(Read more at BISHOP’S ENCYCLOPEDIA) …. Klavan got baptized at the age of fifty. This frightened him given his nominal Jewish background,
“One of my biggest fears confronting baptism—took me five months to work through it—was I didn’t want anyone to think I was turning my back on Jews, trying to escape my Jewish identity. The default mode with some Jews is to assume you’re trying to “pass as gentile” or blend in or that you hate your Jewishness and are joining the enemy. All understandable, because the Jews are the most mistreated group of people on the face of the planet and some of that trouble has come out of Christian sources, which stinks. Oddly, though, accepting Jesus made me feel more Jewish than I ever had, religiously at least. I had no connection to the Old Testament particularly, until I accepted the New.”
Author, screenwriter, and Daily Wire host Andrew Klavan joins me to discuss the craft of writing novels, how he went from being “intellectually agnostic” to deeply religious, and why he decided to out himself as a conservative Christian in Hollywood.
Dinesh D’Souza is a #1 “New York Times” bestselling author, the filmmaker behind “Death of a Nation,” “Hillary’s America,” and “2016: Obama’s America,” and a nationally sought-after speaker. He brings a fiery message of limited government, personal responsibility, and individual liberty to campuses all across the country, debunking #FakeHistory everywhere he goes.
A smack down from the above video:
Allen West served his country honorably for 22 years as a Lt. Col. in the United States Army, and then continued his public service as a Representative for FL-22 in the 112th United States Congress. Now a Fox News contributor, policy analyst, and highly sought-after public speaker, Lt. Col. West brings a new message of freedom to college campuses across America.
Through YAF’s Fred Allen Lecture Series, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro has spread conservative ideas to 50+ campuses throughout the past years. Here are his best moments.
Matt Walsh is a popular writer, blogger, and speaker. His columns on The Daily Wire are read by millions each month. Matt is well known for his controversial and provocative insights into culture, politics, and religion. He lives outside of Baltimore, Maryland with his wife and two children.
Andrew Klavan is an international award-winning author and cultural commentator. Host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” for Ben Shapiro’s “The Daily Wire,” Klavan is one of the most in-demand commentators in the Conservative Movement.
There’s no easier way for a public figure to evoke the media’s fury than to announce he’s not a feminist. But in this video Andrew Klavan, best-selling author and host of The Andrew Klavan Show announces he’s proudly anti-feminist. No, Klavan doesn’t “hate women,” he just hates that modern feminism has bullied us all into accepting the obvious and harmful lie that men and women are more or less the same.
Facebook on Friday issued an apology to PragerU for “mistakenly” removing several videosand limiting the reach of others. (DAILY CALLER)
Confronting The Left’s Agenda To Silence Conservative Voices – The dire lesson of the Freedom Center’s recent victory over censorship. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
Michael Ledeen is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
We’re rightly upset at the censorship of the big social media platforms, and our morale wasn’t improved when something north of three hundred newspapers wrote editorials in virtual unison, or when Mastercard, in cahoots with the Southern Poverty Law Center, attempted to shut down our Center. Thankfully, we won and they lost. But the efforts to silence conservative spokesmen seem to be intensifying, which makes strategic political sense to me. If you can’t win an argument on the merits, then either discredit or silence your opponents.
The Left has lost most of the substantive arguments—from health care to taxation, from foreign policy to defense spending–and their best political chance is to silence the opposition. This campaign rages throughout the society, from social media to the educational system, from publishers to movie makers.
There is seemingly no limit to their zeal in silencing their opponents, even to changing our Constitutional system. Did you know that the Democratic Party is on record against the First Amendment? Officially, publicly, and, in the United States Senate, unanimously. They tried to rewrite it in 2014, and introduced a Constitutional Amendment that would have enabled federal and state governments to prohibit various kinds of political spending, broadcasting or publishing.
