Except that every company that's taken a political stance has demanded that their employees suppress their opinions, unless those opinions are extreme left-wing opinions.

Define "extreme left." Do you mean stalinism or maoism? Are these companies in favor of exterminating the aristocracy through lethal force? Do you mean marxism? Are these companies that are in favor of peacefully gifting their workers with the means of production, and equalizing pay for all employees? Show me these leftist corporations.

Or are you referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent Supreme Court rulings as the "extreme left"?

Or do you mean it in the Fox News sense, where any disagreement with the president is "extreme left"?

Equality of outcome is extreme left, California subscribes to it pretty hard. The left we have in Europe are much saner.

Europe is a pretty diverse legal landscape, but it looks like quite a few countries there have had affirmative action for over a decade. Is California extreme or is it somewhat more progressive? Because I consider Stalin, Mao, etc. to be the extreme left and California to be extremely conservative by comparison.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action

There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.

Edit: About Europe, we almost never practice affirmative action the same way as US does. It mostly is "If two applicants has equal merit you are free to choose the disadvantaged one". See this court case for example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-47335859

In USA there are many examples of worse students being accepted thanks to affirmative action, and it is defensible in court.

> There are different kinds of left. California is not economically extreme left.

I see. This is a confusion of the economic "left/right" axis with the social "progressive/regressive" axis. Mainstream media does tend to collapse those axes, along with the "authoritarian/libertarian" axis, but this is intellectual laziness that doesn't even represent american bipartisan politics faithfully. We can do better.

Personally I am economically left of California and socially right of them. I prefer higher taxes, spend those taxes to help the poor get better opportunities, and then evaluate based on merit. California instead prefer to do lower taxes, let poor suffer and then give them bonus points in selection processes.