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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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It's Different When We Do It

I'm against Libs of TikTok cancelling random poor workers for not knowing when to shut up. But this article makes a case for it.

First, the author makes a case that "Normie Bloodlust" is common and never punished. Think of people expressing hope that a rapist is raped in prison. I don't think the author believes that this behavior is good, per se, just common and usually unpunished.

He then goes on to say that "there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior." He seems to support that sort of cancellation, whichever side of the aisle it is coming from.

But then he argues that the Right has been facing a different, unfair type of cancellation:

The reason you can get fired for liking a Steve Sailer tweet, or donating $25 to a legal defense fund, isn’t because of a Groundswell of Popular Outrage — it’s because your employer can face 9-figure fines if they refuse to enforce a particular set of social strictures.

When my doxx was released, the “expose” got 400 likes on Twitter. For perspective, I’ve had 10 tweets with more than that in the last 72 hours. 400 likes is not “viral”, even with a dozen antifa doxxing rings (at the height of their energy) and a reporter from the Guardian helping it along.

It turns out, nobody actually cares if an entry-level finance drone thinks that feminism sucks.

But it wasn’t about a “social media outrage mob”. My employer was a glowie intelligence contractor — they didn’t “cave to popular pressure”. They don’t even sell to the public.

It was about avoiding the threat of being sued for creating a Hostile Work Environment by allowing my words to go unpunished. They fired me to comply with federal law.

The last interesting point he makes is that:

A good friend who works in HR issues the following warning:

“not sure people realize that 1) a presidential assassination attempt is like a every 30 years black swan event where the HR Ladies are forced to fire anyone who says the wrong thing, and 2) the HR Ladies relish these opportunities to make a few ingroup firings because it reestablishes their neutrality and legitimacy”

“lots of ppl seem to be victory lapping over a "vibe shift" that is really more of a temporary vibe window that will snap shut within weeks”

I think he makes some good points though I disagree with the conclusion that it is fine and dandy for the Right to cancel struggling zero-influence people for saying things that were normal to say two weeks ago.

He then goes on to say that "there’s nothing unfair, and certainly nothing unconstitutional, about facing social opprobrium for unpopular speech and behavior." He seems to support that sort of cancellation, whichever side of the aisle it is coming from.

I think that people treating assholes differently from other people in their local community is likely older than the modern human. Of course, in larger societies, the more basic social norms are generally codified into laws. But there is still a zone of behaviors with negative externalities which nobody bothers to make actually illegal, not every minor annoyance is worth a criminal case, after all.

Like criminal law, social shunning is a double-edged sword in that it can be used both to enforce good norms (don't run around randomly insulting people) or bad norms (don't have gay sex, don't criticize the Fuehrer). However, where laws are at least factually clear (such as StGB 175, which used to prohibit gay sex in Germany), the norms enforced informally have less scrutiny. It is easier to argue against a bad law than against a bad norm which is enforced informally, and laws can be more easily changed.

All of this applies to pre-social-media villages. In a village, if someone says or does something which one percent of the villagers hate totally, while the rest are 'meh' about it, nothing much will happen. With some 22% of the US population on twitter (probably heavily selected towards 'activism'), 1% is still a rather huge mob.

For offline celebrities, it is a bit different. They are selling themselves as a brand, after all, so if anything they do they do is bad publicity, that may have repercussions on how they are treated by companies.

But the average person on the street should not lose their job over icky opinions they post online. Either what they say is actually illegal, in which case it should be a matter of civil and criminal law, or they should be allowed to keep their job.

For pseudonymous opinions, I only see two cases in which doxxing might be justified:

  • directly to law enforcement for things which are actually illegal to say (but not to the general public)
  • the doxxing of doxxers is fine with me, live by the sword, die by the sword.

But the average person on the street should not lose their job over icky opinions they post online. Either what they say is actually illegal, in which case it should be a matter of civil and criminal law, or they should be allowed to keep their job.