This remarkable measure, which flew in the face of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, had no chance of being approved by the requisite majorities in Congress and the states. It was, therefore, a purely political maneuver, laying down a marker for voters and opinion-makers. Still, the numbers are astonishing: 49 Senators voted for it, and not one—not a single one—voted to preserve the First Amendment.
It gets worse. Outraged by the Democratic stance against freedom of speech and press, Senator Ted Cruz introduced his own amendment, which consisted of the First Amendment itself. Once again, the numbers were remarkable. Not a single Democrat voted for it, either in committee or in the full Senate……
Instagram Makes Free Speech Disappear – Company owned by Navy SEALs banned for criticizing NFL kneelers. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
The post in question read, “This sums it up, Veteran’s defend our freedom and keep us safe. Meanwhile overpaid turds throw a leather ball around in an overpriced stadium and shit on all the men and women who have been killed defending our country.”
Project War Path co-owner Tej Gill, a Navy SEAL veteran, told Breibart “players kneeling really hits home with me and my teammates, I think it’s disgusting, an insult to all veterans, Americans, and especially families of veterans that have been killed and wounded during war.”
The same post on Twitter was not removed but Instagram took it down. As Gill explained to Breitbart, “I tried to reinstate my account, the form I filled out said my account was permanently suspended for hate speech. I have not heard anything back from Instagram since.”
Gill cited “a very aggressive censorship operation that is being conducted by Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the mainstream media.” Instagram, as it happens is owned by Facebook, which purchased the upstart in 2012 and turned it into a profit center……
CENSORED! How Online Media Companies Are Suppressing Conservative Speech (NEWSBUSTERS)
Executive Summary (Full Special Report can be found here.)
Like it or not, social media is the communication form of the future — not just in the U.S., but worldwide. Just Facebook and Twitter combined reach 1.8 billion people. More than two-thirds of all Americans (68 percent) use Facebook. YouTube is pushing out TV as the most popular place to watch video. Google is the No. 1 search engine in both the U.S. and the world.
War is being declared on the conservative movement in this space and conservatives are losing — badly. If the right is silenced, billions of people will be cut off from conservative ideas and conservative media.
It’s the new battleground of media bias. But it’s worse. That bias is not a war of ideas. It’s a war against ideas. It’s a clear effort to censor the conservative worldview from the public conversation.
The Media Research Center has undertaken an extensive study of the problem at major tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube — and the results are far more troubling than most conservatives realize. Here are some of the key findings:
TWITTER LEADS IN CENSORSHIP: Project Veritas recently had caught Twitter staffers admitting on hidden camera that they had been censoring conservatives through a technique known as shadow banning, where users think their content is getting seen widely, but it’s not. The staffers had justified it by claiming the accounts had been automated if they had words such as “America” and “God.” In 2016, Twitter had attempted to manipulate election-related tweets using the hashtags “#PodestaEmails” and “#DNCLeak.” The site also restricts pro-life ads from Live Action and even Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), but allows Planned Parenthood advertisements.
FACEBOOK’S TRENDING FEED HAS BEEN HIDING CONSERVATIVE TOPICS: A 2016 Gizmodo story had warned of Facebook’s bias. It had detailed claims by former employees that Facebook’s news curators had been instructed to hide conservative content from the “trending” section, which supposedly only features news users find compelling. Topics that had been blacklisted included Mitt Romney, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Rand Paul. On the other hand, the term “Black Lives Matter” had also been placed into the trending section even though it was not actually trending. Facebook had also banned at least one far right European organization but had not released information on any specific statements made by the group that warranted the ban.
GOOGLE SEARCH AIDS DEMOCRATS: Google and YouTube’s corporate chairman Eric Schmidt had assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The company’s search engine had deployed a similar bias in favor of Democrats. One study had found 2016 campaign searches were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Even the liberal website Slate had revealed the search engine’s results had favored both Clinton and Democratic candidates. Google also had fired engineer James Damore for criticizing the company’s “Ideological Echo Chamber.” The company had claimed he had been fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Damore is suing Google, saying it mistreats whites, males and conservatives.
