Google Engineer Goes on National TV, Exposes Alleged 'Hostile' Work Environment for Conservatives
Conservative Google engineer Mike Wacker appeared on Fox Business Wednesday to elaborate on a post he wrote on Medium claiming the company was overrun with left-leaning “outrage mobs.”
Wacker told host Trish Regan that “it is really rough” being a conservative at the tech giant.
“I’ve been through the experience of college of kind of being in the viewpoint minority and kind of being on the outlier politically,” he said.
“Back then, I used to joke that I was like in a hostile environment and then Google, by comparison, it really is a hostile environment.”
“Sometimes it’s just hard to avoid the hostility to conservative views,” Wacker told Regan. “Anywhere you go, like at lunch, there are political discussions. There’s always some sort of outrage mob about some topic.”
Regan asked Wacker what he does when he feels hostility at Google.
Wacker told Regan that if you “push back” the outrage mobs can “turn on you instead.”
He went on to describe the “outrage mobs” as similar to those found on college campuses.
“It’s so hard to predict what’s going to get them offended next,” Wacker said.
The Google engineer gave an example of an employee sharing an article from the conservative-leaning National Review and was immediately reported to human resources.
Wacker told Regan that in another instance one person at Google told an employee that his job could potentially be jeopardized if he vocalized the same views as the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kay Coles James.
“Then I said something to HR, ‘We’re getting to the realm of employment threats here and that’s not right,’” Wacker said.
“They didn’t really do anything. They said ‘Oh it doesn’t appear to violate Google’s policies.’ [When] you offend someone at the company, then you can get in trouble with HR.”
In his post on Medium, Wacker said, “outrage mobs and witch hunts dominate” Google’s culture.
“These outrage mobs and witch hunts have become an existential threat not only to Google’s culture internally but to Google’s trust and credibility externally,” he said.
In a recent commentary piece on Fox News, Dan Gainor, vice president for TechWatch, business and culture at the Media Research Center, framed the issue of censoring conservatives and Google’s impact on global communications this way:
“Can free speech and free press survive when one company controls more than 92 percent of the search market for all of mankind?”
All of this comes on the heels of a report by the Daily Caller that Google has a blacklist of sites that are kept from appearing in Google News.
“If you can control who belongs at Google, then you can also control what content belongs on Google,” Wacker said.
When asked what his future was like at Google, specifically after the Fox interview, Wacker said, “I come [to work]. I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m here another day.’ I just thank God for that.”
Google declined a request from The Western Journal to comment on this matter.
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