A Google official reportedly bashed the Conservative Political Action Conference as a "sideshow circus," but argued Google should remain a sponsor to "steer" conservatives "away from nationalistic and incendiary comments."
In a leaked audio transcribed and posted by Breitbart, Adam Kovacevich, Google's senior director of U.S. public policy, addresses a supposed company-wide meeting.
Another part of the meeting was released last Friday on Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight"; and shorter releases were posted by tech magazine Wired in December.
The supposed meeting took place in the wake of Google's sponsorship of CPAC in 2018, which triggered an internal rebellion from left-wing employees, Breitbart reported.
In the clips, Kovacevich portrayed CPAC as a conference with a "dual identity," one being a "premier gathering" that features a "whole swath of conservatives."
The other side he described as featuring a "sideshow circus-like element" which "CPAC organizers have intentionally cultivated sometimes, inviting outrageous figures that say incendiary and offensive things, I think in order to draw more attention and controversy to the conference."
"I think it's challenging for us to reconcile those two identities of CPAC," he said, the transcript shows.
Kovacevich also opined "the Republican Party and I think conservatism, in general, is also going through a lot of internal debates about what it should be . . ." the transcript shows.
"And I think that's one that we should be involved in because we, I think, want probably — the majority of Googlers would want to steer conservatives and Republicans more towards a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more sort of nationalistic incendiary comments, nativist comments and things like that."
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