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Google employees melted down after the word “family” was used in a company presentation, documents obtained by TheDCNF show.
Employees were upset that the word was used in a way that links families with children, which they argued was homophobic.
A Google vice president acknowledged that the word “family” had sparked “concerns” about inclusivity.
A Google executive sparked a fierce backlash from employees by using the word “family” in a weekly, company-wide presentation, according to internal documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Many Google employees became angry that the term was used while discussing a product aimed at children, because it implied that families have children, the documents show. The backlash grew large enough that a Google vice president addressed the controversy and solicited feedback on how the company could become more inclusive.
One employee stormed out of the March 2017 presentation after a presenter “continued to show (awesome) Unicorn product features which continually use the word ‘family’ as a synonym for ‘household with children,’” he explained in an internal thread. That employee posted an extended rant, which was well-received by his colleagues, on why linking families to children is “offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong.”
He wrote:
This is a diminishing and disrespectful way to speak. If you mean “children”, say “children”; we have a perfectly good word for it. “Family friendly” used as a synonym for “kid friendly” means, to me, “you and yours don’t count as a family unless you have children”. And while kids may often be less aware of it, there are kids without families too, you know.
The use of “family” as a synonym for “with children” has a long-standing association with deeply homophobic organizations. This does not mean we should not use the word “family” to refer to families, but it mean we must doggedly insist that family does not imply children.
Even the sense, “suitable for the whole family”, which you might think is unobjectionable, is totally wrong too. It only works if we have advance shared conception of what “the whole family” is, and that is almost always used to mean a household with two adults, of opposite sex, in a romantic/sexual relationship, with two or more of their own children. If you mean that as a synonym for “suitable for all people” stop and notice the extraordinary unlikelihood of such a thought! So “suitable for the whole family” doesn’t mean “all people”, it means “all people in families”, which either means that all those other people aren’t in families, or something even worse. Use the word “family” to mean a loving assemblage of people who may or may not live together and may or may not include people of any particular age. STOP using it to mean “children”. It’s offensive, inappropriate, homophobic, and wrong.
Roughly 100 other Google employees upvoted the post, signaling their agreement. Other Google employees also echoed their displeasure with the term. “Thanks for writing this. So much yes,” one wrote.
“Using the word ‘family’ in this sense bothers me too,” wrote another employee, who felt excluded by the term because she was neither married nor a parent.
“It smacks of the ‘family values’ agenda by the right wing, which is absolutely homophobic by its very definition,” she wrote, adding: “[I]t’s important that we fix our charged language when we become aware of how exclusionary it actually is. As a straight person in a relationship, I find the term ‘family’ offensive because it excludes me and my boyfriend, having no children of our own.”
“My family consists of me and several other trans feminine folks, some of whom I’m dating. We’re all supportive of each other and eventually aspire to live together. Just because we aren’t a heterosexual couple with 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog doesn’t mean we’re not a family,” another employee added in agreement.
Another employee wrote that “using ‘family’ to mean ‘people with kids’ is also annoying to me as a straight-cis-woman who doesn’t have or want kids. My husband, my parents, and my pets are my family.”
The new Google logo is displayed at the Google headquarters on Sept. 2, 2015 in Mountain View, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Google vice president Pavni Diwanji joined the conversation and acknowledged that use of the term “family” had sparked “concerns.”
“Hi everyone, I realize what we said at tgif might have caused concerns in the way we talked about families. There are families without kids too, and also we needed to be more conscientious about the fact that there is a diverse makeup of parents and families,” Dwiwanji wrote.
“Please help us get to a better state. Teach us how to talk about it in inclusive way, if you feel like we are not doing it well. As a team we have very inclusive culture, and want to do right in this area. I am adding my team here so we can have open conversation,” Dwiwanji concluded.
TheDCNF previously reported that Google employees had internal debates about whether to suppress right-of-center media outlets, including The Daily Caller and Breitbart, in the company’s search function. That conversation, too, included a Google vice president: David Besbris.
