Netflix Cracks Down on Employee Activism. Is Woke Capital in Retreat?

Not everything that goes woke goes broke. But if you’re going broke, you better ditch the woke.

That’s what’s going on at Netflix, the online subscription streaming service that’s fallen on hard times.

Netflix announced that it lost over 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of the year and expects to lose millions more by the end of July. The company also lost tens of billions of dollars in market value after these announcements.

Clearly, Netflix is operating on much tighter margins than it once did.

The next step it took was remarkable given the collective left-wing turn of corporate America.

Netflix released a “culture” memo to employees that included sections telling them that if the shows or artists in the company’s programming offends them, they will have to deal with it or find another job.

“Not everyone will like—or agree with—everything on our service,” the memo says in a section about artistic expression. “While every title is different, we approach them based on the same set of principles: we support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.”

The memo went even further, saying, “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

This appears to be a response to protests of Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special “The Closer,” which provoked employee walkouts.

In the special, Chappelle made some—by his standards—rather mild jokes about transgender ideology. Apparently, the most “offensive” thing he said was that “gender is a fact.”

Employees melted down.

Woke zealots don’t have a sense of humor. And they don’t like jokes, as a counterprotester found out when he attended the Netflix walkout.

The disciples of tolerance don’t tolerate even the hint of poking fun at the things they care about. For all their talk about protecting marginalized groups, they are firmly committed to marginalizing, canceling, and destroying anyone who disagrees with their cherished narratives.

Given this reality, it’s hard not to see how this is problematic for an entertainment company trying to appeal to diverse audiences and not just the cult of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Netflix is doing even more than just cracking down on out-of-control employees. Several woke shows are also reportedly being shelved. The list includes Ibram X. Kendi’s “Antiracist Baby,” a children’s program that was going to be aimed at preschoolers.

The show, based on Kendi’s children’s book of the same name, was meant to “leverage the power of earwormy songs to empower kids and their caregivers with simple tools to uproot racism in ourselves and society.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/20/netflix-cracks-down-on-employee-activism-is-woke-capital-in-retreat

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Elon Musk Responds to Twitter Employee Mocking His Asperger’s Syndrome

Alex Martinez, identified by Project Veritas as Twitter’s lead client partner, was allegedly recorded criticizing Musk’s takeover attempt and made a reference to Musk previously saying he has Asperger’s.

“He has Asperger’s. So he’s special!” Martinez said in the video, released Tuesday. “You’re special needs! You’re literally special needs.” He added, “So I can’t even take what you’re saying seriously.”

Musk issued a response to the video, saying: “Twitter exec trashing free speech & mocking people with Asperger’s …” He then pinned the Twitter post to his page for a period of time.

Another video that was released by Project Veritas a day before appeared to show another Twitter employee, senior engineer Siru Murugesan, who said in the undercover video that Twitter “does not believe in free speech” and accused Musk of being a “capitalist.” His fellow colleagues, meanwhile, are “socialist” and “commie as [expletive].”

“Ideologically, it does not make sense, like, because we’re actually censoring the right and not the left,” Murugesan said to an undercover Project Veritas journalist. “So everyone on the right will be like, ‘Bro, it’s okay to say it, just gotta tolerate it.’ The left will be like, ‘No, I’m not gonna tolerate it. I need it censored or else I’m not gonna be on the platform.’ So it does that on the right. It’s true. There is bias.”

Murugesan said the idea of Musk, the world’s richest person, taking over the company wouldn’t be favored by some of Twitter’s employees. However, Murugesan said he would be fine with the takeover.

“Some of my colleagues are like super left, left, left, left, left… They’re like, ‘This would be my last day,’” he said in the video. “We did all we could to, like, revolt against it. A lot of the employees revolted against it, but at the end of the day, the board of directors have the say and then they acted on their best interests because they didn’t wanna get sued.”

Last month, Musk and Twitter’s board announced he would attempt to purchase the firm for $44 billion, although the deal hit a snag after the billionaire started to publicly question how many automated accounts or bots were present on the platform. On Friday, he said he is still committed to the deal.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/elon-musk-responds-to-twitter-employee-mocking-his-aspergers-syndrome_4475677.html

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Justice coming for the ‘Dirty 51’ Hunter Biden laptop liars

One of the most galling aspects of the Hunter Biden laptop saga is that the 51 former intelligence officials who played such a critical role in suppressing The Post’s stories and giving Joe Biden cover before the 2020 election have never been brought to account.

The “Dirty 51” lied by painting our stories as Russian disinformation in an Oct. 19, 2020, letter they signed and delivered to Politico five days after The Post exposé and three days before the final presidential debate of the election campaign.

