Ethical to screen out Trump supporters applying for a job?

In My Humble Opinion
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There’s also the issue of beliefs that are traditionally and formally recognized as relating to supernatural and unfalsifiable notions, versus beliefs that are making claims about ordinary material reality.

Throughout human history, most people have had some kinds of non-rational-materialist beliefs about supernatural phenomena (deities, demons, souls, whatever) that have never been supported by conclusive material factual evidence. Such beliefs have been sort of “grandfathered in” to our modern rational-materialist standards for shared practical public discourse in developed democracies.

But that acceptance has been achieved on the understanding that we all expect to treat them as unprovable beliefs about the supernatural—about which everybody’s entitled to have their own irreconcilable ideas—rather than truth claims about demonstrable material reality, which is supposed to provide a common factual and rational basis for our practical policy decisions.

That’s the chief reason IMHO that Trumpist delusional “alternative facts” should not be accorded the same tolerance in the public sphere as explicitly religious and superstitious beliefs. There’s a non-trivial difference between a myth, in the religious sense, and a falsehood, in the secular sense. The latter are not covered by religious-tolerance principles.

TL;DR: If a hypothetical job applicant tells my hypothetical hiring self in the course of casual chat “I believe that Donald Trump is a reincarnation of Sir Francis Drake, which is part of my religious doctrine on transmigration of souls although I know such things aren’t scientifically provable”, I’m going to mentally shrug my shoulders but I’m not automatically going to red-flag that applicant as problematic for my hypothetical company.

But if the applicant tells me “Donald Trump has built an impregnable wall sealing off our Mexican border and won the 2020 election by a massive landslide which was illegally frustrated by vast Democrat conspiracies, and the evil traitorous media are trying to hide those well-known facts from us”, that’s gonna raise an entire May Day parade’s worth of red flags. That’s not just a personal irrational belief: that’s a declaration of allegiance to a full-scale ideological crusade against acknowledging the validity of rationality and reality.

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I agree mostly Kimstu, the difference for me is that the ‘put them in the rejected pile’ move will come specially if they continue to claim what you mention and also say that Trump is still the president after January 20th. By then it is very likely that supporting violent sedition against Biden will be added to their “talents”.

Then I would be concerned about the liability they would be to my company.

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I unfriended a relative because he was posting really vicious anti-Christian things, like “I hope the rapture happens so all the Christians will be gone” or “If there’s ever a Christian holocaust, I’ll be the first to sign up to participate.” Really? Good luck getting a job, too, with posts like that!

I’ve also unfriended, or declined to send requests, to people when I saw their Facebook walls, because they called people who disagreed with them things like libtards, or in one case it was really obvious that she and her husband were sovereign citizens. Evidence of Trump or Sarah Palin worship got the nope from me as well.

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Supposedly, a lot of “upstanding German citizens” were members of the Nazi Party. Even if they were just lemmings, I would not hire them either.

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So how do we feel about hiring Communists? If we’re banning Trump supporters, surely we are banning Communists too, right? I mean, if you run a business why in the world would you ever hire someone whose stated goal is the destruction of Capitalism?

And in terms of evil, a Trump supporter doesn’t hold a candle to a Communist who believes in a philosophy that killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century and which can’t work without the forced redistribution of property at gunpoint. You want to break some eggs to make an omelette? Find another company to do it in.

I mean, now that we’ve accepted the principle that we should base hiring decisions on people’s pllitical beliefs and social media output, why would anyone hire a Communist? Or even a socialist? Or a social justice warrior? They are nothing but trouble. So let’s scour social media and make sure we don’t hire ANY undesirables.

Then there’s those people who have a social media history showing they are union agitators. Can’t hire them…

I hope you are ready to live in the brave new world you are creating.

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All of this begs the question: Where do you draw the line?

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Do these hypothetical Communist job applicants publicly maintain that Stalin ushered in a glorious era of unprecedented Communist prosperity and is now still presiding, at age 142, over an undivided and world-dominating USSR that has just established the first eugenically-purified human colony on Neptune? If so, then sure, deep-six their applications too.

What you are ineffectually trying to smokescreen away here, Sam, is the problem of irresponsible malicious delusion about matters of ascertainable fact, as opposed to mere ideological differences of theory.

