The reporter claims to have come up 808,000 hits in a Google search for the term “white power 88.” That seemed like a lot of hits for an obscure neo-nazi code, so I checked it out.

It’s likely that anyone reading this will understand how a Google search works so I won’t waste space going into that here. But for the sake of clarity, I’m going to put exactly what I typed into the search engine in square brackets. So if I searched for websites with articles containing Jim Kalb and monarchism I would write [“Jim Kalb” monarchism].

The reporter puts the entire search phrase in quotes in the article, so I typed [“white power 88”] into Google. It came up with a whopping 78 hits. What’s more Google deemed only 39 of these hits different enough to display them.

To expand my search I decided to only to put the phrase “white power” inside the quotes, searching for [“white power” 88]. This delivered 4,060 hits. Of the first ten listed, six are anti-nazi websites, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.

The only way I could come even close to the reported number of hits was to delink every term in the search, meaning that Google would come back with every website it discovered having the words “white” and “power and the number “88” regardless of their order or relationship. Searching for [white power 88]delivered 833,000 hits. To be sure, there were a number of neonazi websites. But are also plenty of hits completely unrelated to neonazism, including one selling comforters with the following details: “Full/Queen (88” x 90”) Filled with 31 ounces of 575 fill power White Goose Down.” Other hits dealt with football, Apple computers and great white sharks.

The reporter seriously inflates the presence of neonazis by claiming to have found to over 800,000 hits. This is not an incidental distortion. It informs the fun house mirror moral priorities of nearly everyone involved in the article.

Nice point! I can’t imagine how I slid right over the 808,000 hits.