Ex-Googler Recently Held Up As A 'Whistleblower' And 'Proof' Of Anti-Conservative Bias At Google, Actually Supported Richard Spencer, Racist Skinheads

from the maybe-slow-down-in-picking-your-heros dept

When we recently wrote about the myth of anti-conservative bias at the various internet platforms, we got a lot of angry responses from people who insist (very loudly, often with lots of insults and anger, but rarely with any facts or data) that we're full of shit. We'd be open to believing it if there was any actual support for these claims. But none is ever forthcoming. Indeed, amusingly, some people pointed out that a recent WSJ article about an alleged fired "conservative" engineer at Google, described as a "whistleblower," was more "proof" that the company has it in for conservatives. Tucker Carlson even had the engineer, Kevin Cernekee, on his show last week to continue to feed the narrative.

And, of course, other Fox News characters, such as Lou Dobbs, played up Cernekee's claims as well, which even got President Trump to retweet Dobb's segment about Cernekee as "proof" that Google is trying to influence the 2020 election.

However, as we've pointed out concerning most of the "conservatives" who have had content removed or been banned from social media platforms (as is true in similar situations with liberals and other non-conservatives) there is almost always more to the story -- and that "more" is often that these people are not banned or fired or otherwise held back because of their general political views, but because of something much worse. And, in the case of Cernekee, people finally realized that maybe it wasn't that he was a conservative, but that he wanted to fundraise in support of one of the US's most well known white supremacists, Richard Spencer.

“[A] well­ known conservative activist was sucker punched on camera in DC while giving an interview,” Cernekee wrote on the Free Speech listserv in January 2017, referring to Richard Spencer, probably the most famous white nationalist in America. Two days later, he posted to the same listserv to suggest that members of the free speech listserv at Google should raise money for a bounty to find Spencer’s assailant. The bounty was offered on WeSearchr, a site founded by Charles Johnson.

To be fair to Tucker Carlson, who had Cernekee on his show and played up his claims, it was also his Daily Caller that exposed Cernekee's actual internal postings.

But, yeah, the guy who Trump is holding up as proof that there's anti-conservative bias at Google is maybe not the best messenger if you're trying to convince the world that "conservatism" is not the same thing as "white nationalism." Oh, and it gets worse. The Daily Caller article shows that, despite Cernekee claiming in the WSJ that he was a "mainstream Republican" who "disagrees" with white supremacy, within an internal Google listserve, Cernekee suggested that racist skinheads consider rebranding:

The term “skinhead” has a lot of unfortunate baggage and allows members to be painted as aggressors even in cases where the opposite is true. Why not rename themselves to something normie­-compatible like “The Helpful Neighborhood Bald Guys” or “The Open Society Institute” instead of trying to change the near­-universal negative perception of their old label (which is futile)? This would make it much easier to form alliances with other supporters of liberty and civil rights. The only thing I could figure is that they value having an edgy badass image over mainstream acceptance.

Meanwhile, another "conservative" engineer who was also fired from Google, Mike Wacker, has written a barnstormer of a blog post detailing the fairly typical trollish behavior by Cernekee. It's pretty damning:

I will say, though, that there is more to Kevin than his troubling posts. Another aspect of Kevin is his willingness to play dirty: his willingness to act manipulatively, tell half-truths, and sometimes outright lie. (For whatever influence he had, he certainly did not achieve it by winning over the hearts and minds of Google’s conservative employees in a free and fair exchange of ideas.) Both aspects of Kevin — his questionable viewpoints and his questionable tactics — are necessary to understand his story. As one example of his questionable tactics, in a discussion about Richard Spencer, one Google employee wrote, “I don’t think that assaulting someone is justified, but why on earth would we want to *help* him?” In his response to that person, Kevin deleted that sentence, and then he wrote, “Interesting argument, so are you saying it is OK to sucker punch somebody because you disagree with their politics?” Kevin claimed in an op-ed that he is “merely opposing Antifa violence,” when in reality one of his postings fabricated a claim that his coworker supported Antifa violence.

There's a lot more in there demonstrating rather trollish tactics (some of which will be familiar to people who read the comments here -- because they're used by lots of trolls on the internet).

Google, as a company, almost certainly employs a lot more people who identify as liberal than who identify as conservative (as I've noted in the past, I don't count myself among either group -- though plenty of others have lumped me into both at times, usually whenever they disagree with me and feel the need to align me with those they disagree with). But if you're going to claim that there's "proof" of anti-conservative bias at these companies, it probably helps to show up with actual proof, not the trollish behavior of a guy who has talked about fundraising on a platform that once tried to raise funds for The Daily Stormer, and to have done so in support of an infamous white supremacist, and who appears to have engaged in trollish tactics.

So here's a challenge to anyone rushing to jump into the comments here and call me names. For every insult you want to throw at me, how about you balance that out with actual evidence? And that is not just an example of someone who identifies as conservative being banned or limited in some way, and not quoting someone out of context, but actual proof of someone being limited for actual conservative views. I'm still waiting to see it.

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Filed Under: anti-conservative bias, bias, kevin cernekee, richard spencer, trolling

Companies: google