by Vox Day
For example, when I read the bizarre story of the sudden decline of a once-popular church near my childhood home in Minnesota being reduced to 800 people meeting in a hotel, I knew without even needing to ask anyone what had happened. The church, a Lutheran church called North Heights that my parents had attended in the 1990s, had been infiltrated by SJWs, converged, lost its ability to perform its primary function as a Christian church, and found itself on the brink of failure. What was astonishing to me was just how fast what looked like a rock-solid community institution had gone downhill and collapsed.
Founded in 1946, the church was a fixture in the northern suburbs of St. Paul, with two locations offering seven worship services to 7,000 parishioners. It was one of Minnesota’s first megachurches, which always struck me as a little ironic since the senior pastor since 1961, a quiet, humble Scandinavian man named Morris Vaagnes, could not have been further from the smooth, slick-haired Joel Osteen clones that one tends to picture when one thinks of a megachurch. While I seldom attended it, preferring Greg Boyd’s Woodland Hills instead, my mother sang in the Christmas choir there, my aunt and uncle and cousins were members, and if I recall correctly, several of my friends’ children attended North Heights Christian Academy, a private K-8 Christian school that was founded by the church. It was a church full of good, decent people, nice Minnesota Lutherans in whom even Garrison Keillor could find no fault, who loved Jesus, loved their fellow man, and liked nothing better than to send their children to Haiti or Trinidad for two weeks in the winter to build homes and churches for the less fortunate. It was a wealthy church too, located as it was near the lake homes of Shoreview and North Oaks, and the parking lot was always filled with Audis, and BMWs, and Mercedes.
Pastor Vaagnes was a genuine man of God, who initially appeared a little weak and bumbling in person, but grew in stature in the pulpit, preaching straight from the Bible with a powerful evangelical fervor that belied his traditional white robes and otherwise unprepossessing demeanor. However, he retired in 1999, and as is so often the case when a strong leader retires, was succeeded by men who were considerably less capable of assuming the burden of leadership. In 2007, a woman by the name of Mindy Bak joined what had become a bloated 88-person staff, and with the help of other SJWs who had also infiltrated the church, managed to get herself appointed interim senior pastor in 2014 through a series of highly political machinations circumventing the traditionalists on the church’s Board of Elders. This was rather a remarkable accomplishment, considering that a considerable percentage of the church members were relatively traditional Christians who held to the conventional Biblical teachings on the proper roles of men and women in church ministry.
It was arguably even more remarkable that within just 18 months, attendance had fallen nearly 80 percent, over half the staff was laid off, both total and per-capita giving drastically declined, and the original location was shut down, in part due to “a lack of elevator access for the disabled.”
What could possibly motivate a pastor, even a female one, to destroy her own church in this manner? According to one former member quoted in the Star Tribune, the answer is pretty simple. “She hates men.”
And on March 13, 2016, less than two years after she had been appointed interim senior pastor, Mindy Bak presided over the final service at North Heights Lutheran in front of the last 900 members of the congregation. Her work was done and what for sixty years was a thriving church community had been destroyed.
A long-running schism proves fatal to North Heights Lutheran… Prejudice, sexism and scapegoating all played a role in the church’s downfall, Bak said. Members of the breakaway group didn’t want a female leader, Bak said, particularly one that didn’t shy away from issues that predecessors had refused to address. They didn’t want to hear about the prejudices of North Heights or the truth about its finances, she said. Nor did they want to embrace her message that to love Christ you must love even those people who are challenging to love. A sign in the church hall read, in part, “Throughout our history, many grew to be the followers of Jesus we were called to be. But our willingness to love one another, in spite of division, never came. For decades upon decades, selfishness and pride have brought us to this place of self-destruction. We are a cautionary tale of a dying church.”
—–“Deep divide dooms onetime megachurch North Heights Lutheran”, Star Tribune, 13 March 2016
The convergence, decline, and fall of North Heights Lutheran is indeed a cautionary tale. But it is vital to remember that the SJW convergence of North Heights did not begin with the ascendance of Mindy Bak to the interim senior pastorship. Nor did it begin when she began working at the church in 2007; the fact that she was hired as a pastor indicates that the convergence actually began in the late 1990s, when the church failed to successfully vet its new employees, pastors, and elders. By the time the convergence is visible to the average member of the institution, it is usually too late to salvage the institution in the absence of a strong leader who understands what is at stake, does not fear conflict, and is willing to stand up to the vicious slander and underhanded tactics that will be unleashed against him.
The Organizational Convergence Sequence
STAGE ONE: Infiltration
The infiltration stage usually begins when an institution is at its peak. While it is not unheard of for SJWs to attempt to infiltrate up-and-coming institutions, particularly those in glamorous or trendy industries, the usual pattern is for the SJW to seek out healthy, successful organizations into which they can safely burrow. This is necessary, because SJWs are very seldom capable of pretending to be productive employees for very long, particularly in any area of responsibility where the metrics are objective and their inability to perform quickly becomes apparent to their managers and coworkers. This lack of competence is why SJWs are vehemently opposed to meritocracy, as well as to any system of management or governance that is based on merit or even relies upon objective measures for promotion or compensation. Any job that mostly involves make-work and has no bearing on the day-to-day functioning of the organization is one that will draw SJWs like flies to roadkill, particularly if it is a job that focuses primarily upon some element of social justice such as inclusivity, outreach, or community.
