The high tech lynching of conservative speech

Charmaine Yoest:

In multiple settings, we are seeing a trend toward narrowing the scope of opinions allowed in the public arena. Heading into high school and college commencement season, a rising tide of ideological censorship is drowning out diversity of opinion. And academia leads the way in defining acceptable thought.

This means that as the number of “disinvitations” for conservative speakers piles up, the idea that speech equates to violence is gaining purchase. Silencing different viewpoints is not only growing on campuses, it’s also spreading to the tech world and the corporate arena.

This week Google censored the Claremont Institute, a highly regarded conservative think tank with a 40-year track record of defending American founding principles such as freedom of speech and religion. Claremont recently launched a campaign to raise awareness of illiberal speech codes and their threat to freedom; at the same time, the institute started online advertising for its upcoming anniversary dinner.

Apparently not recognizing the absurdity of censoring an organization for writing about censorship, Google shut down the ads and told Claremont there would be “no appeal.” Claremont’s offense? The discussion of multiculturalism and speech codes on its website.

Eventually, Google relented. But only after Claremont went public did Google back down and acknowledge a “mistake.”

But this “mistake” isn’t an isolated incident. This censorship episode comes right on the heels of a similar one aimed at the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kay Coles James. In April, Google formed – and then within a week disbanded -- an advisory committee related to its work on artificial intelligence. It said the panel was intended to bring “diverse perspectives” to bear on issues in this rapidly evolving area of innovation and invited James to serve on it.

Mrs. James is by any measure a proven leader, having served at the highest levels of government, academia and the nonprofit sector. She also established the Gloucester Institute to train and mentor young black leaders, and has a career marked by explicitly defending the human dignity of every individual.

But James is also conservative. And so a band of five Google employees began circulating a petition calling for her ouster.

Ironically, the petition cited the need for the AI panel to address “historical patterns of discrimination and exclusion.” If anyone knows discrimination and exclusion, it’s James, who suffered verbal and physical abuse as she helped desegregate a middle school in the South as a teen.

Doubling down on the irony, the petition lamented that AI “doesn’t ‘hear’ more feminine voices, and doesn’t ‘see’ women of color.” Still, because Mrs. James holds some policy views that differ from theirs, she was deemed not to have a “valid perspective worthy of inclusion.”

The Googlers refused to see her, or hear her, in her own voice. That’s discrimination and exclusion in action. The takeaway message is clear: Diversity means agreeing with us. Disagreeing with us is intolerance and even “violence.”

As a civil society, we are careening toward ideological balkanization. This trend of labeling opinions with which we disagree as dangerous and hateful threatens Americans’ foundational freedoms. Charges of dangerous speech are laid as an exercise in bullying and raw power.
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Google is far from the only tech company discriminating against conservatives.   Facebook has been banning conservative bloggers by falsely accusing them of "abusive" content.  It has also put conservatives in "Facebook jail" for being too critical of liberal speech.  Twitter is well known for shutting down some conservatives.  That they are going after respected institutions like Claremont and the Heritage Foundation shows a deliberate policy of trying to silence all conservative speech.  The courts and Congress need to act to protect the 1st Amendment rights of Americans.