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Google Groupthink Is the Gateway to Totalitarianism

by Rush Limbaugh - Aug 10,2017

RUSH: I’m glad I waited on the Google story, because there have been developments here that will add to my expose, the entire point that I want to make, that what’s happening at Google is an example of what’s happening on college campi everywhere. This demand for diversity and so-called tolerance is actually leading to the destruction of free speech, and the guy that got fired at Google is making it very plain how things operated out there, and he’s essentially saying the same thing. He’s been interviewed by a couple of people now.

We have that to play-off of. And do you remember when I, El Rushbo, earlier this week said, “Ladies at Google, don’t get offended here. Don’t waste your time becoming social justice warriors. Focus on the money. Google is loaded. You’re being discriminated against, they’re making it plain, and now is the time to go for the money.” In fact, we have audio sound bite number five. This is exactly how I phrased it three days ago.

RUSH ARCHIVE: Google is reeling right now. This is the kind of thing, this is the kind of charge that just sends leftists up the tree, that they’re unfair, that they’re discriminating on the basis of gender. Ladies, tell Google to prove it to you that the guy who wrote the memo is wrong. What you say to Google is, “Show me the money.” Go for the money. Tell ’em you want money. Tell ’em you want raises. Tell Google to prove it. Don’t join the protest march and start throwing underwear and bras. Just demand the money. They’re reeling right now. Hit ’em!

RUSH: And lo and behold, on the Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co., Stuart Varney, talking to Judge Andrew Napolitano (the human Eddie Munster) about a possible lawsuit against Google. Stuart Varney said, “More than 60 women are considering a lawsuit against Google. Silicon Valley will be taken on in a class-action lawsuit claiming gender discrimination.” Who was it? Who was it that first suggested they do this? It was I. And here is Eddie Munster with the reply…

NAPOLITANO: It seems to have been triggered by that bizarre, psychobabble-filled email that the engineer sent to ten people. Two of them sent it to 40,000 people. And, of course, it ginned up all this dispute. We all know what sexism is, and the law doesn’t define it and the law doesn’t condemn it. The law is a lot more precise. If you pay male and female different salaries for substantially the same work, you may be in violation of a California state law. That’s simple as that. What may happen here is there will be a huge settlement. You’re in California. You’re in the most pro-plaintiffs state in the union. You’re in a state of the union where the legal machinery is virtually controlled by the plaintiff’s trial bar.

RUSH: That would be the Democrat Party. So you see, many people have the same instincts as did I. Don’t waste time on the protest march. Don’t do all the traditional things that feminazis would have you do. Just go for the money! Google will be reeling. Just to give you a taste here, the Google employee that wrote the manifesto ended up getting fired, his name is James Damore. And he spoke with the psychology professor, University of Toronto. Jordan Peterson is his name, and the professor here has a YouTube channel. So James Damore agreed to be interviewed by Jordan Peterson, and during the interview Damore, the engineer fired, talked about the reason he wrote the manifesto.

DAMORE: I’m not just attacking diversity. I’m just attacking the fact that we can’t honestly discuss any of these issues, and that that is actually hurting the problem.

RUSH: You see, they can’t discuss. They can’t be open about what they think. They have to follow the Google groupthink or they’re going to be canned. They’re not allowed to dissent. And yet these are people claiming to be the greatest defenders of First Amendment free speech. These are people claiming to be the bulwark and the saviors, and yet if you don’t say what they want to hear or what they agree with, you will be shut down, you’ll be shamed, and you’ll be fired. This is how it begins, folks, and it’s already begun on several college campuses and at many institutions of the left.

As I said yesterday, freedom doesn’t end on the protest march. I mean, you don’t have a bunch of Castro supporters and others marching in the streets saying, “Down with freedom!” In fact, they say just the opposite. The way you end up losing freedom of speech is not by the protest march but actually enforcing no freedom of speech and only tolerating certain speech under the guise of diversity or what have you. That’s how it happens, and it is in the process of happening. And you can look at surveys of Millennials on college campuses.

You’ll find a shocking percentage of these young people who think that it’s perfectly fine that speech be policed so that feelings are not hurt and so that people aren’t offended, and they’re perfectly fine with it — and that’s how it begins. Of course, all of this is happening under an umbrella that people think is ultimately good and positive and compassionate. “We are preventing people from being hurt. We are preventing people from being offended. These speech codes and this discrimination against certain things is a good thing.”

That’s how it always happens. Always under the guise of goodness do people lose liberty and freedom. That’s how it happens, and then after a certain passage of time, that’s when the powerful forces of government begin to enforce the speech codes with the use of force. But the early stages, it’s very seductive and occurs under the cloak of politeness and fairness and decency, all of that. There’s one other thing that Damore said. This is a different interview, actually, a podcast with… I’m not sure the host. It doesn’t matter. This is the guy fired by Google discussing some of his experience there.