SJWs are particularly drawn to HR in the corporate world and community management in the open source world, because these organizational roles tend to combine the two things that SJWs seek most, power over others and an absence of personal responsibility. They can also be found in volunteer roles; SJWs tend to have a lot of time on their hands and volunteering for the jobs that no one else wants to do is one of their favorite ways to make themselves appear indispensable to those who are in charge of the organization. Of course, SJWs are not the only helpful individuals whose assistance can prove undesirable; one churchgoer told me an amusing story of a woman who had been assisting with the Sunday School at his church for some time, who volunteered to take on the responsibility of decorating the church for the holidays when no one else stepped forward. After she unveiled her enthusiastic plans, it took some degree of tact to explain to her that Harry Potter and wizards were not an appropriate theme for a Christian holiday. But if you want to identify the initial SJW in an organization, look for a longtime volunteer, usually female, who is quiet, selfless, well-regarded by everyone, and heavily relied upon by the leadership.
Don’t expect SJW infiltrators to be blue-haired, frothing-mad genderqueer activists with thick-framed eyeglasses. And don’t expect them to unleash the usual monologues on equality, inclusivity, and the inchoate evil of straight white men on unsuspecting strangers either. SJW infiltrators instinctively understand the need to keep their views to themselves. The initial infiltrator is almost invariably going to be the exception, the woman who is just like one of the guys, the black man who doesn’t have a racial chip on his shoulder, or the gay guy who prefers beer and football to methamphetamine-fueled all-night raves. He, or in most cases, she, is going to present as a generally
normal individual, who just happens to be a little more quietly liberal than the organizational norm.
Sometimes the infiltration is incidental. SJWs need jobs just like anyone else, after all, and they are more than willing to exploit the well-known tendency of the average white employer to want to score affirmative action points or pick up a get-out-of-sexism-free card by hiring a woman, particularly for a job in a heavily male occupation. This inexplicable temptation to knowingly hire less-qualified candidates the employer knows will probably not fit in well with the existing employees is a form of what I think of as Republican Candidate Syndrome. The connection may not seem immediately apparent, but bear with me, since it actually makes sense.
Now, have you ever noticed that in recent U.S. presidential election cycles, in the early stages of the campaign for the Republican nomination, a woefully unqualified and unlikely candidate whom no one has ever heard of not only announces that he is running for president as a Republican, but also does inexplicably well in the early caucuses and primaries? In 2015, it was Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon. Four years before, it was Herman Cain, a former CEO and Federal Reserve banker. Before that, the token black candidate was Alan Keyes, an ambassador to the United Nations, who ran for the Republican nomination in 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2008. Now, my family was heavily involved in Republican politics when I was a teenager, and I cannot tell you how many times I heard Republicans declare how much they would absolutely love to vote for a well-spoken black man like Carson, or Cain, or Keyes, for President. Some Republicans, like former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, got so carried away by Republican Candidate Syndrome that they voted for Barack Obama despite him being a Democrat.
Of course, these Republicans are motivated by nothing more than the desire to signal their virtue and obtain a get-out-of-racism-free card. After all, how can you accuse someone of being racist when he voted for a black man for President? And, of course, the entire excercise turns out to be pure political theater, as futile as the Congressional debt ceiling and as predictable as kabuki. In fact, it is so predictable that you can expect to reliably win money on the prediction sites by betting that the token black Republican candidate will overperform in the early straw polls, then unexpectedly underperform once the primaries start in earnest.
This same desire to virtue-signal, to morally parade one’s social self-righteousness, is also observable in corporate America. The desire to vote for a totally unqualified candidate simply because he is black is no different than the desire to hire a programmer for being a woman or any other minority simply due to his minority status. It is an expression of personal magnanimity, of a generousness of spirit that sets one apart from all the other straight white men who would be so shortsighted as to simply vote, or hire, on the basis of perceived merit and ability.
While there are a whole host of intellectual justifications that have been invented over the years to justify the various forms of affirmative action—indeed, there are entire fields of study now devoted to manufacturing new justifications for the preferential treatment of minorities and searching for evidence to continue appealing to the old reasons—they are not relevant to our purpose of understanding the infiltration stage. What does matter is to understand that this desire to virtue-signal exists in many people, and more importantly, to understand that the minorities it benefits not only know that it exists, but are fully aware that it is in their interest to appeal to it.
