OPINION:
Google CEO Sundar Pichai wants President-elect Donald Trump to believe that in a single memo he wrote to Google employees the day before the election, he instantly cured the “woke” mind virus that has plagued the company for over a decade.
Nobody is buying it, especially Google.
In the memo, Mr. Pichai attempted something akin to a Jedi mind trick. He told his staff that Google is “a trusted source of information to people of every background and belief.”
If this were a sitcom, the laugh track would be deafening.
Under Mr. Pichai’s leadership, Google has been anything but trustworthy. The Media Research Center has conducted over two dozen studies of Google that have shown Google burying the campaign websites of Republican candidates and stories from right-leaning news outlets.
The company has also leveraged its unparalleled digital influence to champion Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Vice President Kamala Harris, President Biden and former President Barack Obama, and pushing them into the political stratosphere with the precision of a Silicon Valley algorithm.
Why the feigned change of heart?
Perhaps Mr. Pichai saw the writing on the wall for Ms. Harris. Through Google Search, he has a window into the single most sophisticated human data collection tool on the planet. He likely knew who was going to win this election.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos knew as well. That’s why he ensured that The Washington Post did not endorse anyone for president. His mainstream news outlet had too much at stake to go into Election Day without a contingency plan.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has many federal government contracts to protect, including a $9 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon that it shares with Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.
In addition, there is the looming shadow of antitrust lawsuits, Federal Trade Commission inquiries and Mr. Trump’s Truth Social post promising to have the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute the search giant “at the maximum levels” in connection with election interference.
In the last couple of years, Mr. Pichai has seen Mr. Biden’s administrative state turn on Elon Musk after he bought Twitter in 2022. The Federal Communications Commission canceled Elon Musk’s $900 million SpaceX contract. Suddenly, the Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and DOJ all launched investigations of Mr. Musk.
These tech moguls know this, and it causes them to be terrified, albeit irrationally, that they may face retaliation from Mr. Trump and his incoming administration.
Mr. Pichai’s letter suggests that Google has turned over a new leaf and that its biased interference efforts will end as it corrects course. But Google isn’t retreating.
For 16 years, Google targeted Republicans and moderate Democrats. During the 2024 primaries, MRC Free Speech America studies showed that Google buried the campaign websites of nearly every opponent of the Biden-Harris ticket, including Mr. Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and others.
Just over a month before the election, the search engine did not show a single article from a right-leaning American news source in the 26 pages of Google search results for the search “Donald Trump Presidential Race 2024.”
In August, Google’s autocomplete search suggestions for “assassination attempt on” autocompleted with the search terms “Truman” and “Ronald Reagan,” referring to assassination attempts on others. Mr. Trump’s name was nowhere to be found.
Are we to believe that Google employees who collectively spend millions of dollars every election cycle supporting the most radical candidates will now ignore their rabid activism just because Mr. Pichai wrote a memo?
These are the people who developed a seemingly racist artificial intelligence imaging bot that repeatedly refused to show accurate information. Instead, it showed what appeared to be a Black George Washington, Black and Native American Founding Fathers, Black Vikings and an Asian female pope.
Google’s DEI efforts, however, are more AI code than a code of ethics. Last year, Google had to reassign its head of diversity, equity and inclusion, Kamau Bobb, after he posted on social media that “Jews have an insatiable appetite for war.”
Silicon Valley is obviously liberal, but Google stands alone as the most radical. Make no mistake: The empire will strike back.
• Dan Schneider is vice president of Media Research Center’s Free Speech America. Gabriela Pariseau is its assistant editor.
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