["Pomp and Circumstance"]

Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday, September 13, 2018.

I'm John Pudhortz, the editor of commentary and magazine wishing our Jewish listeners a very happy new year.

And that is some substantial but not total part of our audience.

So I do feel the need to apologize to those who were objecting to our absence earlier this week and last week.

So part of the absence last week had nothing to do with the holidays this week. Unfortunately we could not be here because we were.

Some of us were in synagogue and some of us weren't.

Not that I am the kosher police but among those of us who were not in synagogue and had no obligation to be so a senior writer, Sora, Maumari.

So I say there are no Rothman and a Greenwald our senior editor.

Commentary of course the 73 odd year old monthly of intellectual analysis political property and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective.

We invite you to join us at commentarymagazine.com where we give you a few free reads.

As you subscribe 1995 for digital subscription 29 and 5 for you for all access subscription including our beautiful monthly mailbox in your magazine 11 times the year and yes I did that deliberately because people have been missing it.

We by the way will be in the next couple of weeks unveiling our website redesign which is really more an update that it is a chain of wholesale change watch for it where we like it we think it will move faster and look better on mobile and all kinds of things like that.

With all that housekeeping done what are we going to talk about so of course the world of conservative opinion and conservative grassrootsism and all kinds of conservatism in general in an uproar over the revelation of the tape of the Google wide meeting at the Googleplex in Google California.

Just days after the 2016 election which was like a kind of giant encounter session about the tragedy in the horror of the events that that had just transpired elevating Donald Trump to the presidency.

So this does seem to reveal in a question fashion the fact that Google's top management the top management of what is arguably the most important company in the world seems to have a kind of uniformly liberal outlook liberal opinions and understanding that maybe there was something they could do to try to correct things if necessary.

Who wants to discuss that I'll go because I go I reviewed a lot of this tape and I find it extremely unremarkable what happened so this has been declared by the president's campaign manager a quote threat to the Republic Google is a threat to the Republic.

But because this video shows Google employees behaving as liberals did in the wake of Donald Trump's election and in fact many conservatives who were very afraid by the extent to which he had campaigned on themes that were antithetical to conservative values and American values frankly.

And they were shocked by the outcome of this and there was a lot of rather sort of pathetic handering and the fears over fake news and how they can adjust the algorithm and all you know we know we're a political monoculture and there are a lot of conservatives who come up to me and said that they don't feel kind you know that they can come out and talk about their political values and beliefs in an open fashion around here and we have to address that it's right now it's tired it's road warned we went over these themes for a year and a half to the extent now that they're there being ruged.

And when the president's campaign comes out and tries to make this into yet another event in which conservatives can feel victimized and pressured by the dominant cultural ethos when they command every lever of power in Washington feels to me like a manufactured outbreak.

Okay but let's just go through this because Breitbart got up at Soda Buzzfeed and they both went big with it and it's a big story it's a big story not because it reveals anything new but because it fleshes out and makes undeniable something that was known but that people were always find it relatively easy to poop or say didn't mean anything which is that yes conservatives hold the levers of power in Washington.

Google, Apple, Facebook these are Twitter these are astoundingly powerful companies powerful in a way that previous mega companies in other eras are not because they traffic in words and ideas and information and not in oil or you know commodities or all of them.

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