They used the institutional weight of their powerful former roles to legitimize partisan political propaganda designed to smear The Post and everyone associated with the story and dissuade the rest of the media from looking deeper into the laptop.

The letter, titled “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden emails,” and signed by former CIA Directors John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Mike Hayden, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and other ex-spooks, claimed the material on Hunter’s hard drive “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” although not one of them had seen it.

Their lie “probably affected the outcome” of the 2020 presidential race, as former Attorney General William Barr has said, describing the letter as “partisan hackery,” “baseless” and signed by “a coterie of retired intelligence officials who had lost their professional bearings.”

Yet they have never apologized or retracted their lie. In fact, when The Post contacted the group in March, after the New York Times belatedly acknowledged the laptop was real, some, like Clapper, doubled down.

One former CIA officer who signed the letter, John Sipher, boasted that he took “special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump.”

“I lost the election for Trump?” wrote Sipher during a Twitter spat with a former Trump official. “Well then I [feel] pretty good about my influence.”

The arrogance of these Deep Staters tells you that they believe they will get away with lying to influence an election.

But there’s one person with a bee in his bonnet who isn’t going to let the story go: Donald Trump.

The former president has sicced uber-attorney Tim Parlatore on the Dirty 51. On Wednesday, Parlatore launched the first stage of a multi-prong strategy to make those who signed the letter pay for the damage they have wrought to freedom of the press, election integrity and the welfare of the nation.

His goal is to uncover alleged communications between the Dirty 51 and the Biden campaign.

Parlatore began by filing five letters of complaint with the agencies that formerly employed the 51, including the CIA — which counted 43 of its former officials among the group — the National Security Agency, the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense.

‘Egregious breach’

Each letter complains of “an egregious breach” by former agency employees “that appears to have been overlooked by your agency, as it has gone uninvestigated and certainly unpunished. Specifically, the unauthorized publication and dissemination of an intelligence assessment, purportedly based on classified information, that was used wrongfully to influence the outcome of an election.”

It points out that each of the Dirty 51 was “bound by the lifelong obligation” to submit the letter to their former agencies for pre-publication security review to ensure it didn’t contain classified information, a process that could take several months. The letter then would have been stamped with a disclaimer that the agency was not vouching for its accuracy.

“That would have destroyed the usefulness of the document,” says Parlatore, “plus the process would have delayed it so long, it would not be useful” because the election would have been over.

Letters were sent to John Hoffister Hedley, chairman of the Prepublication Classification Review Board at the CIA; Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command; Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Caroline Krass, general counsel, Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review; and Avril Haines, director of the Information Management Division in the Office of the DNI.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/18/justice-coming-for-dirty-51-hunter-biden-laptop-liars/

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Australia set to sign Geneva’s Global Pandemic Treaty

The ‘New Normal’ of medical fascism is coming regardless of how Australians vote at the federal election.

Having acquired a taste for globalised control during the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organisation has teamed up with vaccine manufacturers, philanthropic billionaires, and power-crazed world leaders to create a ‘Global Pandemic Treaty’ in Geneva.

It is set to form part of the ‘one health’ approach proposed by the WHO and has been pitched by its creators as a way to overcome the inconvenient battle between – as they put it – globalism and statism.

According to International Affairs who were reviewing the treaty, the globalist approach ‘shares many overlapping values with that of a transnational cosmopolitan, medical humanitarianism or moral egalitarian world-view, rooted in the Kantian logic of universal community’ while the statist approach is a nationalist one that might ‘undermine’ global efforts.

In June of 2021, Scott Morrison commented on the proposed treaty, saying:

‘It’s essential that we strengthen global (disease) surveillance and provide the World Health Organisation with the authority and the capacity to do this important job for all the peoples of the world. If we are to deliver on this ambitious reform agenda, then we must work together and put other issues aside.’

Yes, the same Prime Minister who attempted to escape criticism by saying ‘there’s no such thing as vaccine mandates’ is champing at the bit to grant the WHO absolute control over the health choices of Australian citizens. It amounts to extending similar emergency powers to the WHO that Daniel Andrews gifted himself in Victoria – except Australians can’t vote the WHO out of power. As for Labor, they have laid down at the feet of the WHO, tummies up and paws in the air like dogs waiting for a rub.

The advertised pretext for a global health treaty is that countries were wrongly allowed to take bespoke approaches to Covid – in particular, their vaccine roll-outs. According to the WHO, this endangered the health of the whole planet.

A more accurate reading of the situation comes from discussions had at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations launched at the World Economic Forum in 2017, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and a consortium of nations that include Australia. The Liberal government pledged a further $100 million to CEPI in March, 2022 to add to the $1.5 billion it has raised from other governments.

