The Media Research Center has been waging a dishonest war on Google while also trying to defend the right-wing Project 2025, and Luis Cornelio merged the two agenda items in a July 24 post:
MRC Free Speech America has peered under the sheets to catch Google seemingly cuddling up to President Joe Biden to attack The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, just weeks before he exited the 2024 race. As always, the Media Research Center has the receipts to prove it.
When Biden directed his 38 million X followers to “Google Project 2025” last week, MRC researchers took him up on his advice. MRC found that Google, the Democrats’ good old friend, exclusively promoted the scandal-plagued president’s website in searches for “Project 2025.”
The new findings reinforce previous MRC reports exposing how Google has backed the scandal-plagued president until the days of his humiliating ouster from the Democratic ticket. Despite this, Google appears to have a new pal – the unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris.
This was followed by more whining that his preferred narratives weren’t being sufficiently boosted:
Backdrop: Over the past several months, the Democratic Party has deceptively labeled Project 2025 as Trump’s plan to upend the federal government and to transform the country just to conservatives’ liking.
“Google Project 2025,” Biden wrote in a July 9 X post, reaching over 37 million views. Biden’s call to action followed his now-defunct campaign’s (@BidenHQ) month-long reliance on Google to draw attention to Project 2025. The X page now goes under Harris’s moniker, @KamalaHQ.
The Findings, Explained: Conducted on July 10, a clean environment search showed that Google placed Biden’s Project 2025 landing page — https://joebiden.com/project2025/ — at the top of the search results. This website was filled with grossly misconstrued and even demonstrably false information about Heritage’s project.
Tellingly, Google omitted Project 2025’s official website in all 106 results reviewed by MRC’s researchers. This means the tech giant barred curious Americans from learning about the initiative’s intent and proposals in its own words, rather than through the partisan lens of the Biden-Harris campaign.
But Cornelio made no attempt to counter or even identify what, exactly, is “grossly misconstrued and even demonstrably false” about what has been said about Project 2025. He offered only tepid right-wing-approved talking points to describe the project:
What Exactly Is Project 2025 and Why Biden Attacks It: Launched in response to conservative unpreparedness during the 2016 election, Project 2025 is an initiative led by Heritage promoting pro-freedom and conservative principles in the next administration. The non-partisan initiative is not affiliated with President Donald Trump or his campaign.
Trump himself has clarified he is not involved in Project 2025. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” the Republican candidate wrote on Truth Social earlier this month.
This has not stopped Biden nor Harris from attempting to draw negative attention by suggesting it would mark a Trump-led arrival of the antichrist and the end of so-called democracy. This, of course, is demonstrably false as Biden has grossly misrepresented what the project is about. Fortunately, the attacks have been thus far unsuccessful.
Cornelio didn’t explain how a project by an explicitly partisan group can be credibly described as “non-partisan.” He also censored the fact that Trump’s disavowal of the project is more than a little disingenuous given that dozens of Trump administration staffers helped put it together. Again, Cornelio offered no evidence of anything being “grossly misrepresented.”
Cornelio complained that non-right-wing sites dominated search results for “Porject 2025” — then launched in to a conspiracy theory that Google is engaging in “coordination with the Biden campaign (now Harris’s)” to manipulate the results:
Google linked to news articles from the left-leaning BBC and CBS News as the second and third results, respectively, before linking to a PDF copy of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise as the fourth result.
The tech giant also shared Wikipedia’s Project 2025 page, where it is characterized as an“authoritarian, Christian nationalist plan to steer the U.S. toward autocracy.” Only then did Google show a Heritage Foundation-owned page related to Project 2025 which offered only a brief introduction to the initiative. Again, Google did not show Project 2025’s official website — https://www.project2025.org/ — in any of the results.
In response to these findings, MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider suggested Google is making an in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign. “MRC has been sounding the alarm for years that Google is fighting tooth and nail to keep Democrats in the White House. What’s disturbing is that they’re doing it right before our own eyes,” Schneider said.
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to MRC’s questions about potential coordination with the Biden campaign (now Harris’s) before the president mandated Americans to “Google Project 2025.” The tech giant frequently refuses to answer MRC’s questions.
Neither Cornelio nor Schneider offered any evidence of collusion, nor does he admit the possibility that Google won’t talk to him or anyone else at the MRC because they’re waging an aggressive, dishonest and bad-faith war against the company, and there’s no reason for Google to talk to anyone who’s aggressively trying to destroy it.