing out dissent to make sure the faithful adhere to identity-politics orthodoxy. In one recent example, the Tobias Literary Agency fired Sasha White for tweets on her personal Twitter account that expressed solidarity with novelist J.K. Rowling for her views on biological sex.
Rowling had crossed woke Twitter when she tweeted in support of Maya Forstater, whose contract with a think tank wasn’t renewed after she herself tweeted things that offended woke Twitter. She defended the view that a person’s sex is a biological fact that can’t be changed. Rowling supported her. This betrayal stung practitioners of identity politics because the Harry Potter author had become a woke icon after she curried favor with the left by revealing that Dumbledore had been gay all along. Rowling can’t be fired, but she’s now a pariah. ‘I heart JK Rowling’ happens to be one of the hateful tweets that got Sasha White fired, along with horrific word violence, such as calling Rowling’s defense of herself ‘powerfully nuanced and insightful.’
So, to recap, Maya Forstater lost her job because she tweeted that transgender women aren’t really women, J.K. Rowling lost her fans for tweeting in support of Forstater, and then Sasha White lost her job for tweeting in support of Rowling. It was tweet-firing inception, a termination within a termination, like Russian matryoshka dolls. It can be hard to keep track of until you realize that the woke mob is just behaving the way any mob does. First it tars and feathers the enemy; then when the enemy’s supporters reveal themselves, it tars and feathers them too. Then it just repeats the process until all its enemies have been silenced.
The left and the right each discriminates in its own ways, but one thing that distinguishes the left is that it loves to eat its own. People like Rowling and White consider themselves feminists, and their insistence that transgender women should be considered separate from biological women is motivated by their feminism — they think that transgender women and biological women have meaningfully different experiences that are obscured when their identities are treated the same. The woke left calls these heretics trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists, or TERFs. It’s an ironic label because this chain of firings looks much like an actual turf war.
This internecine squabbling for ideological control makes perfect sense under the view that wokeness is a religion. Many religions have one kind of contempt for nonbelievers and a special kind of hatred for heretics, who must be punished even more violently because they threaten to lead the faithful astray. In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormonism), for instance, the only people who actually go to Hell are those who knew the truth but turned their backs on it: the worst sin of all is not nonbelief but apostasy. The Church of Diversity works the same way.
And so Forstater, Rowling, and White were shamed not for being wrong but for being traitors, for violating the tenets of a belief system that they’d been understood to have implicitly agreed to. They were treated with special contempt because their tribe thought they should’ve known better. When they signed on for feminism, they were supposed to have understood that it came with support for transgender women attached. When Rowling said Dumbledore was gay, she became an LGBTQ ally and was baptized to great celebration. But when she said transgender women weren’t women, she became an LGBTQ enemy and was ritualistically excommunicated. If you’re not on board for the whole acronym, you’re against all of it.
That’s just how religious belief systems work — you don’t get to pick your five favorite commandments and follow those. Since it’s a modern religion, the Church of Diversity just transcribes its commandments onto acronyms instead of stone tablets. It ties its dogmatic beliefs together by invoking words like ‘intersectionality’ instead of ‘faith.’
And now corporations are firing people for violating the woke articles of faith, which they are understood to have implicitly agreed to by applying for a job at a woke company. Chances are, by the time you read this, there’ll be a new political firing of the day, probably even in the same chain. Someone will have tweeted in support of Sasha White and been fired for it by now, I expect. Then someone else will tweet about it and be fired for supporting them. This is just the way things are now in the new world of woke capitalism, where for-profit entities are expected to be the judges of good and evil. But it’s not the way they have to be.”
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So, what have we learned here?
Among other things, the Church of Diversity produces logic-challenged, science-denying, dissent-phobic hypocrites. But, we already knew that.
P.S. I may or may not have one more excerpt to present from this book in the weeks ahead. We shall see…
