In other words, you don’t have to shout slurs — if you criticize an employee’s performance, and the investigator thinks your criticism is unfair and that you are some flavor of bigot, that’s enough to justify a shakedown.

This means that virtually any interpersonal conflict in the workplace might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of litigation — and employees in protected categories have massive incentives to generate or fabricate such conflicts.

This risk is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, which is one reason that labor-intensive businesses are dominated by massive conglomerates. You have to pay to play.

Conservative commentators love to characterize HR and DEI as “dead weight” patronage jobs, as if they were the product of bureaucratic bloat or laziness — but DEI mandarins aren’t lying when they say they perform a business-critical function.

If you are identified as a thought-criminal with respect to any legally-protected category, and your employer fails to discipline or terminate you, then any gender creature at the office can decide that you make them Feel Unsafe, and start building a case to put their hand in the company’s pocket.

Corporations don’t hire sprawling HR and DEI departments out of inertia, or because they’re afraid of popular pressure: they do it because they need an internal constituency that is as crazy as their craziest employee — that can keep the organization up to date with the latest progressive moral panic, and punish dissenting employees long before they generate a lawsuit. A DEI department is as practically necessary to the modern American corporation as Legal or Accounting.

It’s a brilliant workaround — it would, of course, be unconstitutional for the regular police to monitor your private communications and punish you for ideological crimes — but the EEOC built a $30B network of internal informants and political officers (twice the size and 3X the budget of the KGB at its peak) who are not accountable to the Constitution, and got your boss to pay for it.

This is why only glad-handing empty suits can get promoted at 100+ person firms, by the way. Frank criticism and Fuhren unter Der Hand (without which a firm can't function) cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. As such the modern firm limps along as a cripple.