Fired Google engineer James Damore has been making the rounds since his ouster, sitting down for interviews with YouTube host Stefan Molyneux and University of Toronto professor, Jordan Peterson.
In his interview with Molyneux, Damore said that he began to write the now infamous 10 page memo on gender differences in the workplace while on a flight to China, after he says a “secretive” internal meeting on diversity rubbed him the wrong way.
“There was a lot of just shaming: ‘no, you can’t say that. That’s sexist.’ There’s just so much hypocrisy in a lot of the things that they were saying,” Damore said in his first public comments since being fired. “I decided to create the document to clarify my thoughts.”
Damore, whose internal memo entitled “Google’s ideological echo chamber” went viral within the company late last week before making it’s way to social media over the weekend, said he penned the document out of love for Google.
Via Bloomberg:
“A lot of this came from me seeing some of the problems with our culture at Google, where a lot of people who weren’t in this group-think just felt totally isolated and alienated,” he told Youtube chat-show host Stefan Molyneux in an interview posted online. “There were many people that came to me and said, ‘yeah I’m thinking of leaving Google because this is getting so bad.”’
“I really thought this was a problem Google had to fix,” he added.
Interestingly, Wired reports that Damore had a ton of internal support for his memo.
” [T]he internal discussions that followed Damore’s memo and its fallout show Google employees both embracing and advancing its views. Damore himself indicated that his former coworkers had reached out privately to express “their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues.” Others chimed in publicly as well.”
See the Molyneux interview here:
And as Zerohedge reports:
the former Googler sat down for a YouTube interview with University of Toronto professor of psychology, Jordan Peterson, to discuss the circumstances leading up to the release of his controversial memo and the fallout that has resulted since.
In this first exchange, Damore explains that he decided to write his now-infamous memo after attending a ‘secretive’ Google “diversity summit” in which he says presenters talked about “potentially illegal practices” intended to “try to increase diversity…basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are.”
Peterson: “Why did you do this?”Damore: “About a month and a half ago, I went to one of our diversity summits, all of it unrecorded and super-secret and they told me a lot of things that I thought just were not right.”
Peterson: “Ok, what do you mean ‘unrecorded and super-secret?'”
Damore: “Most meetings at Google are recorded. Anyone at Google can watch it. We’re trying to be really open about everything…except for this. They don’t want any paper trail for any of these things.”
“They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they’ve been doing to try to increase diversity. Basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are.”
Peterson: “Ok, why?”
Damore: “Because I think it’s illegal. As some of the internal polls showed, there were a large percentage of people who agreed with me on the document. So, if everyone got to see this stuff, then they would really bring up some criticism.”
Damore also talks about how he originally published his memo over a month ago but upper-management largely ignored it until it started to garner media attention. Then, once it went viral, upper management organized a coordinated attack and misrepresented facts in order to silence him.
Damore: “I actually published this document about a month ago; it’s only after it had gone viral and leaked to the news, that Google started caring.”“There was a lot of upper management that started to call it out and started saying how harmful it is. This sort of viewpoint is not allowed at Google.”
Peterson: “Yeah, what sort of viewpoint exactly? The idea that there are differences between men and women that might actually play a role in the corporate world? That’s an opinion that’s not acceptable?”
Damore: “Yeah, it seems so. And there’s a lot of misrepresentation by upper-management just to silence me, I think.”
On why he was fired:
Peterson: “What was there rationale for firing you exactly? What was the excuse that was given?”Damore: “So, the official excuse was that I was perpetuating gender stereotypes.”
And finally, an interesting tidbit in which Damore once again points out that Google’s progressives are all too eager to put on their science hats when discussing climate change but are less eager to entertain scientific facts when they’re deemed ‘inconvenient.’
Damore: “I’m not sure how they can expect to silence so many engineers and intelligent people and just deny science like this”
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