Google Employee Describes Being 'Blacklisted' Then Fired After Expressing Conservative Ideas
The case against Google keeps building.
The search engine giant has already been called out before Congress for shifting votes to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
One of its top executives was busted in a Project Veritas undercover operation boasting about how the company can prevent president Donald Trump from winning again in 2020.
In June, the company made headlines by firing an engineer who publicly stated that “Google has become a company where outrage mobs and witch hunts dominate its culture.”
And in late July, a Google engineer who very publicly accused the company of having a deep-seated bias against conservatives was placed on administrative leave.
Now, in a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer who claims he was fired for not sharing the company’s left-wing culture has gone public with a description of Google’s internal workings that backs up what conservatives have long suspected.
“Historically, there’s been a lot of bullying at Google,” Cernekee told The Wall Street Journal. “There’s a big political angle, and they treat the two sides very differently.”
That news by itself won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s either familiar the infamously liberal Silicon Valley’s recent history or who uses the Google search engine for political topics.
(As of Thursday morning, it was still answering the question “What party was Abraham Lincoln?” with “National Union Party” rather than “Republican.”)
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google states that Cernekee was fired misuse of company property, but Cernekee has a much different story.
And it could show how bad the culture has gotten.
His trouble started in 2015, shortly after he started working for Google, when he took the side of another Google employee in a discussion on an internal messaging board. That employee had suggested the company hire workers “without regard to race or gender,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
That’s heresy for liberals, of course.
“A bunch of people jumped on him and started cussing him out and calling him names,” Cernekee told The Wall Street Journal. “And then his manager showed up in the thread and denounced him in public. I was very disturbed by that.”
In other messaging board posts from 2015, Cernekee advised a self-described feminist that she should be more open to criticism and suggested, according to The Wall Street Journal, that “the company add a clear statement of banned opinions to the employee handbook so conservative employees would know where the lines were drawn.”
Those notes got him a warning letter from the company’s human resources department, according to the newspaper. And about the same time, a senior Google manager put Cernekee on a “’written blacklist’ of employees he wouldn’t work with,” the outlet reported.
Cernekee also told The Wall Street Journal he was acquainted with James Damore, the former Google engineer who was fired from the company after writing a memo that questioned whether men were better suited to high tech work than women.
In fact, Cernekee told the newspaper he was having lunch with Damore in June 2017 when Damore learned that his memo had been made public.
Damore’s case is in arbitration, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Cernekee himself was fired in June 2018.
A company spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that Google would not comment on the case of Cernekee or any other employee.
“We enforce our workplace policies without regard to political viewpoint,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.
Cernekee, however, told The Wall Street Journal he considers himself a whistle-blower. He said he has filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, and has spent more than $100,000 in legal fees related to his termination.
“I very much regret joining Google,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I figured it would be a good place to see intelligent arguments through. It didn’t really turn out how I expected.”
There’s no way of knowing for sure what happened in Cernekee’s case, but Google’s history with conservative thinkers – and its views of the Trump 2016 victory — doesn’t buy the company the benefit of the doubt.
And it looks like the case against it keeps growing.
The Western Journal has reached out to Google for comment on this story.
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