The Social Justice Warriors have claimed their biggest scalp.
Kevin Roberts, the top ad agency boss suspended from his job as chairman of Saatchi earlier this week for failing to show sufficient enthusiasm for promoting “gender equality” has now quit and apologised.
This was totally the wrong move (as I’ll explain in a moment) but I totally get why he chose to jump.
Which remotely self-respecting achiever would wish to prostitute his talents at a company which valued political correctness more highly than the bottom line?
Which alpha male could endure having to answer to blow-dried ponces like Maurice Levy, the smoothy-chops, silver fox French surrender monkey from Publicis Groupe who cravenly threw Roberts to the wolves rather than standing by his talent?
Which reasonable human being could possibly stomach having to work in a business so pullulating with grisly feminist harridans and emasculated Social Justice Warriors that merely telling the truth about the very obvious differences between men and women has become a sackable offence?
Just to recap, let’s remind ourselves what Kevin Roberts did to get himself into trouble.
At the weekend, he was invited by Business Insider to agree that there was a gender diversity problem within the advertising industry.
It cited the following evidence:
All of the six major advertising agency holding company CEOs are men. A survey conducted by The 3% Conference in 2014 found women make up 46.4% of the advertising industry, yet only 11.5% of creative directors within ad agencies are female.
But Roberts refused to play the game.
Women, he argued, mostly don’t want the top jobs men covet not because there’s a glass ceiling or because there’s institutional sexism but simply because women tend to have different priorities.
Roberts – clearly a forthright character who doesn’t believe in career-safe platitudes – said:
“So we are trying to impose our antiquated shit on them, and they are going: ‘Actually guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.’ Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy. So they say: ‘We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by’. I don’t think [the lack of women in leadership roles] is a problem. I’m just not worried about it because they are very happy, they’re very successful, and doing great work. I can’t talk about sexual discrimination because we’ve never had that problem, thank goodness.”
What’s obvious from that statement is that Roberts is bending over backwards not to sound chauvinistic. He isn’t celebrating male machismo, aggression and overweening ambition: rather he is claiming to be embarrassed by it. Hence the phrases “antiquated shit” and “idiotic dinosaur-like men.” Women, he is suggesting, are actually a lot more sensible and better balanced than men.
But still, it isn’t enough to let him off the hook.
Using tactics straight out of the SJW playbook, the (female) journalist relays Roberts’s unexceptionable observation to a feminist campaigner called Cindy Gallop, whose speciality appears to be whining on social media about sexism in the workplace.
“I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business,” declares her Twitter profile.
Gallop – refusing to accept the outrageous calumny that not all the female species want to behave like blokeish thugs and blow stuff up – provides the requisite rent-a-quote.
“The best response to that is to throw it open to the industry, and ask the women and men of the ad industry, all around the world, to tweet at @krconnect to let him know whether they think I’m ‘making it all up’.”
If you’ve read Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie you’ll know this is a classic technique of the regressive left.
It’s what is known as “Point and Shriek” and “Isolate and Swarm.”
The purpose is to make Roberts feel confused, isolated, victimised; to make him appear temporarily so toxic that none of his colleagues dare come to his aid; and to whip up the frenzied passion of the social media bully mob to the point where he is found instantly guilty with no recourse to any defence.
That last bit is key.
If you go back to what Roberts actually said, none of it is unreasonable or particularly controversial. He’s not saying that women make lousy copywriters or less effective ad execs. He’s just saying what has been observable for millennia: that men and women are different. And then, he is using personal observation further to elaborate that maybe this is the real reason for the gender imbalance at high levels in the industry.
But just like with the hounding of biochemist and Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt, this isn’t about anything the man said or did wrong, but simply about what he has been singled out by the SJW attack dogs to represent: sexism in the workplace which must be destroyed at all cost.
As always these occasions provide a litmus test as to which are some of the most nauseating, slimy, authoritarian, cry-bully creeps on the planet and which ones are principled, intellectually independent and courageous.
In the good category I’d place Joanna Williams for writing this defence of Roberts in the Spectator titled Saatchi’s Sexism Row Suggests Feminists Can’t Handle Debate.
And also Julia Hartley Brewer on Twitter. (Read the comments below: very revealing)
In the utterly revolting category, I’d put people like this slithy mangina Brad Jakeman, head of PepsiCo – who couldn’t wait to announce to the world how virtuous he was with this tweet:
and gosh it was worth it because look what he got in return! An approving tweet from one of his feminist employees!!
Also in the totally ghastly category, I’d put Kate Stanners – global chief creative officer at Saatchi – who came on BBC Radio 4 Today programme to knife her boss by saying his remarks had offended “huge” numbers of colleagues.
Huge? Really?
Interviewer Justin Webb noted that Publicis Groupe’s motto was Vive la différence and that this hardly accorded with the punishment meted out to Kevin Roberts merely for expressing an opinion.
Stanners didn’t have an answer for that because there is no answer.
This was a show trial, nothing more. Kevin Roberts did not lose his job because he said or did anything wrong. Rather he was being punished for failing to endorse politically correct groupthink.
And that is why he should not have resigned. Vox Day explains why in Social Justice Warriors Always Lie:
Do not resign! You must always keep in mind that their real goal is not to formally purge you, but to encourage you to quit on your own. That allows them to publicly wash their hands of the affair and claim that your decision to leave was not their fault. They will often enlist more reasonable allies to approach you and tell you that it’s not possible for you to continue any more, they will appeal to your desire to avoid conflict as well as to the good of the organization, and they will go on endlessly about the supreme importance of an amicable departure. Don’t fall for it. Don’t do their dirty work for them. Make them take the full responsibility for throwing you out, thereby ensuring they have to suffer the unpredictable longterm consequences of their actions.
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