Fired Google employee James Damore appeared in interviews with Professor Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux this week to discuss his dismissal from the company after he published a viewpoint diversity manifesto.

Damore discussed details on the secret diversity programs he attended at Google, “potential racism” at the company, virtue signalling, and the way Silicon Valley employees that aren’t progressive feel the need to stay in the ideological closet.

During an interview with psychologist Jordan Peterson, Damore was quick to reassure viewers that his dismissal had nothing to do with performance.

“I got promoted twice, my last review was the highest possible, superb, which is the top few percentile,” he claimed. “So it definitely wasn’t based on performance that they fired me.”

“A month and a half ago I went to one of our diversity summits, all of it unrecorded and super secret, and they told me a lot of things that I thought were just not right,” Damore continued. “They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they’d been doing in order to increase diversity… Basically treating people differently based on their race or gender.”

“So you mean racism,” asked Peterson.

“Yeah, basically,” Damore confirmed. “Most meetings at Google are recorded, anyone at Google can watch it, we’re trying to be really open about everything, except for this. They don’t want any paper trail for any of these things… because I think it’s illegal.”

Damore elaborated to Peterson that there’s “a lot of ways in which they pressure people to ‘increase the diversity’ of their team, and there’s no way to do that besides actually choosing someone based on their race or gender.”

The former Google employee also claimed that his manifesto was published around one month ago, and that the company only started to care after it was leaked to the public and started to go viral online.

“It was only after it went viral and got leaked to the news that Google started caring,” Damore declared. “It sucks, but at least I was proven right. The whole culture just tries to silence any dissenting view… I don’t know how they can expect to silence engineers and intelligent people and just deny science like this.”

Damore also joined podcaster and YouTuber Stefan Molyneux for an interview.

During the interview, Damore continued to discuss the diversity program he attended at Google.

“I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programs. I had some discussions there, there was lots of just shaming, and ‘No you can’t say that, that’s sexist’ and ‘You can’t do this,'” he explained. “There’s just so much hypocrisy in the things they are saying. I decided to create the document to clarify my thoughts.”

On the topic of support, Damore claimed, “There may be a lot of negative responses in the public. But very few of them actually send me messages. They just want to virtue signal to all their followers, ‘I’m a great person, I share your morals. This person is bad.’ But they don’t really want to have a debate on why I’m wrong, or even confront me, they just want to show how self-righteous they are.”

“I’ve gotten a ton of personal messages of support which has been really nice,” he continued. “I got that at Google before all of this leaked. Lots of upper management were shaming me.”

Damore also added that there are “a lot” of conservative and anti-SJW employees in Silicon Valley “that feel like they need to stay in the closet and not really reveal themselves, and mask and say things they don’t believe.”

“There are a lot of libertarians, which would sort of be independent of the left and right, because at least according to Jonathan Haidt’s work, the libertarian mindset is actually very logical, which would fit with coding,” he explained.

Google fired Damore this week after he published a viewpoint diversity manifesto, which explained why there are not more women in tech jobs and called for more ideological diversity in Google’s workplace.

In a memo, the company claimed Damore had advanced “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace,” despite the fact that numerous psychologists, male and female, deemed the manifesto to be scientifically accurate.

Damore is currently “exploring all possible legal remedies” against Google.