by Frank Holmes, reporter
In just a few months, Donald Trump has driven home one message from the streets of Washington to the offices of America’s far-Left corporations: It’s not 2020 anymore.
And the message of America’s MAGA turn has even penetrated the most liberal area in the country: the nation’s HR offices.
After years of coddling Gen Z’s ideological tantrums like kid gloves, employers are telling their workers to get their political protests, left-wing activism, and liberal talking points out of the workplace.
After the 2020 “racial reckoning,” corporations made ritualistic donations to Black Lives Matter, hosted Pride events during the month of June, and hosted special listening sessions for employees to denounce their company’s environmental record.
But now, companies are taking a “1950s approach,” said Jenny Dearborn, an officer at the management consulting firm BTS. That means: Shut up and do your job.
The Wall Street Journal summed the whole phenomenon up in a headline last week: “The Boss Has Had It With All the Office Activists.”
CEOs have to tell their workers, “You are an employee, you’re not a volunteer,” said Jim Fielding, a consultant who used to work as an executive at Disney.
Companies are making sure their employees get the message—loud and clear.
Last week, Microsoft fired two employees—Riki Fameli and Anna Hattle—who broke into President Brad Smith’s office to protest the use of its software by Israel.
That came four months after the company terminated two other employees—Ibtihal Aboussad and Vaniya Agrawal—who held a small demonstration at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event.
In May, Tesla fired an employee named Matthew LaBrot, about a month after he started a website called Tesla Employees Against Elon, targeting the then-DOGE leader Elon Musk.
“We are not the problem,’’ LaBrot wrote. “The problem is Elon.”
Elon’s company begged to differ—and sent LaBrot begging in the unemployment line.
As incredible as it sounds, Democratic officials are standing up for the corporate CEOs.
In a sign the Left has gone too far, even Van Jones—a former San Francisco Maoist activist who became Barack Obama’s Green Jobs Czar— has had enough.
“This is not gonng makle me popular, but I’m not mad, because it got ridiculous!” Jones told CNN’s Abby Phillip on Saturday. “At a certain point, your Slack channel just became Vietnam.”
He had some straight advice for would-be activists in the workforce, too.
“This is not camp, guys! We are trying to make money,” said Van Jones. “We need to move on.”
Sabrina Singh, a deputy press director in the Biden White House, agreed, “I think, (at) your place of work: Just do your job. Just do your job.”
In some cases, the companies are helping their employees stay focused, and employed.
🚨NEW: CNN Panel REJOICES over companies *FINALLY* cracking down on political activism at work🚨
VAN JONES: "I'm not mad — because it got ridiculous!"@DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/GoJUg8iGUi
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) August 30, 2025
In May, Microsoft employees said the bosses got so upset over nonstop political talk that they blocked all emails containing the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” “genocide,” or “apartheid” (but not “Israel”).
The company said it just tried to stop overzealous employees from spamming the entire company with their hot takes.
“To clarify, emails are not being blocked or censored, unless they are being sent to large numbers of random distribution groups,” the company’s chief communications officer, Frank Shaw, told CNBC. “Over the past couple of days, a number of emails have been sent to tens of thousands of employees across the company and we have taken measures to try and reduce those emails to those that have not opted in.”
But employees say their emails got blocked, even if they had only a tiny recipients’ list.
The workplace activists got around the filter by using such hacks as misspelling the word “P4lestine.”
That ingenuity may explain why more than nine out of 10 American workers said they have had political disagreements at work—and more than eight out of 10 said the clashes happened after Donald Trump took office.
Many are willing to lie about matters if it means shutting down an argument. One in every five workers admitted expressing fake political views in front of co-workers just to keep the peace, in a survey treported last September by Kickresume.
Of course, one side of the political spectrum is over-represented in workplace political rants. The America First Policy Institute obtained the work emails of senior career bureaucrats in the federal government and found, near the time of the 2020 election, 95 percent of all political emails expressed left-wing views.
It’s not even political issues alone that bosses are willing to throttle these days.
The America First Policy Institute just published a report showing that 95% of career federal employees who email about politics at work express liberal views. pic.twitter.com/di8ADLp21g
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 16, 2025
JPMorgan Chase disabled comments on its internal webpage in January, when it announced its 30,000 employees had to return to work in an office.
Business executives are just trying to protect their bottom line.
American workers engage in 208 million “acts of incivility” to each other daily, costing employers $2.1 billion in lost productivity every single day, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which compiles its Civility Index.
“SHRM says the spike in office incivility is fueled by broader socio-political tensions, pandemic-induced stress, and what Link calls ‘digital bravery,’” which means they say things online they would never say to someone’s face, according to Fortune. “Simply put, people feel emboldened to say things online that would never fly face-to-face. “Differences in political views, social issues, and even immigration policy are leading to workplace friction, as employees struggle to navigate heated debates and cultural divides.”
Despite the clearest messages that Americans don’t want to be beaten over the head with liberal political views while they’re trying to do their jobs, Democratic activists still haven’t gotten it. Vanity Fair threatened a mass walkout if editors go through with a plan to feature First Lady Melania Trump, who is a former supermodel, on its cover.
Maybe the magazine’s editors should send all these employees off to the welfare office.
After all, isn’t incurable stupidity a fireable offense?