Three cheers for David Brooks and the New York Times!

Yesterday I had this to say about the Orwellian events at Google, where an engineer was fired for writing a nuanced, carefully documented, and eminently reasonable memo suggesting, among other things,  that while men and women are equally intelligent and that there are individual men and women are every bit as good at just about anything you can think of, science does increasingly conclude that male and female brains are wired differently, that men as a class and women as a class may each tend to have different strengths and weaknesses, and that to some unspecified extent that-not even "rather than" but "as well as-"   discrimination, might explain why there are more men in certain jobs and more women in others.

James Damore also touched on another ideological third rail in his memo. He acknowledged the degree to which his company had become a political and social echo chamber, noted that this has serious consequences for any enterprise in which objectivity was important, and suggested   that political and ideological diversity might be a concern to which Google might do well to address.

As soon as the story hit the wires, the libel and slander against Damore began. The overwhelming majority of the news accounts I've seen misrepresented the memo and claimed that he had questioned the competence of his female colleagues or suggested that there were jobs which women were inherently incapable of doing as well as men simply because they are women. To be sure, there has also been a push-back from the right, accurately characterizing Google's action as an attempt to punish thoughtcrime which offended against leftist ideology but in fact constituted nothing more than a sober acknowledgment of objective reality. But as usual, the smaller and less-influential conservative journalists of the nation have been largely drowned out in a chorus of "progressive" outrage.

Today, however, they got an ally, and in the last place, I would have expected. David Brooks wrote an objective and eminently reasonable op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he defended the memo, accurately described what it said and what it did not say, explained the scientific background of the controversy, suggested that Google CEO Sundar Pichai had mishandled the entire incident and called for his resignation.

I commend the article to you. It's one of the most sensible things I've read on an op-ed page anywhere, let alone in the Times, for a very long time.

It's good to see that there are "progressives" who are able to transcend the demands of an orthodoxy which rejects science and objective reality in order to insist that war is peace and that freedom is slavery.

Yes, "progressive" friends.  One of your own has finally admitted that sometimes you guys do that, too.