In August 2001, a month before Islamist terrorists attacked our country by using passenger airliners as missiles, actor James Woods witnessed four suspicious Middle Eastern men on an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Woods shared his fears with the pilot and filed a report with the FAA, but his warning was ignored. Years later, however, the feds confirmed it was indeed a terrorist dry run and that the lead hijacker of the 9/11 attacks, Mohammed Atta, was on Woods’ flight.

We mention this because this week Google appears to have been caught conducting its own dry run — this one to disrupt the upcoming presidential election.

As Tristan Justice at The Federalist reports, “Google appeared to test its ability to blacklist conservative media Tuesday from its monopolized search engine which garners at least 3.5 billion online searches everyday making up 94 percent of the internet’s search share. Websites targeted, according to NewsBusters which itself was temporarily de-platformed, included the Washington Free Beacon, The Blaze, Townhall, The Daily Wire, PragerU, LifeNews, Project Veritas, Judicial Watch, The Resurgent, Breitbart, the Media Research Center, and CNSNews among others.”

Google, of course, isn’t a terrorist organization, but the tech giant is evil. It does have a robber-baronesque stranglehold on online search, and it does desperately want President Donald Trump to lose his bid for a second term on November 3.

Remember the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth we saw in that leaked video of the Google all-hands meeting in the wake of Trump’s shocking victory? The one in which Google cofounder Sergey Brin says he’s “deeply offended” by Trump’s election, which “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values”? The one in which Google CFO Ruth Porat appears to break down in tears before promising that Google will “use the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values”? Yeah, that one.

“The latest bout of censorship,” Justice continues, “comes just weeks after the California tech giant threatened to demonetize The Federalist following NBC’s collusion with a foreign left-wing think tank. … While NBC News first celebrated Google’s decision to de-platform a competitor, the search company clarified that the website had not been banned and instead it merely threatened to demonetize The Federalist for content in the comments sections. YouTube, meanwhile, which is owned by Google, remains notorious for hosting the most nefarious comments sections on the entire Internet.”

Thus caught with its dirty left hand in the censorship cookie jar, Google claimed it had made “a simple technical error” rather than a full-throated and deliberate attempt to silence political speech with which it didn’t agree. Uh-huh.

As for Tuesday’s glitch, former Google engineer Matt Wacker told Mediaite that the list of affected websites “appears to have revealed the existence of another blacklist that disproportionately targets conservatives. The glitch is that sites on this blacklist disappeared from Google search results, but the existence of the list is very much by design.”

This sort of intentional manipulation of its search results would conflict with the 2018 congressional testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who said his company did not “manually intervene on any search result.”

Regarding the veracity of Pichai’s testimony, Tuesday’s incident didn’t happen in a vacuum. At Google, the rot appears to be embedded in the culture. As Project Veritas reported last year, Google whistleblower Zachary Vorhies “saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company,” and he “realized that there were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States.”

Elsewhere in Trump-hating Big Tech news, Facebook continues to be targeted by an advertising boycott from major corporations. Why boycott Facebook? Because CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t yet thrown fully in with conservative speech censors like Twitter’s cowardly Jack Dorsey. Want another reason? Take a look at this list of yesterday’s top-performing link posts on Facebook. (Spoiler alert: Only one of the top 10 isn’t conservative.)

Google isn’t stupid. (Evil, yes; stupid, no.) Its censors are seeing the same data, and they’re doing everything they can to head it off between now and Election Day.

Tell a friend, fellow Patriots. And switch your search engine tout de suite.