A few weeks ago here in Mountain View, California, we had a group of people affiliated with the Alt-Right announce they would march on Google to protest the firing of an employee for cause. The employee James Damore wrote a memo essentially stating that women aren’t as good engineers and coders as men. Because Google has a policy that colleagues have input on each other’s performance evaluations, and Damore admitted to being biased, he was fired for cause. He could not be impartial when participating in the annual review of his female peers. For this, Nazi’s (or their kindred spirits) would march in Mountain View, the location of Google’s headquarters.
I am the mayor of Mountain View. People protest Google all the time with little to no fanfare, but this was immediately following the events of Charlottesville, thus drawing the attention of the nation. That was a very stressful week as the MVPD, high ranking staff of the City of Mountain View, executives and staff of Google, and myself, all worked together to plan and control an event that could have easily gotten out of control. In the end, the white supremacist group that planned the march, canceled. The only visitors we had in the park adjacent to Google’s headquarter building were Canadian geese. Being a welcoming city, I invited the geese to stay.
We have a federal airbase in Mountain View called Moffett Field. When the sitting President of the United States visits the Silicon Valley area, this is typically the location where Air Force One will land. It is common courtesy for The White House to reach out to the current mayor of Mountain View and invite him or her to greet the President when he walks off of the plane. It’s an honor many of my predecessors have had the privilege of doing. I took office on January 10th of this year and in my introductory speech, I announced my concerns and worries of being a mayor in the time of Trump. And I would frequently ask my friends what they would do if they were asked to greet this particular president if he landed at Moffett Field. I often said I’d either turn my back to him or take a knee. But the reaction I received, time after time, is that I needed to respect the “office of the president” even if I didn’t respect the actual man.
All of this “play it nice” advice was before Trump’s NFL comments of peaceful protest. Now we have Trump supporters (some NFL team owners) literally locked arm-in-arm with protestors taking a knee in front of the whole world. Now we have national anthem singers taking a knee. Stevie Wonder taking a knee. A congresswoman taking a knee. This is no longer an unacceptable form of protest.
But think about the contrast between the two events. In the first, we had an Alt-Right group standing up to an employer for firing an employee who was exercising his first amendment rights to free speech and in the second, we had our President suggest that team owner was negligent for not firing their employees for their peaceful protests and their exercising of first amendment rights. So which is it? Can you peacefully protest or not? Or is the difference really as simple as the fired Google employee was white and the athletes who take a knee have been black? Yeah, I think it’s that.
As mayor, I think about the damage this president is doing to our country every day. If you listened to him during the campaign, he had no policy knowledge. He simply spouted out ideas that some folks found protective, like building a wall or expelling people from the country that weren’t Christian. I guess it was enough to get him elected. But now that he is, he is failing to be president of the all the people. He is failing to uphold the same oath that I took when I became a council member. He is dividing our nation as badly as it has been since the Civil War. And I think if I had to greet him at the bottom of Air Force One, I too, would take a knee. Directly in front of him.