When Google launched in the late 1990s, it quickly overtook the market for search engines. Its proprietary method of indexing led users to results they were actually looking for rather than producing the hodgepodge of results offered by other search engines of the time. Within just a few years, it was dominating the market. Today, it is a money-printing machine.

It’s also increasingly horrible at the core mission that produced such success. The company’s leadership may have realized early on that to dominate they needed to maximize the marketing angle of search, but over time that side of the business — the one that produces revenue — swallowed the informative results that drove the search engine’s success.

Now, Google’s true product, its users, are drowning in a sea of partisan slop and sponsored content rather than getting the results we’re looking for when we take to the World Wide Web. By doing so, Google is making it pointless for us to continue to allow ourselves to be the product.

Let’s say you have an artistic daughter who wants some oil paints for Christmas, but you’re unsure about which brand to buy or even what the definition of oil paint is. You head over to Google and type in “oil paint.” Is your first result a definition or even the Wikipedia page? Nope, it’s ads. You have to scroll to get to Wikipedia.

Similarly, you might find yourself hungry while on the road, so someone in the car

If Americans have questions and concerns about how our elections are administered and how ballots are tabulated, does that make them “election deniers,” conspiracy theorists, threats to democracy?

The Wall Street Journal seems to think so. In a long news report published over the weekend headlined, “‘It Feels Very Dystopian.’ Republican County Officials Brace for Election Deniers—Again,” the Journal repeatedly characterized those who think the 2020 election was stolen, rigged, or less-than-secure as “election deniers,” and stopped just short of calling them domestic terrorists. 

The piece is framed as a disturbing look at the growing threats facing local election officials from “election deniers” — an asinine epithet — as we approach November 5: “Four years of baseless allegations of election fraud have created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation among election officials from Atlanta to rural Washington state, transforming the way workers in many parts of the country are approaching the most fundamental of civic duties.”

Election officials, workers, and even volunteers have been forced to take extraordinary measures to protect themselves, we’re told. Active shooter drills, barricading exercises, trauma kits, bulletproof glass, and bulletproof vests have all become commonplace in election offices across the country. Scary stuff.

And it’s all Trump’s fault, apparently. After a series of legal challenges to the 2020 results  were dismissed, Trump “has continued to assert the election was rigged,” the article reads, eliding the important difference between stealing and rigging an election.

The former would mean falsely cast or illegally changed ballots, which is difficult to prove

I’ve seen some amazing crowds in my life. In 1985, my mom scored me and a couple of friends tickets (and backstage passes) to see Prince in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the Purple Rain tour. I still remember standing in the crowd with my lace fingerless gloves on, thinking my mom was the absolute coolest for getting us into the arena. As Prince took the stage and spoke the intro to “Let’s Go Crazy” (“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life …”), thousands of people just like me went nuts. The rafters shook from the weight of all the jumping and shuffling feet.

Almost 40 years later, I stood in the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, waiting for President Trump to take the stage. Less than 48 hours earlier, he’d been shot in the ear by a crazed would-be assassin in Butler, Pennsylvania, the sad result of many months of dangerous rhetoric by Democrats and their allies in the corporate media. But he’d survived, pumping his fist to the crowd at the Secret Service dragged him offstage, yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to his supporters. Finally, he took the stage. Compared to the sound I heard that evening, the roar of all those teenage Prince fans was nothing.

As we head into the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the corporate press continues to tell us that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are running a campaign of “joy.” They tell us that the Democrats are