Tom Wolfe noticed that “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” The same can be said about the toxic workplace. Leftist-run workplaces virtue-signal relentlessly about how good they are to their employees, implying that non-leftist workplaces combine the worst traits of salt mines and antebellum plantations. However, fairly consistently, employee allegations about sexual and racial harassment and discrimination almost invariably arise in companies that are aggressively Democrat in outlook.

Ellen DeGeneres is the latest target of employee charges about racism and bullying. This is ironic because DeGeneres’s motto is “Be Kind.” Publicly, DeGeneres lives up to that motto. She laudably refused to back down when leftists attacked her for attending a baseball game last fall with former President George W. Bush.

Thinking about it, that stance may explain why this reliably left-wing Obama supporter is suddenly the target of claims that she presides over a toxic workplace filled with racism and general bullying:

Ellen DeGeneres has built her worldwide, multimillion-dollar brand on the motto “be kind,” with lavish giveaways and acts of charity. But behind the scenes, current and former employees on her leading daytime show say they faced racism, fear, and intimidation.

“That ‘be kind’ bullshit only happens when the cameras are on. It’s all for show,” one former employee told BuzzFeed News. “I know they give money to people and help them out, but it’s for show.”

BuzzFeed News spoke to one current and 10 former employees on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution from the award-winning NBC daytime talk show and others in the entertainment industry. They said they were fired after taking medical leave or bereavement days to attend family funerals. One employee, who claims she was fed up with comments about her race, essentially walked off the job. Others said they were also instructed by their direct managers to not speak to DeGeneres if they saw her around the office.

Ellen is just the latest leftist to be accused of running a toxic workplace. Here are a few other examples of reliably left-leaning organizations that now have employees accusing them of bad behavior:

The director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, a woke institution with the obligatory grovel to BLM on its home page, is being accused of fostering a workplace that includes “racist micro-aggressions, violent verbal outbursts ... and the tokenization of marginalized artists.”

A senior curator at the very woke San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was forced out because he was a “white supremacist,” the proof being that he said the museum couldn’t discriminate against white artists.

Cards Against Humanity, a hip, edgy organization that’s been relentlessly anti-Trump has been accused of having a pervasively “racist and sexist culture.”

Women and BIPOCs (“Black, Indigenous, and People of Color”) are claiming that Remezcla, a cutting edge website that focuses on Hispanic culture, is a workplace in which they are “underpaid, overworked, and routinely harassed.”

Employees at Essence Magazine, a black-focused magazine that’s reliably anti-Trump, contend that their top editor (a black man) created a toxic workplace in which blacks are “systematically suppressed by pay inequity, sexual harassment, corporate bullying, intimidation, colorism and classism.” 

Pinterest, the online bulletin board site that was so woke it banned references to “plantation weddings” and loudly supported BLM, is being accused of having a racist, bullying culture.

Everlane, a company that is dedicated to the proper leftist causes, is accused of “racism, transphobia, and more.”

Employees at Refinery29, a progressive, female-centric website, forced out Amy Emmerich, the global president and chief content officer, accusing her of creating a toxic workplace that “diminished black women and other women of color.”

Again, all of the above racist, sexist, bullying workplaces are leftist and all virtue-signal vigorously. As I see it, two things may account for the fact that leftists are committing acts they constantly insist are the purview of Trump and his supporters.

The relentless virtue-signaling may, in fact, telegraph that the people running these companies are narcissistic, psychopathic manipulators (also known as the world’s worst bosses):

Here's some fun new research looking at "the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue," published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper—from University of British Columbia researchers Ekin Ok, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino—details multiple studies the authors conducted on the subject.

Their conclusion? Psychopathic, manipulative, and narcissistic people are more frequent signalers of "virtuous victimhood."

The so-called "dark triad" personality traits—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy—lead to characteristics like "self-promotion, emotional callousness, duplicity, and tendency to take advantage of others," the paper explains.

The other thing that may account for these complaints is that super woke companies are more likely to end up with super woke millennials (also known as snowflakes and terrible employees). These kids, after four years of coddling at college, may simply be incapable of functioning in the adult world – especially if their bosses are psychopaths.

Images: Pexels free images (by Andrea Piacquadio)