Let me anticipate an objection because if I don't I'm going to be furious if I have to deal with this in comments later:
Yes. I understand that "Home Depot Lady," personally, did not do any of those things to me, or to Jane or Bob.
Yes, I still think people like Home Depot Lady should face some consequences. Why? Because it was not only "villains" like Fauci or Biden who did this to us. It was our fellow countrymen on the left.
Am I certain that what happened to Home Depot Lady, and the specific way it was done, was the best or right way? No, I'm not certain. But I'm also not going to say, "Since I'm not certain, and since it feels icky to some, then I'm going stop right now and full throatedly condemn her cancellation." If that's what you want, you're one of the people I'm talking about in the essay who approves of narcissistic abuse.
Yes. I want regular people who are doing evil to face consequences for being enablers to powerful narcissists.
A woman posted on Facebook a comment, “To [sic] bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!,” after the attempted assassination on Trump.
Somehow someone discovered (perhaps because some people post too much information) that she worked at a Home Depot as a cashier. Someone went to that store while she was on duty, confronted her about it and posted the video online.
The Twitter account Libs of Tiktok spread it around and tagged Home Depot asking whether they were going to do anything. The Home Depot Twitter account later added a post indicating this woman was no longer employed with them.
The people who were not members of the state or other powerful forces but who otherwise enabled and endorsed this abuse draws parallels to the East Germans who snitched on their fellow friends and family to the Stasi.
After reunification, Germans were given access to these Stasi Files and were able to see who provided information on their personal file. It was often friends, family, lovers.
You are right. The climate of the general public is permissive- or not -for the greater abuses of our history. We cannot accept the unacceptable. Damned what the soft among us feel about ‘conflict’.
While turning the other cheek, behaving with class, and not “sinking to the lowest level” have been important core values in Western culture (and should be aimed for in oneself and admired in others), there is a point at which they overlap with “enabling”. If you are a moral stickler and your opponent believes that the ends justify the means, you’re in a classic catch-22. So, somewhere down the line, you have to compromise your behavior — or you consign yourself to losing forever.
I appreciate your honesty. I experienced similar things with family and friends in 2016 when I posted on FB,"Trump won, get used to it". (I voted for Jill Stein). 🤡 That began my red-pilling. This has been a hard and inevitable journey for many. I focus on being resilient and accepting of chsnge. I removed a huge chunk of long-time friends sick with TDS. I realized they were stagnant and dragging me down. I've made new friends. It seems The Cult is cracking, and I thank God.
Josh, despite the sometimes very lonely road you're forced to trod, you remain steadfast in your search for truth and your willingness to express it in the face of those who prefer to deny it or impose their own version of reality on the rest of us. As always thank you for sharing your thoughts and observations- and for your willingness to stand up.
Josh, thanks for sharing that admission. Please know that through your writings and Disaffected you have developed a network of followers/supporters who while not always visible or available - are emotionally aligned with you. I wish for that thought to make things a little less lonely for you.
As distasteful as it might be to some, there has to be a pushback or we'll never be able to move on. They made the rules, they should have to live by them.
I need to better understand what it means to have a nationalized rental market. I Googled, but I'm overwhelmed by the information and not all of the results, I suspect, mean what I think you mean. Can anyone suggestion a good source?
I do believe people who are being fired for pro-assa**intion tweets have earned what's coming to them with public shaming. But I talked so much smack online in my pre-red-pilled days, I can't help but feel worried about what might be dreaded up in the future from old posts if I were to look for employment or promotion. This just reminds me that social media is a tool of surveillance, which is chilling.
On another completely unrelated note, Josh, I know your interest in Joan Crawford and your use of her as an example of narcissism. I can't help but wonder since you've never, to my knowledge, mentioned the mother- daughter duo of Big Edie and Little Edie. Are you a fan of Grey Gardens? B.E.'s delusions of grandeur ruined her daughter's life. I think I'm going to have to watch the film again. It's pure dysfunctional comfort food. Every time I watch it, my husband asks, "Why are you watching that AGAIN. " LOL!! Anyway, maybe L.E.'s antics might cheer you up, too.
