‘Virulent discrimination’: Lawsuit claims AMEX axed white employees, promoted black workers for racial quotas

The left’s culture war against conservative white people is currently raging in today’s world, with the latest battle being fought between American Express and a former employee who claims in a new class-action lawsuit that the company fired him after more than a decade because of the color of his skin.

(Video: Fox News)

After the 2020 death of George Floyd which sparked destructive riots across the nation, Brian Netzel, 63, says he was dismissed that same year from his job as an Arizona-based client manager for AMEX as a result of the company’s then-newly implemented anti-racism policies — policies Netzel contends created a “racially discriminatory” workplace.

According to a class-action lawsuit filed last Tuesday by Netzel, he and other white employees faced “animosity” as a result of AMEX’s virtuous signal. The lawsuit alleges that white employees were routinely overlooked for promotions in favor of employees who could fill racial quotas.

On Wednesday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Fox News host asked Netzel’s attorney, David Pivtorak, if AMEX’S actions were not “unambiguously illegal.”

“Absolutely, Tucker, it is unlawful,” replied Pivtorak, who added that AMEX and other U.S. corporations have been “emboldened” by the lack of consequences faced by those who riot in the name of “social justice.”

“It has been illegal since at least the 1960s, since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but the reason that this is happening is because back in the summer of St. Floyd in 2020, a lot of the corporations saw that with the BLM rioters, they were allowed to burn down entire cities with absolutely zero consequences because it was in the name of social justice,” Pivtorak said. “So why wouldn’t the companies be emboldened to treat their white employees like second-class citizens and violate them on the most fundamental civil rights laws in this country when we see this precedent that was happening for several years now?”

Included in Netzel’s complaint are claims that American Express forced its white employees to participate in so-called “trainings” in which they were instructed to treat their black coworkers differently.

The racist policies, Netzel alleges, came right from the top, with CEO Stephen Squeri who, Netzel claims, engaged in “what amounted to an emotional tirade against police, against systemic racism in the U.S. and within American Express” at company town halls.

“We filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the administrative arm of the government that is supposed to be handling stuff like this and go after companies like American Express — like a lot of these companines, like Uber and Chase and a lot of the other companies that are instigating these policies — but they just don’t enforce it, because, again, it is done in the name of ‘social justice,'” Pivtorak said.

“They think it’s benign discrimination,” he added, “which the late Justice Scalia said is never the case.”

It isn’t the first time AMEX’s woke policies have garnered harsh criticism.

As BizPac Review reported in April 2021, Critical Race Theory infected a number of Fortune 100 companies in the wake of Floyd’s death, and at American Express, white employees were told they shouldn’t “speak over members of the black and African-American community,” according to Chris Rufo, who vowed to expose them all.

Said Rufo at the time, employees are trained to “deconstruct their own intersectional identities, mapping their ‘race, sexual orientation, body type, religion, disability status, age, gender identity [and] citizenship’ onto an official company worksheet.”

AMEX denied Rufo’s allegations.

In a previous interview with Fox Business, Pivtorak called this case a warning for America.

“[O]nce the truth about American Express’s virulent discrimination is exposed in court…” he said, “it will be a clear warning to the rest of the country about the dangers of woke capitalism.”

Melissa Fine

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