CNN star and former Obama advisor Van Jones has apparently had it with “woke” America festering its way into the workplace.
Jones’ shocking admission stunned a recent CNN bipartisan panel, which discussed politics in the workplace.
Here’s what unfolded, and what Jones did that shocked liberal viewers of CNN.
“For some companies, the new message to employees is ‘Check your politics and your activism at the door when you come to work,’” CNN host Abby Phillip told the panel last week.
“CEOs are making one thing clear, ‘The office is not the public square,’ and they‘re probably not wrong about that.”
Phillip highlighted that politics have grown into nearly every corner of society in recent years, saying:
“And it‘s not to say that you can‘t have free speech in your life, but employers are just like, ‘Do your job and don‘t do anything else.’”
Jones, who has previously argued for woke and DEI, said their time has passed.
“This is not going to make me popular, but I’m not mad [about the change], because it got ridiculous,” he said. “I mean, I‘m an employer and at a certain point, your Slack channel just turns into Vietnam every other day because something happened that had nothing to do with the workplace.”
He noted the headache of having to bring in counselors for such moments of crisis, saying, “This is not camp, guys, we’re trying to make money.”
“So, I enjoyed the moment, for a while, where we were having our reckonings about everything. We done wrecked, OK?” he said, sparking laughter from his fellow panelist.
“We went from reckoning to wrecked. We need to move on.”
Take a listen —
Jones’ fellow panelists agreed.
“I take a similar approach,” CNN global affairs commentator Sabrina Singh replied.
“I think what you do in your own free time, whether you want to participate in political activism or whatever it is, whatever cause you take up, I think you have to do that on your own time.”
During the segment Phillip recalled working on a book about activist Jesse Jackson, noting how he once pressured companies from the outside to adopt more progressive policies. Years later, she said, public perception shifted after a flood of corporate PR statements — so much so that “people may have gotten fooled that these corporations were doing anything other than what they needed to do to survive.”
Republican strategist Lance Trover humorously noted the historic moment of bipartisan agreement on the show.
“You need to mark this moment in this show down,” he said.
“This may be where we all agree here at this table, here tonight. I mean, yeah, ‘Welcome to the real world, Gen-Z wokesters.’ I don‘t know what to tell you.”