Thank you for your honesty and bravery. I love your work.
What I mean: The CDC illegally took control of rentals by disallowing landlords to evict anyone for nonpayment of rent. This was forced federal nationalization. It was an un-American moral outrage.
I know peripherally "of" the Grey Gardens story, but have not actually watched the movie or movies about it.
At some point, allowing individuals a free pass on their unacceptable behavior becomes a systemic infection that threatens the whole society. So it should be personal, because when you take it personally that also becomes a force in the society. We are all people, it's always personal.
When I think about punishment (usually in the context of the law, but I think it applies to social norms as well), there are usually two elements that come to mind. First: the legitimate purpose of punishment is to keep society civil, by A: disincentivizing criminal behaviors through negative consequences, and B: removing offenders from the general population. But the second element present is the satisfaction or pathos I feel when watching the guilty be punished.
For my part, I view it as warning sign when the pathos starts to become the primary element, because if it's allowed to dominate it will inevitably compromise the goal of keeping society civil. Knowing that fat sow got her comeuppance came is immensely gratifying for me. When I catch myself feeling that, I think it's worthwhile to stop and ask myself is this punishment actually serving the purpose civilizing our society?
For the case of the Home Depot Lady, my answer is "yes." The Left has gotten so far out of control with their double standards for speech, their derangement with anything that doesn't adhere to their worldview, and their insistence of redefining words in their favor that this behavior needs to punished (at least socially, if not legally) if we want to re-civilize our discourse. I'm open to the idea that firing isn't the best social punishment, but it does send a social message that when you say something like what she said, you're way on the wrong side of acceptable.
I wonder and am interested in others thoughts, could Home Depot have handled the public side of this issue a bit differently?
They openly tweeted the woman’s employment had been terminated.
This reminds me of the cancellation of Emanuel Cafferty, an employee of San Diego Gas and Electric and Mexican-American working class man.
His crime was making an “okay” sign (which is now a white power sign according to the woke thanks to a 4chan prank) with his hand while he had his arm stuck out the window driving a company marked truck back from a job. This occurred right after the George Floyd incident when there were large marched, protests, riots etc and someone in a march saw his hand, snapped a photo, and tweeted for SDG&E to do something.
Over the weekend he was asked to return the truck, his badge, and other equipment and was fired.
SDGE tweeted that he would be taken care of.
Well, it turned out the “sign” he showed wasn’t the “okay” sign and that he was just cracking his knuckles. Even the person who took the photo and tweeted at SDG&E backed off admitting he’d made an error.
Sure. Their response seems pretty typical of the limp-dick, “do whatever the loudest voice on social media says” corporate response that has dominated during the era of cancel culture (this is probably why some people are uneasy with it).
I’ve always been of the school where you publicly praise and privately chastise. In a saner world I think them saying something like “we recognize how this reflects upon us, and we are addressing it internally” would suffice. Then internally probably indicate to her how much money this cost them and that if she’d caused that much damage to merchandise she’d have been fired several times over.
However, this probably doesn’t work now because of how often corporations have caved to the woke that the public probably wouldn’t trust them to actually do anything. Even so, I would have respected the Home Depot corporation more if they had demonstrated more independent judgement rather than just default to firing someone and virtue signaling it throughout Twitter as damage control.
Josh unfortunately you're living in crazy land. You see the nut jobs everywhere in Burlington. Luckily living in Florida (other than how horrible the summers are temperature wise) the evil wing nuts are fairly limited. But they are still there-walking around masked at 98 degrees and 98% humidity. You can't fix stupid. It's senseless to try. Too many "normies" either pretend it isn't all that or they just go with the flow. Someone with guts and balls will never do so. That makes you an outlier. But would you rather go around claiming that cutting the penis off a troubled ten year old boy is all well and good or that all white people have a life of luxury. Fuck these dolts. I'd rather not go through a life a douche bag. And if I insult someone's "pc" fuck them.
