How to Stop the Corporate Virtue-Signaling Before It’s Too Late
7th December 2018
Just before Halloween, the U.S. streaming giant Hulu sent out a tweet: “If you’re dressing up for #Huluween this year, this is your reminder to wear a costume that is culturally appropriate and respectful to others. Let’s celebrate the holiday in a way that we can all enjoy.”
The question of whether some Halloween costumes are “appropriate” is one of the hottest flashpoints in the culture wars right now. The mainstream media, university professors and left-wing politicians seem to agree that dressing up as people of another race is inherently offensive while a large proportion of regular people believe that costumes are only offensive if there’s an intent to mock. Unsurprisingly, Hulu’s finger-wagging tweet pissed off a lot of people who wondered why a streaming service was suddenly sounding like a social justice warrior. Hulu deleted the tweet.
The problem is that companies are filling up with snowflakes who have been trained to political correctness since their childhoods, and who think of this sort of ThoughtControl as a perfectly natural thing for a social organization like a company — it wouldn’t occur to them that there is a difference between a business and some sort of club — to do.
That is even ignoring pseudo-businesses like Ben & Jerries whose business model is catering to the special snowflake crowd and depending on charging hipster prices for a virtue-signaling vehicle.
Sammut points out that the corporate virtue-signaling almost exclusively tends to favor the political tastes of the “elites” over the “ordinary” people, and that’s what makes it so dangerous. When Hulu tweets about being “culturally appropriate” at Halloween, it’s affirming values primarily held by rich urban-dwellers in California and New York, while attacking the values of white rural voters who overwhelming elected U.S. President Donald Trump or voted for Brexit.
Again, it’s largely a matter of corporations taking their managerial leadership from Children of the Crust who are more and more products of the Marxist March Through The Institutions and who see absolutely nothing wrong with promoting rigid conformity with proglodyte nostrums. The rabid GoodThink promoted in Silicon Valley is just a sign that things have progressed farther there than elsewhere. In that sense, California is truly ‘ahead’ of the rest of the nation.
December 8th, 2018 at 08:25
I’m employed at a Fortune 100 company and was greeted yesterday by a picture of my CEO holding a handwritten sign I didn’t bother to read when I logged into my computer. What I did notice is that December 7th was now no longer a day to live in infamy, but is rather a Day of Understanding.
Quick research discovered that an organization called CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion had signed up hundreds of companies to this grand cause. Frankly, not a big deal because I’m immune now to the PC march of Diversity! Inclusion! Diversity! Inclusion! But what did get under my skin was either the total lack of historical awareness that December 7th was already taken… or more likely the intentional decision to co-opt the day when 2,403 Americans were killed by an alien attack force operating beyond the norms of civilized countries as regards legitimate warfare.
I could deliver a sermon on defending freedom but this crowd doesn’t need it. But come on… December 7th as a Day of Understanding? Understand this… freedom is not free and it wouldn’t hurt to say thank you every once in a while.