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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Working next to a bigot who doesn't bigot in the office doesn't constitute a "hostile workplace" under EEOC rules either (although, absurdly, having a co-worker put a Gadsden Flag in their cubicle can do) - the problem is more subtle than that, and involves a combination of the inherent dangers of strong anti-discrimination laws and the spectacularly broken American civil justice system.

Fundamentally, the problem is that if a workplace discrimination lawsuit against a medium or large business gets past summary judgement, you are going to be settling it, probably for a six-figure sum of money, because the alternative is to let the plaintiff go on a fishing expedition at your expense for anything bigoted any employee anywhere in the organisation said or did in the last N years (where N is at the discretion of the judge, and can exceed the statute of limitations). And "this company knew they had racists on staff and didn't fire them" plus "one co-worker said a bad thing to me in the workplace once" is sufficient circumstantial evidence of a pattern of officially-tolerated peer-on-peer discrimination to get past summary judgement.

I don't know the mechanics of OSHA enforcement, but my guess would be a civil lawsuit over workplace safety that gets past summary judgement would require an injured employee and some plausible connection between the injury and the presence of people who shitpost ghoulishly about Charlie Kirk - that is a much less plausible outcome.