The "Be Nice" signs are revolting. Never has such an innocuous phrase had such a menacing undertone, or an unwritten ".... or else." It is close to unbelievable that people on the left would rather let a kid/teen cut off their boobs, mangle their privates, or ruin their bodies with hormones and puberty blockers rather than hurt their feelings by asking them to take a breath. I live in CT, and a mother posted in our town's "Buy Nothing" group asking for a chest binder for her 11 year old daughter. The post elicited countless "heart" and "we care" emojis. Not a single person questions the mother's decision to support her daughter's trans identity. It makes me sick.
You are not alone in how you feel about all of this. My wife's niece, pretending to be a boy since she was twelve, is now nineteen and pretending to be a man. She comes from a family of women with large breasts, and yet she has always remained absolutely flat-chested. I know what happened there, and I know her parents condoned it. It's horrifying.
The one thing that I admit I find unsettling is the number of young people who are still doing this after years. IF this is a mistake ---- and I do believe it is ---- why isn't the realization hitting sooner?
You’ve hit the nub of the issue there. Because how can they? There is no obvious way back from agreeing to your own mutilation. And far, far worse; there is no way back from mutilating your child. If you haven’t yet please look up Helen Joyce on YouTube. She makes the excellent point that these people, and especially these parents, are like the Japanese soldiers on those islands in the pacific after WW2. They cannot admit what they have done because the psychological hit would be too devastating to survive. Our conscious mind will try ANYTHING to protect us from the realisation that we have done the worst thing a parent can do: irrevocably maim our child.
Yes, plus they're still being told by the government, academia, public schools, the medical and psychological professions, the mainstream media, social media, and much of society at large that what they're doing is the right thing, and that to question it makes you Hitler.
Watched the video. Not sure it should have happened the way it did (even though I feel her comments were incredibly wrong and would not wish what happened to Trump happen to JB even with how I feel about him) but...sometimes people need to be confronted with their over the top statements and have something like losing their job happen for them to look at themselves and reflect. Hopefully she will do that. But probably not.
It's curious, isn't it. I will admit that over the last few days, as I've seen this battle and debate rage on Twitter, I find myself split as though my rational and dare I say "academic" response and my emotional response are in some kind of civil war. It seems though that these new era rules, some kind of wild west minus the honor code and masculinity have been set in motion by "the left." They were in power; this was a strategy they adopted and here we are. Has it run amuck? Yeah. It's vicious, and maybe even in-human but for years now, we've seen decent people have their lives ruined under this new social order. An order that apparently can and will do anything to anyone and s self satisfactory glee as long as it's in the name of "fighting fascism, bigotry" etc... One problem is that today's leftists aren't strong armed by a moral code the way other "non-leftists" typically are (though of course they are exceptions; Hello "not alls") Today's left will cry out in ear piercing pain as they ruin you. An extension of the grand reversal that's infected our society and politics. However, I worry that using their weapons against them irreversibly solidifies within our society, "collective punishment." Now, granted, I know that already exists. I see it for example, by the rise of hostility towards western Jews and institutionalized ant-white racism. I'm just wondering if engaging them on their vile terms leads any place good. But I fully admit that "take the high road" reads like smug luxury. A righteousness that is potentially masochistic. Is this in fact a political problem disguised as a moral one? In any case, we have one hell of a problem, and a society that is rapidly normalizing, if not celebrating, anti-social behavior under a banner of "justice."
Seems like a good draft title and theme, Josh. I'm in the same boat except that I escaped corporate life before being pushed out due to a situation that I would have certainly been led into, had I remained. I was in the C-suite of a large law firm surrounded by 8 women and 1 man...the managing partner of the firm who didn't have the balls to stand up to their wokeness, and who couldn't provide me with the backing to do so myself.
I left in large part because I could no longer stand being in an environment that prioritized woke initiatives over good business decisions, where my COO boss was more concerned about the women's empowerment than she was in maintaining a secure and stable IT system...the very backbone of what made that firm $200M per year. I left corporate life a couple months before the COVID outbreak and while that firm wouldn't have forced me to inject myself, they sure would have pressured me to do so. I was a gnat's ass away from blowing up my 20+ year career many times during those final few years, rather than gracefully stepping away. I wish I'd had the courage to stand up in defiance and defense of THE truth, but I'm OK with how I handled it.