This misses the weaponized middle ground of "Being around people who think such stuff makes members of protected classes uncomfortable, therefore it creates a hostile workplace environment, therefore people who are known to think such stuff must by law be fired"

I think the crux for me is how colleagues in protected classes became aware of the distasteful opinions of their colleague.

If it was because he came to work wearing a swastika shirt, then firing him sounds like a great idea.

If he ran an offensive twitter account under his real name, but with no link to the company, I would argue that this should not be a firing offense for a lower level employee -- don't google stalk people if you can't handle what you might find.

Even more so if he ran a twitter account under a pseudonym and got doxxed.

I don’t like it when the libs do stuff like this or rioting because it violates my principles.

But the underlying reason why is don’t like having my principles violated on a large scale like this is because where my principles used to be the default societal principles, it signals that they aren’t anymore.

I don’t like seeing buildings burned partially because I don’t like the buildings burning, but also because I don’t want the live in a society where building burning has become a necessary part of participating in the society.

So when the libs were cancelling people for the okay symbol 4 years ago, the feeling we were all feeling was dread at watching the society change. But now here we are.

A similar thing will happen when the democrats have their way and “pack” the Supreme Court. The republicans will be forced to pack it back, and so on and so forth until it’s destroyed.

It’s highly unfortunate and I don’t think firing random Walmart staff making $12 an hour for these opinions is kind or fair, but I also think the only way to establish either social norms or (better yet) laws that strictly limit firing people for political opinions is for the right to start aggressively cancelling progressives if political winds change.

but the problem is norms can change suddenly and unpredictably, for both sides

Is that really "a problem"

and this isn't a problem that can be solved, it's just life.

this is why law and order matters, and why lawlessness is such a threat to our civilization.

interesting how both our comments were downvoted despite being at odds. goes to show how it's irrelevant what you say, but who says it. respected members can post anything and always gets lots of votes.

I think he makes some good points though I disagree with the conclusion that it is fine and dandy for the Right to cancel struggling zero-influence people for saying things that were normal to say two weeks ago.

Yeah, I can understand the sentiment of "I am not getting in the way of this mob, after what you've done (/not done) to me" but actively whipping the mob into a frenzy is another story.

On an individual level, anger is a good deterrent. You do stupid, irresponsible things when really angry, potentially seriously harming yourself and your future prospects just to hurt the target of your ire. It's not that doing so is rational--it's that in some ways being an angry person, and in a sense precommitting to being irrational when angry, can be a good strategy. This is the case for revenge more generally. It's not particularly in America's interests to nuke whatever country has sent nukes flying America's way, but doing so is a good deterrent, so credibly precommitting to nuclear war is ironically possibly the best way to avoid nuclear war.

I see the mob the same way. It's not that cancellations etc. are good per se, but the existence of repercussions for voicing seriously delusional takes creates a chilling effect and prevents many of those takes from being voiced in the first place. Being a bit unnecessarily cruel towards people who cross major lines is a generally pretty good way to prevent those lines from being crossed at all.

but the existence of repercussions for voicing seriously delusional takes creates a chilling effect and prevents many of those takes from being voiced

this is good in principle, but it would seem as of it when one side is typically on the of said repercussions. California has the right approach in this regard, for everything else that is wrong with the Golden state.

I see the mob the same way. It's not that cancellations etc. are good per se, but the existence of repercussions for voicing seriously delusional takes creates a chilling effect and prevents many of those takes from being voiced in the first place.

That's the thing though - I don't care about people voicing delusional takes, I care about people being fired for their takes (whether they are delusional or not). You can still frame it in some "if you go after us, we'll go after you" game-theory way, but in that case, go after the actual cancellers, not a rando cashier.

