Google’s Ideological Safe Space: The James Damore Memo and the Day Asserting Biology Facts Can Make You Lose Your Job
Back in 2017 an avocado toast was still a quirky millennial indulgence, blockchains were going to save the world. Google was the champion for “Don’t Be Evil” and a proud sponsor of every rainbow emoji under the sun. The folks there decided that the most dangerous thing an engineer could circulate internally wasn’t classified code, but a polite, footnoted Google Doc suggesting that maybe, just maybe, men and women aren’t psychologically identical in every way.
Enter James Damore, a soft-spoken software engineer who dared to write “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” In it, he argued that the company’s aggressive diversity initiatives, while well-intentioned, were built on a shaky foundation: the assumption that any gender imbalance in tech must be 100% the result of discrimination, bias, or the patriarchy refusing to hand out enough pink laptops.
James Damore calmly pointed out (with citations from actual psychology papers) that average differences in interests, personality traits, and preferences – things like “people vs. things” orientation, higher male variance in IQ, and yes, that pesky neuroticism gap might explain some of the disparity. He wasn’t saying women are inferior. He wasn’t even saying Google should stop hiring awesome female engineers. He just suggested maybe stop shaming people who notice biology exists and try non-coercive ways to attract more women.
The memo was thoughtful, data-driven, and explicitly “pro-diversity-of-thought”. It even opened with disclaimers and “not all women” qualifiers. In a sane world, it might have sparked some self reflection. It might have made Google rethink its policy of “balancing” search results, making sure that Black physicists, female physicists and trans physicists appear in search results for the word “physicist” while the “privileged” ones like Einstein and Hawking get pushed back.
Nope, it didn’t happen. Instead, it sparked the corporate equivalent of a toddler tantrum.
Google’s response? Fire the guy for “hate speech”. CEO Sundar Pichai personally weighed in, calling parts of the memo “harmful gender stereotypes.” The company line: this wasn’t about facts; it was about creating a “welcoming” workplace. Translation: welcoming for everyone except the guy who knew what he was talking about.
But wait, it gets better. This being the modern workplace, there had to be an “investigation”. And in 2018, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dropped the most gloriously woke verdict since men can be women. An internal NLRB memo concluded that while Damore’s criticism of Google’s policies might have been protected under labour law… his actual statements about biological differences were not.
“…were so harmful, discriminatory, and disruptive.”
Boom. Mic drop from the bureaucracy. Not “factually incorrect.” Not “bad science.” Not even “let’s debate the studies.” The facts are Harmful. Discriminatory. Disruptive. The same adjectives you’d use for someone showing up in a Klan hood, not a dude linking to peer-reviewed papers on sex differences in Big Five personality traits.
Let’s pause and savour the delicious absurdity here. Google, a company that literally tracks your every search, knows what you had for breakfast via your phone and once bragged about building an AI that could tell you if your cat video was cute enough, yes that Google, looked at decades of evolutionary psychology, twin studies, and cross-cultural data showing consistent male-female differences in interests and concluded: “Nope, too spicy. This is violence.”
This is peak “woke logic” in action. The woke folks religiously defend diversity. Diversity is our strength… unless that “diversity” includes the “heretical” belief that humans come in two sexually dimorphic flavours with overlapping but statistically different distributions of traits. In that case, diversity gets you a severance package and a lifetime supply of “problematic” labels on social media.
Think about the broader implications, because this wasn’t just one engineer getting the boot. It was a signal flare for every Fortune 500 HR department: biological reality cannot stand in the way of DEI. Want to close the gender gap in STEM? Great! Just pretend the gap has nothing to do with the fact that on average, more men than women enjoy spending their weekends debugging kernel panics while surrounded by empty Coke cans and pizza boxes. The imbalance must be “corrected” by hook or by crook in order to seem fair and just.
The edge cases are even funnier. Imagine applying this standard elsewhere:
- “Sorry, medical researcher, your paper on human reproduction gives inappropriate references to males and females. We’re going to need you to retract it or at least add seventeen trigger warnings.”
- “Labour minister, your observation that men are overrepresented in dangerous jobs suggests that some people are better at managing personal risks than others. Harmful. Have you considered that toxic masculinity is the real culprit?”
Meanwhile, Google’s diversity dashboards kept glowing with pride. “Look at all the boxes we’ve checked! Our workforce is a beautiful mosaic of people who all agree that biology is a social construct and anyone who disagrees is literally Hitler.” But to use the exact terms of the woke, what is inclusion and diversity when you can’t allow conservatives or even an honest biologist to speak without fear?
The James Damore saga wasn’t about protecting women from “harm.” It was about protecting a “sacred narrative” from uncomfortable truths. And that’s the real punchline: the same crowd that screams “follow the science!” on climate models suddenly discovers that science is optional when it comes to sex differences. Brain sex? Totally plastic and socially constructed. We can all lean either way regardless of what we’ve been born with.
In the end, Damore got his moment in the sun wrote a book, and the rest of us got a front-row seat to the clown show. Trouble is, some people still don’t get it. Google kept preaching inclusion while quietly hemorrhaging talent who dared to notice the emperor had no chromosomes. Corporate America learned the new golden rule: diversity, equity, and inclusion for thee… but never for inconvenient truths.
So here’s to James Damore, the man who reminded us that sometimes the most “disruptive” thing in tech isn’t a new algorithm. It is a narrative embraced by zealots that can turn the world upside down. During the Cultural Revolution in China, not more 12 million Red Guards held a country of 800 million hostage. In today’s land of the woke, that’s apparently the most dangerous code of all.
The trouble with woke people is that they think that they are being very heroic when they bash rich and seemingly powerful people like Elon Musk. They don’t seem to realise that before Musk bought over Twitter, saying that trans “women” are men and not women on that platform actually got some people banned for “hateful speech”.
Trump or Musk may not be likeable people, but someone has to fix the madness.