The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Dallas Express.

“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” – Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Charlie Kirk was assassinated two days ago, shot (allegedly, at this point) by 22-year-old sniper Tyler Robinson during a campus event at Utah Valley University. He was murdered for openly sharing his conservative opinions, sentiments that are shared by a plurality of Americans, and for boldly challenging those who disagreed with him to open and honest debates. As Charlie’s legion of stunned and heartsick colleagues and fans express their horror and shock, much of the commentary is focusing on the variety of factors that are to blame for our society reaching this point where a 31-year-old husband and father of two is gunned down in cold blood simply for expressing commonly held political principles.

Higher Education’s Role in Silencing Conservatives

If the accused young man is indeed guilty, what kind of unspeakable evil so twists a 22-year-old’s mind that he murders a man for voicing and defending his fully mainstream policy views? Lots of things, obviously. In his case it appears to be primarily his experience of “higher” education.

Charlie and the organization he founded and ran, Turning Point USA, focused on bringing active conservative voices back into the open on the nation’s campuses where they had long ago been silenced and banished. For that they killed him, despite his relentless affability and his endless respectfulness toward those who disagreed with him.

Our colleges and universities have become parodies of the bastions of open expression, debate, and intellectual rigor they’re supposed to be, morphing instead into a heterodox network of institutions enforcing lockstep extremist ideological conformity and intolerance. Charlie was trying his level best to change that, and he was succeeding, which is most likely why he became a target. He knew full well he was a target too, as he received constant death threats, but he persisted nonetheless.

Corporate America Embraces the Same Dogma

One element that’s sorely missing from the discussion about Charlie’s murder so far, however, is the responsibility that America’s business community bears.

Here’s an awful reality: our corporations and large businesses (and too many small businesses as well, in an apparent attempt to “keep up with the Joneses”) have done much the same to marginalize and ban conservative voices as our colleges, only with much less attention paid to them. Go scour any large American company’s website. You will almost certainly not find a distinctly conservative position presented there. You will find, however, a great deal of radical leftist dogma: DEI, “implicit bias,” and critical race theory.

ESG (itself a naked effort to institutionalize radical left politics in our business world) and sustainability. Feminism and the transgender cult. And just like our educators do, the corporate communicators present those political positions as though they’re the only ones out there, the only ones allowed in polite society. It’s the same forced ideological conformity as on our campuses, despite the fact that at most companies, far more of the employees and customers than not hold diametrically opposing policy viewpoints.

The marginalization of conservatism certainly first got its start in the schools, gaining a foothold there all the way back in the 1960s. It began to take root in the corporate world more than thirty years ago, with the introduction of the concept of “diversity” by HR departments. (That development was covered brilliantly by Peter Wood in his 2003 book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.) Newly liberated from their old name of “Personnel,” HR organizations everywhere seemed bent on abandoning their raison d’etre of actually serving the people working for the company in favor of elevating themselves into positions of unaccountable corporate power.

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They set about institutionalizing the disfavored old concept of affirmative action under that new banner, counting noses in the workplace based on race, sex, and sexual orientation and then “correcting” imbalances with discriminatory recruiting, hiring, and promotions. That it meant enacting programmatic immoral and illegal prejudice against a large part of their workforces appeared to give them no qualms whatsoever. Over time, “diversity” morphed into the divisive and hateful “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (which has now become a department all to itself). As it did, HR and top execs ignored their own hypocrisy regarding that last word in DEI and established “Employee Resource Groups,” company-sponsored organizations of employees of selected “identities” who receive special treatment by, and assistance from, executives and company institutions and programs. Those groups pointedly include everybody but men and white people. Their variety of “inclusion” is apparently rather more exclusive than I would have believed the word’s plain meaning dictates.

In the decades since, the rest of the C suite and management class has followed suit and doubled down, actively embracing far-left dogma and actively silencing anything else. Companies were soon involving themselves in public policy areas ranging from energy policy to immigration to voter fraud to abortion, almost always from the left. Power-abusing CEOs like Ed Bastian of Delta Airlines, Tim Cook of Apple, and Chip Bergh of Levi Strauss were corruptly employing corporate resources to advance their radical leftist personal politics despite clear company rules against such on-the-job political activism. Their supposedly above-the-fray HR organizations as well as the general business community were deafeningly silent, and there was a complete absence of accountability.

The Rise of Cancel Culture in Business

But holy cow… the instant a CEO strayed from the accepted narrative, my, how things changed. John Gibson of Tripwire, a video game company, made the fatal executive mistake of Tweeting from his personal account his support for the Supreme Court’s 2021 refusal to hear a challenge to the Texas fetal heartbeat law that restricted abortion in that state. That was a legal decision that was conceded as correct by even the left-wing rag Newsweek. Nonetheless, Gibson was immediately assailed by his own company, by various others in the video game segment, and by the general business community, and he was unceremoniously forced out.

