When President Trump hosts leading tech executives at the White House on Friday, the specter of Silicon Valley’s power over America’s political discourse and the electoral process will loom large.
Ostensibly, the topic of the summit will be the spread of extremism and the use of online platforms by domestic terrorists. But if the president’s astute tweets earlier this week are any indication, he’ll also be on guard against any potential efforts by Big Tech to use those threats as excuses to discriminate against conservatives even more than they do already.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai assured the president in March that his company is maintaining political fairness. Anyone who has seen their favorite conservative voices deplatformed and the transformation of Google search results since President Trump’s victory in 2016, however, knows that was a lot of double talk.
Since then, there’s been a cascade of evidence showing that Google’s employees are determined to stop President Trump from winning a second term and repeat the humiliation that literally brought them to tears in 2016. Just days ahead of the White House summit, we learned that Google employees celebrated the company’s decision to pull funding from CPAC, the largest conservative conference in the country, calling it a “circus platform for hate.”
But one story in particular captured the president’s attention and called Pichai’s claim of political neutrality into serious question: whistleblower and ex-Google engineer Kevin Cernekee’s revelation that “there is bias at every level of the organization.”
Based on his experience with his former employer, Cernekee warned that Google intends to “ramp up the censorship” as the 2020 election approaches.
“Google has a lot of mechanisms for manipulating public opinion,” Cernekee asserted in a subsequent interview. “They’re constantly looking for ways to manipulate the electoral process.”
Cernekee’s decision to come forward this week immediately set the tone for Friday’s summit at the White House. As President Trump tweeted, Pichai’s professions of neutrality “sounded good until I watched Kevin Cernekee, a Google engineer, say terrible things about what they did in 2016 and that they want to ‘Make sure that Trump [loses] in 2020.’”
There are signs that the other tech giants are equally committed to tipping the 2020 elections toward the Democrats. Just one day after the president posted that tweet, Twitter locked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s official campaign account for posting a video of a Black Lives Matter protest outside McConnell’s home that shows activists calling for physical violence against the GOP leader. Twitter’s purported justification for censoring McConnell’s account—that the video contained “violent threats”—is patently ridiculous, considering that McConnell was the subject, not the author, of those threats. It’s a classic case of blaming the victim to accommodate a political agenda.
Cernekee’s bravery may wind up making a huge difference at a pivotal time. After the horrific terrorist attack in El Paso, Texas, the tech giants are champing at the bit to eradicate “white nationalists” from the internet, and the entire left-wing media establishment is adamantly insisting that President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Candace Owens, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), and even rank-and-file Trump-supporting Republicans are “white nationalists” or worse.
Tech executives were probably hoping to use the summit to argue that it’s their duty to purge the internet of such voices, which would have given a false veneer of legitimacy to their ongoing efforts to prevent conservatives from using social media platforms to counter the rampant liberal bias of the mainstream media. Instead, Big Tech will come to the White House with the threat of an executive order to combat online censorship hanging over their heads.
Unfortunately, Cernekee’s decision to speak up also comes at a price. Not only was he previously fired for refusing to cave to the leftist orthodoxy of his Google co-workers, but he’s been slandered, as well.
The Daily Caller recently published leaked listserv posts from January 2017 in which Cernekee decries political violence and directs his Google co-workers to a crowd-funding effort to find the Antifa thug who sucker-punched actual white nationalist Richard Spencer.
It was a prescient message at the very beginning of the current wave of unrest that culminated last weekend in twin mass murders—one by a racist extremist in El Paso, Texas; the other by a dedicated Antifa-supporter who vowed to “kill all fascists” in Dayton, Ohio. It was a plea to pull back from the brink and condemn political violence, whatever side it comes from.
With the help of equally biased reporters eager to help them nullify Cernekee’s whistleblowing, however, Google’s liberals have sought to twist that message of peace into evidence that Cernekee himself is a neo-Nazi.
Luckily, President Trump hasn’t been distracted by the noise or the spin. When Big Tech’s representatives arrive at the White House on Friday, they won’t be able to launch their anticipated offensive against conservative speech, because they’ll be too busy trying to defend Silicon Valley’s rampant liberal bias and ongoing efforts to interfere in our elections.
Photo credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images