So by now, you have probably heard about this Google controversy. If you haven’t, it’s time to familiarize yourself with it because this is one of the most chilling news stories of the year. This is about something far bigger than one tech company’s internal politics. Google is, in many ways, the world’s ultimate gatekeeper in an era where the mainstream media is losing its stranglehold on societal thought. If you want information about the world, you get it from the internet. You get it from the internet, often, by going through Google. Or you get it from someone on social media (who got it from Google). Or you get it from an independent website…that relies on Google rankings and Google advertisements to stay in business. The company’s informational power cannot be overstated.
And that’s why this is a canary in the coal mine for where we’re headed as a society.
This week, Google’s parent company fired engineer James Damore for a memo he wrote criticizing the stifling social-justice culture that’s threatening to send the company off the rails. Damore’s memo, which argued that Google’s diversity initiatives were the result of an “ideological echo chamber” lacking in intellectual rigor, set off a firestorm of controversy when it was released publicly.
“I’m simply stating that the distribution of preference and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership,” Damore wrote. “Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.”
In other words, it doesn’t make sense for Google to go out of its way to recruit women or create diversity quotas. You’re fighting forces that have nothing to do with sexism or politics and everything to do with facts and scientific distribution.
Now, Damore’s beliefs aren’t necessarily any more “correct” than those governing Google’s initiatives. Maybe he’s completely wrong. Fine. But why is Google (and they are far from the only ones) so terrified of a dissenting viewpoint that they have to fire an employee who expresses them? There’s nothing hateful in Damore’s memo. The only thing “wrong” with it, ethically, is that it goes against the left-wing hivemind.
But that’s enough, apparently.
CEO Sundar Pichai said parts of the memo “violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
Uh-huh.
The thing is – if women and men are biologically and psychologically the “same,” as Google appears to be insisting, then why is gender diversity important? Hell, the left now claims there is really no difference whatsoever between men and women. That these differences are fictions based on social norms and traditions. So if that’s the case, why should it matter that a company employs mostly men? Can it correct this imbalance simply by asking some of its male employees to identify as women for the official record?
None of this makes any sense, but that’s where we are now as a society. That’s why it’s especially frightening to see that a company like Google, which wields so much power over what we see, hear, and read, has a zero-tolerance policy in place for ideological arguments that are right of center.
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