DAMORE: I heard things I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions with people there but there was just a lot of shaming and, “No, you can’t say that. That’s… That’s sexist.” A lot of this came from me seeing some of the problems in our culture at Google where a lot of people that weren’t in this groupthink just felt totally isolated and alienated.

RUSH: Now, normally — and in this case, it’s true too. We’re talking about the dividing line of liberalism versus conservatism. This guy happens to tend towards conservatism and that’s what is not permitted. Not just his words. His thoughts, if they’re discovered, are not permitted. So people get shamed, they’re called names, and that’s how certain speech is silenced — under the guise of improving everything, under the guise of not hurting people, under the guise of not offending people.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: James Damore is the Google employee who wrote a 10-page interoffice memo on what he thought was a very bad diversity system inside the company. He was interviewed by a Canadian professor — a psychologist, actually — and it was part of a podcast. One of the questions was, “How would you say you’ve performed as an employee at Google? Have people been happy with you or have you been in trouble?”

James Damore said (summarized exchange), “No, I got promoted twice. My last review was the highest possible: Superb. That’s the top-few percentile. So my firing wasn’t based on performance. A month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits,” he said. “All of these summits are unrecorded and…” Well, this one was unrecorded and super-secret. Apparently, inside Google they have regular summits to talk about diversity and the company’s view on it, and some of them are recorded but some aren’t.

In this particular summit a month and a half ago, Damore says that Google executives said a lot of things he thought were not right, and he thought that they were telling the people attending the summit about “a lot of potentially illegal practices that they’ve been doing trying to increase diversity.” So the interviewer said, “What kind of practices?” and Damore said: “Well, basically treating people differently based on their race or gender.”

So the interviewer said, “I see. So it was unrecorded and secret in what manner?” He said, “Most meetings at Google are recorded. Anybody at Google can watch them. Google’s trying to be really open about everything except for this one. They don’t want any paper trail for any of these diversity summits because I think it’s illegal, and some of the internal polls showed there were a large percentage of people that agreed with me on that document that I wrote.

“So if everybody got to see this stuff they would really bring up some criticism.” He said, “There’s a lot of ways Google pressures people to increase the diversity of their team. There’s no way to do that besides actually choosing somebody based on their race or gender. So diversity became quotas, and it wasn’t merit-based and it wasn’t performance-based. Managers were told to diversify their staffs based on skin color and gender.”

He just thought that was wrong because it “didn’t allow for merit-based advancement or anything.” So he was asked, “What was the rationale for firing you?” He said, “The official excuse was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes.” He says he thinks that his firing proves that he was right; that “the whole culture just tries to silence any dissenting view, and that we need some more objective way of looking at diversity because the diversity of skin color and gender isn’t diversity, it’s discrimination.”

Another Google employee said, “Google is run like a religious cult. Conform and carry out the rituals, and you’ll be rewarded and praised; ask any uncomfortable questions or offend the wrong people, and the threats and public shaming will be swift and ruthless. The religion in this case is a kind of intersectional feminism, its central tenets are Diversity and Inclusion, its demonic enemy is Bias, and its purifying rituals include humiliating forms of ‘training,'”
like re-education camps.”

If you’re not thinking right about gender diversity and race diversity, they will take you aside and retrain you. He said, “This might sound crazy to a lot of your readers, but college students should understand, since it’s a similar culture.” This is not the guy that got fired. This is another employee. People have gone out and talked to Google employees and they’re talking to him anonymously. Folks, it’s exactly as I suspected: What’s really happening is the erosion of free speech under the guise of promoting it.

What’s really happening is the erosion of diversity under the guise of promoting it. Freedom is being killed off by virtue of censorship that is designed to be helpful and to prevent people from being hurt or offended. It’s being done purposely — seductively, purposely done — to get people to willingly sacrifice and concede their liberty and freedom for some so-called common good. It’s hideous. It’s hideous and it’s happening on college campuses. It’s happening at high-tech places like Google.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, folks, four different scientists writing for Quillette magazine (this story from Intellectual Takeout) claimed that the Google engineer fired for questioning “diversity” in his memo was right. Now, we’re going to link this at RushLimbaugh.com, so you’ll have it as a reference. It’s Intellectual Takeout, Jon Miltimore. It’s actually from a couple of days ago, Koko, as you search for it. I’ll send you a link when the program is over. But it’s Intellectual Takeout from August 8: “Google Engineer Fired; Four Scientists Say He Is Right.

We’ll put this in the Google section today at RushLimbaugh.com.


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