Lawsuit Exposes Google as Intolerant and Vindictive
It’s targeting conservative and white male employees simply because of their appearance and beliefs.
Conservative icon William F. Buckley once said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” Today’s “liberals” are not only offended to discover other viewpoints; they actively seek to crush them. There is no room in modern progressivism for disagreement when it comes to enforcing the leftist worldview, and that jihad against free thought is manifest most clearly in the leftist strongholds of academia, the media and Silicon Valley technology giants.
Though claiming to be champions of diversity, Silicon Valley tech giants are anything but. Mozilla fired its founder for donating $1,000 to a pro-marriage campaign a decade ago. Video-streaming giant YouTube (owned by Google) censors videos from Prager University and other conservative commentators, and Facebook and Twitter routinely censor content. Google also has added a new feature: a sidebar called “Reviewed Claims” that only seems to show up when searching conservative news sites.
Now tech giant Google finds itself the subject of a lawsuit for discriminatory practices, targeting conservative and white male employees for harassment and mistreatment simply because of their appearance and beliefs.
Last summer, Google made headlines for firing senior software engineer James Damore who, according to his performance reviews, was a stellar employee with a bright future.
So what egregious sin got him fired and made Google executives turn him into a pariah? He dared utter the biologically indisputable truth that men and women are different; anatomically, intellectually and in their career preferences and life goals. His memo, entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” not only called the company’s “diversity” initiatives into question, but argued that “differences in distributions of traits may in part explain why we don’t have 50 percent representation of women in tech.”
Damore’s lawsuit asserts he and others at Google were “ostracized, belittled, and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males. … This is the essence of discrimination — Google formed opinions about and then treated Plaintiffs not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in groups with assumed characteristics.”
The lawsuit includes a wealth of internal memos and emails revealing that rather than being a bastion of diversity, Google more closely resembles Soviet Russia, where blasphemy against the religion of the state was punished swiftly and harshly.
White males are particularly singled out for contempt, as evidenced by the fact that Google managers created “blacklists” of conservative employees that they refused to work with. There was also a meme posted internally claiming if Google wanted to increase diversity it should “fire all of the bigoted white men.”
Google reflects a sort of mob mentality against conservatives specifically. As reported in The Guardian, internal Google memos show employee support for aggressive intolerance against Damore and any who share his views, demanding Google respond to Damore’s memo by “disciplining or terminating those who have expressed support.” One manager went so far as to post his efforts to “silence” certain “violently offensive” perspectives, writing, “There are certain ‘alternative views, including different political views’ which I do not want people to feel safe to share here. … You can believe that women or minorities are unqualified all you like … but if you say it out loud, then you deserve what’s coming to you.”
Damore’s lawsuit also includes a mass email from one of Google’s directors in which he called Damore’s (scientifically accurate) email “repulsive and intellectually dishonest,” and an email from another engineer warned him, “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired.”
Rachel Whetstone, formerly senior VP of communications and public policy for Google before being recruited by Uber, expressed her concerns over this strictly enforced groupthink at Google, stating, “It seems like we believe in free expression except when people disagree with the majority view. … I have lost count of the times at Google, for example, people tell me privately that they cannot admit their voting choice if they are Republican because they fear how other Googlers react.”
Other examples of such intolerance include Google’s refusal to allow internal mailing lists for conservatives while supporting such lists for those interested in polygamy, transgenderism, and “furries” (people who like to dress up in animal costumes, often for sexual gratification).
When Damore’s firing became national news, Danielle Brown, the ironically titled vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, stated, “We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company. We’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul.”
Unless, of course, you are a white male with conservative political views, in which case you should be made a public example; attacked, vilified, excoriated, driven from polite company, and stripped of your livelihood.
Because tolerance.
It might also interest the reader to discover that Google, this bastion of diversity and tolerance, is not only being sued for creating a hostile work environment for white males and conservatives, it is being sued for “extreme pay discrimination” against female workers following a three-year investigation by the Labor Department.
So there’s that.
British historian Alan Bullock wrote of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s mastery of propaganda, explaining that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
It looks like Google has learned that lesson well.