The Culture Wars Have Come to Silicon Valley<br />“Google drives a big sector of tech into the arms of Trump: fires employee who wrote memo about women in tech jobs,” Dr. Pinker wrote.<br />In contrast, Mr. Hastings, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said earlier last year<br />that Mr. Trump, if elected, “would destroy much of what is great about America.”<br />“I see our board being about great judgment, particularly in unlikely disaster where we have to pick<br />new leaders,” Mr. Hastings wrote in the email to Mr. Thiel, a copy of which was obtained by .<br />One of the most outspoken supporters of Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley has been Mr. Thiel, a founder of<br />PayPal, who has since faced derision from other people working in tech for his political stance.<br />The tensions became evident last year with the rise of Donald J. Trump, when a handful of people from the industry<br />who publicly supported the then-presidential candidate faced blowback for their political decisions.<br />Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said Mr. Damore’s comments carried additional weight to people on either side of the political spectrum<br />because he was an engineer at Google, one of the world’s biggest technology companies.<br />His memo and dismissal transformed Mr. Damore into a hero on right-wing news sites like<br />Breitbart, which has long criticized the political leanings of the tech industry.
