Big Brother, or his gender-neutral persona, is flexing at you

On the march toward their preferred frontier, progressives muscle up pressure in order to enlist or exclude

I’ve never been privileged to own beachfront property in southern California — can you say lack of stupendous wealth? — so I had to enjoy ocean views while standing on public land when working in or visiting the formerly Golden State.

Watching the waves crash on the rocks in La Jolla one time more than a decade ago, my nephew, Charles, and I concluded that California’s not a bad place to live, except the left-wing politicians won’t leave you alone. They come for you.

Along a similar line of seeing people under a boss’s power being conscripted into a cause mandated by management, I was shocked a few days ago online to see workers at a place where I used to toil proclaiming “gay pride” month. The post said that part of the month’s celebration included “a discussion about talking to kids.”

“Talking to kids” about homosexuality and other varieties or spin-offs? And this wasn’t even a Disney business. When I worked there less than a decade ago, it was a conservative major corporation that would have considered this unthinkable. There was, for sure, no mandated “celebrate Christ” month or “Right to Life” month. But the social revolutionaries apparently came pounding on the door of the executive suite within the last few years — as we also have seen happening at a number of other major businesses that push very political positions definitely on one side of the aisle.

Longtime opinion editor David Mastio was pressured out of his job at USA Today after he offended its woke staffers by tweeting, “People who are pregnant are also women,” and their firm idea that men can get pregnant actually is only an “opinion.”

In a Fox News Digital interview posted July 1, Mastio described the uproar fueled by offended LGBTQ staffers. Fox said Mastio recalled that “USA Today editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll and editorial-page editor Kristen DelGuzzi brought him into a meeting to inform him about his new job description and a $30,000 salary cut, offering a caveat that if he deleted the offending tweets, ‘she would not cut my salary as much’.”

When his job security became more tenuous, Mastio got a lawyer and decided it was time to leave.

In an article posted at the New York Post June 23, Mastio wrote of USA Today’s parent company, Gannett: “Gannett’s top editors and publishers are filling the company with a cadre of young college graduates who share a narrow ‘woke’ ideology that is alien to the values of most of its readers.” He added that Gannett and USA Today’s “top leaders” have “lost control of its newsrooms, which are writing off half their potential readers to pursue activist staffers’ narrow political agendas. It won’t be long before that hits the bottom line — if it hasn’t already.”