More water-muddying attempts at “bothsidesism”, with the weasel phrasing “believes in a philosophy” trying to serve as a parallel to Trumpist delusionism of “alternative facts” and “fake news”.

Nobody here is advocating screening out job applicants merely on the basis of their “believing” in an unworkable “philosophy” in the abstract. Stalinist communism, Libertopianism, Reaganist supply-side economics, antitechnology agrarianism, all are ultimately unworkable philosophies, along with many others. Nobody here AFAICT is suggesting that anybody should automatically disqualify a job applicant because of their abstract ideology involving such a philosophy.

When an applicant starts asserting that flat-out falsehood about major current events is the only acceptable reality, though, that goes beyond reasonable expectations of tolerance for ideological diversity. Why is this difference so difficult for you to grasp, other than the fact that grasping it would destroy your pretense at making a rational rebuttal, of course?

I hope you and the thousands of chapfallen conservatives like you will eventually realize that your loserly attempts at “bothsidesist” scolding and gloomy-sounding prophecy are not successfully concealing your inability to produce an actual argument.

I’m getting a bit tired of all these ass-exposed pseudo-pundits in their dime-store Cassandra costumes constantly intoning “Woe, woe upon you liberals for you are about to be just as bad as your enemies, any minute now!!”, while thinking “please don’t embarrass me further by pointing out why you’re not actually anywhere near as bad as your enemies, nor at all likely to be”.

All these sore-loser conservatives need to stop trying to whitewash outright malevolent delusionism by pretending it’s nothing more than ordinary ideological partisanship.

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You make it clear that politics ends when you walk in the door of the office, and therefore what your political beliefs are is irrelevant to the job. And anyone who starts political agitating at work will be terminated if they continue doing so after being warned.

For example, if it was me in charge those Google engineers who maintain ‘blacklists’ of fellow employees they refuse to work with because of their politics would all be read the riot act, and shown the door if they persisted. And I’d do the same if they were conservatives trying to grt rid of the leftists.

Do that, and you don’t even have to check on how a new applicant votes or what they think outside of work. And you shouldn’t. The same goes for their religion, sexual orientation, etc. An employer has no right to intrude on the privacy of an employee outside of the workplace. Get caught makjng unwanted advances on other employees and I’ll fire you on the spot. But if you arethe biggest lothario in the world in your off-hours, it’s no business of mine unless it affects your work. Boundaries are critical to a civil society.

My last employer, a very large company, had a simple policy: Say what you want on the internet on your own time, but never do it while involving the company, and never when you are acting as a representative of the company. Other than that, do whatever the hell you want and it’s none of their business.

What if they believe that Hugo Chavez was a misunderstood genius? Is that okay? Since we are substituting rules for personal judgement, what if -I- don’t think it’s okay? As an employer, do I have the right to dig into a candidate’s private life and refuse to hire them if -I- don’t like it? What if they think ‘proper Communism’ just hasn’t been tried yet, but still advocate for a worker’s revolution? As someone who would be lynched or at least have his business expropriated if such ideas came to fruition, do I have the right to not hire such people?

I’ve got news for you: There ARE two sides. And plenty of business owners are on the ‘other’ side from you, and would be very happy if the rules changed such that they could start hiring only people who have the same political beliefs.

You can’t make up new rules and expect only their side to have to live by them. Remember #Metoo? It started as an attack against Trump, and wound up taking down a whole lot of Liberals.

The funny thing is that the left used to make the argument I’m making. Free speech and the right to not be discriminated against for out-of-work beliefs and activities were fundamental. But I guess all that changed when they decided they were now the ones holding the clipboards and makjng those decisions. Now political purity tests for employment are apparently A-OK.

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That’s more theoretical-opinion waffle trying to look like a genuine parallel to my criticisms of Trumpist delusionism on factual grounds. What specific factual claims are these hypothetical Communist job applicants making about Chavez?

On the contrary, the use of personal judgement about screening out applicants is exactly what we’re defending here. Nobody’s saying that an employer can’t hire a Trump supporter if they want to.

? In the US, according to federal law employers can hire only people who have the same political beliefs, if they want. You may be mixing us up with Canadian provincial employment law which AFAICT generally treats political belief as a prohibited ground for discrimination.

But that’s not what I’m advocating here. I repeat: This isn’t about “political beliefs”, this is about voluntarily espousing gross delusion and ignorance about demonstrable facts.

