There's detail missing, so it's hard to be sure, but this just seems like HR incompetence more than anything else, and it's right that the head of HR left.
Companies shouldn't have political discussions in work forums, so the comment about Nazis was inappropriate. But was it a firing offense? They do talk about a "pattern of behaviour", but this comment can't trigger a firing. If they had just reinforced that work forums aren't the places for political discussion, that might have been the end of it.
Now they have to put out a virtue-signalling report about racism and actually encouraging people to discuss politics in internal forums.
There are all sorts of dangerous people out there. Of the 16,000 people murdered in the US every year, how many are by Nazis? No, it's a political statement, which is fine, politics is good. The workplace is just not the place for it.
We don't know that, no one has counted. There were tens of thousands of people there, how many were Nazis? We don't know how many of them are there in the US, for that matter.
What we do know is that they have no real cultural influence or power. That's why calling them out as particularly dangerous is an act of politics. It attempts to smear political opponents by grouping them with evil figures like Nazis, white supremacists and racists.
There were people with using nazi symbols in the protest. People wearing nazi symbols are historically violent to certain groups of people. That's enough reason to alert people in the vicinity about it.
At my work's Slack I get snow alerts, heat wave alerts, lockdown alerts. All those can be politicised depending on the audience, but are still highly appropriate to be had on a company's Slack channel.
You don’t think that in the midst of a terrorist attack in which multiple perpetrators bear Nazi symbols, people in the area should be at least slightly more worried about Nazis than usual?
Companies shouldn't have political discussions in work forums, so the comment about Nazis was inappropriate. But was it a firing offense? They do talk about a "pattern of behaviour", but this comment can't trigger a firing. If they had just reinforced that work forums aren't the places for political discussion, that might have been the end of it.
Now they have to put out a virtue-signalling report about racism and actually encouraging people to discuss politics in internal forums.