It looks like Google finally got around to googling Winston Churchill’s famous quote: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
When radical leftist employees occupied Google’s New York and Sunnyvale offices in an anti-Israel, pro-terrorist sit-in, the tech giant felt the hot crocodile breath, called the police and had them arrested. Good for Google.
But that’s still not far enough.
Don’t believe for a second that Google is walking away from its woke policies.
Had those employees not occupied Google’s offices, they’d still be sitting in their little Google pods, working away, actively subverting businesses that are not part of the Woke religion.
A couple of dozen employees gone; hundreds who are just as politically malignant still on the job.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., must do more than have executives issue a statement saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again.”
That ain’t gonna cut it.
Pichai must be wholeheartedly devoted to changing Google’s culture, not just its policies, because unless the culture changes, the political subversion will remain.
We’ve written on these pages about Google’s Gemini AI churning out historically inaccurate pictures of black Vikings and female popes.
You may also recall that Google fired an employee because he expressed his constitutionally protected but “politically incorrect” conservative opinions.
Google is horrendously biased.
And everyone knows it.
But Google’s discrimination isn’t always so blatant.
Much, if not most of Google’s bias manifests in discrete discrimination against non-woke or conservative voices.
If Pichai wants to put his money where his mouth is, he can and should start by addressing Google’s algorithmic bias, which black holes everything not woke, particularly in news and media.
Wouldn’t it be great to see the New York Post appear among the top search results for “Donald Trump”?
But that doesn’t happen.
Instead, The New York Times, CNN and other liberal outlets hostile to Trump rise to the top.
We just did that search, and The Post was not even on the first page of results.
We feel The Post’s search-result pain.
Our site, LegalInsurrection.com, suffers the same down-throttling in search results, even when our stories are among the most highly read on a topic.
This happened to us with the Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College case, where our coverage drove the news.
Worse still, we have inexplicably been demonetized by Google Ads.
Google owns YouTube, which removes videos that don’t toe the woke line.
Skepticism about COVID vaccines or the 2020 election results were suppressed and their publishers frequently deplatformed, while anti-Trump and anti-Republican conspiracy videos thrived.
Even if the right-leaning videos remain up, the search function may make it harder for an audience to find them, thanks to shadowbanning censorship.
But this ridiculousness doesn’t end with algorithmic discrimination.
Not too long ago, Google Docs introduced a feature that suggests alternatives such as “police officer” and “humankind” if someone types in “non-inclusive” words like “policeman” or “mankind.”
Pointless and unhelpful.
So, just because Google fired a few of its subversive woke employees, doesn’t mean it’s changing its culture.
Google has a long, long way to go.
But, maybe, as Churchill also famously said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
This may have been an accidental trip in the right direction, but let’s hope it leads Google down a less biased path.
William A. Jacobson is a clinical professor of law at Cornell and founder of the Equal Protection Project, where Kemberlee Kaye is operations and editorial director.