And I repeat:

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In this case the “other” supports a man who shares a massive amount of responsibility, through deliberate and spectacular lying, for the deaths of 330,000 Americans, many of which were easily avoidable and preventable; for promoting racism; for the erosion of trust in the democratic electoral system (also through a campaign of lies and bs); for the attempted replacement of the post WW II western world with a transactional international system with its attendant erosion of trust and reliability of alliances; and the condoning of the replacement of a global mindset that ultimately should be guiding the progress of the human species in conjunction with the health of the planet. All this “other” gives a damn about is what’s in it for them. They deserve the scorn.

These are not simply equally good people with a differing set of equally valid but differing views based on critical thinking and rational thought.

Having said all that, I work for a large global company based out of Montreal and, as a coworker once remarked, it’s like the United Nations. Our company promotes diversity (for real and not just lip-service btw). If I knew that a pro-Trumper was a candidate I would certainly do what I could, within reason, to prevent his or her employment.

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Sure, but if an employee oversteps their boundaries at work, AND I knew or should have known ahead of time that they had some sort of problem that might spill over, then as their employer I could be held responsible/liable for acts that harmed other employees or customers (“negligent hiring”). That’s most commonly used for criminal records, drug/alcohol problems, and the like, but a racially-motivated incident could certainly fuel such a suit.

It wouldn’t even take a lawsuit, necessarily, if the employee’s actions resulted in awful publicity for my business. An employee going on a racist rant on duty that gets put on YouTube, e.g., would be terrible in any circumstance, but if I knew he had a tendency to make racist remarks in his private life and I hired him for a public-facing position anyway, it would be much worse. “This business hired known racist who ended up screaming at innocent black child” could be the kind of publicity that puts a small business out of business. At that point, firing him would be closing the barn door after the horse is in the next county.

Are we talking about somebody who has advocated for a lynching or expropriation, or publicly praised Chavez or Mao or Stalin, or merely somebody who thinks that Chavismo ideas such as plentiful social welfare programs are good? (Chavez was big on soldiers distributing food and teaching schools, not so much on lynching.)

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Can you find any legal experts who would agree that hiring a Trump supporter puts a company at risk for negligent hiring?

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First, define “Trump supporter”: does that mean anybody who voted for Trump, or anybody who publicly praised Trump’s racial or misogynist views or xenophobia, or anybody who thinks Trump really won the election, or what?

Certainly there are legal experts who would agree hiring somebody whose social media reflects reacist views puts a company at risk for negligent hiring; here’s one.

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If you don’t want communists working for you, don’t hire communists. I’m not sure why this is supposed to be some sort of gotcha. Do you think that, because you’re arguing with a bunch of largely centrist Democrats, that we’re going to be falling all over ourselves at the idea of <gasp, pearl clutch> not hiring communists?

Keep the red bastards out of your business if you want. It’s your business, right?

That aside, why are you talking about “bans.” If you want to hire Trump supporters, go for it. Nobody is arguing that you shouldn’t be allowed to hire them. It’s almost like you can’t argue the proposition on it’s own merits, so you have to distort it into something nobody is advocating.

Thanks, Sam, but I’ve already spent most of my life living in a world where people were free to discriminate against me because of aspects of my personal life. This isn’t a “brave new world,” it’s the same shitty world it’s always been. You just don’t get a pass on some of the shitty parts because you’re white, straight, and male anymore.

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Who one votes for should have no bearing on their ability to get a job, go to college, or rent a house.

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Thanks for sharing.

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You’re welcome! I can tell by your previous comment you disagree. You think people should be able to not hire or rent to others for any or no reason at all? Or do you think it’s in society’s interest that everyone has an opportunity to work?

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I support legal protections for innate aspects a person has no control over, such as race or sex. I think people should be legally allowed to refuse to hire morons, monsters, and raging lunatics.

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A person’s brain is a function of their birth. You mention morons, monsters, and raging lunatics. At least two of those can be a pure function of brain structure and/or chemistry.

It is a dilemma because there are many things I wouldn’t want to hire for. Here’s a good example. In some parts of the country, maybe all, there are registered sex offender lists. Should a person on that list be unable to rent or work anywhere?

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Interesting that you would equate Trump followers with sex offenders. I wouldn’t have gone in that direction, but to each his own.