Gregory Angelo is the President of the New Tolerance Campaign. He is is the former President of the Log Cabin Republicans.
Federal Newswire:
What is the New Tolerance Campaign?
Gregory Angelo:
The New Tolerance Campaign…is a relatively nascent nonprofit. It was founded to push back on wokeism and cancel culture, but wokeism and cancel culture are really symptoms of the greater problem. It's a problem that the New Tolerance Campaign seeks to address. That specifically is the institutions whose double standards and hypocrisy have gotten us into this mess.
When I say institutions, I am talking about these woke corporations, their boards, their CEOs, executive directors, and trustees of activist nonprofits that, at least on paper, have noble missions, but have completely lost their way and are basically now just carrying water for the Left. I'm looking at you, ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center, among others. Then, of course, what I call the OGs when it comes to the hypocritical cancel culture institutions. That is the colleges and universities around the country that continue their ever leftward drift, canceling speech and doing the exact opposite of promoting civil discourse.
Now, what makes us unique at the New Tolerance Campaign is that we represent the grassroots movement pushing back on all of that. I think for far too long, our side has not engaged in the same type of aggressive grassroots pressure campaigns and activism that the other side has. Incidentally, that's another reason these institutions have been corrupted. We have taken the “call your Senator, email your congressman” model and repurposed it and turned the turrets onto those institutions.
We allow everyday Americans to send messages directly to the CEO and board of directors of Walmart when they mandate critical race theory principle training among their employees. You can send messages directly to the deans of colleges and universities when they de-platform and de-charter student organizations; like the Turning Point USA chapter at Emerson, and then in one case like the Emory University Free Speech Forum, which we did help get rechartered at that school.
We have a couple of victories under our belt right now. I am under no illusions that this is going to happen overnight. But I also don't want to see the culture war hill to the left. I think it's something that is still salvageable. That's what we're working to do at New Tolerance.
Federal Newswire:
How does a community in which its citizens can't talk to each other solve problems?
Gregory Angelo:
I think we're already there. We're already at a point where people aren't talking. It's not just that people aren't engaging with others that share different views. What we're seeing is a trend that has been emerging called self-silencing, where people make a point of not saying anything in public to colleagues or friends for fear that whatever they say is something that could get them in trouble or canceled. They might even lose their job as a result, so people are lying.
Actually, there's been polling about this, where people are saying things that they don't believe, just because they want the approval of their peers, friends, and colleagues. But when they go home, they don't believe this. When they're in the voting booth…they don't engage in that kind of self-silencing.
There's a disconnect between what we're actually hearing in the public square and what people support and oppose. In that case, we're not going to get anywhere. There's actually no way to make any progress in our society because there's no way to actually discuss and reach consensus on issues. We're at a stalemate.
Federal Newswire:
When you say silencing, are you referring to mob activities and intimidation?
Gregory Angelo:
Yeah. That's where the mob mentality is taking us. At this point, it's not enough to not agree with the mob and to not say anything that might earn their ire. You are actually compelled to say things that you might not believe, that you don't agree with, in order to just continue living your life in quiet dignity.
Federal Newswire:
Do you recall when Vice President Mike Pence went to see Hamilton on Broadway and the cast lectured him from the stage? Is there no longer a separation between politics and entertainment where we can just go out and enjoy ourselves?
Gregory Angelo:
It's not even the fact that he was being lectured to by the cast of Hamilton after the show. It's that there's no escape from politics anymore. I mean, going to see a Broadway show, that was something that united people. It doesn't matter what your politics are. You can talk about seeing a fantastic performance, leaving the theater humming the songs from Phantom of the Opera or Les Misérables or even Hamilton.
I think we're seeing this right now also in the case of Bud Light, where you usually crack a beer open to unwind and get away from the politics and the intensity of the day. But more and more…, we are seeing politics at every turn infesting every part of our lives. Coupled with the self-silencing, there's a degree of exhaustion, with all of this but also a degree of frustration that the public has.
I think that the silent majority is a real thing. It's something that I'm seeing at the New Tolerance Campaign because when we're rallying voices together, we actually see that there are tens of thousands of people around the country that are happy to lend their voice to a cause as long as they know other people are there to join them.