I think it depends. For a political opinion, unless that opinion in some way affects your ability to do your actual job or you’re the public face of your company, I think not only should it not get you fired but it should be protected with the same sort of rules that religion gets — you shouldn’t be able to fire liberals or conservatives for simply stating something you disagree with, much like you can’t fire a Muslim for being a Muslim. If it’s an opinion like “woman can’t do X” and people who do X are direct reports, you hire people to do X, or serve clients who do X, that’s a different thing, it’s affecting your ability to do your job. Likewise if you’re doing marketing for a company or are in some public facing role for the company, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to protect its image by firing a person who’s going to make them look bad.

Having said all that “too bad the shooter missed” isn’t political, it’s condoning violence. I don’t think she’d get the same response if she’d have just said “I don’t like Trump.” That’s not why she got fired. She wanted Trump dead, that’s why she got fired. It’s a different opinion.

I would rather both religion and politics lose those rules than maintain the mostly one-sided semblance of protection they currently have.

Having said all that “too bad the shooter missed” isn’t political, it’s condoning violence.

Seems like this principle could be stretched arbitrarily far. "I support Israel and hope they are able to achieve their military objectives in Gaza in a timely fashion" is also condoning violence.

Eh. All succinctly-stated principles can be stretched arbitrarily far. This is a good thing, because it's not that the principle ever "runs out" or stops, it's that it runs into a conflicting principle with a greater priority in the topic at hand. When "don't advocate for violence" runs into "sometimes we have to support just wars," the former principle doesn't cease to exist, and should in fact inform and temper to some extent our obedience to the latter principle.

Obviously we all obey multiple principles, and each of them takes priority in different situations. Objecting that a single stated principle can be stretched overly much is similar to an isolated demand for rigor, because it assumes/implies that the original comment advocates for following only that one single principle, meaning that the only way for the principle to be correct is if it encapsulates the sum total of morality.

Put another way, statements like "self defense is justified" and "violence is not political" do not inherently claim to solve for all possible edge cases and shouldn't be read that way.

Reciprocal violence is still violence.

Of course, my point is that no one here thinks that someone should lose their job because of tweeting something like that, even though it violates the "condoning violence" clause outlined above.

No probably not.

I suspect some may draw a distinction between condoning or advocating for specific political violence domestically and general or specific military violence by a foreign state against their forever conflict opponent.

woman can’t do X

We saw people twist Damore’s words on overlapping distributions into this statement, and fired on the rationale that women couldn’t work around him.

Having said all that “too bad the shooter missed” isn’t political, it’s condoning violence.

I disagree. Wanting Trump dead is political. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, and you draw it here. I feel it's arbitrary.

If political expressions of employees should be defended, then even the wackiest of nutjobs should be safe from getting fired.

What is uniquely bad about violence? Would you say that violence is an assault on the system that protects freedom of expression and freedom of political affiliation? That because the employee rejects this system, he no longer deserves its protection?

But what if the employee is a rabid monarchist, a communist, or Nazi? The explicit aim of these ideologies is to dismantle the current democratic system, to overthrow the government, and to impose authoritarian rule. Fired?

I disagree. Wanting Trump dead is political. But a line has to be drawn somewhere, and you draw it here. I feel it's arbitrary.

Line where free speech ends and crime begins had been drawn, in US, as "incitement to imminent lawless action".

"Billy Bob deserves to be hanged" - free speech.

"Here lives Billy Bob, go and hang him!" - incitement.

Yeah. Saying, "too bad the shooter missed" isn't incitement, so the employee shouldn't be fired.

If the person she posted about wasn’t famous in any way, would you still see it as “just an opinion?” If she saw news about a drunk uncle getting robbed at gun point and said “so sad the shooter missed,” it’s hard to see this as anything other than wanting them dead. And I think in either case, the same thing — businesses are perfectly free to have policies that forbid violence or threats of violence.

More comments

That's enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be arrested; not enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be fired. If Billy Bob is among your customer base and there's now only one way to make him feel safe walking down your rope aisle then maybe you do what you need to for him to feel safe.

