Silicon Valley’s War on Free Speech

The recent and possibly illegal firing of Senior Software Engineer James Damore by Google has fired up a controversy over the company’s growing monopoly on free speech.

Popular support for the former Google programmer has been growing rapidly despite attempts to smear his reputation by his former coworkers, the media, and Google itself. Yet, at the same time, the tech company is doubling down on its anti-free speech rhetoric- painting a grim picture for the future of freedom of expression.
 
Damore’s life was thrown into a tailspin after he was summarily terminated from his position at Google. He was accused of promoting an “unsafe work environment” and “gender-based stereotypes,” and fired after his memo was leaked by coworkers. According to Damore, Google had run a series of secretive meetings in which they claimed to be looking for ways to promote workplace synergy through diversity. The company had asked many of its most esteemed employees, (including Damore), to offer their suggestions on how to further this goal- to which Damore responded in good faith.
 
His memo was a well-sourced document on some of the natural differences between men and women as they relate to the discipline of computer programming. He discussed the well-proven fact that while the abilities of men and women are largely comparable in terms of intelligence and aptitude- women have a strong tendency to be more interested in people than in things, and men tend to be more interested in things than people. While there are outliers in both genders, this is a fact that has been exceedingly well substantiated by numerous researchers who have amassed volumes of data on the topic over many years.
 
Damore’s suggestions were of the bent that it would be helpful to Google’s programming workforce if measures were taken to assist all employees to be tasked with duties that would most appeal to them. The memo took into account the fact that while men tend to like things, and women tend to like people, it would be wise to make room for those rare women who prefer to work with things and for those rare men who prefer to work with people.
 
We could hardly invent a more inclusive set of ideas.
 
Media outlets like CNN, Wired Magazine, and Business Insider have published blatantly dishonest portrayals of Damore’s memo. They have called it sexist and interpreted its assertions in the simplest terms while omitting the many scientific sources that it makes use of. Now, Damore is being tarred and feathered in the mainstream media as a bigot.
 
But Google’s public comments on the memo and their dismissal of him only came after the memo was anonymously made public by a fellow Google employee. It would appear, that Google did not have a problem with the memo, or Damore’s ideas until the media started reporting on it.
 
In interviews, Damore talks about how he has long been an admirer of the massive tech company. He mentions his affection for the Android mobile operating system and for the company itself for creating search engine technology that makes so much information available to billions of people at the stroke of a keyboard.
 
Damore, wisely, refused to be interviewed by CNN, Wired, and other MSM outlets who had already begun to misrepresent him from the moment the story went public. Instead, the author of the memo went to prominent You Tube philosophers Jordan B. Peterson and Stefan Molyneux.
 
Molyneux operates arguably the most popular philosophy program on Earth at Freedomain Radio with over 650,000 subscribers and nearly 200 million unique views. Peterson is a professor and clinical psychologist in Canada who has been embroiled in a debate over free speech at the college in Ontario over his refusal to use gender-based neologisms as directed by new legislation.
 
These two respected thinkers were the first to talk with Damore publicly and were immediately called “right-wing extremists” by writers at Business Insider, Wired and elsewhere. Jordan Peterson reached out to one journalist and was able to get a retraction of some such defamatory comments.
 
But even as popular support grows for Damore, and as awareness about the true nature of his memo spreads, Google is doubling down on their disturbingly authoritarian and anti-free speech rhetoric. However, the tech company may be on thin ice as, according to the National Labor Board, employees cannot be fired while they are engaging in whistleblowing activities.

~ Liberty Planet


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