Federal Newswire:
Are you familiar with Bill Penzey of Penzey Spices? In 2017 he stated that he hated Donald Trump and didn’t want any of his supporters buying his spices and while Bill has a right to say this, is this politicization of everything what you’ve been talking about?
Gregory Angelo:
We're a long way from Michael Jordan saying, "Republicans buy sneakers, too." It used to be that when you'd start a private corporation or a business, it was all about making sure that you had your eyes on the bottom line.
I think it's interesting that we've seen over the course of the last 5-7 years, the whole Jack Phillips controversy, where…you cannot deny service to anyone.
Federal Newswire:
Explain your background and why you came to this epiphany about becoming part of the solution?
Gregory Angelo:
It's actually a funny story. I'll give you the genesis of a Wall Street Journal op-ed that ran last Wednesday. I've been in my current role at the New Tolerance Campaign since May of 2021. So it's been a while. Shortly after departing the White House, I had the opportunity to move into this role. It's just something that fit.
The mission of the New Tolerance Campaign is to push back on wokeism and these CEOs that are involving themselves in these contentious cultural issues. I was out for drinks with a friend. We were trying to pinpoint the moment where all of this started happening. Woke seems to have crept up on us. Certainly, we don't have decades of history of corporations weighing in on issues. It's been, "Open for business means open for business to everyone," for a very long time. We thought back and said, "You know what? It's the gay stuff, isn't it?"
It was around maybe 10-15 years or so ago. We saw corporations weighing in mass on issues like same-sex marriage. Issues like people should not be fired from their jobs because they're gay.
What I mentioned in The Wall Street Journal op-ed is I'm not a research analyst or anything. I don't know if that was the moment where things got woke. But if it wasn't the moment, it was certainly the prime accelerant. It's when we started seeing rainbow logos everywhere in the month of June. It's when all these LGBTQ affinity groups started popping up around major corporations. That's declaring your sexuality in the office. I mean, that's not something that had been accepted for a very long time, and here it is, being celebrated now in corporate America.
I will say, I don't regret any of the time or work I did at Log Cabin Republicans and the things we accomplished. But in terms of this strategy, it is something that I have hesitations about.
So when my buddy and I determined this, we said, "Wow, it was the gay stuff, wasn't it?" Then, of course, I realized, "Wait a minute. I had something to do with this." I was actually part of the problem. I immediately recalled a meeting that I had in the spring of 2013. It's the way I opened this Wall Street Journal piece…I was meeting with the head of government affairs for one of the major airlines in the United States and the chief lobbyist for one of the largest hotel chains in the United States. It was to secure corporate support for what was called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This would've made it illegal federally to terminate someone's employment because of their sexual orientation.
The strategy and the thinking was that if corporations support Democrats and Republicans financially through their PACs we can create a critical mass of corporations that weigh in on this issue. That could be just the pressure that is needed to move Republicans that we were trying to court on that legislation from a no to a yes.
This major airline was already a supporter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The chief lobbyist for this hotel chain shared that they actually liked that there was no federal LGBT non-discrimination law. In fact, they loved doing business in states that did not have those protections at a state level. Why? Because the hotel chain had them as a matter of their employment policy for years. They didn't need a federal or a state law. If you applied to work at this hotel chain, you would know that you would be welcome if you were gay. You will certainly not be terminated for that reason.
The hotel chain thought that it put them at a competitive advantage. Here we are, in these states, we actually have a broader access to a network of employees. It gives us a competitive edge in hiring. But this guy, he throws his arms up in the air and goes, "But okay. Yeah. You can count us in. You can count us in."
You know why? It's because they knew that if all these other corporations were supporting this legislation and they weren't, they'd stick out like a sore thumb. It would be a PR nightmare for them. So they were actually happy to, well, not happy, but they reluctantly gave up a competitive advantage in business so that they wouldn't be the target of a woke mob.
That, in a nutshell, is everything that is wrong with wokeism in America. It is weighing in on contentious cultural issues. It is actually bad for business in many cases. It's something that doesn't directly impact their bottom line. In fact, it could have a negative impact on their bottom line.
