The Snowflakes of Google

What do Google, Evergreen State College, and Middlebury have in common?

A lot, apparently.  They’re filled with “snowflakes” — those students (in Google’s case, employees) who have such a high sensitivity to — or is it inability to tolerate — diversity of thought, they dissolve like so many, well, snowflakes.  (Unlike real snowflakes, however, that are different one from the other, these snowflakes tend to be monotonously the same, spewing the same slogans and even wearing, basically, the same clothes.)

People are beginning to get fed up with this jejune politically correct censorship and, just as with the University of Missouri before it, Evergreen State is evidently having trouble getting new students to attend their famously “progressive” institution. Some would prefer to study rather than protest non-stop. Imagine.

Perhaps ultimately more interesting — after demonstrating a problem with free speech when it fired its software engineer James Damore for the most benign of criticisms — will Google suffer the same fate as these colleges? Will people turn away to the search engines of companies more attuned with the Bill of Rights and less anxious to be “thought police”? Or will they applaud the females working for Google who, in the grand snowflake tradition, refused to come to work because Damore expressed his opinions in a memo?

Those opinions, of course, are pretty much those that got Larry Summers in trouble at Harvard back in 2005 — that there were biological reasons that women, in general, did not excel at science as often as men. It’s important to underscore that Damore, like Summers, made it very clear these were generalizations with many exceptions. In fact, in Damore’s case he offered several good-hearted suggestions for how to overcome this that were, obviously, ignored by Google and its PC-at-all-costs CEO.

And speaking of excelling, as is also well known, women are overwhelming our educational institutions these days, getting college degrees far more often than men in a ratio approaching 60-40.  As Damore points out, they have plenty of skills of their own outside of STEM.  In fact, the way things are going, there’s reason to believe that women will be taking over society in the next fifty years, assuming the robots don’t.

Still, the snowflake grievance committee goes on, performing the umpteenth rerun of feminism 4.6 or whatever. Silicon Valley seems to be one of the key centers for this, a virtual haven for hypocrisy and virtue signaling while making sums of money unheard of in human history.  It’s the world’s capital — or should be — of “watch what I do, not what I say.” You would think that given Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s background — born in Moscow in 1973 — he would be especially sensitive to the dangers of thought control of any sort.  Evidently not enough, not in Damore’s case anyway.

Damore is now suing Google for a lot of money, though not enough to put a dent in parent company Alphabet (currently trading at about $940 a share).  Not much could these days, I guess, except us defenders of free speech.  As one of those defenders, I’m providing the following list of links, although I disapprove of boycotts.  But just, say, as a suggestion, here’s a list of the 15 most popular search engines as of July 2017.  Google is of course still number one, but it’s a habit.  I’ve been having a lot of fun of late with Dogpile.  It seems to me they’ve got their head screwed on straight.  And unlike Google, they haven’t been playing footsie with China.

One last thing. When we talk about diversity from here on in, let’s talk about real diversity — “diversity of thought.”  It’s the THOUGHT that counts.  Forget the sex thing. Forget the race thing.  It doesn’t even exist.  

A FINAL FULL DISCLOSURE: About five years ago, I got an email asking if I would like to come up from L.A. and lecture at Google. They wanted to hear from “conservatives.”  Intrigued, I said fine.  They wrote back I would have to be “approved.”  Then nothing.  The program was canceled.  Was I censored?  Yeah, probably, but I’m not suing.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media.  His latest book is I Know Best:  How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If  It Hasn’t Already.  He tweets @rogerlsimon.