On Friday, when Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) announced her support for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, ensuring that he would receive the votes required for confirmation, a Google executive tweeted an ominous message about America’s system of government. He also joined an effort to bribe a U.S. senator.
“Abolish the Senate,” tweeted Ken Norton, a former project manager at Google and currently a partner at GV — formerly Google Ventures — the company that directs the venture capital investments for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Norton has been at Google for 12 years.
https://twitter.com/kennethn/status/1048365930739195904
Worse, Norton tweeted a call to action, announcing that he had donated money to a bribery scheme attempting to force Collins to vote “no” on Kavanaugh. “Match my pledge to Either Sen. Collins VOTES NO on Kavanaugh OR we fund her future opponent on [Crowdpac]!” he tweeted.
https://twitter.com/kennethn/status/1048374066028003328
The Crowdpac “quid-pro-quo bribe” raised money for a future challenger to Susan Collins, with the.understanding that the money would be returned to donors if Collins were to vote “no” on Kavanaugh. The scheme arguably violated federal laws against bribery, and Collins declared that she would not be swayed by it.
Norton was not the only Google leader to respond extremely negatively to Kavanaugh’s confirmation. As Fox News reported, design lead Dave Hogue infamously tweeted, “You are finished, [GOP]. You polished the final nail for your own coffins. F**K. YOU. ALL. TO. HELL.”
The tweet, now deleted, concluded with yet more vitriol. “I hope the last images burned into your slimy, evil, treasonous retinas are millions of women laughing and clapping and celebrating as your souls descend into the flames,” he wrote.
On Sunday, Hogue posted a follow-up tweet admitting that he deleted the original message. “Yes, I deleted that tweet. Yes, those opinions are mine personally, and I am responsible for them. Yes, I should have been more eloquent and less condemning. Yes, I still believe the [GOP] is wrong and not serving your best interests. Yes, I still believe we can do much better,” he declared.
https://twitter.com/DaveHogue/status/1048989153130475520
Hogue’s tweet expressed a great deal of vitriol, and he was right to retract the message. Norton, however, has not yet retracted his own tweet.
“What employees say in their personal capacity has no bearing on the way we build or operate our products,” a Google spokeswoman told Fox News.
All the same, Norton’s call to “abolish the Senate” seems particularly concerning, given Google’s immense power online.
Peter Schweizer, a New York Times bestselling author and writer for the new film “The Creepy Line,” warned PJ Media about the kind of power companies like Google and facebook possess.
“Throughout human history, tragically, leaders, ideologies, and belief systems have arisen that want to have total control over our lives, they want to remake human nature,” Schweizer said. He mentioned Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.
“They all had police forces, they killed millions of people — tens of millions of people, in some cases,” Schweizer noted. “I’m not suggesting companies like Facebook and Google do that, but these companies do have control or influence over us that those dictators and leaders would dream about.”
In “The Creepy Line,” researcher Robert Epstein argues that Google could easily sway elections using the “search engine manipulation effect” (SEME). He even claims that Google bias may have given Hillary Clinton her margin of victory in the popular vote in the 2016 election.
The fact that Norton — a leader in a company with the power to sway elections — would call for abolishing the U.S. Senate because it confirmed a Supreme Court nominee he dislikes is extremely troubling. The fact that a Google Ventures investment partner would fund a bribery scheme is particularly disgusting.
Last month, a study found that 90 percent of Google employee donations went to Democrats. The conservative nonprofit Prager University is suing Google and YouTube because YouTube has restricted access to 80 of its videos. After the 2016 election, Google executives lamented Hillary Clinton’s loss and bragged about increasing Latino turnout, thinking it would bolster Clinton. Worse, some employees strategized about how to counter President Trump’s immigration order.
After PJ Media released the results of an unscientific study showing Google’s bias against positive Trump news, President Trump himself tweeted about the issue, leading some to suggest that it is a “conspiracy theory” to say Google is biased against conservatives. While Trump arguably went too far, the bias remains quite feasible.
The political positions of Hogue and Norton only underscore Google’s left-wing bias. Norton’s willingness to call for the abolition of the Senate and to donate to a bribery attempt are particularly noxious. The company does not endorse its employees’ political positions, but statements like these underscore James Damore’s comments that conservatives are “in the closet.”
“The evidence against Google continues to pile up,” Dan Gainor, vice president of business and culture at the Media Research Center (MRC), said in a statement responding to Hogue’s tweet. “Its executives tried to fix the presidential election for Hillary; its staff and executives freaked out when she lost; it is working with an authoritarian government [China] to create a censored search engine and its employees keep getting caught showing their liberal biases.”
“How are conservatives to believe they will ever be treated fairly? And how can we trust that Google won’t interfere in future elections – even in 2018?” Gainor concluded.
These questions have taken on a new importance given Norton’s support for a bribe and his call to “abolish the Senate.”
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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