IIRC the (ex-)Home-Depot lady didn't even go that far, it was more like "Billy Bob's favorite candidate deserves to be hanged", with Billy (and his compatriots) in no danger, but it's still defensible for a judgement call to land somewhere in between "we should just ignore this" and "we need to call the cops right now".

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I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated, and yeah, you might have faced consequences for it (or not, depending on how your boss feels). That's why this celebration of victory is premature, nothing has really changed. Many individuals on the left have overreached and gotten burned, but nobody is going to get fired merely for supporting Biden, let alone for being gay or black or trans. The rules, written and unwritten, about what you can or can't say at work, are still written or unwritten and enforced or unenforced by the same fat liberal white women.

This article provides two examples of public figures or bodies implicitly promoting violence against Trump during his first term. It also touches on the rather creepy social media trend that developed after the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade, in which the justices' home addresses were shared on social media with the obvious purpose of prompting some crazy person with nothing to lose to go there and murder them (which one guy indeed tried to do). So yeah, I think promoting violence against Trump and people allied with him was a totally normal thing in American left-liberal circles throughout his first term.

to actually call for Trump to be assassinated

Prof. John McWhorter, of all people, did, on a public podcast. He later recanted, but still.

Glen Loury can't abandon the propaganda of McWhorter as a " moderate, centrist calm reasonable person" while criticizing him for his comments of favoring the assassination of Trump.

We really are living in the times of the cult of symbolic centrism, symbolic antiracism, symbolic racism, symbolic nazism, etc, etc. Where groups and individuals are assigned irrational undeserving positive and negative status and associations, based on false expectations.

Hope we see some genuine lowering of status and consequences for people like McWhorter and the end of the illusion that people like Loury want to maintain. Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?

Is Loury going to stop constantly talking with McWhorter in the way he isn't talking with many people to the right of his?

I doubt it. I don't think he chooses whether or not to talk to McWhorter based on political purposes. I think they do just honestly go way back as friends first. It's extremely easy to shun people who you're not friends with based on political differences. When you start doing it to your pre-existing friends, it's a short road to loneliness, above and beyond the typical concerns people have (especially influential public figures) with determining whether anyone who appears to be a friend is acting that way because they genuinely like being friends or if it's just a means to an end.

There is likely a friendship there too, but Loury and McWhorter podcast together is also very much so political content. I also get the impression that part of their friendship has to do with their common political ground.

Alternatively, things really are coming apart to such a degree that even the calm, reasonable people are losing their minds.

A lot of people think that Trump dead would be a net-positive outcome. My problem isn't that this is mean, but rather that it is dangerously wrong. Trump does not generate the culture war, but rather was generated by it. Killing him will not magic it away, but will only throw gasoline on the fire.

I've been of the opinion for a while that Trump having a heart attack would be net-good, although this is not entirely for culture war reasons (part of it is just that he's too old to be POTUS in a term that might include WWIII).

However, on the one occasion I did mention this on theMotte I did also mention that this doesn't apply to murdering him (which, as you say, would end Badly).

Trump got Babbit killed. Trump is getting people killed.

Trump is not some magical output of a culture war. Trump is a danger to us all.

If you want the violence to stop, the person blaring violent rhetoric nonstop has to be silenced.

  • -24

Trump got Babbit killed.

How, exactly? Please explain the causal chain between something Trump did and the Babbit shooting.

I don't see much justification of how things have changed for McWhorter to be calling for the assassination of Trump. He isn't a reasonable guy who lost his mind because there is an event that justified him supporting openly Trump being assassinated, but someone who should lose the quality of being considered reasonable and he proved that such estimation was mistaken. Trump is someone who isn't even particularly right wing. The criticism should be on the mentality of people like McWhorter, who have no adequate justification for this. My belief is we live in an age of too much unnecessary rage against compromising establishment "right" figures who probably deserve criticism for failing to even do their promised duty. So, that outrage is unreasonable, and so is putting people like Trump on the pedestal for being targets of it, even if he should be defended against such unjustified anger.

