Meet RedBalloon, the ‘Anti-Woke’ Job Board for Christian Nationalists

On March 19, Donald Trump Jr. sent an email via the firm that manages his father’s email list, Campaign Nucleus , announcing “a HUGE advance in the culture war. ” That culture war, Trump wrote, is “coming to corporate America.

” He added that conservatives have a “new” tool to fight back against “woke” workplaces: the “free to work” job board RedBalloon. As an incentive to create an account on the website, Trump offered 20 autographed copies of his latest book, Triggered . “The big job boards like Indeed and ZipRecruiter are actually promoting ‘woke’ workplace policies,” Trump said in a promotional video posted on the right-wing video streaming site Rumble.

“They’re a huge part of the problem. ” Exactly what the problem is, or what the word “woke” is supposed to stand for other than a conservative shibboleth, is unclear. Standing next to the eldest son of the recently indicted former president in the RedBalloon advertisement is the company’s unfortunately named founder, Andrew Crapuchettes.

RedBalloon’s origin story goes back to 2021, when Crapuchettes claims he was fired from his role as CEO at his former company, EMSI, for being “ too conservative and Christian . ” RedBalloon’s explicitly “ anti-woke ” positioning fits within a broader conservative push in recent years to create a “parallel economy” apart from progressive values. The idea has been promoted by the junior Trump and far-right pundits like Charlie Kirk of Turning Points USA.

And while a parallel right-wing ecosystem of media outlets has gained some traction, other anti-woke projects haven’t fared so well . Consider the Peter Theil-funded bank that faced self-cancellation , or the fact that right-wing Twitter alternative Parler is down to around 20 employees. As NBC News reported last month, conservative tech founders at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference “said they believe some companies that were part of the ‘parallel economy’ movement got ahead of themselves in their aspirations.

” The particular nature of Crapuchettes’ Christian faith is something that may give pause to fans of the separation of church and state. In November 2021, The Guardian reported Crapuchettes as an elder of the Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho —a church that is led by a man who has “openly expressed the ambition of creating a ‘theocracy’ in America. ” “When I ran the company, I believed that everybody should bring their whole self to work,” Crapuchettes says when asked about his faith.

“And as an unapologetic conservative Christian, that means that when we’re having our annual Christmas dinner, I’m going to pray for the meal. ” Regarding Crapuchettes’ role as an elder of a church that promotes Christian theocracy, he says it was “never brought up” as a conflict by his former board of directors. “Was it an underlying issue? I have no idea,” Crapuchettes says.

Crapuchettes says the issues with his former employer started when he and the EMSI board of directors butted heads over various social issues. “The Covid-BLM-George Floyd social shift happened,” Crapuchettes says. “We came to a head on a number of things, and they ended up selling the business.

” EMSI, an employment data firm that later changed its name to LightCast after a merger with BurningGlass, released a June 2021 announcement regarding Crapuchettes’ transition from CEO to the role of “strategic advisor. ” It does not mention his faith nor frame it as a firing. Scott Bittle, a LightCast spokesperson, did not comment on the reasoning behind the merger.

A few months after being shifted out of his role as CEO— something that happens to many CEOs after corporate mergers —Crapuchettes launched RedBalloon. In April 2022, he claimed on a podcast that he had been made “delightfully unemployed” by the new board of the merged company. But LightCast claims he was still employed by the company at the time of the podcast interview.

“Following the merger of Emsi and Burning Glass, the former CEO of Burning Glass was appointed as CEO of the combined company,” Bittle says. “Crapuchettes remained employed as a strategic advisor until he voluntarily departed a year later in June 2022. ” If RedBalloon represents the gateway for job seekers to the right-wing parallel economy, then the anti-woke economic outlook is looking a bit anemic.

For job boards like RedBalloon, one meaningful metric of success is the number of job listings available on the site. While Crapuchettes boasts that over 3,000 employers have signed up for RedBalloon, a WIRED analysis shows that RedBallon has fewer than 900 active job listings as of this writing, representing 0. 01 percent of the estimated 9 million active job listings available on ZipRecruiter .

Hundreds of RedBalloon’s listings were created in 2022 and 2021. Crapuchettes describes these dated listings as “evergreen” opportunities, but it’s unclear if they’re all actually open. While many job listings by various small businesses do not appear particularly noteworthy, a meaningful 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 explicitly right-wing Christian employers that have been drawn to RedBalloon are Patriot Mobile, a Christian Nationalist cell phone company that’s influenced school board elections in Texas and now faces four complaints to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regarding allegations of severe racism and sexual exploitation ; the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian Right legal advocacy organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated as a hate group ; Brave Books, a Christian book publisher that has created books with the hateful founder of LibsofTikTok and SPLC-designated extremist Jack Posbiec ; Treefort Systems, a streaming technology company with an “all of Christ for all of tech” mentality that is “ incubated at ” Canon Press, publisher of the book The Case For Christian Nationalism, which argues for a sort of “blood and soil nationalism” and holy war against democracy; and Christ Church, the theocratic church that started Canon Press, counts Crapuchette as an elder, and for years employed a deacon who was convicted in February 2023 of possession of child sexual abuse material . If scandal-ridden Christian Nationalism isn’t your preferred 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 like Robert Kennedy Jr. ’s Children’s Health Defense and the Informed Consent Action Network ; the Cenikor Foundation , which required unpaid labor at its faith-oriented addiction rehabilitation treatment centers , according to an investigation by Reveal; and Patriot Switch, a multi-level marketing scheme run by a Tomahawk-toting QAnon supporter . Many of the aforementioned employers also list opportunities on outside job boards.

Some employers on RedBallon, such as Patriot Mobile and the aforementioned anti-vaccination advocacy groups, appear to have active listings exclusively on the site. But the only three employers with more than 20 active listings on the site—the Cenikor Foundation, a Republican job recruitment service , and the Gavin de Becker & Associates security firm—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 little indication that it’s pulling away their business.

Only time will tell whether RedBalloon will soar to new heights or deflate. After all, the job board is only in its second year, and American democracy has not yet given way to a right-wing Christian theocracy. But as it stands now, RedBalloon looks less like a “HUGE advance in the culture war” than a work in progress.

A recent job listing on RedBalloon says it’s looking to hire a user interface (UI) designer on contract. And it just might find one. Per the corresponding job listing on LinkedIn, the company stopped accepting applications after receiving 237 of them.

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