The Google Gate

By Hal Lindsey

 

Tucker Carlson of Fox News recently called Google, “The most powerful company in the history of the world.”

 

That’s an amazing statement, but hard to argue with.  There are dozens of internet search engines, but Google controls 81% of the market.  The internet holds the world’s data, and the world uses Google to access it.

 

Early on, the company promised “unbiased and objective” search results.  But Google has a point of view.  This month, their biases were exposed to the whole world.  

 

It started when Google sent a young engineer, James Damore, to a diversity seminar in China.  He later described it as “a lot of just shaming.”  On the flight back to the U.S., he wrote a memo about diversity at the company.

 

To its credit, Google encourages employees to speak up in various internal forums.  Damore shared his memo with colleagues, and it quickly spread across the company.  Then someone leaked it online, and it went viral.

 

The tech industry, particularly in Silicon Valley, is under constant pressure to hire and promote women.  But there are fewer female candidates for such jobs than male candidates.  Some blame the firms themselves, including Google.  Others blame education or residue from a patriarchal past.

 

Damore suggested that one of the contributing factors might be inherent biological differences between males and females.  For most people, the idea of differences between the sexes is obvious — not controversial.  But, while true, companies have to be careful with that idea.  Applied with a broad brush, it can lead to discrimination.

 

So, Damore released a memo saying that Google may not be as guilty of gender-discrimination as the numbers might indicate, or as Google itself seems to believe.  Even so, Google fired him.  Damore explained the firing like this.  “I committed heresy against the Google creed by stating that not all disparities between men and women that we see in the world are the result of discriminatory treatment.”

 

I have a slight difference with him there.  He didn’t just commit “heresy against the Google creed.”  It was deeper than that.  He committed heresy against political correctness.

 

Damore is a really smart guy.  A child chess prodigy, he served as a researcher in Biophysics and Systems Biology at MIT, Computational and Mathematical Biology at Harvard, and Computational and Experimental Biology at Princeton.  Pete Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, wrote, “Damore put forward a view that has reasonable scientific support, and on which it is important to know what the facts are.  Why then was he fired?”

 

University of New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey Miller wrote that Damore got “most of the science right.”  Miller also said that Damore showed “pretty good judgment about what we know and what we don't know.”

 

Google stands as the gatekeeper of the world’s knowledge — and it fired a man for merely questioning PC orthodoxy.  This shows how deeply the current academic climate has embedded itself into corporate America.

 

Tucker Carlson said he believes the U.S. Congress should take immediate action.  “Since it has the power to censor the internet,” Carlson said, “Google should be regulated like the public utility it is, to make sure it doesn’t further distort the free flow of information to the rest of us.”

 

I like Tucker and share his concerns.  But his remedy would make things worse, not better.  Suddenly, government bureaucrats would become the gatekeepers of knowledge.  Regulate Google, and you have to regulate all Internet search companies.  There would be no more competition.  Government would control them all.

 

Government regulation would give us inferior search engines, and a less free society.  Google is the biggest because — for now — they make the best product.  If we keep government out of it, a competitor may come along with a better product still.

 

Be that as it may, I’m fascinated that Tucker Carlson, a well-known, small-government conservative would want to concentrate such power in the hands of government.  If he, of all people, sees the need for such enormous government reach, it’s easy to see how a future government could step in, and decide what Internet search results are “fair.”

 

But which government?  When I said 81% of searches used Google, I didn’t just mean in the United States.  I meant in the whole world.  How can the U.S. Congress presume to regulate what people in India see when they search the internet?  The only way such control could be effective is for it to be global.

 

Imagine the selling points for a global commission regulating internet search results.  In addition to “fairness,” they would promise to screen out terrorist propaganda, fake news, misleading ads, and other “dangerous ideas” (including alternative medicine).  

 

The internet is a morass of scams and misinformation.  The modern terrorist movement thrives because of the internet.  A commission with real enforcement powers would promise to change all that — and it would be a powerful step toward a one-world totalitarian, Antichrist-led government.

 

For the Antichrist to rule the world, he must control the World Wide Web — starting, perhaps, with Google.