Last week a Google engineer expressed, in a perfectly reasonable memorandum about human diversity, the view that the company had become a left-wing monoculture in which dissenters actually might have to worry about being fired. For publishing this essay, he was fired.

Now Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced that the company is giving a million dollars to the execrable “hate”-hunting racket called the Southern Poverty Law Center.

If you’re like me (of course you are!), all this makes you want to have nothing more to do with either Google or Apple. Thinking about that, though, made me realize how hard it would be for most of us to do so.

For starters: if you have a modern cell-phone, it is almost certainly an iPhone (Apple), or some sort of Android device (Google).

Maybe you use iTunes (Apple) to play music, perhaps on your Mac (Apple again). Or maybe you use the Chrome browser (Google), and maybe you use it to do Internet searches (Google again, obviously). Perhaps you watch videos on YouTube (Google), or maybe you find your way around with Google Maps, or Google Earth. If you’re a blogger, you might well be on Blogger (Google again). There’s also a good chance you have a GMail account. (I have two.)

So: you’ve begun to realize that these very powerful companies are strongly aligned against proponents of traditional Western nations and cultures. But it’s probably also the case that you are a daily, and at this point deeply dependent, user of their products. (As I’m fond of saying, invention is the mother of necessity.) Are you prepared to give all that stuff up? I doubt it. I’m certainly not inclined to; in fact I wonder how I ever lived without it.

This is something of a problem, no?