Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco-based attorney representing former Google engineer James Damore in his class-action lawsuit against Google, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight on Thursday to tease information about a burgeoning blacklist of conservatives among Silicon Valley-based technology companies. She told Breitbart News Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak that some of her clients have been “blackballed” by “supposedly neutral hiring platforms.”
Dhillon said, “I’ll have some troubling developments next week about people’s job searches and how I believe Silicon Valley companies are actively trying to blacklist people through some hiring engines. Some of the top companies that do the hiring, matching people with jobs and job seekers, are blackballing people who talk out. That’s a developing new story.”
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Dhillon added, “I’m seeing clients of mine being blackballed by supposedly neutral hiring platforms where their accounts just get deactivated overnight.”
Dhillon spoke of racial and sexual considerations Google used in its human resource policies in pursuit of “diversity.” She said, “[My] three new plaintiffs are three highly qualified white men who identify as conservatives online who were denied jobs at Google, and it turns out that either the positions remained open or people with lesser qualifications ended up being hired for those positions. So that’s kind of classic employment discrimination that you see in gender cases and cases brought by people who are traditionally on the left.”
Dhillon explained that Google, like Starbucks, mandates its employees attend “workshops” ostensibly combating “unconscious bias.” She stated, “Some of the other things that are included in the new complaint are some internal documents that Google gives its managers about unconscious bias. We’ve seen this a lot in the news with regard to the Starbucks issue, and Starbucks will be closing itself down to do this unconscious bias training, and I suspect that they’re going to be hearing a lot of the same type of rhetoric as Google is already giving to its hiring managers and managers generally, which is that, basically, some pretty gross stereotypes about white people, about how they are all about ‘meritocracy,’ and they talk about people behind their backs; they don’t talk to their faces — ridiculous stereotypes that anybody who’s worked in America knows are not true. Apparently, it’s the last frontier of acceptability to slander white people in our culture. What’s ironic is that [James Damore] was fired for allegedly perpetuating gender stereotypes, yet Google clearly perpetuates race and gender stereotypes every day in its HR policies; it’s just that they’re the political version, so they get away with it.”
Dhillon recalled a senior engineer at Google suggesting sabotage of President Donald Trump’s Android-based mobile phone. She remarked, “One of the senior software engineers [at Google] in an all-hands meeting said that Google should consider bricking the president’s phone because [Trump] uses an Android device, and also shutting down the Gmail accounts of White House staffers because they don’t deserve to have those types of accounts. That hasn’t happened, mind you, but that’s the mentality that is sort of laughed at and accepted as a normal thing to say at Google. It’s very foreign to most of us Americans.”
Dhillon praised Breitbart News’s reporting of Silicon Valley’s politicking. She said, “Breitbart has done a good job. I think Allum Bokhari wrote the story about Google’s marketing team openly instructing customers of theirs not to serve ads next to so-called right-wing sites. Breitbart is called out, but other sites that are called out for discrimination by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups like that. We believe the SPLC is one of the shipping lists by which Google marketing managers use, but I don’t think it’s the exclusive source for their discrimination.”
Dhillon added, “What’s most insidious about this is that people don’t know, so consumers who are using the search engine to find information are not being told that the engine results and advertising service are biased. People who invest in advertising are not necessarily aware of the biases in the system, and that, I think, is troubling for consumers, and maybe something that government should be looking at in terms of deceptive advertising.”
Dhillon said technology companies lobby against domestic adoption of European-style regulations pertaining to “privacy guidelines.” She observed, “One of the things that I know as a tech lawyer in Silicon Valley is that every tech company, including clients of my firm … are scrambling to comply with European privacy guidelines that are coming into effect very shortly, and yet, all the effort on their lobbying front is to make sure that the same privacy guidelines don’t occur here in America. I don’t think Americans are fully aware that A) these companies loathe conservatives, many of them, and mistreat their employees who are conservative, and B) while their motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ they are, at the same time, advocating that the same privacy rights that people in foreign countries have with respect to their products do not exist in America.”
Dhillon commented on technology firms’ lobbying efforts in Washington, DC. She said, “They have a carefully crafted facade of being a neutral company. … D.C. is a swamp, and every single member of Congress or senator I know is constantly in fundraising mode, and tech companies are writing them checks.”
Dhillon warned conservatives against apathy on threats to privacy and Fourth Amendment protections coming from technology companies and the state. She said, “There’s a lack of critical thinking on [privacy issues]. … We see the same lack of critical thinking and inconsistency in our privacy with regard to government spying and Fourth Amendment and search and seizure issues. There are a number of issues where Americans — and I have to say conservatives — are like sheep, and they’re sheep being led to the slaughter without critically examining what it is that the government is doing and what it is that their government is allowing big corporations that are ‘too big to fail’ to do to us. This is no different than the mortgage crisis, and some other crises in our country where some companies are just too big to fail, and they have spread so much money in so many people’s pockets on both sides of the aisle that there’s nobody left to speak for the consumers.”
Mansour opined, “One of the civil rights battles of our day [is] this digital fight for free speech.”
Dhillon cautioned observers against thinking that racial policies related to “unconscious bias” programs are restricted to Silicon Valley. She said, “It is not just tech; you’re seeing it at Starbucks. Baristas are being forced to kowtow to this concept of unconscious bias and, somehow, self-flagellation because of their race and assumptions being made about them. Anybody who thinks this is limited to Silicon Valley is fooling themselves. Today, it’s James Damore. Tomorrow, it could be your industry.”
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