Is Apple, at last, succumbing to the woke mob’s clamor for intellectual conformity?
It was Apple, after all, that famously ran an ad during the 1984 Super Bowl taking full advantage of the resonances of that fabled year. The ad, itself called 1984, drew heavily from the imagery and dire warnings of George Orwell’s novel of the same name. In it, a strong, colorful young lady with a mallet — the nonconforming free thinker — runs through rows of grey worker drones in lockstep and shatters the Big Brother screen to which those benighted, defeated hordes mutely attended.
The message could not have been clearer. The brash new start-up technology company Apple stood foursquare in favor of freedom of thought and expression, while its amazing new information tools (in that year, the genuinely revolutionary Macintosh computer) would help to free our minds forever.
That celebration of free and daring thought, even if disfavored or unpopular, has rarely been evident in Silicon Valley in recent years. Mozilla fired a new CEO for having contributed to the “incorrect” side in a California referendum. Google fired an employee for expressing the view that women and men are different in material ways, and evidence suggests that Google’s search engine may — by design or otherwise — be ideologically biased. All of this and more has left conservatives fearful that expressing their opinions could hurt their careers.
All of this is immensely depressing. This country has been here before. Until recently, it seemed to have learned the lessons of that grim past.
The debate about whether the American government and businesses may or should discriminate on the grounds of political viewpoint or philosophy stretches back at least as far as the initial Red Scare following World War I. The argument reached its apogee during the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings of the 1950s. During what is most commonly known as the McCarthy Era, government and private industry “blacklisted” those with minority political viewpoints, costing them their jobs and their livelihoods. Major political, media, and literary figures rallied against McCarthyism — coined after Republican Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy — with the result that the American people reached a broad consensus that discrimination in employment on the grounds of political viewpoint was beyond the pale.
We all know this. Many of us were introduced to the evils of McCarthyist discrimination and its discourse-deadening effects by reading The Crucible, a high-school syllabus favorite for decades. That work illustrated that threatening to wreck people’s lives for independent thoughts or speech leads to figurative or even literal witch hunts and to societal madness. Those of us of a certain age had the message reinforced by Apple’s own 1984 ad.
It is, therefore, particularly distressing to see Apple fighting to keep the door open for just this sort of discrimination, even as it threatens to engulf some of its Silicon Valley neighbors. In recent months, we at the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research have pushed Apple to consider expanding its nondiscrimination policy to protect against McCarthyist viewpoint discrimination. So far, Apple has fought our efforts tenaciously, trying to avoid having to even ask its shareholders whether they support commissioning a study analyzing the possible risks that may arise from failing to ban this pernicious practice.
To his credit, Apple CEO Tim Cook has asserted that there is no place for such discrimination at Apple, advising any employees who felt marginalized to contact him personally. But Cook has himself argued that religious-liberty protections are just gussied-up hate. And even if his heart is in the right place, he as CEO can hardly intervene personally in every instance of viewpoint discrimination.
If Cook means what he says, that McCarthyism has no home at Apple, then he knows how to ensure that result. It’s time for Apple to remember the noble commitments of its early days, and to act.
Scott Shepard is the coordinator of the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
