New York Times reporter Farhad Manjoo and his editors apparently are so insulated in their politically correct bubble that they fail to recognize embarrassing text anyone outside of that bubble with two eyes and and ounce of sense can clearly see.
In a Wednesday piece (Thursday print edition, Page B1) designed to portray Republican National Convention speaker, Donald Trump supporter and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel as an outlier, Manjoo described Silicon Valley as a place of "militant open-mindedness" which will "severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought." Manjoo also illustrated how one Silicon Valley executive has allowed that area's culture to save him having to do his own political homework. These are considered good things in Old Gray Ladyland.
Here's are several paragraphs from Manjoo's mangled missive (HT Michael Barone via Instapundit):
Peter Thiel’s Embrace of Trump Has Silicon Valley Squirming
(Note: Print edition headline is "A Tech Wild Card Makes His Play")
When the technology investor Peter Thiel takes the stage just before Donald J. Trump at the Republican convention this week, he will become the most prominent public face of a species so endangered it might as well be called extinct: the Silicon Valley Trump supporter.
... Mr. Thiel, who was last in the news for his financial support of Hulk Hogan’s legal fight against Gawker Media, has a slate of political views that stand out of line with most in tech, and perhaps most Americans. He once wrote that “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.”
... not only could Mr. Thiel’s public embrace of Mr. Trump backfire on him, but it could also become another plot point in the larger story line that Silicon Valley is exclusionary and narrow-minded and that its innovations are advancing global inequality.
Manjoo clearly believes that Thiel is the exclusionary one, and stoked readers' paranoia in an earlier paragraph by writing that "he suggested (that) things went south (after the 1920s) because, among other things, women were given the right to vote." What Thiel actually wrote in a 2009 Cato Institute essay is that "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron." Manjoo is being intellectaully dishonest, as so many reporters so frequently are, by claiming Thiel was "suggesting," when he was really observing, and by citing just one factor (the item Thiel cited first) without the other.
He doesn't appear to believe that Silicon Valley is "exclusionary and narrow-minded," and he went full Orwell to defend it:
A bigger problem than Mr. Trump’s policy ideas was his tone. Though Silicon Valley has well-known problems with diversity in its work force, people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought — see how Brendan Eich, the former chief executive of Mozilla, was run out of his job after it became public that he had donated to a campaign opposed to gay marriage.
So the noble people in Silicon Valley are sooooo open-minded that they'll "severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought," and getting Brendan Eich's scalp proves how open-minded they are. Got that?
Speaking of Mozilla and Eich, whose ouster was seen as a landmark victory for "openmindedness," Firefox's market share as of June was 8.0 percent, down from roughly 17.6 percent at the time of Eich's 2014 ouster and 11.6 percent in March 2015. No one in the tech industry-covering press will dare acknowledge the likelihood that user pushback against "militant open-mindedness" might have a great deal to do with Firefox's 55 percent decline in market share in just over two years.
Now let's watch Manjoo perfectly describe one man's decision to go along with the PC crowd without giving the matter genuine consideration:
“This is our democratic process, and I don’t think we should try to shout down Peter Thiel because he’s not saying the same thing that everyone else here is saying,” said Garrett Johnson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Initiative, a tech-policy research group. But Mr. Johnson, an African-American Republican who said he was also voting for the Libertarian candidate this year, said he doubted that Mr. Thiel could persuade him to support Mr. Trump.
“As a black guy in Silicon Valley, I just find it very hard to support a candidate who has been called racist,” Mr. Johnson said.
Johnson isn't holding back on supporting Trump because he has researched the man and found him in his view to be racist. Heck no. He's doing so only because other people have called Trump a racist. That's enough for him.
Silicon Valley's culture isn't producing "militant open-mindedness." What it's really producing is people who openly admit that they won't think for themselves, and who will join a high-tech lynch mob against dissenters at the drop of a hat in the name of "open-mindedness."
Speaking of repressive corporate cultures, in Old Gray Ladyland, George Orwell's 1984 has apparently replaced its stylebook as primary reading, and is being used as a how-to manual instead of a serious social and political warning.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
