Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Last Call For the Great Google Goofball Grifting Game

The enemies list that the Trump regime will take action against now includes Google, for the crime of not having enough good articles about Trump in its news searches.

The Trump administration is “taking a look” at whether Google and its search engine should be regulated by the government, Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s economic adviser, said Tuesday outside the White House.

“We’ll let you know,” Kudlow said. “We’re taking a look at it.”

The announcement puts the search giant squarely in the White House’s crosshairs amid wider allegations against the tech industry that it systematically discriminates against conservatives on social media and other platforms.

Kudlow’s remark to reporters came hours after Trump fired off a series of predawn tweets complaining about Google search results for “Trump News.”

Trump understands that all publicity is good publicity, but he needs enemies to rally his hate-filled base and to play along with the political kayfabe.

Google, in a statement, said its searches aren’t politically biased: “When users type queries into the Google Search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology.

“Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users’ queries,” Google said. “We continually work to improve Google Search and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”

The White House has not responded to requests for further comment.

Trump’s tweets came the morning after Fox Business host Lou Dobbs aired an interview Monday night with the pro-Trump commentators Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, popularly known as Diamond and Silk, who have long claimedthat their online videos are being suppressed by tech companies.

“I am not for big government, but I really do believe that the government should step in and really check this out,” Hardaway told Dobbs in the interview.

Google search results are affected not only by region but also by personal search history. It was unclear whether the president had Googled himself, or whether he was referring to a recent piece in PJ Media, a conservative blog, alleging that 96 percent of Google search results for news about Trump were from “left-leaning news outlets.” His accusations appeared to mirror those in the Aug. 25 piece.

Right-wing noise machine websites like Breitbart and PJ Media, and grifters like Diamond and Silk helped put Trump in office by playing this bad faith game, and everyone profits from it.  Everyone involved knows the truth, but they go along anyway. 

That's how this works, guys.  Trump names an enemy, and his base attacks it to distract the press from whichever self-caused disaster has the upper hand on his merry band of rotten eggs. There's always an enemy to bully, whether it's Google, the memory of John McCain, Robert Mueller, or reality itself.

And if that fails, there's always Hillary Clinton to attack, right?

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