As explained in a previous Spectator Australia article, CEPI’s mission is to create ‘equitable access to vaccines’ because they do not like the volatility (and competition) of the free market. This is the same organisation that poured a fortune into RNA and mRNA vaccines for the WHO’s DiseaseX scenario which – less than a year later – was put into emergency production to combat Covid as a ‘proof of concept’ exercise. Their stated objective from the beginning, long before Covid, has been to find a way to force Western governments to purchase vaccines in bulk for the Third World under the banner of ‘equity’.

The handling of the Covid pandemic is being used as an excuse to justify what was already designed and publicised. In this light, the proposed Global Pandemic Treaty is – first and foremost – a trillion-dollar business deal.

Being discussed is a $10 billion per year ‘preparedness fund’ along with an additional $100 billion emergency fund – that you pay for. Who knows what else is coming…

The World Health Organisation often complains about free will when it comes to national pandemic responses. We now know that nations like Sweden were able to provide real-world data that contradicted much of the ‘approved’ health advice issued by the WHO. We also know that the WHO ‘leaned on’ European nations that tried to go their own way with health directives.

If anything, one of the great weaknesses of the Covid pandemic response was the uniform approach enacted by world leaders that copied Communist China in their locking down of nations, unethical medical coercion of citizens, and widespread police brutality. How much worse would the behaviour of state premiers, prime ministers, and presidents have been if their actions were ‘legalised’ by an international treaty with no possible recourse for citizens? There is certainly no confirmation that the WHO took the correct approach, considering some of the countries who deviated from the norm did better than the average of obedient nations.

Worse, the nation that caused the pandemic – China – is one of the notable absences from the treaty. What is the point of enacting the treaty if Patient Zero refuses to come to the table? It’s a bit like the United Nations’ Climate Change promises that don’t include the world’s largest polluter.

Further difficulty is being created by the reputation of the WHO. Historically, the WHO has hardly been a reliable or independent body worthy of wielding absolute power over the global health decisions. Its leader, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was controversially backed by Xi Jinping’s government in a nasty election process. Tedros, in turn, was criticised for shielding China from investigation over the outbreak of Covid that (almost certainly) escaped from a Level 4 Viral Lab in Wuhan. On repeated occasions, advice issued by the WHO was found to be inconsistent or simply wrong, while they issued eye-brow raising changes to long-held dictionary definitions of fundamental concepts like ‘herd immunity’ and ‘vaccines’, let alone the near comical back-flipping on mask advice.

It is not the sort of behaviour that instils confidence. This is before addressing the recorded failures and subsequent investigations into WHO practices in the Third World. If anything, what the world desperately needs is independent thought in pandemic responses – a free market of ideas where merit, not compliance, is given the opportunity to advance health.

If Anthony Albanese signs this treaty, it represents a seismic shift in everything we thought we knew about democracy.

It is likely the treaty will make it possible for a foreign bureaucracy with unacceptably close ties to China to call the shots – literally – on global public health. Universal healthcare was meant to be a voluntary safety net – not a stepping stone to international socialism or the dissolution of body autonomy. That said, the wheels are already falling off, with questions being raised about whether it will be a ‘treaty’ in the legal sense after parts of the WHO Constitution were re-worded.

The vote for this dangerous Pandemic Treaty will be held in Geneva on May 22-28. The Prime Minister of Australia will be there will bells on, ready to sign and absolve himself of the ‘bother’ of responsibility. It is a dream come true for weak leaders who would love nothing better than to let the blame for the next pandemic and the accompanying citizen outrage rest safely offshore.

Among the horrors facing Australia if the treaty were to proceed are the advertised promises of global tracking (most likely through the World Economic Forum’s Digital Identity policy linked to health passes), mandatory vaccination of all citizens, and the ability for the WHO to declare and sustain a pandemic along with its emergency powers.

Lately, international treaties have been used to undemocratically circumnavigate the sovereign will of nations. A treaty is a powerful legal document that leaders use to defy public opinion. While the United Nations cannot force a country to honour its ink-mark (as we saw with China’s shredding of the Sino-British Joint Declaration), Western leaders frequently brandish these treaties as security blankets to justify unpopular policy.

‘The ongoing chaos of this pandemic only underlines why the world needs an ironclad global agreement to set the rule of the game for pandemic preparedness and response,’ said WHO Director General, Dr Tedros.

Or – stay with me on this one – the WHO could do its actual job and properly investigate China and its medical partners for dangerous and experimental gain of function research in dodgy labs.

Will Australia vote for freedom?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/australia-set-to-sign-genevas-global-pandemic-treaty/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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