Report: Google Soured on Leftist Identity Politics After Employee Lawsuit, Breitbart Exposés

Fear of lawsuits from aggrieved employees and exposure by Breitbart News led Google to scale back its internal commitment to radical intersectional leftism, according to a report by NBC News.

The NBC report, an in-depth feature that drew on comments from current Google employees, pointed to Breitbart News’ exposés on the company’s internal culture, which is highly biased against white males, as one of the reasons for the tech giant’s shift:

The right-wing news website Breitbart began covering the internal tensions about Google’s efforts to become more diverse, publishing a July 2018 article on a speaker event hosted by Google on the topic of how white people can better navigate conversations about racism and privilege in the workplace. Breitbart accused Google of breaking its internal policy against using blanket statements about categories of people, such as about employees in certain racial groups.

“There was a meme going around that said white fragility shuts down discussions of white fragility,” a person involved with the event said in an interview, referring to a meme that circulated on an internal employee message board. The event wasn’t ultimately shut down, but additional security was provided.

Read the full report at NBC.

Radical intersectional leftism, an ideology often characterized by the the use of demeaning language (“white fragility”) against white males, is typically introduced into corporations like Google under the banner of “diversity and inclusion,” whereby discrimination and hostility against certain groups is excused on the basis of creating an “inclusive” culture for women and minorities.

According to the NBC report, fear of further lawsuits similar to James Damore’s class-action case against the tech giant, which alleged that it discriminates on the basis of race and gender as well as political viewpoint, was another factor causing the company to scale back its internal “inclusion” efforts.

As Breitbart News reported in 2018, the Damore case revealed numerous instances of rampant anti-white, anti-male sentiments in Google’s workforce in the runup to Damore’s firing (Damore was fired after he circulated a memo calling for more viewpoint diversity at the company).

One comment made by a then manager-level employee, Liz Fong-Jones in 2015 released via the lawsuit reads “I could care less about being ‘unfair’ to white men. You already have all the advantages in the world.”

In another 2015 post released via the lawsuit, then manager-level employee Kim Burchett shared an article challenging people to “stop reading white, straight, cis male authors for one year.”

The lawsuit also revealed a document that was circulated to managers at the company, advising them that values like “objectivity,” “individual achievement,” and “perfectionism” were examples of “U.S. white male dominant culture.”

Melonie Parker, Google’s “Chief Diversity Officer,” denied that the company is scaling back its diversity efforts. In a comment to NBC, she said the company is “maturing our programs to make sure we’re building our capability.” Parker cited the company’s new “racial equity training” course, which was launched recently.

However, NBC cites a source at Google who says that one senior employee in the AI unit told her that “conversations about diversity could become a liability.”

Another Google employee’s statements to NBC indicate that some of Google’s changes were merely cosmetic, for example referring to diversity and inclusion by the acronym “D&I” instead of saying the word “diversity.”