Another conservative fired by Google tells the story of what happened to him there

You didn’t think James Damore was the only one, did you?

It’s always dicey when someone claims they were fired from a job for untoward reasons. You don’t really know what kind of employee they might have been, and it’s hard to judge from the outside what really happened or why.

But given what we know about Google and its bizarre culture, it’s not really such a stretch to believe Kevin Cernekee might be telling the truth when he says he was fired for one reason and one reason only.

Cernekee was an engineer at Google, and in 2017 – shortly after being hired – Cernekee became an active participant on the company’s internal message boards. Those boards apparently can get pretty political, and Cernekee wasn’t shy about asserting his conservative beliefs. That quickly got the attention of a lot of people, including some at the management level, and the results for Cernekee were not positive to say the least:

After several posts on the company’s freewheeling internal message boards in early 2015 rankled some colleagues, he was given an official warning from human resources about conduct deemed disrespectful and insubordinate. Around that time, a senior manager wrote on the boards that he added Mr. Cernekee to a “written blacklist” of employees he wouldn’t work with.

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Mr. Cernekee, 41 years old, spent much of the next three years battling Google over his perceived violations, and pressing his contention that right-leaning employees were being treated unfairly, according to interviews, documents and copies of posts on Google’s internal message boards. In one example from 2017 that he reported to human resources, a manager publicly asked on a board about employees holding views like Mr. Cernekee’s: “Can’t we just fire the poisonous assholes already?” In June 2018, Mr. Cernekee was fired.

Now Google says Cernekee was fired for multiple violations of company policy, including unauthorized downloads of company material. Cernekee says he didn’t do any of that, and this was about nothing but his conservative beliefs.

I don’t know the facts for sure, although I do know that if you’ve decided you need to fire someone, you can usually find something to hang on them.

It seems to me that if you go to work for Google because you want the job, and arguing about politics isn’t part of your job, you’re awfully foolish to sit there and get into political debates on internal forums – knowing how the prevailing attitudes are at Google. I understand the impetus not to sit there and listen to nonsense when you could respond. It’s no fun to sit there and let the other side have the run of the place while you feel you have to remain silent. I get it.

But your job is to be an engineer, not to argue politics. If you want that job, then be an engineer. If it bothers you what’s being said on the forums, then don’t look at them.

That’s career advice for Cernekee. It doesn’t justify the fact that you can be an outspoken liberal at Google without risking anything, but if you are exactly the same on the conservative side, you’re at risk of being ostracized and ultimately fired.

And this is the company whose policies determine whether anyone will see your web site, your ad or whatever else it is you’re trying to do on the Internet. Google is that powerful, and neither its culture nor its policies leave any real room for conservative thought. And as we see over and over again, too many on the left can’t even stand to be exposed to conservative thought, or to the people who think those thoughts.

That’s what happens when you mistake your opinions for virtue defined. You don’t even think you need to defend your ideas intellectually because you just figure they’re morally superior, and you consider it beneath you to have to deal with anyone who thinks differently. That’s why Kevin Cernekee is out of a job, and why so many people are running around parroting left-wing bromides based on what they see from their Google search results.