OK, so the reason I used a series of clearly very different political beliefs people can have was to make a point about consistency of freedom of belief & speech which includes the freedom to choose not to listen to people pontificating about their religion & politics. https://twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/1387312715169947650

There is almost no-one who wouldn't object to being forced to hear an employer or work colleague go on about at least one of those. This means there is almost no-one who would never think that a 'no talking about politics at work' rule/expectation would be good in some situations

The thing is that while there are people - committed ideologues - who knowingly and after significant thought genuinely believe that everyone in their workplace should be forced to listen to & affirm their own belief system - way more who are going along with this don't.

They haven't thought it through & can still be reached by the golden rule - If I wouldn't like to have certain political beliefs imposed on me in places where I cannot get away, perhaps I shouldn't do that to others or (go along with it being done to others).

100 people will now tell me I am being very naive & this is yet another manifestation of my misguided belief that people are generally sincere & well-intentioned. But I don't think it is & my work with Counterweight supports me in this belief.

When we engage with employers who are implementing or planning to implement policies & programmes that train people in belief systems they don't think are factually true or ethically sound & require them to affirm those beliefs...

...very few of them are willing to explicitly admit that this is what they are actually doing. Instead they waffle around the subject & desperately try to avoid saying "Yes, we think our employees should have an ideology forced on them"

This is extremely frustrating but it also gives grounds for hope because it indicates that at some level they feel liberalism & freedom of belief are good things & are having cognitive dissonance between that & supporting Critical Social Justice Aims.

We need to make this dissonance stronger & make employers choose. Either you support your employees right to their own ethical frameworks & the privacy of their own minds OR you coerce them into policies & training programmes which compel them to affirm CSJ beliefs.

This is why the emails I help people write to their employers typically end in a few straightforward questions that the employee would like straightforward answers to.

Eg, Please assure me that:
I will be allowed to maintain my own political/ethical/religious beliefs.
I will be allowed to disagree with beliefs I think are wrong or unethical.
I will not be forced to undertake training intended to examine the contents of my mind & retrain it.

Typically, this results in the employer asking the employee to have a meeting in which they can waffle vaguely about the importance of diversity, equity & inclusion & the company's commitment to dismantling its own biases & not answer the questions.

Employees should anticipate that but also have realistic expectations of how it will go. However, they have their short list of questions (my examples were general but they're often more specifically geared at particular policies & training plans) & can press for clear answers.

So they can say "Yes, certainly, but could you please also just reassure me on these 3/4/5 specific points?" And keep asking for this very politely & reasonably to have them answered in writing.

It is better not to say directly "I want you to answer these questions in writing" but after the meeting, you could email and say something like "Thanks for your explanation today. It was very useful. Just to clarify the finer points...<repeat questions>

Keep repeating questions until employer has to either confirm the employee's right to their own political/ethical/religious beliefs & privacy of their own mind or explicitly say they intend to deny them those rights.

Two other outcomes may also happen to enable the employer to continue to refuse to answer the questions. One of these is good & you need to be able to recognise it & accept it. One of them is bad & you need to be prepared for it, unfortunately.

The good one is that your employer will refuse to answer the questions but gradually back off from the plans they had been making to retrain people's brains to CSJ ideology in a way that allows them to save face. Recognise this as a victory even if they concede nothing explicitly

The bad one is that your employer will find a reason to fire you to stop you from asking them uncomfortable questions. This is much easier to do in the US than in the UK because of a much more libertarian ethos in employment in the US.

This is why the first question we ask on our form for people seeking help is "Which country do you live in?" This is essential to strategizing accurately & creating action plans to help people push back the incoming CSJ without getting fired.

It is a strange reality that while the US has much stronger legal protections for freedom of belief & speech than the UK precisely because of the libertarian ethos on which it was founded, this also allows corporations to deny individuals freedom of belief & speech more easily.

I think it's a similar phenomenon to the one in which the US has much stronger stated commitments to secularism than the UK which still has a state religion but religious belief still has a much bigger presence & social influence in the US than it does in the UK.