The last thing is, it sets a precedent where, once corporations weigh in on something like LGBT issues, they are going to be and have been asked to weigh on things like Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, abortion, so-called voting rights bills. So I just thought that moment meeting with those two government affairs individuals was very instructive, and just opened my eyes to what's wrong about all this wokeism in corporate America.
Federal Newswire:
How do you apply this to colleges and universities?
Gregory Angelo:
When I talk about hypocrisy in institutions, you don't see greater hypocrisy, in most cases, than you do on college campuses. I think it's no secret that there's been a leftward drift in the politics of higher education in the United States for probably well over the last half century. I think we're more than 50 years here, where, in the 1960s, those institutions really started getting taken over by individuals who were far-left students.
But what has happened is that over the last 50 years, those people who were students in the 1960s and '70s are now the deans, trustees, and faculty of those universities. When people wonder why there's been this ever leftward drift in higher education, that's why. It's because those products of far leftism in the 1960s have matured.
What's that apocryphal quote from Winston Churchill? “If you're not liberal when you're young you don't have a heart. But if you're not conservative when you're an adult, you don't have a brain.” I mean, they were dyed in the wool liberals. That's what's happening at universities today.
Federal Newswire:
Are corporations getting bad advice from GenZ public relations advisors who have adopted this wokeism approach?
Gregory Angelo:
It's interesting. There was a survey that came out in November of last year…where 63% of CEOs felt it was their duty to weigh in on social issues. It was their obligation as executive leaders and captains of industry to use their platform and the business to weigh in on these issues.
The Wall Street Journal, a week before my op-ed ran, did their own poll. What's wild is that the number was the same, but it was exactly mirrored. The Wall Street Journal poll found 63% of Americans felt CEOs and corporations should not weigh in on contentious cultural issues at all.
What does that tell me? There's this total ivory tower disconnect that's happening right now in boardrooms and executive offices around the United States, where these CEOs are being told by a bunch of yes-men in the boardroom, "Attaboy. Attagirl. Yeah. This is exactly what we need to do. You're doing a great job." Told by their PR and marketing teams that these are good ideas.
For a very long time, there was never any pushback. Well there was pushback, but in the sense that corporations could get away with doing this, knowing that, at worst, there would be a sternly worded op-ed in National Review. But it would all blow over within 24 to 48 hours.
Much like the head of that hotel chain, they would know that if they did not pursue this line of marketing, they might earn the ire of the Left. That's what we're doing right now at the New Tolerance Campaign, is making sure that these CEOs in these ivory towers hear it from their consumers. Making sure that the deans of these universities hear it not just from everyday Americans, but from alumni and donors at these universities, that the support that they think they have is actually not there at all.
Federal Newswire:
Is the goal of the New Tolerance Campaign putting people in connection with CEO’s and University heads so that they know they’re not above hearing from their “constituents?”
Gregory Angelo:
Yeah. 100%. Just to be clear, I have nothing against the National Review. I think they do great work. But the idea in starting the New Tolerance Campaign was that when people read that op-ed and get fired up, what can you do? You're just one person. What can you do except shake your fist at the sky? It doesn't matter if American Express is pushing racial quotas in their hiring process at that company. You could cut your credit card up today and put it on social media. American Express won't care. But if people know that there are others like them, that are able to raise their voices together and send a message, and not just into the abyss, but actually send it directly to the CEOs and the boards of directors of these corporations that they disagree with, well, then all of a sudden they have a sense of agency.
The grassroots component has been missing from all of this. I realize there's people who have maybe thought that this type of activism is a little gauche. It's like, "Oh, my gosh. We're going to gang up on private corporations now and tell them what they can and cannot do?"
We're actually seeing results here. The goal is not to push corporations and make them conservative. It's to push them to a place of neutrality. I think if we can rally those types of voices through NTC to help do that and be the grassroots component there, we can get to that place.
Federal Newswire:
How do folks find out more about the New Tolerance Campaign?
Gregory Angelo:
Go to our website, www.newtolerance.org. You can find us on Twitter, @new_tolerance, or on Facebook, just search for New Tolerance Campaign. If folks are interested, my personal Twitter handle is @gregorytangelo.