FPI / June 22, 2020
Corporate WATCH
By Joe SchaefferOn June 9, telecommunications giant T-Mobile's CEO Mike Sievert haughtily revealed via social media that the company was dropping all advertising for populist nationalist Tucker Carlson's highly rated Fox News program. "Bye-bye Tucker Carlson," Sievert tauntingly tweeted, mocking the personal political views of millions of actual and potential T-Mobile customers.
The move is hardly out of place for the insanely woke company. T-Mobile's corporate culture is an absolute cult devoted to some of the ugliest and most divisive facets of the Cultural Marxist "diversity" battle-ax. T-Mobile prominently champions Black Lives Matter, plays up white guilt and engages in perhaps the most aggressive pro-transgender agenda of any large corporation in America today.
T-Mobile joined the lemming march of major corporations expressing its fealty to Black Lives Matter in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis while under police custody. "I want to be clear that we at T-Mobile are firm in our belief that Black Lives Matter – and we stand for change, for justice and for equity," CEO Sievert bellowed in an official company statement released June 9, the same day he tweeted out his slap at Carlson.
"[W]e know that systemic racism is real. It has been persistent. And it can't be wished away. If we want a better world, we have to ACT to create it," the statement cried out.
Jon Freier, Executive Vice President of Consumer Markets for T-Mobile, declared his determination to serve in the front lines in the war against racism as early as May 31. "I won't stay silent. I'm sickened beyond sickened tonight," he tweeted. "I'm sickened as to how we arrived here. I understand how we're here. I really do. I'm sickened about ALL of the violence. We must FULLY eradicate racism and begin to heal this country. We must."
Inappropriately bringing his emotional political bias into the workplace, Freier described his actions at a weekly conference call with "over 10,000 employees":
"One person texted me and asserted that I was being political. From my view, pushing the boundaries in an effort to exterminate racism and advance equality is not political. I won't apologize for engaging in a discussion to understand differences, to address realities of some, all in an effort to advance equality for the majority minority frontline team that I lead. I don't think any of us should apologize for that, nor fear some notion that participating or leading this discussion wades into the polarizing topic of politics. Equality is not politics. That's my view, and I'm unapologetic about it."
[...]
"As a person of white privilege, I will be forever grateful for the rest of my days to have had one of the greatest opportunities in the world to lead this incredible team. We have so much more work to do on this topic, so let's get to work. It's time to change."
On June 19 T-Mobile announced that it had brought in radical college professor Ibram X. Kendi to speak to employees on the subject of "systemic racism" for "Juneteenth," an annual day that marks the end of slavery in the United States. Kendi is a hardcore racial radical who has stated that "[t]o fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
As part of this proposal, Kendi wants to create a Department of Anti-Racism to police the thoughts of all public officials. "The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas," he wrote in an absurdly tyrannical 2019 piece for Politico.
Kendi of course is well-rewarded for this kind of racial rabble rousing. He has been named a professor of history at Boston University, where he is the "founder and director" of the sparkling new "BU Center for Antiracist Research." Even in the leftist madhouse that is modern academia, that name is going to be hard to top in terms of its sheer Orwellian nature.
Deanne King is Executive VP and Human Resources Officer for T-Mobile. She announced Kendi's appearance to employees on her Twitter account. Like her fellow exec Freier, King is all-too-willing to assume a posture of white moral inferiority before BLM righteousness.
One can only shudder at the thought of what this executive attitude will mean for white T-Mobile employees moving forward.
But T-Mobile's leftist lunacy is not only expressed on racial issues. The company aggressively promotes the leaden tropes of diversity and inclusiveness throughout its operations. An in-house program known as Insight Out reveals T-Mobile is running something akin to a mind cult to foster wokeness among employees. This "innovative approach to diversity & inclusion" deserves to be quoted at length. According to the company, Insight Out is:
"[A]n ongoing experience that helps every employee, from the most senior executive on down, understand the importance of diversity and the power of inclusion. While we could have taken an 'easier' route to scale this across 52,000 employees with web-based training, in order to achieve the impact we wanted, we knew that the experience couldn’t be a 'one-and-done' training program. Insight Out needed to be an ongoing experience, based on face-to-face interaction, that would enable thoughtful discussions, build trust, and foster a sense of belonging while tackling topics that some might find uncomfortable."
