The left coerces CEOs to admit they're scum

By Bill McCusker

For most of my corporate career, I felt insulated from partisan politics. After all, focusing on opportunities and threats, satisfying clients, putting out fires and fighting off aggressive competitors was a full-time job for us business leaders. To be sure, outside of the business world lurked troubling trends galore. For decades, we conservative corporate types watched with dismay the progressive takeover of the media, education and entertainment industries. More recently, we have lamented the intrusion of the progressive agenda into the military, courts, religions, professional sports and the public square. But business? If business folks engaged in political issues, they tended to do so on their own time and away from the office. There was simply too much to do 9 to 5. Or 5 to 9.

No longer.

According to the CEO Action website, over 700 CEOs and presidents have signed the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion pledge to purge themselves of their "unconscious bias." They are holding "Days of Understanding," where employees learn how insidious their bias, lack of fairness, gender discrimination, toxic masculinity, sexism, white and cisgender privilege, homophobia, transphobia and other diseases really are. For many companies, these are the latest in the fire-hose of diversity and inclusion initiatives bolstering the "core values" all directors, executives and employees must embrace.

To be sure, no reasonable person objects to fairness and inclusion. Nor to equality, charity, understanding, kindness, honesty and opportunity for all. And as an imperfect species, we need reminders on how to put these principles into practice in all spheres of our lives including the workplace. But what's going on here is something else entirely. In my opinion, these CEOs are coercing millions of Americans – their employees – onto a forced march of progressive identity politics and victimology. Ironically, these CEOs, while trumpeting diversity, are dictating a set of beliefs their people must hold as a condition of employment. Many conservative and religious employees, or those who simply believe that businesses should focus more on serving customers and less on indoctrinating workers, have been forced into silence, fearful of expressing an opinion contrary to the company's official beliefs.

CEOs are at liberty to rally their organizations' time, talent and treasure to whatever causes they favor. Some, like Ben & Jerry's, Nike, Starbucks and Gillette, unabashedly support progressive causes. Fair enough. But 700 CEOs and presidents confessing to their bigotry – and then issuing self-congratulatory press releases that their organizations have fallen in line with the political left? I wonder if they've stopped to consider how many employees, if allowed to do so, would voice disapproval of their CEOs aligning their companies with the same political forces that demand quotas, the suspension of due process in campus sexual-harassment cases, racially segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, discrimination against Asian college applicants, disparate impact assessments, gender-neutral bathrooms and boys-competing-as-girls in high school sports?

I sense some CEOs have moved to the left reluctantly, being pulled along on a progressive tide their advisers say is too strong and politically incorrect to swim against. I suspect many CEOs privately favor free markets, the rule of law, personal responsibility, fair competition, meritocracy, individual freedom, smaller government, fewer regulations and lower taxes – those principles that helped to build the organizations they now run and from which they have profited handsomely. But when is the last time CEOs stood up in defense of these principles? When have they responded to a virulently anti-business presidential candidate? When have they hosted a Day of Understanding on the merits of capitalism, the economic system unmatched in its ability to improve lives, versus the now-trendy socialism, a proven prescription for poverty and misery?

Doing so would take courage, once considered a CEO requirement. Instead, hundreds of them beat their breasts and line up with the media, Hollywood and academia in turning our country into what millions of decent and fair-minded employees, customers, clients and recruits find repugnant.

More such pledges will emerge, and it would be instructive for CEOs to imagine what actions these pledges will demand. Deny promotions to males? Demote Trump supporters? Contribute to leftist hate groups? Denounce Israel? Support open borders? Condemn the Founding Fathers? Mock pro-lifers? Fire gun owners?

Will CEOs say "Enough" and get back to the business of running the business? Or will they continue to place their bets with those who preach diversity and tolerance but who, in reality, trade in division and hate?

Bill McCusker a recently retired business executive who spent 36 years in the business world, most recently with KPMG. He is founder and CEO of a nonprofit, Fathers & Families, Inc.