Matthew Peterson: Conservatives, Stop Giving Money to People Who Hate You

Elon Musk’s reform of Twitter has brought about both jaw-dropping revelations and much rejoicing, as the tyrannical reign of some of the worst hall monitors on the internet seems to be coming to an end. The case of Yoel Roth has garnered particular attention. It turns out the company’s former censor in chief—or Twitter’s head of trust and safety, if you insist—wrote his doctoral dissertation “in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services,” as Musk put it, including the gay hookup app Grindr.

Right-leaning commentators and everyday Americans alike need to stop pretending to be shocked by these stories. There’s a deeper lesson here, if we are willing to heed it. Yoel Roth is not unique. He, and a myriad of others throughout America’s elite professional class, are typical representatives of an irredeemably corrupted credentialing system.

Anyone who wants to free themselves and their business from the insanity of woke capital needs to get serious, reject our current credentialing system, and radically change how they recruit and hire.

Roth’s Ivy League PhD dissertation (yes, about a gay hook-up app) is full of the usual vacuous platitudes common to ruling-class institutions. With additional resume lines from the Aspen Institute and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center’s “Dangerous Speech Project,” he’s as close to perfectly credentialed as one can get for the professional elite. That’s the problem.

Highly credentialed left-wing radicals populate the highest levels of tech, media, finance, and other corporate sectors. This is a legion of immature and unserious people possessed of a very shallow education, or a thinly veiled one undergirded by insane radicalism. They all went to the “right” universities; they are good at reading the room. They quickly adopt the evolving dialect of Woke and do and say all the right things. But all the buzzwords are ultimately about promoting a radical ideology they have zero ability to question.

Those who wish to develop an alternative need to hire differently. As I wrote in The American Mind, “whoever starts demonstrating competence and generating revenue outside of woke capital’s control will have historic levels of talent and experience to draw from.” Anyone who seeks excellence over supposed “equity” in the workplace will need workers fit for the job; success cannot be achieved with a workforce that thinks in ruling-class-approved buzzwords.

Fortunately, the laborers for this task are not few. That’s why we started the New Founding Talent Network. We connect companies and elite professionals looking to build with others of like mind. A surprising number of people across the professional spectrum are fed up with the woke rat race; indeed, people have been signing up in droves since day one. We represent the cutting edge of a trend: Red Balloon is another such service, serving an even broader range of employment.

Aside from stealing unhappy talent laboring under woke capital’s insane conditions, anyone who wants to avoid woke censors in their own business needs to look for alternative credentials. Yes, the usual credentials make hiring easy; but they are thoroughly corrupted, and sane alternatives already exist. For example, if you hire from elite liberal arts colleges, start looking at places that still teach real stuff, such as Hillsdale College, The King’s College, the University of Dallas, and many others. The top students from these institutions are now as talented as any in the nation. What’s more, they have actually received an education.

Sadly, there is a lack of alternative advanced or specialized field credentials because the universities are so far gone. But going out of your way to look for alumni of alternative educational institutions and programs who have started to specialize professionally, or who have fellowships and extracurricular activities on their resume from organizations that dissent from woke ideology, is now a very good idea.

Conservatives, stop hiring and giving money to people who hate you. If you recruit talent from a decayed and corrupted system that laughs at virtue, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, you should not be shocked to find traitors in your midst. You will continue to suffer under the rolling woke revolution and you will deserve it. Get serious. Get outside the box and look for real innovators and builders. They’re out there; they’re sane; they’re motivated. Find them.

Matthew Peterson is the Co-Founder of New Founding Org and President of the American Firebrand PAC. He can be reached on Twitter @DocMPJ.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.