In January 2022, Jennifer Sey was pushed out of her job as Levi’s global brand president because she advocated for opening public school playgrounds and unmasking toddlers. Woke employees complained, and despite 23 years of loyal service, Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh told her there wasn’t a place for her at the company. Here, Sey reflects on the scandal.

It’s been a year since my story of my cancellation went viral, and I think I know why: hypocrisy.

Levi’s is known as an all-American brand rooted in rugged individualism. A successful ad campaign that I created as the chief marketing officer exhorted our fans to “use their voices.” The idea that I could not use mine in defense of children conflicted with all the brand claimed to stand for.

I kept my advocacy focused on children. I was for open public schools and playgrounds, for youth sports, against masks on toddlers and against vaccine mandates for students. I thought that we could all agree that it was not a good idea to harm children. I thought that in a world where lefties claim to fight for equality, we could agree that rich white people sending their kids to in-person private schools while low-income black and brown kids were denied schooling for a year and a half was discriminatory, racist and unacceptable.

I assumed that the white liberals posting black squares on Instagram weren’t raging hypocrites. I was wrong.

I was viciously censored, bullied and interrogated by my colleagues for going against the mainstream press narrative and Democratic Party dogma. The woke mob brooked no dissent.

And when they couldn’t keep me quiet through an aggressively hostile work environment and constant bullying and harassment, they just took my job away to protect their own reputations as empathetic leaders fighting for employee well-being, inclusion and safety.

Of course, all this reputation laundering is one big charade meant to shield these C-suiters from scrutiny. Their only true mission: profits for themselves. In 2020, under the cover of COVID, Levi’s laid off 15% of its workforce to bolster profits and the company stock price. During that same time period, CEO Chip Bergh cashed out on $43 million in stock.

In 2022, Levi’s continued with layoffs while paying the new brand president $25 million for her first year on the job. And, in the 2022 annual report, the company has promised more layoffs are coming this year.

It’s an evergreen approach: Sacrifice employees in order to enrich executives. And banish anyone who dares to challenge your altruism.

Much has happened in the year since I resigned. And it seems I wasn’t so “out there” after all. I simply had the audacity to challenge public school closures, before the New York Times did it. And now, after three years of printing government and Big Pharma press releases as journalism, the Times has finally acknowledged how disastrous the consequences of these onerous restrictions on children have been.

Kids are experiencing unprecedented learning loss, devastating mental health impacts and alarming dropout rates. Close to a quarter of a million students are missing from the school system entirely. And mask mandates have definitively been proven to be ineffective, with the recent publication of the Cochrane Study, which concludes that “face coverings make little to no difference” in COVID infection and fatality rates.

But as anyone with a little common sense can see, masks have many adverse impacts, including causing speech and development delays in very young children.

And so, it seems, I was right all along. But it doesn’t matter. I still have no job, there has been no apology to those who were blacklisted, nor has there been any accountability for those who made these catastrophic policy choices. And the children are still suffering from the impacts, as many of them will for the rest of their lives. Higher rates of illiteracy and lower rates of graduating from high school will inevitably lead to increased rates of poverty and incarceration. And, ultimately, lower life expectancy.

The questions I am most frequently asked are: 1) Do you regret what you did? and 2) Have you gotten an apology?

No, I do not regret it. I didn’t bend a knee during my two years of conflict at Levi’s and I won’t do it now. I was right and children need common-sense adults to stand up for them. I will not further lies (kids are resilient, there’s no such thing as learning loss, open-schools parents are racist and don’t care if black children die) to remain in good standing with the tribe.

In my case, “the tribe” is Democratic Party acolytes who appear all too willing to tout harmful deceptions to retain the sheen of moral virtue and the comfort of being with the “in-crowd.”

And no, I have not received an apology from anyone. Not from the friends I lost, or the family members who rejected me or the employer that took my job away. They have all, in fact, doubled down. Levi’s has offered this twisted defense of its actions:

“… when Jen went beyond calling for school reopenings and began using her platform to criticize public health guidelines … it undermined the company’s health and safety policies.”

But it was public health guidelines that ensured schools stayed closed. Levi’s statement is merely PR hogwash meant to distance the company from the fact that it took my job away because I advocated for open public schools for low-income children while executives’ own children attended in-person private school.

The general vibe directed at open-schoolers like me: You may have been right, but you were right for the wrong reasons. And now you’re just nursing old grievances. Schools are open. Shut up already. And let’s offer amnesty for those well-meaning leaders, like teachers union bosses and superintendents, who were just doing the best they could.

But I won’t. I offer no amnesty — and indeed no forgiveness — because it was clear from the outset that closed schools beyond a few months were a morally abhorrent policy choice, one that Europe and red states did not make. Too many children’s lives have been ruined to just pretend it all never happened. I did not, and will not ever, bend a knee.

Jennifer Sey is the author of “Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice.”