For Trump, Google Replaces Pride Month With 'Arnold Palmer's Gigantic Hog' Month
Heavens no, it wasn't politics, it was just, um ... 'not sustainable.' Yeah.
Google has knuckled under to Mad King Donald again. Not much of a surprise; like several other Big Tech suckups, the company (“Don’t call us Google, we’re Alphabet, OK? Google is just the only thing people know us for! We’re Alphabet!”) donated a million bucks to Trump’s inauguration. Google followed that by joining the wave of companies formally reinstituting a preference for discrimination in its business practices by eliminating “DEI” programs.
At the end of January, Google earned itself special mockery when it announced it would change the “Gulf of Mexico” to the “Gulf of America” in its Maps app, a change that went into effect yesterday, but the company explained that’s only for users located in the US of A. In Mexico only, English language settings will call it “Gulf of Mexico,” but the rest of the whole damn world will see the embarrassing “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America).”
But that’s not all! Partway into Black History Month, Google’s Calendar App no longer mentions that this is anything but February, and has also removed most of the holidays and observances that Trump recently ordered federal agencies to remove from their own lists of observances, unless they’re actually designated federal holidays when your mail isn’t delivered. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and Juneteenth were passed by Congress, so they remain for Google, but Holocaust Remembrance Day is gone. No more Indigenous Peoples Month, Jewish Heritage Month, Women’s History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, or Pride Month either. The last of those will at least satisfy the offended Mad Moms who occasionally found it “offensive and disgusting” that their calendar app was overflowing with sodomy.
A Google spokesperson explained that there was a perfectly good not-bowing-to-fascism reason for dropping almost all of the non-white-cisgender-straight male holidays. It was simply that all those crazy observances were too much for its workers to keep track of. The spox for the poor beleaguered tech giant said that the changes actually started in the middle of 2024 and, uh, you people just never noticed, because they lived in Canada?
For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world.
Well that was very good of them to go to all that effort, which we’re sure involved several keystrokes.
We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.
Hello, class, today our lesson will be about the term “pretext” and why it is not really the same as “a good reason.”
We can appreciate that maybe Google, the company that has mapped 10 million miles of streets all over the globe (with regular updates!) using its fleet of camera cars, couldn’t possibly keep track of every last cultural observance in every last country. But at the risk of a bit of US chauvinism, we’d also say that eliminating less than a dozen non-obscure American observances like Pride, Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and the others is gross and fascist, so please don’t compound the injury by insulting our intelligence and claiming it was simply easier than failing to mark December 23 as La Noche de Rabanos (“The Night of the Radishes”), a delightfully goofy pre-Christmas festival in Mexico, or Spain’s barbaric Goose-Pulling Day (July 25), which used to celebrate Spain’s liberation from the Arabs in 1141 with men on horses trying to pull the head off a greased live goose hanging from a pole over the road. (Franco banned it, because your fascists can be weirdly friendlier to animals than people. The practice resumed, but now uses pre-killed geese.)
Sorry, weird holidays were more fun to write about than Google acquiescing to Trump’s racism and pretending it was only a matter of efficiency. Besides, Google Calendar includes plenty of not-days-off observances like Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, and even Cinco de Mayo, which is dangerously ethnic. (You can probably find plenty of people who’d argue that St Patrick’s isn’t ethnic, not really, because being an idiot is also an American tradition.) Halloween made the cut, but not Dia de los Muertos. And Talk Like a Pirate Day is criminally absent; we will sue. No word on whether another large Trump constituency, the Incel Neckbeard community, will demand that Valentine’s Day be purged.
Google is a major competitor for computing services contracts with the US government, so why not just come clean and say “Hell yes, the bottom line is what matters to us! We didn’t want to piss off Donald Trump, so we’re proudly throwing the people he hates under the Googlebus!”
OK, we can see how honesty about Google’s craven motives might be bad for the bottom line, too. Which is why we need to shame these bastards at every opportunity.
But the Alphabet suits have to know that even if they appease Trump on matters like this, he’ll still find things to rant at them about, because he already has: In 2018, he griped that Google search results were always “RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal?”
A month and some before the 2024 election (if you can remember those long-ago times), Trump said that Google should be criminally prosecuted for “election interference” because search results kept bringing up bad things about the horrifying things he promised to do, but not as many horrifying things about what Kamala Harris would do if she were elected. Trump was apparently all het up about a “study” by rightwing loony Brent Bozell III’s “Media Research Center” that “revealed” Google searches for “Donald Trump presidential race 2024” made him look like a fascist asshole, which he has in fact turned out to be. Trump proclaimed that Google
has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris.”
Trump vowed that if the Justice Department didn’t immediately prosecute Google, then he would order it to do so “when I win the election and become President of the United States!”
Gosh, ya think that Google is trying to suck up to prevent that from happening? More to the point, do you think anyone in the corporate suite really believes that pandering to Trump’s call for disappearing those scary LGBTQ+, Women, Black, Latino, and Jewish observances will buy them any cover at all six months from now, when Trump explodes because searching “Trump tariffs effect on inflation” brings up accurate results?
[The Verge / Time / Google Blog]
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Joke's on them. Every month is gay pride month in my house.
OK, this is odd, too: If Google wanted to include them, these observances are indeed listed at timeanddate.com:
USA – First Day of Pride Month
USA – First Day of Women's History Month
USA – First Day of Black History Month
USA – First Day of Native American Heritage Month
USA – First Day of National Hispanic Heritage Month
USA – First Day of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
Curiouser and curiouser.