But the fact is that I - like many others but obviously not you after you started voicing your newfound opinions - had to take the "high road" and lay silent. For me it was something that festered to a point where I had to give up a 1%er career and lifestyle to simply not be associated with these people. And I still remained silent because I had to build a new book of business, and I remain reasonably silent today in professional circles in order to retain a few within our current client ranks (we have mouths to feed). But those situations are dwindling and we don't take on any new clients who clearly don't align with conservative values.
Wow...that was a lot of words to say: I'm done taking the high road, or at least in laying silent. You're correct - we don't have to accept all that's fed into the zeitgeist, and we have the right to evaluate it all and change our opinions...and to voice those changes of opinions, in support of what's clearly logical and just. And after this past weekend's awful event, I suspect (and have already seen) that many others are coming out of the woodwork. It's amazing to see how a single event can turn the tide.
Josh, we sincerely appreciate and support you being among the early leaders on this battlefront. Keep it up!
Thanks - definitely yes, on that front. Ended up using some very hard-earned savings to buy into the partnership of a thriving IT support business, and having lots of fun with my lifelong friend and some interesting clients. Even saw one of those (clients) spotlighted on RNC coverage a couple of nights ago, which was pretty cool...
Let me anticipate an objection because if I don't I'm going to be furious if I have to deal with this in comments later:
Yes. I understand that "Home Depot Lady," personally, did not do any of those things to me, or to Jane or Bob.
Yes, I still think people like Home Depot Lady should face some consequences. Why? Because it was not only "villains" like Fauci or Biden who did this to us. It was our fellow countrymen on the left.
Am I certain that what happened to Home Depot Lady, and the specific way it was done, was the best or right way? No, I'm not certain. But I'm also not going to say, "Since I'm not certain, and since it feels icky to some, then I'm going stop right now and full throatedly condemn her cancellation." If that's what you want, you're one of the people I'm talking about in the essay who approves of narcissistic abuse.
Yes. I want regular people who are doing evil to face consequences for being enablers to powerful narcissists.
Home Depot Lady?
Please Google. It's the new current thing (I know this is exhausting).
John Carter just wrote about her too.
A woman posted on Facebook a comment, “To [sic] bad they weren't a better shooter!!!!!,” after the attempted assassination on Trump.
Somehow someone discovered (perhaps because some people post too much information) that she worked at a Home Depot as a cashier. Someone went to that store while she was on duty, confronted her about it and posted the video online.
The Twitter account Libs of Tiktok spread it around and tagged Home Depot asking whether they were going to do anything. The Home Depot Twitter account later added a post indicating this woman was no longer employed with them.
Thanks for the briefing!
Thanks for the explanation. You could have added another "[sic]" after "they". But on second thought, why keep kicking the fool while she's down?
The people who were not members of the state or other powerful forces but who otherwise enabled and endorsed this abuse draws parallels to the East Germans who snitched on their fellow friends and family to the Stasi.
After reunification, Germans were given access to these Stasi Files and were able to see who provided information on their personal file. It was often friends, family, lovers.
You are right. The climate of the general public is permissive- or not -for the greater abuses of our history. We cannot accept the unacceptable. Damned what the soft among us feel about ‘conflict’.
I'm with you, Josh. The only thing being cowardl...um, "taking the high" road has reaped is exponentially growing evil.
Yes. I’m not interested in having my sane, firm boundaries framed as cruel, abusive, or ideologically deranged.
Solzhenitsyn’s lament was that if only they had said something they could have avoided disaster.
Thanks to you and others for standing up to speak the truth.
While turning the other cheek, behaving with class, and not “sinking to the lowest level” have been important core values in Western culture (and should be aimed for in oneself and admired in others), there is a point at which they overlap with “enabling”. If you are a moral stickler and your opponent believes that the ends justify the means, you’re in a classic catch-22. So, somewhere down the line, you have to compromise your behavior — or you consign yourself to losing forever.
