Kari Lake finds the real culprit in her election loss: Google did it!

Kari Lake has at long last figured out who stole her election.

Turns out it wasn’t just the faulty printers or phony ballots or that wily he-devil, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer.

Nope, it was Google.

The revelation came during Tuesday’s meeting of the Legislature’s new Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability and Big Tech.

The committee was created last month after a handful of emails from then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and her staff were uncovered, most of them asking Twitter to remove factually incorrect posts about election fraud. (One from Hobbs inappropriately — and unsuccessfully — sought to bury an old Hobbs tweet.)

The panel’s objective, according to House Speaker Ben Toma: to “examine government censorship and conduct of state executive officials.”

Google is a 'mind control machine'?

So naturally, Chairman Alexander Kolodin kicked off the committee's work on Tuesday with a four-hour forum focused largely on how Kari Lake was robbed in last year’s election.

The first witness was Robert Epstein, a Democrat and psychology researcher who told the panel that Google — or as he called it, “the biggest, most powerful mind control machine that’s ever been invented” — has a bias against conservatives that steers undecided voters to their opponents.

Epstein’s previous findings — that Google stole votes in 2016 from Donald Trump — have been disputed, though he claims to have broadened his study in subsequent years.

On Tuesday, he assured the panel that he can precisely calculate how many more votes Lake would have gotten had Google not “interfered” in the 2022 election.

Curiously, the Harvard-educated former editor of Psychology Today didn't explain how he arrived at his conclusion, but conclude he did.

Lake shares his claim, without evidence

“Kari Lake would have won, hands down, absolutely guaranteed,” he said. “If you took Google out of the picture, Kari Lake would have won.”

Naturally, Lake had his comments posted to X (formerly Twitter) in near record time.

“@DrREpstein is the foremost expert on how Google’s censorship & manipulation of search results manipulate the outcome of elections,” she said. “He just testified before the House Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability & Big Tech this interference CHANGED the outcome of our race.”

“The margin of victory is only .6%,” her “war room” account added. “The full extent of these manipulations absolutely changed the outcome of the gubernatorial election.”

New culprit, same stolen election charge

Lake, who lost to Hobbs by 17,117 votes, was the final person to speak during Tuesday’s hearing, waxing on about election fraud and now adding Google to the many culprits that cost her the election.

“Google has a much bigger ability to decide who is running our country, running our states, running our cities, than we the people do,” she told the panel.

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As an opportunity to once again preach to the choir about the many ways in which she was robbed, Tuesday was a fine day for Lake.

As an opportunity to win in 2024, when she’s likely to make a run for U.S. Senate, not so much.

The real reason Kari Lake lost in 2022

The 2022 election wasn’t lost because Google had it in for Lake any more than it was lost because Stephen Richer had it in for Lake.

It was lost a few days after the primary election, when Lake herself stood at a CPAC summit in Dallas to celebrate her victory over “RINO” Karrin Taylor Robson, a traditional Republican who likely would be governor today had she prevailed in the primary.

“We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” Lake proclaimed, to wild cheers of the ultra-MAGA crowd.

It was lost on the Friday before the general election when Lake sneered at “the party of McCain” during a campaign event, and told “McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out!”

It was lost a little bit every day as she slashed and burned her way through a 17-month campaign in which she made it clear that she didn’t need — or want — the support of moderate Republicans and independents as she marched ever onward with her America First “movement.”

They simply granted her wish.

MAGA is poised to repeat its failure

Now, it appears, she’s about to do it all over again, with rants about the “uniparty swamp” and “spineless Republicans” and "we the people" — as if that is a group exclusive to those who march on the far right side of the road.

To be fair, Lake gets plenty of validation from the grassroots activists in the Republican Party, the ones who almost daily seem to target another traditional Republican for censure or attack.

Lake lost because Republicans, having apparently learned nothing from 2018 and 2020, were determined to nominate another crop of Trump-endorsed MAGA candidates who cannot win in a general election.

Now, having endured kicks of the donkey in three successive elections, they seem bound and determined to do it again.

But sure … Google.

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake fingers a new culprit that cost her the election: Google