Corporate post-America: where free speech goes to die

David French at NRO has a piece today that deals with the situation I treat in the post below (Google's firing of the author of the memo on men-women differences) as one of two examples of the ominous direction of corporate cultures in post-America.

The other is how an airline reacted to America's premier loudmouth pervert getting a case of the vapors over something that wasn't even her business:

Early last Thursday morning, [Lena Dunham] tweeted at American Airlines that she’d heard two of its employees engaged in “transphobic” talk. Specifically, she said she heard two flight attendants talk about how they thought transgenderism was “gross,” and they’d “never accept a trans kid.” She did not see them harassing anyone. She was simply eavesdropping on a conversation.

How did American Airlines respond? By launching an investigation into the offending employees (they couldn’t substantiate Dunham’s claims). Is that now the standard? Will American Airlines investigate employees without any allegation that they’ve actually mistreated a single customer merely on the grounds that their employees’ private conversation offended a leftist?

Later in his piece, French draws a broader conclusion:

The primary victims of this new culture of groupthink are social conservatives and other dissenters from identity politics. In field after field and company after company, conservatives understand that the price of their employment is silence. Double standards abound, and companies intentionally try to keep work environments “safe” from disagreement. Radical sexual and racial politics are given free rein. Disagree — and lose your job.

It takes a person of rare constitution and moral courage to speak up. And that’s precisely how the far Left likes it. After all, what value is there in disagreement? They’ve figured out that elusive path to racial, gender, and sexual justice, and disagreement only distracts. It does worse than distract. It wounds.

But take heart, conservatives. It’s not all bleak. After all, the government is highly unlikely to persecute you for your speech. And if you want to succeed in cutting-edge businesses or enjoy equal opportunity in the academy, you do have one good option. You can shut your mouth.

I see this a lot. Indiana, where I live, may look like the reddest of flyover-country states to much of post-America, but that's not actually saying much in the second decade of the twenty-first century. When then-Governor Mike Pence signed religious-freedom legislation in the spring of 2015, a number of firms based here - Cummins, Angie's List, Ball Corporation, Lily - banded together to adopt a stance of outrage. (My two alma maters - Butler University and Wabash College, as well as a current employer, Indiana University - chimed in.) The following winter, on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Tom Linebarger, CEO of Cummins, took the occasion to write an insipid, vomit-inducingly self-congratulatory column for the Indianapolis Star that cited his company's role in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and used it to infer that the same factors were at play in the religious-freedom situation. (And casually dropped in a reference to Ferguson, Missouri, which, as we know, was a local-crime story about a doped-up guy who robbed a convenience store and then reached into a policeman's car window to try to grab his gun.) Even trotted out the hackneyed catchphrase "diversity and social justice" in his second-to-last paragraph.

I bring it up because it serves as a rather extreme example. Of course, places like Bay-Area California or the coastal side of Washington state are, as one would expect, even more ate up with this mindset.

I wonder if James Burnham, when he so presciently warned in 1941 that a class of administrative pointy-heads was taking over society, foresaw that it would get this far.

I can tell you this: You'll never find me in one of those cubicles.