🎯
I appreciate your honesty. I experienced similar things with family and friends in 2016 when I posted on FB,"Trump won, get used to it". (I voted for Jill Stein). 🤡 That began my red-pilling. This has been a hard and inevitable journey for many. I focus on being resilient and accepting of chsnge. I removed a huge chunk of long-time friends sick with TDS. I realized they were stagnant and dragging me down. I've made new friends. It seems The Cult is cracking, and I thank God.
Josh, despite the sometimes very lonely road you're forced to trod, you remain steadfast in your search for truth and your willingness to express it in the face of those who prefer to deny it or impose their own version of reality on the rest of us. As always thank you for sharing your thoughts and observations- and for your willingness to stand up.
Thank you Mark. It is deeply lonely. I confess it makes me scared and resentful, too. Yep.
Josh, thanks for sharing that admission. Please know that through your writings and Disaffected you have developed a network of followers/supporters who while not always visible or available - are emotionally aligned with you. I wish for that thought to make things a little less lonely for you.
Yes, and it's reciprocal; having Josh say it like it is, makes the world less lonely for us, who stand with him.
As distasteful as it might be to some, there has to be a pushback or we'll never be able to move on. They made the rules, they should have to live by them.
I need to better understand what it means to have a nationalized rental market. I Googled, but I'm overwhelmed by the information and not all of the results, I suspect, mean what I think you mean. Can anyone suggestion a good source?
I do believe people who are being fired for pro-assa**intion tweets have earned what's coming to them with public shaming. But I talked so much smack online in my pre-red-pilled days, I can't help but feel worried about what might be dreaded up in the future from old posts if I were to look for employment or promotion. This just reminds me that social media is a tool of surveillance, which is chilling.
On another completely unrelated note, Josh, I know your interest in Joan Crawford and your use of her as an example of narcissism. I can't help but wonder since you've never, to my knowledge, mentioned the mother- daughter duo of Big Edie and Little Edie. Are you a fan of Grey Gardens? B.E.'s delusions of grandeur ruined her daughter's life. I think I'm going to have to watch the film again. It's pure dysfunctional comfort food. Every time I watch it, my husband asks, "Why are you watching that AGAIN. " LOL!! Anyway, maybe L.E.'s antics might cheer you up, too.
Thank you for your honesty and bravery. I love your work.
What I mean: The CDC illegally took control of rentals by disallowing landlords to evict anyone for nonpayment of rent. This was forced federal nationalization. It was an un-American moral outrage.
I know peripherally "of" the Grey Gardens story, but have not actually watched the movie or movies about it.
Thank you! I understand now. (GG is on YouTube, btw)
At some point, allowing individuals a free pass on their unacceptable behavior becomes a systemic infection that threatens the whole society. So it should be personal, because when you take it personally that also becomes a force in the society. We are all people, it's always personal.
When I think about punishment (usually in the context of the law, but I think it applies to social norms as well), there are usually two elements that come to mind. First: the legitimate purpose of punishment is to keep society civil, by A: disincentivizing criminal behaviors through negative consequences, and B: removing offenders from the general population. But the second element present is the satisfaction or pathos I feel when watching the guilty be punished.
For my part, I view it as warning sign when the pathos starts to become the primary element, because if it's allowed to dominate it will inevitably compromise the goal of keeping society civil. Knowing that fat sow got her comeuppance came is immensely gratifying for me. When I catch myself feeling that, I think it's worthwhile to stop and ask myself is this punishment actually serving the purpose civilizing our society?
For the case of the Home Depot Lady, my answer is "yes." The Left has gotten so far out of control with their double standards for speech, their derangement with anything that doesn't adhere to their worldview, and their insistence of redefining words in their favor that this behavior needs to punished (at least socially, if not legally) if we want to re-civilize our discourse. I'm open to the idea that firing isn't the best social punishment, but it does send a social message that when you say something like what she said, you're way on the wrong side of acceptable.
