Wow. In her non-inclusive decision to oust Peter Thiel from her “Project Include,” Ellen Pao expresses the most un-American of values. There has always — until the increasingly-Marxist political Left in the U.S. began to erode it — been a healthy separation here between one’s personal life, one’s professional life, and one’s political life: it’s long been taboo among the cultured and educated classes to punish anyone in one sphere for what he or she did in another.
This began to erode, thanks to the thoughtless short-term interest of the Left in punishing its enemies to the detriment of long-term comity, with actions like the attacks on the Tea Party, the Chick-fil-a boycotts, and the firing of Brendan Eich over political contributions — which generated equal-and-opposite (if not immediately apparent) cultural forces. It continued through the targeted harassment of other conservatives (including powerless everyday people, some tarred with hoaxes) and begat increasing cultural frictions. The media’s efforts to deliberately socially engineer and control our culture — like the pervasive liberal bias in news media and the progressive media collusion behind the #Gamergate backlash — threw gasoline on the searing cultural frictions created by the Left’s extreme activism and violation of the autonomy of people’s personal/professional/political lives, and begat the Alt-Right and other forces which are only now coming into their own.
And Leftists like Pao are doubling-down on their mistakes, which will only further divide us all and increase the long-term strength of the “regressive backlash” to such “progressive extremism.” Severing ties with Y Combinator over its work with Peter Thiel because of Thiel’s pro-Trump politics, adds yet another layer of unhealthy discrimination to the mix — Pao’s Project Include is doing the equivalent of firing a company for that company’s choice to not fire a particular employee for that employee’s political support of a major-party candidate. Put more straightforwardly: “This is a Democrat shop. Your company hired a Republican. Fire him, or we’ll fire you.” The danger is obvious. And turnabout is fair play…
Pao tries to hide the essence of what she’s done (and the toxicity of its potential contagion elsewhere) by trying to paint Thiel’s support of Donald Trump as somehow different from support of any other major-party candidate. Trump is an exceptional danger, she claims — except that the Left already used that argument about Mitt Romney, and about John McCain before him, and even about Bush in his second-term election. It uses that same argument about the “basket of Deplorables” and the Alt-Right, as it did about the Tea Party — trying to conflate disagreements over border enforcement, culture, entitlement dependency, etc., with racism and whatever-ism.
When Ellen Pao was made CEO of Reddit and cracked down on freedom of expression there by conservatives and the “politically incorrect,” both Reddit and the larger culture suffered; this is because in culture, as in physics: For every action, there is an equal-and-opposite reaction. Twitter is likewise now suffering financially and culturally because of its similar embrace of “SJW” politically-correct extremism and platform censorship — which ironically has only grown and strengthened the Alt-Right and other “Deplorables,” nudging them towards the mainstream in the process.
Trying to “Brendan Eich” Peter Thiel continues down the path of Mutually Assured Destruction. Instead, we must redraw the distinctions and rebuild the walls which the Left thoughtlessly tore down; we must rebuild and respect the distinctions between peoples’ personal lives, professional lives, and political lives. The reason it’s wrong to fire someone for being gay is, at its base, the same reason it’s wrong to fire someone for his or her politics. If we recognize the sovereign distinctions between the three spheres of our lives — which overlap, but need not interfere with each other — then we can reverse our current sociopolitical discord. If we fail to do so, we will deepen our schism; and it won’t end well for either side.
