Sigh. We go to war with the Republican congressmen we have, not the Republican congressmen we’d like to have.
Louis Gohmert had an opportunity here to make Google CEO Sundar Pichai defend the indefensible. He would have sounded terrible trying. Gohmert’s point would have been proven. He had Pichai absolutely dead to rights concerning its reliance on the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “trusted flagger.”
All Gohmert had to do was lay out the basic facts and force Pichai to respond. The result would have been a disaster for Pichai and for Google.
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But alas, Gohmert wasn’t disciplined enough to pull it off:
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So you’re probably wondering right about now: Why did the video only include Gohmert’s question? Where is Pichai’s response? Why wasn’t that included?
Because, sillies, there was no response. And that’s completely on Louis Gohmert. He blew it.
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What he should have done is laid out the truth about the SPLC and simply made Pichai explain why Google empowers it as a “trusted flagger”. But he couldn’t stay focused, and he rambled all over the place to the point where there was no clear and direct question Pichai felt on the spot to answer.
Forcing Pichai to defend Google’s trust of the SPLC would have been powerful, and it would have been impossible for Pichai to do it. It’s easy to demonstrate that SPLC routinely abuses the trust it receives from the likes of Google, Facebook and pretty much all of the mainstream media to label as “hate groups” basically anyone who disagrees with the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy and social justice warriors.
Gohmert had a good example with the Family Research Council, but his extended rant about Christianity was an unnecessary waste of time. So was the reference to Wikipedia. There is truth to that, but it’s not as blatant an indictment of Google as its trust of SPLC.
Basically, Wikipedia shows up as a top search item on Google because of the relevance of its content and its existing reach. That is legitimately a product of algorithms and not a management decision. That one would have been easy for Pichai to defend if he’d needed to (which he didn’t because Gohmert talked too long).
The decision to trust SPLC as an unbiased arbiter of hate or whatever is completely impossible to defend.
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Now, Pichai might have tried by pointing out that other major social media and all the establishment media trust SPLC just the same. And by doing so, he would have further proven the point about the larger liberal bias of the media.
Why does the SPLC label Bible-believing Christian organizations as “hate groups”? Because SPLC is anti-Christian. Why do the mainstream media see no problem with this? Because their own institutional biases are anti-Christian as well. They don’t see anything out of the ordinary with what SPLC thinks because it’s also what they think. They don’t see SPLC as liberal or biased. They just see them as correct, because they agree on what is correct.
That’s the real problem here. SPLC fits into Google’s definition of mainstream thinking because it is shared by most executives and employees at Google. That’s why James Damore is out of a job but the SPLC is a “trusted flagger.”
It would have been must-see TV to watch Sundar Pichai try to defend this. But Louis Gohmert couldn’t shut up long enough to let it happen, and Pichai was able to stand mute – never really having been confronted with a clear question to answer, let alone the time to answer it.
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If you wonder why conservatives do so poorly in the culture wars, there are many reasons, but crap like this has to be near the top of the list.