I wonder and am interested in others thoughts, could Home Depot have handled the public side of this issue a bit differently?
They openly tweeted the woman’s employment had been terminated.
This reminds me of the cancellation of Emanuel Cafferty, an employee of San Diego Gas and Electric and Mexican-American working class man.
His crime was making an “okay” sign (which is now a white power sign according to the woke thanks to a 4chan prank) with his hand while he had his arm stuck out the window driving a company marked truck back from a job. This occurred right after the George Floyd incident when there were large marched, protests, riots etc and someone in a march saw his hand, snapped a photo, and tweeted for SDG&E to do something.
Over the weekend he was asked to return the truck, his badge, and other equipment and was fired.
SDGE tweeted that he would be taken care of.
Well, it turned out the “sign” he showed wasn’t the “okay” sign and that he was just cracking his knuckles. Even the person who took the photo and tweeted at SDG&E backed off admitting he’d made an error.
Sure. Their response seems pretty typical of the limp-dick, “do whatever the loudest voice on social media says” corporate response that has dominated during the era of cancel culture (this is probably why some people are uneasy with it).
I’ve always been of the school where you publicly praise and privately chastise. In a saner world I think them saying something like “we recognize how this reflects upon us, and we are addressing it internally” would suffice. Then internally probably indicate to her how much money this cost them and that if she’d caused that much damage to merchandise she’d have been fired several times over.
However, this probably doesn’t work now because of how often corporations have caved to the woke that the public probably wouldn’t trust them to actually do anything. Even so, I would have respected the Home Depot corporation more if they had demonstrated more independent judgement rather than just default to firing someone and virtue signaling it throughout Twitter as damage control.
Josh unfortunately you're living in crazy land. You see the nut jobs everywhere in Burlington. Luckily living in Florida (other than how horrible the summers are temperature wise) the evil wing nuts are fairly limited. But they are still there-walking around masked at 98 degrees and 98% humidity. You can't fix stupid. It's senseless to try. Too many "normies" either pretend it isn't all that or they just go with the flow. Someone with guts and balls will never do so. That makes you an outlier. But would you rather go around claiming that cutting the penis off a troubled ten year old boy is all well and good or that all white people have a life of luxury. Fuck these dolts. I'd rather not go through a life a douche bag. And if I insult someone's "pc" fuck them.
The "Be Nice" signs are revolting. Never has such an innocuous phrase had such a menacing undertone, or an unwritten ".... or else." It is close to unbelievable that people on the left would rather let a kid/teen cut off their boobs, mangle their privates, or ruin their bodies with hormones and puberty blockers rather than hurt their feelings by asking them to take a breath. I live in CT, and a mother posted in our town's "Buy Nothing" group asking for a chest binder for her 11 year old daughter. The post elicited countless "heart" and "we care" emojis. Not a single person questions the mother's decision to support her daughter's trans identity. It makes me sick.
You are not alone in how you feel about all of this. My wife's niece, pretending to be a boy since she was twelve, is now nineteen and pretending to be a man. She comes from a family of women with large breasts, and yet she has always remained absolutely flat-chested. I know what happened there, and I know her parents condoned it. It's horrifying.
The one thing that I admit I find unsettling is the number of young people who are still doing this after years. IF this is a mistake ---- and I do believe it is ---- why isn't the realization hitting sooner?
You’ve hit the nub of the issue there. Because how can they? There is no obvious way back from agreeing to your own mutilation. And far, far worse; there is no way back from mutilating your child. If you haven’t yet please look up Helen Joyce on YouTube. She makes the excellent point that these people, and especially these parents, are like the Japanese soldiers on those islands in the pacific after WW2. They cannot admit what they have done because the psychological hit would be too devastating to survive. Our conscious mind will try ANYTHING to protect us from the realisation that we have done the worst thing a parent can do: irrevocably maim our child.
Yes, plus they're still being told by the government, academia, public schools, the medical and psychological professions, the mainstream media, social media, and much of society at large that what they're doing is the right thing, and that to question it makes you Hitler.