Besbris and other participants in that conversation advocated providing contextual information about media sources in search results, and the company later did so with a short-lived fact check feature at the end of 2017.
Not only did the fact-check feature target conservative outlets almost exclusively, it was also blatantly wrong. Google’s fact check repeatedly attributed false claims to those outlets, even though they demonstrably never made those claims.
Just give her some more cornbread and she will say anything.
In a recent interview with PBS, defeated Georgia gubernatorial candidate and Democrat Stacey Abrams said she would not oppose non-citizens voting in U.S. elections.
Yes, that is really a thing she said.
Ryan Saavedra
✔@RealSaavedra
Margaret Hoover asks former Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams if she supports non-citizens voting in local elections.
The fact that there are major officeholders (or nearly) out there who would actually think this, much less say it out loud and on a camera, is a very serious matter.
Ari Fleischer
✔@AriFleischer
This question should be asked to all elected officials, especially AOC and the 2020 presidential candidates.
Ryan Saavedra
✔@RealSaavedra
Margaret Hoover asks former Georgia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams if she supports non-citizens voting in local elections.
‘Fox and Friends’ host Brian Kilmeade ripped Abrams’ comments.
Bobby Lewis@revrrlewis
Brian Kilmeade gets incredulous about Stacey Abrams and Bill de Blasio each promoting the idea of granting non-citizens the right to vote in local elections. “Where do we come in as Americans?”
Dems: The alleged Russian collusion in the last election is so troubling we must stop everything, get to the bottom of it right now and impeach President Trump no matter what.
Also Dems: Hey, why don’t we allow people from all over the world to vote in our elections?
This idiot thinks he can impeach Trump for firing James Comey.
Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) plans to introduce articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Thursday — the first day that Democrats control the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Sherman first filed such articles in 2017, though they had no chance of going anywhere in the Republican-controlled House. Other Democrats joined his effort over the months that followed, without much effect.
Sherman, who was until recently considered a “moderate,” is close to the Bill and Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. He backed Hillary Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Democratic presidential primary in 2016, and has adopted hawkish foreign policy positions in the past. But in the two years since Trump won the presidency, Sherman has — like some other “moderates” — become obsessed with removing Trump.
Rep. Brad Sherman plans to introduce articles of impeachment against President Trump on Thursday, the first day of Democratic control of the House.
Sherman (D-Northridge) is reintroducing a measure that he first rolled out in 2017. But this year it carries more political significance: The decision of whether to act on it rests with Democrats — not Trump’s Republican allies.
Sherman’s articles of impeachment accuse Trump of obstructing justice by firing former FBI Director James B. Comey, among other wrongdoing.
“There is no reason it shouldn’t be before the Congress,” Sherman said. “Every day, Donald Trump shows that leaving the White House would be good for our country.”
Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has tried to keep impeachment at bay, knowing that it would provoke public opposition. However, left-wing Democrats like Tom Steyer — who may be running for president in 2020 — have insisted that impeachment should be the top priority of the new Democratic majority in the House.
Any impeachment would have to be confirmed by the Senate in a two-thirds majority to convict and remove Trump — something that is very unlikely to happen, given that Republicans increased their majority in the 2018 elections.
Update: Newly-elected Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) also endorsed impeaching Trump on her first day in office, according toThe Nation, which described Tlaib as calling for “immediate steps” to remove the president from the White House.
“Each passing day brings more pain for the people most directly hurt by this president, and these are days we simply cannot get back. The time for impeachment proceedings is now,” Rep. Tlaib declared.
Clinton also fired his FBI chief — but he wasn’t being investigated by the FBI at the time
James Comey has made history, but not in the way he would have wanted: In the 82-year history of the modern FBI, he’s only the second of the nation’s top law enforcement officials to be fired by a sitting president.
The first was FBI Director William Sessions, whom President Bill Clinton fired in 1993 amid allegations of ethics violations. Sessions (no relation to Trump’s embattled attorney general, Jeff Sessions) was just six years into his 10-year term, and the firing helped set the stage for what became years of tensions between Clinton and the FBI.