YOUTUBE IS SHUTTING DOWN CONSERVATIVE VIDEOS: Google’s YouTube site had created its own problems with conservative content. YouTube moderators must take their cues from the rest of Google – from shutting down entire conservative channels “by mistake” to removing videos that promote right-wing political views. YouTube’s special Creators for Change section is devoted to people using their “voices for social change” and even highlights the work of a 9/11 truther. The site’s very own YouTube page and Twitter account celebrate progressive attitudes, including uploading videos about “inspiring” gay and trans people and sharing the platform’s support for DACA.
TECH FIRMS ARE RELYING ON GROUPS THAT HATE CONSERVATIVES: Top tech firms like Google, YouTube and Twitter partner with leftist groups attempting to censor conservatives. These include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Both groups claim to combat “hate,” but treat standard conservative beliefs in faith and family as examples of that hatred. George Soros-funded ProPublica is using information from both radical leftist organizations to attack conservative groups such as Jihad Watch and ACT for America, bullying PayPal and other services to shut down their funding sources. The SPLC’s “anti-LGBT” list had also been used to prevent organizations from partnering with AmazonSmile to raise funds.
LIBERAL TWITTER ADVISORS OUTNUMBER CONSERVATIVES 12-TO-1: Twelve of the 25 U.S. members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – which helps guide its policies – are liberal, and only one is conservative. Anti-conservative groups like GLAAD and the ADL are part of the board. There is no well-known conservative group represented.
TECH COMPANIES RELY ON ANTI-CONSERVATIVE FACT-CHECKERS: Facebook and Google both had partnered with fact-checking organizations in order to combat “fake news.” Facebook’s short-lived disputed flagger program had allowed Snopes, PolitiFact and ABC News to discern what is and is not real news. Google’s fact-checkers had accused conservative sources of making claims that did not appear in their articles and disproportionately “fact-checked” conservative sources. On Facebook, a satire site, the Babylon Bee, had been flagged by Snopes for its article clearly mocking CNN for its bias. YouTube also had announced a partnership with Wikipedia in order to debunk videos deemed to be conspiracy theories, even though Wikipedia has been criticized for its liberal bias.
[…..]
Fighting Political Desegregation With A Digital First Amendment – Political segregation must end just as racial segregation did. (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism
The United States has 325 million people. Facebook has 2.2 billion active users. Google is even bigger. Even a smaller company like Twitter tops the population of the United States with 335 million active users. And not even China has a bigger population than that of the biggest internet companies.
The scale of the internet dwarfs any individual nation-state and obtaining many of the traditional benefits of the nation-state, political freedom, engagement, economic opportunities, requires access through the corporate monopolies that act as the gatekeepers of their own virtual nation states.
Google, Facebook and Amazon aren’t governments, but they have a larger virtual citizenry than any government, and they control access to the marketplace of ideas, determining what ideas billions of people can express, whether they can conduct financial transactions or even exist. Technopolies have a vast sphere of control without having to offer their users any of the personal freedoms of governments.
The virtual state of the internet grew to be controlled by a handful of corporations based out of bicoastal cities, almost universally to the political left of ordinary Americans.
8.8% of tech industry founders voted for Trump, compared to 46% of voters or 56% of the country. 63% of tech bosses are Democrats while only 14% are Republicans. A majority of Americans support the death penalty. A majority of tech bosses oppose it. More Americans want to decrease immigration than increase it. But a majority of tech bosses want to increase immigration levels instead.
The tools of political participation and engagement, the means by which politicians, political activists and the public interact, are in the hands of leftists. And they’re using them for political segregation.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the left blamed social media for its defeat. Campaigns were launched to scour opposition media from social media under the guise of fighting ‘fake news’, conservative organizations and activists were banned from social media and dropped by payment processors after pressure campaigns by left-wing activists denouncing them as ‘hate groups’…….