McWhorter being dangerously wrong is part of the fact that his politics are unreasonable and he is unreasonable.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/donald-trump-violent-rhetoric-catalogue

someone who should lose the quality of being considered reasonable

Trump has lost the quality of being reasonable, and his continued existence in our public life or any advocacy of such should be grounds for having lost the quality of being considered reasonable.

  • -19

I don't think it was normal, even two weeks ago, to actually call for Trump to be assassinated

There was some recent Supreme Court decision about the President not being liable for "official acts", which resulted in progressives tripping over themselves to suggest Biden orders an assassination on Trump. None of them got fired as far as I know. I have no idea where the idea that this was not normal is coming from, it almost feels like there's a need to pretend that nothing ever changes, and therefore the status quo is how it has always been.

There is a difference between petitioning the government to pursue X policy and telling random people to do X by criminal violence. It's co-ordinated vs. un-co-ordinated meanness. The obvious analogy is that asking the government to keep or re-introduce the death penalty for murder is totally legal, but putting out a Craigslist ad for the Bay Harbor Butcher is conspiracy to commit murder.

With that said, there does seem to be some movement; I notice that people saying "it sucks that Crooks missed" or equivalent (which is not direct incitement) seem to be getting hit, which does seem unusual.

I don't have any particular concerns over the way most people raised this. It was a standard "parade of horribles", where you try to come up with the most extreme 'hypos' (in the legal lingo) to push an interpretation as far as it can go in order to see if that's really an interpretation that you can live with. This one is pretty extreme, because the President's powers in this area are pretty plausibly vast. We saw somewhat similar language pushing on "assassinate a US citizen" around the al-Awlaki business. The President's war powers are among the most dangerous powers given to anyone in the country; they sort of have to be. We want a President Lincoln to be able to order the killing of rebel soldiers and leaders, even on US soil, in cases of genuine rebellion. How to draw lines is hard, and frankly, we probably still haven't managed to lay out any lines with real conceptual clarity; it might just not be possible to do so a priori. I'm pretty fine with people at least considering different scenarios in order to argue that we need to be careful in how we draw the lines as a separate thing from, "Whelp, if we're going to draw the line where you want to draw it, President Biden actually should order Seal Team Six to assassinate Trump." Probably some blowhards on reddit actually said the latter thing, but most relatively serious folks (to the extent there are many left) were doing the more sensible thing.

Believing that the president should order a hit squad on Trump implies that Trump is such a danger that that's required. Claiming that he's that dangerous encourages violence from everyone, not just from a government raiding party.

I wouldn't have this kind of problem with someone asserting that Trump should be arrested and given the death penalty after a fair trial, but not many people will say that, precisely because that doesn't imply that he needs to be killed by any means possible.

I don't mind blowhards blowing hard, my point is that something has changed over the past two weeks. While a lot of people are still making edgy jokes, some of them are getting got, which didn't happen before. I don't even know if it's a good thing (beyond some unpleasant people getting a taste of their own medicine), I just think it's weird to insist that nothing has changed.

I say "not normal" in that I think it was wrong of them to suggest it.

It sounded like you said they were likely to face consequences for it. I think I even disagree with it being wrong, depending on how it's done.

Of course they never directly called for him to be assassinated. That would be vulgar, and possibly illegal. But there was a lot of rhetoric like "Trump is a fascist," "he's a threat to democracy," "Jan 6 was a coup attempt," "if he wins there might not be another election until he dies," etc. The logical conclusion from that, that any redblooded young wanna-be hero would think of, is that he's a monster who must be stopped by Any Means Necessary. Pundits need to back off and say "yes Trump is bad, but even if he wins there will still be another election in 4 years, so keep a sense of perspective."

When the pendulum precesses , you don't know when you're on the receiving end until too late.

The more conventional the opinion, the more cartoonishly sadistic its enforcement. They love to talk about what ought to be done to pedophiles — not because they have unusually strong opinions about the well-being of children, but because pedophiles provide the broadest possible canvas on which to fantasize about social cruelty.

