For those of us on the right who knew the culture wars were not going to stay on college campuses. The woke ideology has been seeping into corporate America for well over a decade. Perhaps tech entrepreneur and CEO Andrew Crapuchettes’s RedBalloon can offer a solution that allows those who wish to leave Woketopia an off-ramp.
According to RedBalloon’s website, the company’s mission is to unite a community of businesses and job seekers who value the freedom to work and want to preserve it.
We connect employers who value freedom with employees who value it too. We envision a world beyond cancel culture, where employees are free to work… without fear that they will find themselves on the wrong side of their employer’s politics.
That’s it. No agendas, politics, or drama. Just work. Interested? Let’s create that world together.
This message mirrors the sentiments of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who extracted his company from politics. In a blog post, he laid down the guardrails and gave severance packages to employees who were not satisfied with working in a company that refused to engage in political activism. He listed four specific things the company would not do:
- Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
- Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
- Assume negative intent, or not have each other’s back
- Take on activism outside of our core mission at work
These four items were called professional behavior when I entered the corporate world 20 years ago. Unfortunately, even then, the legacy of affirmative action had morphed into “corporate diversity,” which turned the intent of Title VII entirely on its head. Rather than focus on merit and capability, employers started to focus on immutable characteristics and trying to balance them. It never quite worked.
Policing language started with laws against sexual harassment in the workplace. Rather than elevating women, these laws and the corporate policies that evolved resulted in managers and human resources employees policing interactions. I can recall having to investigate a male employee patting a woman’s shoulder and saying, “Thanks” when she moved out of an aisle so he could pass by. It got that bad. A law meant to prevent sexual abuse and coercion devolved into babysitting.
Related: The Threat of Woke Capitalism Is Deeper and More Powerful Than it Appears
No one wants to work in a company that discriminates against people due to an accident of birth. Nor do we want to go into an office where women are abused or coerced. However, when you give the radical left a foothold, they will push it until there is a boot on the necks of well-intentioned, good people who missed the latest memo about what the intransigent minority finds acceptable. It is one reason I decided not to return to corporate America after recovering from a severe auto accident. I wish RedBalloon had online then.
The final straw was in 2017 when I read that Apple had fired its black female vice president of diversity and inclusion. Denise Young Smith’s 20-year career at the company ended over comments she made at a conference. She said, “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.” She added, “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
To anyone raised in the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr., her sentiment is uncontroversial. Judging people by the content of their character requires going more than skin deep. It means you need to understand a person’s knowledge, values, experience, and goals. RedBalloon is giving employers and employees a way to find each other based on who they are, not what they are.
Lately, there has been a lot of conversation about a “national divorce.” There have been think pieces arguing the topic and several interviews with intelligent people who offer convincing arguments on both sides. My personal view is that if we don’t find an uneasy peace in radical federalism, it is not clear how we solve the level of balkanization that is only getting worse. Everyone talking about it seems to note that the side of freedom has been slow to build durable parallel institutions.
One facet of this is connecting people and opportunities in order to make a living. Whether or not we hang together, Americans need to be able to build networks of like-minded individuals. Andrew Crapuchettes created RedBalloon to do just that for people who believe in fundamental individual rights.
RedBalloon was founded in 2021 as the solution to the ever-growing problem of government overreach and “cancel culture” invading the American workplace. RedBalloon connects like-minded businesses and Americans who seek the freedom to work without the fear of discrimination against personal beliefs, infringement on constitutional rights, or invasion of medical privacy. We pioneered RedBalloon to honor and celebrate the American liberties that make this country great. We strive to empower employers to preserve these liberties for their workforce, and to place talented Americans into careers that will value their freedom and prioritize their success.
It sounds like a great place to start a job search for employers concerned with productivity and employees who want to work. Maybe even an unwoke former HR director.
CEO Andrew Crapuchettes introduce RedBalloon:
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