PHILIP WEGMANN: Google Is More Afraid Of Liberal Outrage Than Federal Law.

Google purports to value “honest discussion.” And reasonable people should be able to disagree about these things. Google just didn’t want the bad publicity of having someone with such ideas on their payroll. But never mind the incongruity or hypocrisy. The more important problem is that litigation is around the corner.

“I have a legal right to express my concerns about the terms and conditions of my working environment and to bring up potentially illegal behavior, which is what my document does,” Damore told the New York Times.

According to Dan Eaton, an attorney and ethics professor at San Diego University, the engineer certainly has grounds for a case on two fronts. “First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions,” Eaton writes.

And second, because the memo was a statement of political views, Eaton says Google may have violated California law which “prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.”

An international corporation with armies of both lawyers, Google knew all this. They decided to take their chances with state and federal law anyway rather than stick up for one of their employees and risk public backlash. That’s an incredibly telling decision from a company that has mastered everything from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.

In short, the tech titan is scared. Not of losing talent. Not of legal fees from the pending litigation. And not of a potential settlement. No, Google just doesn’t want to stir up outrage from the left and so they squashed speech.

Google is Mizzou.