Along the way, as the corrupt executives assured us without any actual evidence that all customers now demand that companies take political stands, somehow it always magically wound up being extremist “progressive” politics they espoused, and the relative few who spoke out against it and ran afoul of the resulting “cancel culture” were overwhelmingly conservative. (It’s ironic that it is Charlie’s death that finally put a small dent in the culture of near impunity when it came to liberals ever being “canceled” for expressing their views, with a good number of “progressive” people losing their jobs this very day—not for simply stating scientific facts like “men can’t be women” as so many on the right were fired for not long ago, however, but for ghoulishly celebrating an innocent man’s political assassination.)

The 200 CEOs who signed a 2019 full-page ad in the New York Times voicing their full support of abortion, meanwhile? Still happily (and extremely gainfully) employed.

A Climate of Fear for Ordinary Workers

Now, what do you think ordinary conservatives working for all those countless activist companies do? They shut up. They self-censor. They duck their heads down and do their jobs and try not to make waves, because they know full well that if the powers that be can destroy John Gibson’s career, by golly, they won’t hesitate a millisecond to destroy some vocal underling’s.

How do I know that? Because I’ve been one of the stupid ones for years, refusing to remain quiet (though not being nearly as outspoken as I’d have liked, either). And I can’t count the number of comments and emails I’ve gotten over those years saying, “I’m glad you’re speaking out. I feel the same way, but I can’t afford to say anything and risk my job.” I’ve even gotten several of those from C-suite execs at some of America’s biggest corporations, for heaven’s sake!

What did lower-level executives and managers do in the meantime? They parroted the bigotry and abuse, especially if they were members of those favored identity groups. That further isolated and demoralized conservative voices and workers in the disfavored groups. Indeed, open bigotry against them has become matter-of-fact. Not long ago an East Coast executive I was interviewing casually derided my business segment of manufacturing, which literally built the world, as “male, pale, and stale.” When I published my piece a few months ago calling for an end to DEI (linked in paragraph six up above), a young woman commented publicly about it on LinkedIn, “Just what I would expect from a Christian heterosexual white male.” I’m guessing she wasn’t “canceled.”

Dehumanization Breeds Violence

How does this relate to the murder of Charlie Kirk? Here’s how: both educational institutions and most businesses in the country have spent multiple generations telling some of their charges that they’re victims by virtue not of what anybody actually did to them but simply by accidents of birth, and that their oppressors—who in the overwhelming majority of cases are wholly innocent of wrongdoing whatsoever—are their fellow students and workers who simply look different from them or believe different things. Decades of “leaders” in our society dehumanizing the disfavored classes and people with different opinions has now spawned real and fatal violence.

When will enough enough? How far are we from wrongthink-committing businessmen like John Gibson being gunned down instead of “just” losing their jobs? The killing of Charlie Kirk would say we’re not far from that at all. It was only about nine months ago that Luigi Mangione gunned down another husband and father, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a gruesome murder that continues to be celebrated by radical leftists. Our businessman president survived not one but two (!!!) assassination attempts during last year’s campaign. Charlie himself reported in April on the rise of liberal assassination culture on how radical activists in California were naming ballot initiatives for Mangione.

How perfectly horrible and unfathomable that it claimed him.

The Need for Courage and Action

We’ve remained silent and just taken it for at least two generations now, suffering not only our own personal career setbacks, abuses, discriminations, and indignities, but condoning that same relentless abuse even as it’s now directed toward our children and grandchildren. (It’s informative to note that in pretty much all the recent backtracking on DEI and “woke” by a few major corporations, including Target, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, John Deere, and most recently Cracker Barrel, every single one of their actions was driven not by internal dissent, but by outside pressure from a single bold and courageous activist named Robbie Starbuck.) All the while, we’ve allowed the business world to mostly fly under the radar on these outrageous abuses, and on their decades of casting perfectly mainstream conservative politics as anathema. It’s past time to call this out and put a stop to it at long last. As commentator Mollie Hemingway said in an interview about Charlie’s killing, “We’ve seen a lot of weakness and impotence on the right…” Indeed. That must change.

Maybe this week’s horrific and revolting public political assassination of a man of unbelievable courage who singlehandedly began turning back the tides of repression and bigotry on our college campuses, will serve as an actual turning point. It’s a good time to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask those faces looking back at us when our own courage is at long last called for to do the same in our workplaces. When are we going to be wiling to stand up for what is right and end the abuses, the bigotry, and the silencing of our voices?

If you ask me, I’d say the time is now. (I love the adage that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago… and the second-best time is now.)

“But how?” you might be asking.

Well, certainly not with the hatred and violence that have become de rigueur for the political left.

This article by Jamie K. Wilson, executive editor at Conservatarian Press, provides a comprehensive list of reasonable actions for the path forward. “Buy Conservative, Sell Conservative,” “Refuse Self-Censorship,” and “Withhold Cooperation” are just a few of the many superb actions it recommends.

Go get started. For the sake of our nation and our liberty and our children and their posterity, and yes, for God’s sake, go get started now.

My lovely wife reminded me that Robinson is innocent until proven guilty, which I wholeheartedly agree with. I have amended my article accordingly.

Jim Vinoski is a manufacturing executive and contributor at Forbes. He writes “Manufacturing Talks with Jim Vinoski.”