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Trump cites fired Google engineer and hate group advocate in unfounded bias accusation

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the Infrastructure Initiative in Richfield, Ohio, U.S., March 29, 2018.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the Infrastructure Initiative in Richfield, Ohio, U.S., March 29, 2018.
Image Credit: REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
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Apparently triggered by a recent Fox News segment, President Trump unleashed a tweetstorm this morning claiming that Google may be secretly working to derail his 2020 reelection campaign.

Trump’s fury was so great that he misspelled his own name in one of the tweets.

Even more amazing, coming a day after his half-hearted attempt to deliver a call for unity in the face of two mass shootings, Trump cited as a source Kevin Cernekee, the Google engineer who actively tried to rally internal support for white supremacist groups before being fired.

The messaging between Fox and Trump serves to amplify a right-wing effort to paint tech companies as being heavily biased against Conservatives. In Congressional hearings, and now potential antitrust investigations, Conservatives are trying to keep companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter from too aggressively clamping down on the type of fake news and propaganda that dominated the 2016 elections.

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This morning, Trump repeated his warnings that Google is out to get him.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1158706052768157701

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1158706058724040704

This outburst followed a segment by Fox News conspiracy theorist Lou Dobbs, who caught up with Cernekee as he made the media rounds to play up claims that he was fired because of his Conservative views. Google had previously said Cernekee was fired for misuse of company property.

Later, it was revealed that Cernekee was using internal messaging boards to encourage coworkers to contribute via an extremist crowdfunding platform to fundraising efforts aimed at finding the person who had punched white supremacist Richard Spencer on the day of Trump’s inauguration. In another post, Cernekee offered suggestions on branding to improve the image of the Golden State Skinheads.

Naturally, none of this is mentioned in the Dobbs segment.

Dobbs later interviewed Peter Schweizer, who with Steve Bannon cofounded the Government Accountability Institute, an extremist think tank that espouses various conspiracy theories about the Clintons, and about “Liberals” in general.

Foolishness aside, the remarks seem to indicate that Trump has no intention of dialing back his rhetoric in the wake of a spree of mass shootings. And tech companies will likely feel increasing pressure from both the Left and Right amid growing calls for greater regulation, and even for some kind of move to break them up.