09 Aug 2017 I Confronted Google About Its Liberal Groupthink At A Shareholder Meeting — Here’s What Happened Next

In the name of diversity, Google just killed diversity.

While that may sound like a sentence out of a Lewis Carroll novel, it’s the stark reality of the modern-day liberal groupthink that pervades much of America’s academic and corporate cultures. The titans of Silicon Valley roaming the halls of Google’s sprawling Mountain View, California campus represent the epitome of this totalitarian mindset.

Justin Danhof, Esq.

After Google engineer James Damore recently penned a lengthy memo calling for the company to take real strides toward diversity rather than just bean-counting folks by race, ethnicity and sex, he was summarily fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” What nonsense.

What exactly were Damore’s sins? He suggested that men and women are actually different, and that companies should value ideological diversity. For the liberal leadership at Google, this was a bridge too far. Among today’s American left, the altar of diversity actually dictates that leaders must discriminate against those holding contrarian views. Disagreement with the liberal ethos simply isn’t tolerated anymore.

Damore is far from the first to suffer such a fate. In 2013, the liberal pitchfork brigade helped to oust Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for his 2008 donation to a traditional marriage initiative.

Damore’s firing was total twaddle, but it was predictable.

In fact, we at the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project warned of the perils of Google’s authoritarian tendencies earlier this year at the annual shareholder meeting of Google’s parent company, Alphabet (GOOGL).

At the meeting, I asked Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt about the company’s actual commitment to diversity and inclusion in light of the company’s public policy positions, not to mention the views of top management, that all skew to the extreme political left. I noted conservatives may not feel welcome in such an environment, let alone feel free to express their beliefs. Schmidt and other company executives dismissed my entire question by claiming everyone at the company — and in the tech industry as a whole — was in agreement with them.

Not so fast, Mr. Schmidt.

After that confrontation, a strange thing happened. I started receiving messages from Google employees thanking me for challenging Alphabet’s leadership. Without realizing it, I was apparently speaking for a closeted segment of Google employees with conservative beliefs.

One email read, “I’m working with a few other Googlers to fix the company’s political discrimination problem. Really appreciate you shining a light on the matter.”

Another said she was working closely with a group of conservatives at Google, and noted, “(t)hey’re all very appreciative that you were standing up for their interests at the shareholder’s (sic) meeting. The shareholder resolution your organization filed also made a lot of people happy.”

I won’t divulge the names of these conservative Google employees lest they suffer the same fate as Damore. But it’s clear that, despite Mr. Schmidt’s claim, not everyone at Google subscribes to his far-left worldview.

After the shareholder meeting, we warned that “Schmidt’s bold claims that no one disagrees with his liberal elitist positions prove the point of the Free Enterprise Project’s question. To the extent that any conservatives exist within Alphabet’s walls, it certainly doesn’t appear they can be comfortable letting those opinions be known to upper management. hat’s not fostering diversity of opinion. That’s approaching a hostile work environment.”

Damore made his opinion known. It was met with the ultimate corporate hostility as he was shown the door.

To honor the memory of musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, singer Don McLean penned the classic song “American Pie” in which he mournfully wrote that he “saw Satan laughing with delight the day the music died.”

Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil.” I now think I see Satan laughing with delight on this day that diversity died there.

Justin Danhof, Esq., is the director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project. This was originally published by Investor’s Business Daily.