On March 19, Donald Trump Jr. sent an email through the company that operates his father’s email list, Campaign coredeclaring “tremendous progress in the culture war”. That culture war, Trump wrote, is “coming to corporate America.” He added that the Conservatives have a “new” tool to respond to “awakened” workplaces: the RedBalloon “Free to Work” job board. As an incentive to create an account on the site, Trump offered 20 autographed copies of his latest book, caused.
“The big job boards like Indeed and ZipRecruiter are already promoting ‘woke’ workplace policies,” Trump said in a promotional video posted to the right-wing video streaming site Rumble. “They’re a big part of the problem.” Exactly what the problem is, or what’s the word. “I wake up” It’s meant to stand for non-conservative terminology, fuzzy.
The company stands by the former president’s eldest son who was recently indicted in a RedBalloon ad Unfortunately, his name Founder Andrew Krapochitis. RedBalloon’s origin story dates back to 2024, when Crapuchettes claimed he was fired as CEO at his former company, EMSI, for being “Very conservative and Christian. ”
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RedBalloon explicitly”Anti wake upPositioning within a broader conservative push in recent years to create a “parallel economy” away from progressive values. The idea was Little Trump promoted it and far-right critics such as Charlie Kirk One of the turning points of the United States of America. And while the parallel right-wing media ecosystem has gained some traction, Other anti-wake projects have not fared so well. Take, for example, the bank funded by Peter Thiel that he encountered self cancellation, or the fact that Twitter’s alt-right Parler is down to about 20 employees. like NBC News reported Last month, conservative tech founders said at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference that “they believe some of the companies that have been part of the ‘parallel economy’ movement have gotten ahead of their aspirations.”
“An unapologetic conservative Christian”
The particular nature of the Crapuchettes’ Christian faith is something that may turn off lovers of the separation of church and state. In November 2024, the guardian mentioned Crapuchettes as an elder of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho—a church led by a man who “has publicly expressed an ambition to create a ‘theocracy’ in America.”
“When I ran the company, I believed that everyone should work for themselves,” says Krapochiet when asked about his faith. “And as an unapologetic conservative Christian, that means when we have our annual Christmas dinner, I will pray for the meal.”
Regarding the Crapuchettes’ role as a church elder promoting Christian theocracy, he says it was “never brought up” as a conflict by his previous board.
Was it a major issue? “I have no idea,” says Krabuchiet.
Crapuchettes says the issues with his former employer began when he and the EMSI board mentored chiefs on various social issues. “The Covid-BLM-George Floyd social shift happened,” says Crapuchettes. “We worked out a number of things, and they ended up selling the company.”
EMSI, the employment data company that later changed its name to LightCast after merging with BurningGlass, has released June 2024 announcement regarding Crapuchettes’ transition from CEO to a “strategic advisor” role. He does not mention his faith nor frame it as fire. LightCast spokesperson Scott Bittle did not comment on the reasons behind the merger.
A few months after he was removed from his position as CEO –Something that happens to many CEOs after companies merge– Launch the red balloon crabchits. In April 2024, he claimed on a podcast that he had been made “delightfully unemployed” by the combined company’s new board of directors. But LightCast claims he was still working at the company at the time of the podcast interview.
“After the merger of Emsi and Burning Glass, the former CEO of Burning Glass was appointed CEO of the combined company,” says Bittle. Crapuchettes remained employed as a strategic advisor until he left voluntarily a year later in June 2024.
The suitable job
If RedBalloon is a gateway for job seekers into the right-wing parallel economy, the anti-wake-up economic outlook looks a little weak. For jobs like RedBalloon, an important measure of success is the number of job listings available on the site. While Crapuchettes boasts that more than 3,000 employers have signed up for RedBalloon, a WIRED analysis showed that RedBallon has fewer than 900 active job listings as of this writing, which is 0.01 percent of the There are an estimated 9 million active job listings available on ZipRecruiter.
Hundreds of RedBalloon listings have been created in 2024 and 2024. Crapuchettes describes these dated listings as “evergreen” opportunities, but it’s not clear if all of them are actually open. While many of the job listings by several small companies don’t seem particularly noteworthy, a significant portion of the live listings on the site are posted by a coterie of Christian nationalist companies, some of which have been embroiled in scandal.
Among the outspoken right-wing Christian employers drawn to RedBalloon is Patriot Mobile, a Christian nationalist cell phone company She influenced school board elections in Texas He now faces four complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding allegations of extreme racism and sexual exploitation; coalition in defense of liberty, An organization for the legal defense of the Christian right that Classification of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a hate group; Brave Books, A Christian book publisher that created books using The obnoxious founder of LibsofTikTok And Ultra SPLC recruited by Jack Posbiec; Treefort Systems, a streaming technology company with a “Christ is all technology” mindset and is “incubated inCanon Press, publisher of the book The case for Christian nationalism Who argues for a kind of “Blood and Soil Nationalism” Holy war against democracy. And the Church of Christ, the theocratic church that established the Canon Press, counts Crapuchette as an elder, and for years employed a deacon who had been convicted of February 2023 Possession of child sexual abuse material.
If scandalous Christian nationalism isn’t your favorite flavor of conservatism, RedBalloon has other options. There are listings for opportunities at right-wing media outlets Project Veritas and Louder With Crowder; right-wing parallel economy companies like Parler and PublicSq; Anti-vaccination groups such as Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Advocacy and Informed Consent Action Network; the Snicor Foundationwhich requires Unpaid work in religiously oriented drug rehabilitation treatment centers, according to an investigation by Reveal; and Patriot Switch, Multi level marketing plan managed by a Tomahawk-toting QAnon supporter.
Many of the employers above also list opportunities on external job boards. Some employers on RedBallon, such as Patriot Mobile and the vaccination advocacy groups mentioned above, appear to have active listings exclusively on the site. But the only three employers with more than 20 active listings on the site – Cenikor Corporation, Republican Employment Service, and security firm Gavin de Becker & Associates – they also post listings on sites like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, or LinkedIn. Even if RedBalloon positions itself as a competitor to the big “woke” job boards, there’s no indication it’s walking away from their business.
Only time will tell if RedBalloon will rise to new heights or shrink. After all, the Labor Council is only in its second year, and American democracy has yet to give way to a Christian right-wing religious current. But as it stands now, RedBalloon seems less of a “huge advance in the culture war” than a work in progress. A recent job listing on RedBalloon says they are looking to hire a User Interface (UI) Designer on a contract basis. And you might just find one. According to the corresponding job listing on LinkedIn, the company stopped accepting applications after receiving 237 of them.
Update 7:30 PM ET, April 14, 2023: Shortly after publication, News broke that Parler is closingat least temporarily.