STAGE TWO: Reinforcement
I got a strange message on Twitter. Someone at GitHub wanted to talk to me. I thought I knew what it was about: a year before, I had been talking to a diversity consultant (who was contracting there at the time) about working with GitHub on diversity and inclusivity and exploring their interest in adopting the Contributor Covenant across all of their open source projects. But that’s not what they wanted this time. They wanted to offer me a job. They had just created a team called Community & Safety, charged with making GitHub more safe for marginalized people and creating features for project owners to better manage their communities.
At first I had my doubts. I was well aware of GitHub’s very problematic past, from its promotion of meritocracy in place of a management system to the horrible treatment and abuse of its female employees and other people from diverse backgrounds. I myself had experienced harassment on GitHub. As an example, a couple of years ago someone created a dozen repositories with racist names and added me to the repos, so my GitHub profile had racial slurs on it until their support team got around to shutting them down a few days after I reported the incident. I didn’t get the sense that the company really cared about harassment.
My contact at GitHub insisted that the company was transforming itself. She pointed to a Business Insider article that described the culture changes that they were going through, and touted the hiring of Nicole Sanchez to an executive position leading a new Social Impact team. I was encouraged to talk to some other prominent activists that had recently been hired. Slowly, I opened my mind to the possibility. Given my work in trying to make open source more inclusive and welcoming, what could give me more influence in creating better communities than working at the very center of the open source universe?
With these thoughts in mind, I agreed to interview with the team. The code challenge was comparable to other places where I’d interviewed, as was the pairing exercise. I was impressed by the social justice tone of some of the questions that I was asked in the non-technical interviews, and by the fact that the majority of people that I met with were women. A week later, I had a very generous offer in hand, which I happily accepted. My team was 5 women and one man: two of us trans, three women of color.
—“Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub”, Coraline Ada Ehmke
As was described in SJWs Always Lie, SJWs naturally gravitate to Human Resources for two reasons. First, because it is a job that allows the employee to completely avoid any objective performance standards. How does one measure the performance of an HR employee, or even an HR unit in objective terms? Any meaningful measure, such as the quality of people interviewed and hired, is intrinsically subjective; this is why most managers can permit themselves to simultaneously believe that their employees are both superior to the industry standard and content to be compensated at industry-standard rates. Avoiding objective performance metrics is always a priority for the SJW, because he knows it is much more difficult to spin a narrative that places the responsibility elsewhere when he has specific production targets for which he personally is responsible. The second reason is because Human Resources tends to provide the SJW with maximum influence over the corporation with minimum effort. If you’re wondering if there are any SJWs in your company, the first place to check is always HR.
Once securely in place in HR, the SJWs first priority is to hire more SJWs in HR, first in order to provide protective cover to the original SJW, and second to help establish a unit narrative that can begin influencing the corporation as a whole. Once an HR unit is converged, it will begin to regularly transmit propaganda about itself and its activities to the company at large, especially to the executives. There will be a series of programs, initiatives, mandates, and informative broadcasts about new laws and regulations, most of which are of only potential significance to anyone in the company. The more an HR unit communicates to the entire company via email or internal communication system, the more converged you can be certain that it is. These corporate communications usually start in a harmless enough manner, cheerfully letting everyone know that it is Sheryl’s birthday today, or the seventh anniversary of Hank joining the corporate family, so if you see them, be sure to wish them a wonderful day!
But before long, they are informing everyone that it is Frida Kahlo’s birthday, and if you want to learn more about this great Mexican painter, be sure to sign up for the trip to the local museum next month in time to take advantage of our corporate discount! And gradually, the tone darkens, the exclamation points disappear, and in the place of birthdays and company
picnics, dire, Orwellian warnings are issued about behaviors deemed inappropriate and the outings are transformed into mandatory workshops and seminars. And all the while, they are busily interfering with the attempts of managers to hire productive employees by establishing new corporate policies about job requirements that permit them to weed out anyone who lacks the desired Gender Studies degree or activist profile no matter what the nature of the nominal job is supposed to be.
Over time, the SJWs in HR will transform the corporate culture and make it into the thought police state that is more to their liking, but the cultural transformation always begins in HR. If you are a corporate executive and your company has an HR department, I can guarantee that it is already at least partially converged.
STAGE THREE: Seize the High Ground
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In corporations and organizations, the high ground is defined as those groups capable of influencing decisions related to hiring, firing, discipline, and compensation. It takes a long time and an amount of proven competence to reach the executive levels, so this is not an option for most SJWs, who can seldom remain in any position requiring objectively measured performance for long. In addition to HR, SJWs have begun to gravitate towards corporate compliance-related jobs, particularly recent inventions like GitHub’s Social Impact team. Measuring social impact is the SJW’s dream job, because it combines not having to do anything substantive with the chance to criticize others, and on top of it all, doing so professionally in the interest of social justice. As you can probably imagine, this is akin to putting the fox in charge of the henhouse and asking it to tell the farmer how many chickens the henhouse needs. No matter what the corporation does, the answer of the Social Impact group will always be the same: it is not enough! There must always be more diversity, more inclusivity, more equality, regardless of any negative potential effects on the company.