Fox News is the last place you’d expect to see evidence of the growing push for antitrust enforcement. And yet Tucker Carlson this week devoted segments on two of his shows to arguing that Google has surpassed the federal government as the biggest threat to American liberty. In a spirited debate with Senator Mike Lee of Utah (who sits on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights), Carlson called for a return to trust-busting: “Here’s the bottom line from my perspective: No company has ever been as powerful in the history of the world as Google is … and it’s now become really clear that they’re misusing that power: They’re too powerful and they’re hurting people.”

What prompted Carlson’s tirade? A day earlier, he had James Damore on the show to discuss the lawsuit he had recently brought against Google. In 2017, Damore was fired for writing a lengthy memo that argued that women and minorities were not proportionately represented in Silicon Valley because they were inherently ill-suited for tech work. His suit claims that he was terminated out of prejudice—for being a white, conservative male. In his conversation with Damore, Carlson laid out his argument against Google: “The federal government is no longer the main threat to your privacy and to your freedoms, you’ve grown up thinking that, it’s no longer true. Big corporations are the main threat to your freedom and your privacy. The government doesn’t own your private emails—Google does.”

It’s a conclusion that many liberals might share. But in truth Carlson and Damore are using antitrust to open a new front in the culture wars. Google’s market power is secondary to their main point: that Silicon Valley is using that power to oppress conservatives. Similar to the way that the religious right has embraced free speech in cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which critics say is an attempt to entrench anti-LGBT discrimination, antitrust is being used to argue that the real victims are white, conservative males.



Damore’s lawsuit against Google, brought on Monday, is designed to embarrass Google. Several conservative outlets have picked up the cause, with National Review claiming that Damore has exposed “Google’s culture of ignorant intolerance.” But Damore’s lawsuit is short on evidence of discrimination and long on nitpicks about the company “catering to employees with alternative lifestyles, including furries, polygamy, transgenderism, and plurality.” Posts from numerous Google employees are cited, including apologies for “whitesplaining,” cartoons about punching Nazis, and diatribes against Donald Trump. These are meant to display a corporate culture where conservative voices are silenced—never mind that most of the posts cited by Damore are reacting against intolerance.

In Damore’s depiction of a politically correct culture run amok, Google employees freely rant about Trump and his supporters, but Damore is fired for an unpopular opinion, namely that men dominate the company because they are biologically superior. Google tolerates someone who identifies as a “yellow-scale wingless dragonkin,” but can’t abide a plain old white conservative.