Companies Hijacked by Justice-Oriented Employees – Which Is Next?

As a company founder, you’ve worked years, perhaps decades, to build a successful brand slowly, carefully assembling the best team, tweaking it for positive direction, for ingenuity, growth and sustainability, prestige- rewarding the founders, investors and employees. Then, activists infiltrate your company, and it all goes to hell.

Take Microsoft, for example, and countless more companies large and small. They’ve been challenged to balance the long-held corporate management structure seemingly replaced with activism from their own employees with strikes, mass dissent, quitting employees and threat of software lockouts.

Just this past week, unionized employees of some Starbucks locations took a hard line in a very public fight supporting Palestinians and Gaza in the Israel-Hamas war. A lawsuit filed by Starbucks corporation against them was answered with a countersuit from the union. Apparently, baristas making your latte feel the tragic conflict thousands of miles away necessitates a war solidarity incorporated into their work environment, enough to commandeer the Starbucks corporate branding and create a hailstorm of negative publicity for their employer.

The horrific events in Israel lead us to also examine the immediate aftermath here in the U.S. Far from physical conflict is the media war playing out before our eyes. Mass rallies and protests have ensued, many which have been called for by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), especially the New York chapter. Who leads this DSA organization? Why is there such political penetration into our lives and livelihoods by insane social justice radicals and their slogans and messaging across the country?

Actually, we can find the leaders of the DSA and who’s funding them. It’s not secret. It doesn’t involve clandestine hacking of computers and cellphones. We instead simply access the publicly-available reports these organizations file with various agencies. It’s all there: reports, financial data, donors, officers and directors; names, addresses and sometimes, even compensation.

Here in San Francisco as well as other cities around California, candidates for elected office and Political Action Committees (PACs) like the DSA file initial paperwork to create an official political entity. Documents naming the candidate, or the PAC’s name, address, purpose and management (especially treasurer) are submitted to the California Secretary of State in Sacramento. Changes to organizational leadership, or to name, address, or termination of the PAC, are accomplished via filing amendments. All these filings are publicly available. Government websites provide insight and actual images of the PAC documents and financial reports freely and without a paywall or other restriction. Therefore, for any of us seeking knowledge of who’s behind a candidate or a PAC – who’s financially supporting them – is just a few mouse clicks away. You just have to know where to look.

The San Francisco chapter of the DSA has been just slightly less radical than New York’s counterpart, yet staunchly pro-Palestine/Hamas, leading to local outcry nonetheless. On social media, calls escalate for disclosing who’s behind the SF DSA chapter. As just discussed, simply fire up your laptop and click around on links to get the answer. Go to www.sfethics.org and look along the top for Disclosures >> Statements.  Then, in the search box, enter “socialists” and you’ll find the PAC. You can download the full financial data reports for the lifetime of the PAC or candidate, in Excel format.  Donations in these reports are outlined by individual’s name, donation date, employer, occupation and dollar amount. Who the donors to these radical socialists are may be startling.

It is important to clarify that unless the donor indicated is a company, we should not imply that the entire company espouses the radical ideology of the individual employee who is the actual named donor to the DSA. But it instead gives us a reason for caution.

Of course, politically, we are able to speak and think freely – this is, after all, America (or can we?). We must be cautioned in that companies large and small may, behind the scenes, be infected with radical social justice, marxist, anarchist, genocidal, antisemitic ideology-aligned employees we see in the two examples above, namely Microsoft and Starbucks. It can also explain why we’ve witnessed over these last few years fundamental changes in corporate messaging and advertisement, their choices in marketing ( think the Bud Lite fiasco) and the ruinous DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) efforts by entertainment companies like Disney.

Back to the DSA financial reports: after downloading the San Francisco DSA files we see an interesting trend: many very recognizable companies, many in tech, have employees who’ve donated to the San Francisco DSA. From Adobe, Atlassian, Docusign, Google, Yelp, to Twitter, Nextdoor, Uber, Starbucks and many more, donors are programmers, lawyers, even CEO’s. Though the number of individuals who’ve made a money contribution is relatively small, we can expect the actual DSA-ideological supporter base to be higher, as not all employees disclose an affiliation with the ideology with a financial donation.

Nonetheless, we must not overlook this. Corporate upper management, boards and investors are at a crossroads now, their corporate culture overtaken, as well as universities’ student unions and leadership. We now know how.