Do you remember James Damore. He was the author of the now-notorious 10-page memo about Google’s ideological echo chamber — a memo that got him fired.
The point of the memo is the bias inherent in Google’s diversity policies, which ignore some basic (and well-known) facts about differences in men’s and women’s brains, bodies, and interests. Google fired Damore for “perpetuating stereotypes”, when it is Google that perpetuates anti-factual stereotypes.
I am writing about Google’s firing of Damore for daring to speak the truth because it is of a piece with the left’s political modus operandi:
Fixate on an objective, regardless of its lack of feasibility (e.g. proportional representation of various demographic groups — but not Asians or Jews — in STEM fields), lack of validity (e.g., the demonstrated inaccuracy of climate models that lean heavily on the effects of atmospheric CO2); or consequences (e.g., high failure rates among under-qualified “minorities”, lower standards that affect the quality of output and even endanger lives, the futile use of expensive “renewable” energy sources in place of carbon-based fuels).
Insist that attainment of the objective will advance liberty, equality, fraternity, or prosperity.
Demand punishment for those who question the objective, thereby suppressing liberty; fostering false equality; engendering resentments that undermine fraternity; and diminishing prosperity.
What happened to James Damore is what happens where leftists control the machinery of the state. (Be mindful that Hitler was a leftist, as I explain and document in “Leftism in America“.) I turn to Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, with the proviso that his references to communism and socialism apply equally to leftism generally, whether it is called progressivism, liberalism, or liberal democracy:
[T]he abominations of actual socialism are characterized as deviations, or treasonous perversions of “true” Communism….
But this account of redemption through good intentions is undermined by an impartial and, above all, comprehensive exploration of socialist literature. Already among the most authentic sources of socialist thought, among the earliest doctrinarians, are found justifications for ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the totalitarian state, all of which were held up as legitimate and even necessary weapons for the success and preservation of the revolution….
What all totalitarian regimes have in common is that they are “ideocracies”: dictatorships of ideas…. [T]he rulers, convinced that they possess the absolute truth and are guiding the course of history for all humanity, believe they have the right to destroy dissidents (real or potential), races, classes, professional or cultural categories — anyone and everyone they see as obstacles, or capable one day of being obstacles, to the supreme design….
… [Ideocracy] strives to suppress — and it must in order to survive — all thinking that is opposed to or outside the official party line, not only in politics and economics, but in every domain: philosophy, arts and literature, and even science.[pp. 94-100, passim]
The left’s supreme design includes the suppression of straight, white males who aren’t leftists; the elevation of females, blacks, Hispanics, other persons of color (but not Asians), and gender-confused persons, regardless of their inherent or actual abilities; the suppression of statements by anyone who questions the foregoing orthodoxies; the extinction of property and associative rights; and dirigisme on a scale that would be the envy of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — despite its demonstrably destructive effects.