WALTER OLSON: Google memo drama really is about free speech.

Because Google and Silicon Valley are cutting-edge workplaces, there’s a tendency to assume that the premise of the Google memo furor — “Your erroneous opinions are making my work environment hostile” — is somehow new as well.

But it isn’t the least bit new. The application of hostile work environment law to workplace speech — including basically political or ideological discussions, not just vulgar jokes or unwanted personal talk — goes back decades.

I had a chapter on it 21 years ago in my book on employment law, “The Excuse Factory.” Others wrote about it then and earlier.

Jonathan Rauch, for example, in the New Republic in 1997, wrote that “quietly, gradually, the workplace has become an exception” to the general rule that in America the law does not seek to restrain wrongful opinion and expression.

And Rauch explained the indirect mechanism by which this has come to pass: “What the government cannot do directly, it now requires employers to do in its stead: police ‘discriminatory’ speech.”

There’s a word for big government and its big business cronies working hand-in-hand to suppress the individual. I’ll give you a hint: It’s something the Left always accuses the Right of being, but they’re projecting.