But Donald Trump isn’t Bill Clinton, and Jim Comey isn’t Bill Sessions. Clinton only fired the FBI chief after a several months-long investigation that concluded before Clinton even took office.That deep dive into Sessions’s actionsresulted in a 161-page report chronicling, in meticulous detail, a pattern of alleged ethical violations. More importantly, Clinton — unlikeTrump — wasn’t under active FBI investigation when he decided to oust Sessions.
By contrast, Trump has fired the man leading a criminal investigation into the president’s own campaign. The allegations — that the Trump team actively colluded with Russia to help Trump win the White House — couldn’t be weightier. Trump’s move could impede the FBI probe in the short term, but it’s almost certain to accelerate a process that could prematurely end his presidency.
“The FBI has gone after presidents before,” says Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and historian, pointing to the bureau’s probes of Richard Nixon during Watergate and Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal. “But never … has a president dismissed an FBI director when members of the president’s administration and members of the president’s campaign team were under investigation for colluding with a foreign power.”
Understanding why Trump’s move has sparked such an uproar means taking a closer look at the Sessions firing and its similarities to the Comey ouster — and, more importantly, its differences.
Donald Trump isn’t the first president to fire an FBI director
The year was 1993; the newly minted president was William Jefferson Clinton. (The country was months, even years, away from when Clinton himself would be under investigation for a real estate scandal in Arkansas and, later, lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.)
The FBI director was William Sessions, a federal judge put in charge of the FBI by Ronald Reagan. Sessions was six years into his 10-year term, and he was a thorn in the side of at least two of the presidents he served — not because he was investigating them but because of his poor performance.
On January 19, 1993, the last day of the George H.W. Bush administration, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) released a massive documentdetailing allegations of significant ethical lapses and questionable practices that were undermining Sessions’s ability to lead the FBI. There were so many examples of problematic, fireable behavior in the report that calls immediately came for Sessions to resign or be fired.
The report found that Mr. Sessions had taken numerous free trips aboard F.B.I. aircraft to visits friends and relatives, often taking along his wife, Alice. The report, which was endorsed officially by Attorney General William P. Barr on his last day in office, detailed a litany of abuses. It is a lacerating portrayal of the director as an official who was in charge of enforcing the law but who seemed blasé about perceptions of his own conduct.
There was more: The report indicated Sessions had improperly given rides to non-official passengers in his government-funded vehicle — a punishable violation under FBI rules; that he had thwarted FBI efforts to look into allegations; that he had received a mortgage from a bank under what the investigators called a “sweet-heart deal”; and that he had “abused his security detail for personal purposes.”
The report concluded: “Our findings raise serious issues that only the President can resolve regarding whether Director Sessions can continue to enjoy the President’s full faith and confidence in his ability to properly conduct his office.”
As Clinton explained at the time of Sessions’s firing, under normal circumstances, a new Democratic president would want to avoid summarily firing an FBI chief selected by a Republican predecessor.
Indeed, Tim Naftali, a professor of history and public policy at New York University, told me Clinton later revealed in his memoir that he hoped Sessions would step down of his own volition.
That didn’t happen. Sessions called the report’s allegations “scurrilous attacks” and told the press he had “refused to voluntarily resign.” Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, by then, had told the president there was no option but dismissal.
Reno was scathing in her assessment of Sessions in the letter she wrote to Clinton recommending Sessions be relieved of his duties. The FBI chief, she wrote, “had exhibited a serious deficiency in judgment involving matters contained in the [OPR] report and that he does not command the respect and confidence needed to lead the bureau and the law enforcement community in addressing the many issues facing law enforcement today.”
Current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein used similar language in his memo on Tuesday recommending that Trump fire Comey, stating, “Over the past year … the F.B.l.’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice.”
Still, there is an enormous difference between these two stories: Bill Sessions, in Naftali’s words, “was not in the midst of a major investigation of the Clinton campaign and a foreign power.”
The Sessions dismissal, he says, “didn’t smack of a potential obstruction of justice.” The Comey one does.
