Trump’s CT Machine On Full Tilt, Now Claims Hillary Really Lost By 16 Million Votes

Remember the movie “Scanners” where peoples’ heads exploded? Perhaps a sequel should be made, with the cause of the cranial detonations being prolonged exposure to Donald Trump’s toxic blend of paranoia, lies, and conspiracy theory. Here’s the latest gem.

Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2019

Now, if you find yourself, jaw dropped, saying, “Whut?” that means that your bullshit detector has gone off. Before your head explodes, trying to wrap it around Mad King Donald’s latest offering, hurry and read this factual analysis from Bess Levin at Vanity Fair. And don’t forget, the Foxies are listening to this and lapping it up like cream. To them, it’s real.

As is typically the case, no one knows precisely what the president of the United States is talking about. Presumably this tweet is a product of his tendency to pick up various threads of information from unreliable sources, let them rattle around in his head for a bit, and then spit out something incomprehensible to those who don’t speak Trump.

Seven minutes prior to the tweet, Fox Business aired a segment discussing congressional testimony from psychologist Robert Epstein. In June, Epstein told Ted Cruz that Google’s bias had likely resulted in at least 2.6 million undecideds voting for Clinton, and that in 2020, Big Tech could band together and throw an extra 15 million-odd votes toward whomever the Democratic nominee turns out to be. As TechCrunch notes, Epstein puts out “anti-Google editorials almost monthly,” and has been attacking the company since 2012, when Google helpfully warned visitors to Epstein’s website that it had been hacked to serve malware to anyone reading it. And, as Mother Jones writes, there’s good reason to ignore not just the president, but the quack whose extremely unscientific work he seemingly attempting to reference on Monday:

…where does Epstein get those numbers? This is a bit murky, but a couple of years ago he published a paper showing that search results can bias decision-making. The limits of the paper are so breathtaking that I’m not sure how you can draw any real-world conclusions from it, but basically he came to the unsurprising conclusion that if you (a) give people a choice of two politicians they’ve never heard of and (b) provide search results that are unanimously positive toward one and negative toward the other, then (c) they’ll tend to support the person who got the positive results. No kidding.

In April, Epstein presented another study in which he argued that Google’s algorithms are biased because their search results are dominated by news from mainstream outlets like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, rather than conservative sites like Breitbart. In other words, Epstein’s basis for saying Google is biased is that it gives more weight to legitimate new sources and less to the since abandoned love child of Steve Bannon and erstwhile Trump sugar daddy Robert Mercer. Using this theory, Epstein tracked “47,300 searches by dozens of undecided voters in the districts of newly elected Democratic Reps. Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin,” and then claimed that an estimated “35,455 voters who were on the fence were persuaded to vote for a Democrat entirely because of the sources Google fed them.” Yes, people read stories from news outlets that have never had an entire section called “black crime,” and made a decision based on those stories. Or, as Epstein would put it, they were manipulated into voting for a Democrat by Google, a move the site may pull again in 2020.

Isn’t that stunning? Legitimate news sources, that have been around for 100, 150 years, are considered more credible than two to five year old right-wing hack sites in the Google search engines — and this is a bad thing? This is bias? Donald Trump is the perfect *resident to represent a dumbed down America. If there weren’t 63 million sufficiently deluded and delude-able voters in this country, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And make no mistake — full on conspiracy theory is where Trump is going to go from here on out. He’s got no choice. The economy is slowly listing to the side, and ready to take on water, and that is his sole issue to run on for reelection. He loses that, he loses period — and he knows it. So what you will see in coming months is more self-serving drivel like this.

Fact checking Trump has never been easy, but it’s about to get worse. Remember the line in Alice in Wonderland, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Translate that to, “It takes all the fact checking you can do to keep from falling too far behind Trump. If you want to understand Trump’s idiocy, and keep up with it, you have to fact check twice as fast!” The pops you start to hear are the sounds of heads exploding. Get used to it. It’s going to be a long fifteen months.

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