Addressing the "unconscious bias" of employees is a hallmark of this programming:
"The first phase of this multi-year initiative creates a safe space for conversations around biases. The experience encourages everyone at T-Mobile, from the highest leaders on down, to recognize that everyone has bias (both conscious and unconscious) and provides them with interactive scenarios, case studies, and a shared vocabulary with which to discuss how bias affects decisions within their teams."
T-Mobile boasts that it continues to ensnare more and more employees in the diversity brainwashing net. In a June 17 statement noting its "Gay Pride Month" activities titled "Your Fight Is Our Fight," the company noted that:
"Over 39% (and growing) of T-Mobile employees are part of our six diversity and inclusion employee resource groups, and these team members at every level and from every corner of our company set the agenda for [LGBTQ] Pride. This year it is abundantly clear that our Pride belongs to our Black colleagues and the Black community, and we'll stand together to fight for overdue racial equality."
T-Mobile claims it is a proven fact that embracing "diversity" leads to better employee performance. "There is a 30% productivity gain when people are allowed to be their authentic self in the work place," the corporation's official job board quotes marketing director Jen Smith Palmer as saying. Gee, with productivity markers such as this, I wonder why their network went down the other day?
Promoting transgenderism is also a heavy part of T-Mobile's inclusion mantra. In November the company announced that it was "launching new optional name badges for all retail employees that can include employees' personal pronouns."
"These new badges are a prescription for happiness," T-Mobile manager Tiffany Moton declared in an official company statement at the time. "They show that T-Mobile is all-in for inclusion, that we care about our employees' well-being and I am excited to wear them as a conversation starter. The badges will help educate us about addressing others with respect as well as avoid awkward moments like being misgendered, judged or stared at."
The company made it clear that the move was part of a larger effort to embrace gender confusion in its work environment. "In addition to the new pronoun option on name badges, employees are encouraged to add pronouns to email addresses and kick off meetings by sharing pronouns," the statement continued. "The T-Mobile benefits team also just reviewed all of the company's available options looking for gender references, to make sure that options are accommodating for all employees."
As part of its Insight Out employee-conditioning program, T-Mobile in May 2019 released a guide on "how to respond if someone comes out to you as transgender." "Confirm what name and pronouns they are using now" and "Check in about how they want to update the rest of the team" are among the action items listed.
Even more disturbing is a video posted on T-Mobile's official YouTube account in June 2019 to mark "Gay Pride Month." The video features a "transgender activist" offering a brief history of the homosexual rights movement. This activist prominently salutes the Mattachine Society, a pro-homosexual group founded in 1950 by known pedophilia supporter Harry Hay. Hay was a stout defender of the North American Man/Boy Love Association during that organization's brief and repulsive heyday, and even declared:
"Because if the parents and friends of gays are truly friends of gays, they would know from their gay kids that the relationship with an older man is precisely what thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-old kids need more than anything else in the world."
T-Mobile, owned by German global conglomerate Deutsche Telekom AG, frequently paints itself as possessing an outside-the-box set of corporate values that "continues to disrupt the wireless industry by staking our business on putting people first." Its actions speak otherwise. T-Mobile absorbed top competitor Sprint in a high-profile and complex merger that finally closed in April. On June 15 the company wiped out the jobs of hundreds of Sprint employees in one quick stroke via the highly personal and caring process of a six-minute mass conference call.
T-Mobile serves as a classic example of global capitalism ratcheting up superficial howlings about "diversity" as it reduces actual customer and worker choice. Examined from this broad view, it can be seen that hollow corporate "inclusion" theater is far from the harmless pandering it is too often brushed off as but a valuable weapon to further the elitist plan to usher in a world of crushing monopolistic homogeneity.
Joe Schaeffer is the former Managing Editor of The Washington Times National Weekly Edition. His columns appear at WorldTribune.com, LibertyNation.com and FreePressInternational.org.
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