I think this has more to do with rallying support among a shelling point: pedos deserve to have violence inflicted on them, so as a way of making their other views palatable by first establishing a common ground..

Ironically the reason cancellations of non-celebrities don’t work in Europe is because the laws are more leftist and thus quite explicit about how and for what sorts of things an employer is allowed to fire people. ”A non-spokesperson said something on their personal account and didn’t associate it with the company” not being one of those.

In October, Ireland was aflame with the story of a photogenic tech employee who incautiously criticised Israel on her personal account and expressed support for the Palestinian cause - seemingly unaware that her employer, Wix, is an Israeli company. They promptly decided to part ways with her. I was curious what had come of the story since and it's currently going through the Workplace Relations Commission - if her complaint is upheld, she stands to make up to €80k in lost earnings.

Sure. But you know you might go to jail over certain views so there’s that.

The range of views which are de facto illegal to express for an American who relies on W-2 employment to eat is considerably larger than the range of views which are de jure illegal in other Western countries.

It's not clear to me that this is in fact the case. But let's say it is - something being de jure illegal is much, much harsher than something being de facto illegal. So it's possible for the situation you describe to exist, and for the American restrictions to still be overall more lenient.

Which is the game theory view for firing HD lady. A bad spot in game theory is to have it be legal to espouse leftist views but defacto illegal to espouse right views. The place you want to land is everyone can have views. But it’s still better to firing everyone who has view than only have leftist views supported.

Seems like W-2 people don’t get to have views is the optimal position.

That depends. For plenty of roles and organisations you're explicitly prohibited from having a political social media presence of any kind and you can get fired for that.

That said, you're almost always supposed to receive multiple formal warnings before being fired.

In France if you work for a random private company and retweet Eric Zemmour on your personal account and you get fired for it you probably have at least some recourse / legal options, though.

Yes, it’s actually much harder to fire people for speech in France and Germany. Even if you’re arrested for speech in these countries, they make it more difficult for companies to fire you and it’s a hugely drawn-out process (it took years for the left to prevent Bjorn Hocke from retaining his teaching job for example, even after he faced repeated police/state action for his comments). Even in the UK there has to be an internal investigation and you’re put on leave for a long long time, and then it can all be challenged extensively (and is often overturned as in the case of the TERF who was fired) by and at employment tribunals.

That corporate comms in Manhattan can immediately fire any employee if there’s public heat after 1 hour of media attention at 4am is pretty unique to the US.

I mean, it's pretty unique to corporate positions too. Or at least was pretty unique to corporate positions. I think that's why this round of cancellations is so shocking to some- there's a sense of home depot cashiers being so far down the totem poll that they're treated as random civilians not subject to reprisals. I don't think getting the bud light marketing VP fired would have been controversial. I don't think LoTT getting teachers fired is controversial.

And when I notice who's getting upset about the cancellations, I think it's related to the red/blue violence as an offswitch/violence as a ratchet. In a real sense a lot of the people upset about getting a home depot cashier fired are the types who, let's be real, are probably a bit uncomfortable with Trump- even as they're more uncomfortable with wokeness. Conversely the people shrugging their shoulders with 'they hit us, why can't we hit them' aren't.

I think that's why this round of cancellations is so shocking to some- there's a sense of home depot cashiers being so far down the totem poll that they're treated as random civilians not subject to reprisals

As Nybbler pointed out, there's nothing shocking about it, I've seen worse from progressives (there was a guy who got fired for cracking his knuckles, because someone decided that's the OK handsign, and that in turn must be a dogwhistle. The dude in question was Mexican, or something, by the way). I'm also not against "if they hit us, we hit them" (nor am I against Trump), I just don't think we should go after "civilians", as you describe them.

Again feel free to go "it's not like we didn't warn you guys", but celebrating/defending the cancellation is a step too far.

I think that's why this round of cancellations is so shocking to some- there's a sense of home depot cashiers being so far down the totem poll that they're treated as random civilians not subject to reprisals.

