Antonio Garcia-Martinez
Article by Andrea Widburg in The American Thinker
The Silicon Valley Maoists come for Antonio Garcia-Martinez
Until a few days ago I had never heard of Antonio Garcia-Martinez, the best-selling author of a bestselling autobiographic novel about working for Facebook and living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He became a person of interest to me when Apple, one of the most powerful companies in the world, having just hired him, fired him because the young Maoists working for Apple demanded his head. These revolutionary monsters need to be stopped unless we truly want to go down the path of China’s murderous Cultural Revolution.
Garcia-Martinez turns out to be something of a polymath. He studied physics at UC Berkeley and then went on to multiple successful careers: He was a quantitative analyst for Goldman Sachs; worked as a product manager for Facebook; founded and was the CEO AdGrok, an advertising platform for business owners trying to optimize the process of working with Google AdWords; and a New York Times best-selling author.
In 2021, Apple lured Garcia-Martinez to Silicon Valley to work on the advertising platform’s team. Garcia-Martinez, who had been living in Washington state, sold his house and packed up most of his life, to move down to the southern end of the San Francisco Bay area. Within days the young Maoists at Apple went on the attack.
Before going further, let me define what I mean by Maoists: These are young people educated into a totalitarian mindset who seek to impose their extremist values on the nation. They’re successful because their fanaticism frightens institutions, which back down before the baying mob. Eventually, this mob, drunk on its power, uses violence on an epic scale to achieve its goal of cultural purity.
By the time the Cultural Revolution ended its decade-long run in China an unknown number of people had died – both in the military and civilians – with the estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions. These movements of fanatic youth need to be nipped in the bud because they don’t get better if left unchecked.
In the case of Garcia-Martinez, within days of his starting to work at Apple, the young Maoists in the company learned that his book said insulting things about women. They created a petition accusing Garcia-Martinez of being misogynistic and claimed that his presence at Apple would create an “unsafe working environment for our colleagues who are at risk of public harassment and private bullying.”
Apple promptly bowed before the mob, firing Garcia-Martinez last week, within days of his having started to work at the company. So far, Garcia’s Martinez has not done the ritual apology. Instead, he seems to be fighting back:
1. Apple actively recruited me for my role on the ads team, reaching out via a former colleague to convince me to join. Apple found my experience in the ads space, specifically around data and privacy, highly relevant to their efforts and persuaded me to leave my then role.
— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) May 14, 2021
3. Apple was well aware of my writing before hiring me. My references were questioned extensively about my bestselling book and my real professional persona (rather than literary one).
— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) May 14, 2021
This set of prominent Valley VCs and execs are all willing to assert as much under oath.
5. Apple has issued a statement that clearly implies there was some negative behavior by me during my time at Apple. That is defamatory and categorically false.
— Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) May 14, 2021
Garcia-Martinez also makes clear on his Twitter feed that Apple was fully aware of his book. He points out, as well, that the book was extremely well received in the mainstream media (which Apple works with and respects).
If you’re wondering what Garcia-Martinez said that instantly turned Apple into an environment so unsafe no woman could reasonably be expected to work there, here is the “dangerous” passage from his book:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
I have my own theory about what outraged the Maoists at Apple. It’s not that the language is offensive; it’s that it’s accurate. In that one paragraph, Garcia-Martinez accurately skewered a generation of extremely damaged young women, all of them products of America’s colleges and universities, and all of them marinated in the cognitive dissonance and self-loathing of modern leftism. The women’s reaction at Apple proves his point.
I hope Garcia-Martinez sues Apple and that he wins huge amounts of money. I hope that a painful loss teaches Apple to push back at the Maoists before whom it is currently bowing down. (If you are interested in learning more about this subject, I highly recommend Matt Taibbi’s defense of Garcia-Martinez.)
