Google kills Black History Month, Women's History Month and LGBTQ+ holidays
Are we witnessing the return of common sense?
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Google — not a company known for its common sense approach to life — has removed Black History Month, Women’s History Month and “LGBTQ+” holidays from its calendar.
The world’s biggest search engine previously marked the beginning of Black History Month in February and Pride Month in June, but the events do not appear for 2025. A Google spokesman told the Guardian that the listed holidays were not “sustainable” for their model.
There are two explanations for this. Firstly, as the Google spokesman argued, there were the practical hurdles. “Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” he said.
“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.” In addition, the decision to kill off those holidays from the calendar predated Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Fair enough. On the other hand, however, it does feel like Google’s latest move is representative of a Trumpian zeitgeist. Recently, the company announced that it would be reducing its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, reflecting Trumps’s orders to do the same in federal agencies.
Moreover, on Monday, Google changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” for users in the United States and has vowed to start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the Alaskan mountain currently called Denali. These measures were a response to executive orders signed by Trump on his first day in office.
It’s not just Google. This month, Goldman Sachs announced that it would no longer require companies it takes public to have diverse members on their boards of directors, which has been its position since 2020. Disney has cancelled its “Diversity & Inclusion” performance metric and axed its “Reimagine Tomorrow” DEI website.
The list goes on. Meta and Accenture said they would no longer use diversity employment targets and both PBS and the FBI closed their diversity offices. McDonald’s announced that it would abandon diversity targets and Amazon said it would roll back “outdated programmes and materials”. More than a dozen firms have removed references to DEI in their 2024 annual reports to investors, including Pepsi, GM, GE, Intel, PayPal, Chipotle and Comcast.
Make no mistake: following Trump’s election, a wave of common sense is crashing over corporate America. All over the country, young people with green or blue hair, screen addiction and mental health problems are rubbing their eyes and crying. Is this the moment we have been waiting for?
From a British point of view, the jury remains out. We absorbed this ideology from our Stateside cousins, of course, but it seems that we are slower to respond to the new president’s agenda. Deloitte, for example told American employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures but its British branch said diversity “remains a priority” and it would stand by its DEI goals.
Perhaps this should be no surprise, given that Britain is politically out-of-kilter with much of the West. While they are flinging off the shackles of progressivism, we in our wisdom have elected a leftist government with a huge majority.
Nonetheless, given the weakness of Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership and his dire relationship with the electorate, it is likely that over time, the popular animosity towards DEI will force him to change. Indeed, in a recent attempt to prevent leakage of Labour support to Reform in the north, the government released photographs of illegal migrants being deported, surrounded by five security officers each.
During Prime Minister’s Questions today, the Prime Minister criticised a judge who granted a Palestinian migrant family the right to live in Britain after they applied through a scheme meant for Ukrainian refugees, saying he had made the “wrong decision”. In a remark that contradicted his entire career to date, he told MPs that “it should be Parliament that makes the rules on immigration”, not judges.
Is anybody fooled by this stuff? I don’t think so. But in a way, who cares? We have groaned under the yoke of DEI for far too long. If it is eased, I for one won’t be asking too many questions about whether the government means it or not. They’ll be out of office in a few years, anyway.
It is no exaggeration to say that DEI ideology is wicked. In the name of “anti-racism”, it introduces a virulent form of racism through the back door. As Martin Luther King famously argued, the way you overcome racial prejudice in society is by emphasising our unity, not our diversity, our similarities, not our differences.
The sheer idiocy that has been in the air these past few years has been shameful. From Rhodes Must Fall to journalists disgracefully arguing that Nelson’s Column should be torn down, from Just Stop Oil to children being pumped full of puberty blockers, we have been in the grip of a cultural insanity. It would be funny if it wasn’t so harmful.
I’m no partisan supporter of Donald Trump. Increasingly, however, I think to myself: God bless him. The man is outrageous, morally dubious and very, very odd, but the effect he is having on the world is looking more positive with each passing week. The reversal of DEI in particular is truly wonderful to behold. Finally, even Google is starting to live up to its original slogan, “don’t be evil”.