Clinton might have wanted to fire the next FBI chief, but he couldn’t
With Sessions out, Clinton installed Louis Freeh as the director of the FBI. He surely came to regret that.
Freeh, very early on, set his sights on investigating the Clintons — again and again.
He turned first to a morass of a story back in Arkansas, known as the Whitewater real estate scandal, which focused on whether then-Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary illegally benefited from personal investments, and dug into the origins of money used for Bill’s 1994 governor’s campaign. He also investigated alleged Chinese financial interference in the 1996 election campaign. Later the FBI also became tangled up in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“Clinton couldn’t fire Louis Freeh — even though he wanted to — because Louis Freeh was investigating him,” Weiner says. “It would have been seen as an obstruction of justice.”
Both historians return again and again to that phrase: obstruction of justice. In 1993, there was no implication that the firing of William Sessions was improper. Firing him did not raise the specter that firing James Comey has raised today: the obstruction of an ongoing judicial investigation.
Some senators and Congress members did object at the time: Bob Dole, then the Senate minorityleader (and later a GOP presidential candidate), worried it would set a bad precedent and potentially compromise the FBI.
This, however, was the minority opinion. Charles Schumer, then a member of the House, pointed out that Sessions had lost respect in the FBI, which “compromised” his leadership.
“In the case of William Sessions, you had a case of [misconduct] in office,” Wiener says. Comey, by contrast, was actively looking into “a sophisticated attack by the Kremlin on the 2016 election and … whether Americans aided and abetted in that attack.”
And that is the most troubling thing of all. Trump isn’t the first president to fire an FBI chief. But he is the first to fire one who was investigating him and his administration. Comey isn’t the only one who has made history here.
Migrants are the “lifeblood” of America, not Americans and their children, says former top Democrat Sen. Harry Reid.
“Immigrants are the lifeblood of our nation,” Reid said, ignoring the 4 million Americans who turn 18 this year in a homeland with 260 million Americans, 34 million legal immigrants and at least 11 million illegal migrants.
Migrants, he said, “are our power and our strength.”
Reid made the claim as he tried to slam President Donald Trump’s call on Oct. for a reform of the birthright citizenship rules.
Reid led the Senate Democrats until 2016. His elevation of migrants above Americans came shortly after President Donald Trump declared himself to be a pro-American nationalist.
But Reid’s praise for migrants and contempt for Americans is echoed by many Democrats, by progressive columnists, some GOP-affiliated columnists, and by many immigrant political activists.
For example, the Democrats’ leaders in the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared in a lengthy speech in February 2018 that:
We’re a great country because we’re constantly reinvigorated by immigrants coming to our country. Their commitment and courage and commitment to the American dream which drew them here in the first place strengthened the American dream. As newcomers with all of that hope and aspiration, they make America more American when they come here and that’s why our country will not stagnate.
…
Great things, discoveries in America came from immigrants coming here. Many of the great academic minds in our country came from another country. But then — at the same time America produced our own and that’s a pretty exciting combination.
Rep. Joe Kennedy, in an October article for Time magazine, tried to revive the claim that America is a “nation of immigrants,” not a nation of and for Americans and their children:
Few felt it as deeply as President John F. Kennedy. In his 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants, recently re-released, my great-uncle outlines the compelling case for immigration, in economic, moral, and global terms. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation,” he writes. “But only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources.”
Many pro-migration advocates also argue that migrants are more important and productive than Americans:
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in January 2018:
Over all, America is suffering from a loss of dynamism. New business formation is down. Interstate mobility is down. Americans switch jobs less frequently and more Americans go through the day without ever leaving the house.
…
Of course [Americans] react with defensive animosity to the immigrants who out-hustle and out-build them. You’d react negatively, too, if confronted with people who are better versions of what you wish you were yourself.
In June 2017, a former Wall Street Journal writer who is now working for the New York Times declared America belongs to immigrants because immigrants make the nation more powerful. Bret Stephens wrote:
I speak of Americans whose families have been in this country for a few generations. Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning…
Bottom line: So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future.