Josh, your careful and cautious approach to this is appreciated.
Watched the video. Not sure it should have happened the way it did (even though I feel her comments were incredibly wrong and would not wish what happened to Trump happen to JB even with how I feel about him) but...sometimes people need to be confronted with their over the top statements and have something like losing their job happen for them to look at themselves and reflect. Hopefully she will do that. But probably not.
Self-reflection? Nah, she just hates conservatives more now.
It's curious, isn't it. I will admit that over the last few days, as I've seen this battle and debate rage on Twitter, I find myself split as though my rational and dare I say "academic" response and my emotional response are in some kind of civil war. It seems though that these new era rules, some kind of wild west minus the honor code and masculinity have been set in motion by "the left." They were in power; this was a strategy they adopted and here we are. Has it run amuck? Yeah. It's vicious, and maybe even in-human but for years now, we've seen decent people have their lives ruined under this new social order. An order that apparently can and will do anything to anyone and s self satisfactory glee as long as it's in the name of "fighting fascism, bigotry" etc... One problem is that today's leftists aren't strong armed by a moral code the way other "non-leftists" typically are (though of course they are exceptions; Hello "not alls") Today's left will cry out in ear piercing pain as they ruin you. An extension of the grand reversal that's infected our society and politics. However, I worry that using their weapons against them irreversibly solidifies within our society, "collective punishment." Now, granted, I know that already exists. I see it for example, by the rise of hostility towards western Jews and institutionalized ant-white racism. I'm just wondering if engaging them on their vile terms leads any place good. But I fully admit that "take the high road" reads like smug luxury. A righteousness that is potentially masochistic. Is this in fact a political problem disguised as a moral one? In any case, we have one hell of a problem, and a society that is rapidly normalizing, if not celebrating, anti-social behavior under a banner of "justice."
Seems like a good draft title and theme, Josh. I'm in the same boat except that I escaped corporate life before being pushed out due to a situation that I would have certainly been led into, had I remained. I was in the C-suite of a large law firm surrounded by 8 women and 1 man...the managing partner of the firm who didn't have the balls to stand up to their wokeness, and who couldn't provide me with the backing to do so myself.
I left in large part because I could no longer stand being in an environment that prioritized woke initiatives over good business decisions, where my COO boss was more concerned about the women's empowerment than she was in maintaining a secure and stable IT system...the very backbone of what made that firm $200M per year. I left corporate life a couple months before the COVID outbreak and while that firm wouldn't have forced me to inject myself, they sure would have pressured me to do so. I was a gnat's ass away from blowing up my 20+ year career many times during those final few years, rather than gracefully stepping away. I wish I'd had the courage to stand up in defiance and defense of THE truth, but I'm OK with how I handled it.
But the fact is that I - like many others but obviously not you after you started voicing your newfound opinions - had to take the "high road" and lay silent. For me it was something that festered to a point where I had to give up a 1%er career and lifestyle to simply not be associated with these people. And I still remained silent because I had to build a new book of business, and I remain reasonably silent today in professional circles in order to retain a few within our current client ranks (we have mouths to feed). But those situations are dwindling and we don't take on any new clients who clearly don't align with conservative values.
Wow...that was a lot of words to say: I'm done taking the high road, or at least in laying silent. You're correct - we don't have to accept all that's fed into the zeitgeist, and we have the right to evaluate it all and change our opinions...and to voice those changes of opinions, in support of what's clearly logical and just. And after this past weekend's awful event, I suspect (and have already seen) that many others are coming out of the woodwork. It's amazing to see how a single event can turn the tide.
Josh, we sincerely appreciate and support you being among the early leaders on this battlefront. Keep it up!
Glad you got out of that madness and hope you’re thriving professionally somewhere else with people that have better values!
Thanks - definitely yes, on that front. Ended up using some very hard-earned savings to buy into the partnership of a thriving IT support business, and having lots of fun with my lifelong friend and some interesting clients. Even saw one of those (clients) spotlighted on RNC coverage a couple of nights ago, which was pretty cool...