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Comment by aaron-santos | Hacker News Reader

Being The Economist I suppose it makes sense they left out the absolutely massive shift in the trending of Marxism[1](~+900%) in the last few months.

[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F065...

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I'd like to point out that you are data-illiterate here.

Here is an alternate explanation: Very few people search for 19th century political philosphies on Google, compared to the number of people who search for "hangover". Therefore all it takes is 1 news article, interview, book, movie, etc to cause people to do a quick search and find out what a word means.

So called "using google as a dictionary" is all you are seeing here.

The spike you are seeing, no surprise, coincides with a specific person describing BLM as "marxist".

This has nothing to do with covid. It's honestly stupid for you to try to draw a straight line between COVID and marxism and imply that it's some kind of conspiracy that the Economist is hiding.

This is a pretty hostile post that looks like it violates site guidelines to me. Can you express your point civilly?

I don't think the insults obscure the point. I may be "data illiterate" too but it sounds plausible.

That seems to mirror the trend for "cultural marxism", a term frequently used by the alt-right, so that trend chart may not show what you think it does.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=Cultural%2...

Nearly all of the "Related queries" contain reference to BLM. There's arguments to be made for many interpretations of the trends page.

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