The Patriot Post® · How Google Interferes in Our Elections

Nearly four years ago, a self-described Democrat named Robert Epstein was called by Republicans to testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. What he told them was chilling.

“I love America and democracy,” he began, “and I am also not a conservative.” But then, having firmly established his left-leaning bona fides, he offered evidence of what every fair-minded person who’s ever done a politics-related Google search has long suspected: “Data I’ve collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor of one political party — a party I happen to like, but that’s irrelevant.”

Epstein, a Harvard-educated behavioral psychologist and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, went on to paint a grim picture: “Democracy as originally conceived,” he said, “cannot survive Big Tech as currently empowered.”

That might seem hyperbolic, but it wasn’t. Sixteen months later — now just a month before the 2020 election — Epstein appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to warn that Google and other Big Tech companies could surreptitiously shift as many as 15 million votes without leaving so much as a paper trail.

Was anyone listening to him?

Apparently not, if we’re to believe a new 16-page report from the Media Research Center, which documents 41 separate instances of election interference by Google since 2016.

For example, in 2008, when Google decided it wanted Barack Obama to be the Democrat nominee instead of Hillary Clinton, it censored pro-Clinton bloggers. Obama, of course, went on to win the nomination and then the presidency, and his administration kept that good thing going. As the report details: “Despite Obama’s promises to ‘shut the revolving door,’ an unprecedented number of Google employees cycled in and out of the administration. The Intercept tabulated ‘55 cases of individuals moving from positions at Google into the federal government, and 197 individuals moving from positions inside the government to jobs at Google.’”

That there is a lot of incest. And there’s more. By 2012, Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt was helping the Obama campaign assemble its technology and team. As the MRC report reads, “Schmidt was intimately involved in building Obama’s voter targeting operation in 2012, recruiting digital talent, choosing technology, and coaching campaign manager Jim Messina on campaign infrastructure.” Schmidt was so thoroughly invested in Obama’s win over Mitt Romney that he was at Obama’s campaign headquarters on election night.

What are the odds that a Big Tech titan will be hanging out with Donald Trump on election night 2024? (It’s a rhetorical question.)

Much to Google’s chagrin, 2016 didn’t go as planned. But then, The New York Times had Trump as a 100-to-1 shot on Election Day, so Google could be forgiven for not having taken the Trump threat too seriously. Still, its engineers weren’t sitting on their hands. They tweaked their search engine’s autofill capability to misdirect searches looking for info about Hillary Clinton’s crimes and her potential indictment, and they hid “crooked Hillary” from their search suggestions entirely. Couple these dirty tricks with the general search-engine censorship and Google’s targeted efforts to boost the Hispanic vote in “key states” by helping to fund rides to the polls, and the impact becomes considerable, especially in an election that was decided by fewer than 100,000 votes in three “Blue Wall” states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. As Epstein put it in that 2019 interview: “In 2016, Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that shifted at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton, whom I supported. I know this because I preserved more than 13,000 election-related searches prior to election day, and Google’s search results were significantly biased in favor of Secretary Clinton.”

Imagine their shock when they woke up on Wednesday to the reality of President-elect Donald Trump.

Shortly after the election — while some of our nation’s leading universities were scheduling “stress-busting self-care activities” such as coloring, blowing bubbles, and sculpting with Play-Doh — Google held an all-staff “trauma session” during which the company’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, called the election “deeply offensive” and said that Trump’s election “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values.” These words sound like more than just condolences; they sound like a call to action.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the exhaustive MRC report, but we encourage you to read it yourself. Do so, and you’ll learn about Google’s election interference in the 2018 midterms and its all-hands-on-deck, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to the 2020 election.

As for Google, MRC founder and president Brent Bozell had this to say about the Big Tech behemoth: “Google’s massive and deliberate efforts to interfere in U.S. elections for the past 16 years is unacceptable and the biggest threat to American democracy today.”

As Elon Musk put it: “This article understates the magnitude of the problem — Google interferes to help Democrats thousands of times every election season! This is to be expected when their censorship (aka ‘Trust & Safety’) teams … have far left political views.”

Never fear, though. As a Google spokesperson told the New York Post: “Politicians on the left have a long history of making similar claims, too. We have a clear business incentive to keep everyone using our products, so we have no desire to make them biased or inaccurate and have safeguards in place to ensure this.”

As we noted last week, Google jettisoned its famous “Don’t Be Evil” motto in 2015 in favor of the far more subjective “Do the right thing.” By then, its leadership clearly knew that the former directive had become untenable.

At least they get points for self-awareness.