It shouldn't be; the left did a LOT of cancellations of random civilians. Say the n-word on Twitbook on Sunday, lose your shitty retail job on Monday.

There was a high-profile tumblr called racistsgettingfired whose raison d'etre was precisely this.

People say that, but there are parts of the US with very broad restrictions on what at-will employees can be fired for (California), or do not have a default assumption of at-will employment (Montana), and they are not especially resistant to cancel culture. Indeed, many cases the labor protections are what demands firing of some righties.

It depends. For example we don’t know what settlement Damore and Google came to but he was able to pursue legal action against them because California bars firing for political opinions. Nybbler claims it was “probably” very small but I’m much more skeptical, I think it was a larger settlement.

Damore hasn’t worked much recently for example even though his skillset and political cancellation would surely make him attractive to various Thielverse and other right-leaning tech companies. That suggests a big payout to me.

I'm not sure what you're using to support that. Damore's been working for some unnamed startup in Austin since 2018, according to his LinkedIn page, and it doesn't even look like a lead (or single-digit-number) position. That looks a lot more like 'right-leaning tech company' than fuck you money.

In Europe, there's no need to fire wrongthinkers. You can just throw them in jail instead. Whatever the cure to cancel culture is, it's definitely not more leftism.

While this is true with countries like Britain which is a very underrated totalitarian police state oppressive far leftist tyranny, arresting far more people for speech than Russia, and even more so per capita, I do think there is value in not siding automatically with owners vs employees. There are definetly European countries which are freer than USA due to being more right wing and having less enforcement, which in the USA private organisations and state within the state and connected with the state and especially deep state activist mega groups like ADL (which can get Jewish CEO of huge companies to retalitate with adverts towards Elon Musk.

Fundamentally, the kind of people who owned media, the networking, mouthy capitalists, the activist capital that does exist are going to impose left wing cultural values on their workers and hire these kind of people. But it is the wrong framing of leftism vs rightism.

The right should not see itself as the party of giving rich cliques, or donors, whatever they want, whether it goes against the national interest, good cultural standards, average family, public morality, the right to speak the unpopular truth, the separation of political with regular life, etc. In addition to those who acquire their wealth through shady means, a person can be skilled and hard working and lucky, and connected and help economically, while politically be destructive because they use their funds to promote bad causes.

There is also a genuine value in the agency factor of the public vs smaller minorities. There is a lot of whining about the immorality of the mob and there is some truth too it, but there is also even greater immorality and much more focus in targeting them for influence, of isolated minority groups and elites. Conversely, it is harder to get the majority to go against the collective interest, even though it is possible, because the majority like smaller minorities can be also unwise. Still on many issues, the majority like immigration wanted one thing, and got something different. Most importantly, the majority can be manipulated and lead by said organized minorities.

Which then raises the question of what ought to be done about it. It isn't a simple goverment as protective of private sphere since organized activist groups and lobbies will try to capture as much influence in the goverment too. A part of the solution is to ban groups like hope not hate, ADL, OFCOM, open society, and many more and try to remove their fellow travelers who marched through the institutions. Where for example in Britain they failed to solve burglary in half the country in 3 years, while they are arresting in record numbers for speech, while lead under woke leadership. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13152403/amp/Police-failed-solve-single-break-half-country.html

These should be the targets for firing and even making their organizations illegal and in the worst cases subject to criminal prosecution, not people working at supermarkets. I also think there is a value in letting people err and have freedom to be wrong, even though we do need to force those controlling powerful institutions to a) not be enforcing, censorious of immoral morality b) to follow good moral standards and pursue the common good of their society and people.

I would love to see people like Soros clan and their top open societies people, the left wing activists, the NGO types, the version of these people within the corporate hierarchy, the new left bureaucrats, the extremist editors, many journalists and these kind of people to be suppressed and lose in all manner of ways. However, I don't want to see simple working people get fired for having asinine opinions.

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