BOOM: Google Spikes DEI Hiring ‘Targets’

To quote the late, great Bill Paxton: Game over, man. Game over!

Earlier today, Google joined Wal-Mart and a host of other large American corporations in reversing their discriminatory policies under the DEI rubric. Google had implemented a quota system five years ago in the wake of the George Floyd riots, with targets set for later this year, that would have set aside 30% of leadership positions for “underrepresented groups.” Not only has Google ditched that quota, they will ‘review’ the rest of their DEI policies as well, the Wall Street Journal reports:

In an email to employees Wednesday, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce. 

In 2020, amid calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.

Parent company Alphabet’s annual report released Wednesday omitted a sentence stating the company was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” The sentence was in its reports from 2021 through 2024.

Google also said it was reviewing recent court decisions and executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and federal contractors. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” the email said.

Right now, as the WSJ notes at the end, that leaves Apple pretty much as the sole DEI advocate in Silicon Valley. We know what Elon Musk has had to say about it regarding Twitter/X, Tesla, and SpaceX. Amazon jumped off the DEI bandwagon a month ago. Meta/Facebook dropped DEI around the same time, with Mark Zuckerberg announcing the dissolution of its “diversity team” after detecting a tipping point. And he wasn’t alone:

Zuckerberg’s most talked-about decision was the rollback of social-media fact-checking protocols that were introduced in the wake of Trump’s first election. The elections “feel like a cultural tipping point,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the change.

On Friday, after publication of this article, Meta aired a memo on a company messaging board saying it was eliminating the team assigned to diversity. “The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in the memo. “The term ‘DEI’ has also become charged.” Meta declined to comment. …

Alongside the change in the White House, business leaders say the nation’s shifting legal landscape and cooling job market is spurring them to reconsider diversity programs, climate-change efforts and other Trump targets. 

This isn’t so much a Trump-caused phenomenon as it is a Trump-revealed phenomenon. Just as with males competing in women’s sports as “trans women,” which Trump barred by EO as I wrote this post, DEI turns out to be incredibly unpopular … when debate and dissent is allowed to take place. Until Trump decided to take up both issues in the presidential campaign, the Overton window set by the Protection Racket Media remained firmly shifted to a position where dissent on both would be punished as “extreme.”

DEI turned out to be extreme to the voting electorate. So too did males encroaching on female spaces and opportunities on the basis of ‘gender identity.’ Trump’s opponents called him a bigot and his followers extremist, but Trump won the popular vote — and suddenly, corporate America has belatedly heard the message. 

Some of this momentum existed before the election, of course. Robby Starbuck fought this left-wing character-assassination strategy for years while slowly making an impact on DEI policies in American boardrooms. Until the election, however, Meta and Google made themselves obstacles not just to change but to even debate on these public-policy issues that people clearly wanted to engage. 

The Overton Window has shifted. Or perhaps better put, American voters are no longer putting up with speech police on issues like DEI, CRT, and the protection of spaces for females in athletics, sports, or public accommodation. Trump certainly provided leadership in that process, but Trump is also the result of the suppression of debate by the radical progressive elitist clique that has gripped American institutions — until now.