Americans have no right to America, Stephens continued, saying:
We’re a country of immigrants — by and for them, too. Americans who don’t get it should get out.
In January 2018, the Washington Post’s (WaPo) op-ed editor, Fred Hiatt, declared:
Here’s the bottom line: I think we should remain open to immigrants because it’s part of who we are as a nation, because every generation of newcomers — even, or maybe especially, the ones who come with nothing but moxie and a tolerance for risk — has enriched and improved us …
A vote to choke off immigration is a vote for stagnation and decline.
In February 2017, Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the D.C.-based Weekly Standard magazine, declared that population replacement would be the best for national power:
“Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?
[I hope] this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse. You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico.
Stephens’ progressive and elitist peers have lauded the Hamilton musical, which portrays says American was founded by immigrants, not settlers, and that today’s immigrants as the rejuvenating diverse lifeblood of dull, white America. The play includes a song titled: “Immigrants (We Get The Job Done),” which glamorizes the imported, underpaid cheap-labor and sweatshops which serve Hamilton‘s wealthy ticket-buyers:
Pelso also said Americans owe a moral debt to illegals for bringing their children into the United States:
I say to their parents: Thank you for bringing these Dreamers to America. We’re in your debt for the courage it took, for you to take the risk, physically, politically, in every way, to do so.”
Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said President Donald Trump was a “poster boy for what a mob protester looks like.”
Discussing conservative media calling protests a “mob,” Waters said, “Well, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s not believable. As a matter of fact, this country was built on peaceful protests. And those of us who were part of the Civil Rights movement, who understood the power of protest taught by Dr. Martin Luther King and others know that we cannot allow Donald Trump and anybody else to take protests away from us and to deem it to be violent and to try and make us look like a mob. It is because of peaceful protests, not only in the Civil Rights movement, but the labor movement was able to get better wages, able to get better working conditions, able to get better pay, everything because they learned to march and protest. And they still do it today. We know that protest is guaranteed to a democratic society. We know that this is guaranteed to us by the Constitution.”
What A Damn Joke
She continued, “They’re trying to change the description of protest and call it a mob. Well, this president is the poster boy for what a mob protester looks like. He is—matter of fact, he’s the one who has been violent in his speech. He’s the one in his rallies has said things like ‘I’d like to punch him in the face.’ Trump said that at one of his rallies, he said ‘knock the crap out of them, would you, and seriously, okay, just knock the hell out of them, I mean, I promise I will pay the legal fees.’ That’s the kind of talk that he has done. That’s violent talk. With don’t have that kind of talk that has come from the women who are protesting. As a matter of fact, this country is past due for the kind of protests that we have seen women do in the last few days as we have gone through this confirmation process of Kavanaugh. It is time for women to say that we’re tired of being disrespected.”
Investigative counsel Rachel Mitchell, cross-examining Christine Blasey Ford at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, demolished her claim that she could not testify on Monday because she was afraid of flying.
Ford and her attorneys refused a Monday hearing, arguing that she was afraid to fly. One of her friends even claimed that her fear of flying was a result of the alleged assault by Judge Brett Kavanaugh over 35 years ago.
The GOP has been told that Ford does not want to fly from her California home to Washington, according to the Republican senator, which means she may need to drive across the country. Ford has reportedly told friends she is uncomfortable in confined spaces, indicating a physical difficulty in making the trip by plane.
Committee chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) then offered to travel to California to interview Ford, relieving her of the need to fly. She declined. There was talk of having Ford drive across the country to make the hearing.
Yet under questioning by Mitchell, Ford admitted that she had, in fact, flown across the country to make the hearing. She had also flown to the east coast for a vacation with family in August. She also admitted flying frequently for her work and for her hobbies, including surfing vacations in Hawaii, Costa Rica, and French Polynesia. Ford, laughing nervously, said that it was easier to fly for vacations.
Critics had speculated that the sole reason Democrats, and Ford, were refusing a Monday hearing — or even a compromise Wednesday hearing — was because a Thursday hearing would make it almost impossible for the Senate to hold a confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh before the Supreme Court begins its new session on October 1.
