OPINION:
Roughly 90 percent of political donations made by Alphabet employees — those who work for Google, YouTube, Verily, and the handful of other companies owned by the tech giant — have gone, between the years 2004 and 2018, to Democratic pockets.
Well, well, well, Houston we have a problem. Just in case there’s any doubt the tech giant leans left — here’s the proof, in numbers.
“Since 2004,” wrote Emil Pitkin, a statistician and the CEO of GovPredict, in the first of a series about political donations from major U.S. companies, “Alphabet employees have contributed a little over 90% of their political dollars to Democratic candidates and causes. Since 2008, the strongest imbalance came in 2016, when 94% of their contributions went to Democrats.”
Republican candidates saw a windfall — if you can call it that — in 2010, when 19 percent of Alphabet employees gave to GOP causes. But that’s the high.
By and large, Google workers, led by Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt — who recently stepped down from his executive chairman role to become the company’s technical adviser — give to the left. And we’re not talking chump change, either.
GovPredict had to sift through 233 different variants of Alphabet’s many holdings, “including ’Google Ventures,’ ’Nest Labs,’ ’Nest at Google,’ ’Verily (Google Life Sciences),’ and the like,” to uncover all the employee donations within Federal Election Commission files. But in the end, they found: employees in 2004 and 2006 donated almost exclusively to Democratic causes, to the tune of $301,045 and $315,579, respectively.
In 2008, the breakdown was $1.66 million to Dems; $184,175 to Republicans. In 2012, it was $2.98 million to Democrats; $336,131 to Republicans. In 2016, it was $5.87 million to Democrats; $403,042 for Republicans.
And in this latest cycle, 2018, the totals so far are $2.16 million to Democrats; $278,441 to Republicans.
That’s quite a chasm, quite a potential for inherent bias leading to censorship — just what conservatives, booted from, say, YouTube, for alleged inappropriate content, have been charging for so many months now.
It’s not that the findings from GovPredict are entirely shocking. It’s more that now conservatives have the nuts and bolts, dollars and cents, proof positives of Google employees’ bias.
It’s more that conservatives, expecting any type of fair shake when they discover their content has suddenly disappeared from social media, or that their accounts are locked, their posts deemed inappropriate, can at least glean a bit of insight into the whys and into the what’s-going-ons.
Alphabet workers are living in a liberal bubble, basing their considerations of bias and defenses and arguments against charges of censorship on what their equally biased, equally leftist-leaning colleagues say.
It’s easy for liars to get away with lying if everybody in their circle is perpetrating the same lie. Who’s to shed the light?
But here’s the test: Imagine if roles were reversed and 90 percent of Alphabet employee donations went to Republican causes. If that seems an eyebrow raiser, then the intellectually honest would have to see the present Alphabet situation in equally alarming terms.
Of course, expecting intellectual honesty from today’s Democrats — the party of resistance, the party of anti-Republicanism, the party of intolerance and divisiveness and street thuggery and MAGA hate — may be a bit optimistic. We’re simply not living in truthful times.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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