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.

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

Why Twitter's Alt-Right Banning Campaign Will Become The Alt-Right's Best Recruitment Tool

from the control-alt-delete dept

If there are two points worth hammering home on matters of free speech, they are that defenders of free speech must be willing to defend speech they don't like and that the solution to bad speech is more good speech. I would argue that Western democracy as a whole can be defined as a political version of the Socratic Method, by which the electorate engages in public debate, constantly questioning the other side, in order to produce the most optimal thoughts. For those that value this method of discourse, it's instantly recognized that it only works if you have opposing views. To that end, it's imperative that we not only allow, but feverishly welcome, different points of view.

But this kind of thinking is currently under assault in America, and from both sides. The latest example of this is Twitter's recent decision to carpet-ban an entire slew of accounts linked to the so-called "alt-right" movement.

The social media platform has suspended accounts of several high-profile users associated with the alt-right movement, CBSNews.com reported Wednesday. These include Richard Spencer, Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers.

Spencer, among those suspended this week, has been a leader in the alt-right movement since creating a website for it in 2010. He's president of the National Policy Institute, which describes itself as "dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States," and has been described as a white supremacist.

Let's get some caveats out of the way. First, Twitter is a private entity and can refuse participants in this manner if it likes. Nothing about this violates any kind of law. Second, many of the accounts in question did give voice to speech and ideas that are the most putrid form of racism and identity politics. This is not optimal thinking or speech. And, where accounts were used to actually harrass and abuse others, we can leave our outrage at the door.

But that isn't the case with all of these accounts. Even Spencer, a leader of this racially-charged speech, has not been found to do any sort of harrassing. Yet his account and that of his website were banned as well. In other words, many of these bans appear to be motivated primarily, if not solely, by idealogy as opposed to any actionable abuse. And that's a bad idea for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it legitimizes one of the main claims of the alt-right movement: that it suffers censorship within the marketplace of ideas.

It’s precisely the perception of arbitrary and one-sided speech policing that drives so many young men toward radical, illiberal politics. On campus especially, but also in the corporate world—and now on social media—they perceive that wild and wacky things can be said by some people, but not by others. By useful comparison: On the very same day that Twitter suspended the accounts of some alt-right users, DePaul University forbade a scheduled appearance by the broadcaster and writer Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is not an alt-rightist; in fact, the Anti-Defamation League reported last month that Shapiro is Twitter's single most frequently targeted victim of anti-Semitic abuse by alt-rightists. But Shapiro is a scathing polemicist and provocateur—an alumnus of the same Bannon-Breitbart empire that incubated Milo Yiannopoulos—and DePaul expressed worry that his appearance on campus might provoke violence.

The culture of offense-taking, platform-denying, and heckler-vetoing—now spreading ever outward from the campuses—lets loudmouths and thugs present themselves as heroes of free thought. They do not deserve this opportunity.

Bad ideas, if they are indeed bad, are susceptible to attack from good ideas. Unless we now think that American culture as a majority would line up with alt-right thinking, the only weapon needed against such thinking is a better alternative line of thinking. If we instead take Twitter's lead and simply try to put a lid on speech we don't like, it will only serve to solidify the feeling of victimization amongst those speakers, while leading others to seek them out to find out what all the fuss is about. Strangely, it might be Americans' natural tendency to want to stick up for victims of injustice that lead some to join the ranks of those that would spread injustice to others. And this would be supercharged by companies like Twitter leaning on censorship, achieving the opposite result of its intention. That's not a good strategy.

The other problem is that it's difficult to cease going down this censorship road once you've begun. And if the arguments of small-"l" liberalism are so weak that they cannot combat ideas we think are bad, then our arguments are bad and we should think up new ones. But trying to silence others isn't the answer. Look at every major step forward on matters of social justice, be it the end of slavery, economic progress, secularism or LBGT rights, and you will find they all have something in common: an opposition. It's already been proven that good speech can defeat bad speech, and that good ideas can defeat bad ideas. That's all we need. We don't need to be coddled by our social media networks and we cannot win a fight we never are able to have.

Filed Under: alt right, free speech, opinions, platforms, richard spencer, viewpoints
Companies: twitter