Is Donald Trump correct when he says CNN, The New York Times, and other mainstream outlets report fake news? Commentator and bestselling author Andrew Klavan explains.
Andrew Klavan had a thoughtful show on several subjects today, one of which is Planned Parenthood, the undercover films, and how the people who secured those films showing Planned Parenthood’s activities with regards to not only killing babies by the millions, but selling their parts, have been charged with felonies. Planned Parenthood however, is still skating, and will probably get not just a new pair of roller skates, but a brand new key…to continued public funding.
Here’s a WND article from earlier today about that for further reading:
The left wants to show that the nation’s largest provider of abortions is off limits. Sacrosanct, I guess. An utterly disgusting blight on the world and it’s history too. But that’s just the opinion of well over half the world’s living inhabitants. The unimportant ones, many of whom live in “flyover country” where that big city Democrat-controlled water never finds it’s way to them, whether comprised of navigable streams or not. Have no idea what’s in that water, just know it’s fatal.
Another subject Klavan deals with here can be summarized with the most brevity I can muster, in a short statement: The “mainstream press” is slanted. To expand a little on that, I don’t mean slanted as in leaning. I mean slanted as in horizontal and otherworldly at the same time. The words bias or slanted, just can’t do what they do, justice, and ‘they’ certainly do the truth no justice. They’re like the Incredible Hulk of hypocrisy, and every bit as big, green, massive, and temperamental…with emphasis on the mental, and there seems not to be filter or cure that sinks to the occasion of remedy.
It’s also mailbag day, where Klavan answers questions from viewer/subscribers to The Daily Wire, and his answers are always thoughtful. He’s a very good off-the-cuff talker and held my interest pretty well today, so here’s that.
Description of the above audio: Worst President Ever
Andrew dissects Obama’s insane interaction with Raoul Castro;
and discusses how a culture of narcissism weakens capitalism…
New York’s Democratic governor banned state travel to North Carolina this week, citing its residents’ supposed lack of equal protection under the law, weeks after he announced efforts to facilitate travel from New York to Cuba, which is ruled by a repressive communist dictatorship that routinely imprisons political dissenters. (Washington Free Beacon)
The left-wing Governor of New York is banning state employees from traveling to North Carolina, on the basis that barring biological males from using the women’s bathroom is the worst violation of Human Rights in the History of Everything.
…Symbolism aside, this is the same Democrat Governor who recently traveled to Cuba to establish trade relations with a country notorious for their poor civil and human rights record.
Cuba has no anti-discrimination laws currently regarding the provisions of goods and services. None. They have no anti-discrimination laws regarding hate speech against particular groups. But they do have a constitutional ban against same-sex marriage.
Here is an excerpt from the John Nolte article Larry Elder reads from at about the midpoint of the audio:
Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem…
…Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.
You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.
Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence.
Despite all that, we don’t riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others…
Andrew Klavan adds the following summation of what people get when they treat our Republic like a Democracy:
I can only add this excellent passage from a wonderful book I just read. I’ll have more to say on Theodore Dalrymple’s Admirable Evasions soon, but for now, here’s just a relevant taste:
Seeing victims everywhere you look is the zeitgeist, it is what gives people license to behave as they like while feeling virtuous. Virtue is not manifested in one’s behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one’s attitudes towards victims. This view of virtue is both sentimental and unfeeling, cloying and brutal: for it implies that those who are not victims are unworthy of our sympathy or understanding, only of our denunciation. Thus a dialectic is set up between libertinism on the one hand and censoriousness on the other, the latter being precisely the characteristic that seeing victims everywhere, and disguising from them the degree of their own responsibility for their situation, was designed to avoid.
Don’t think for a minute, though, that these brilliant diagnoses constitute a cure. The problem with democracy is that we get what they deserve. The democrat victim machine may have created the problem of Baltimore, but it’s the rest of us who are going to have to solve it.
In which our resident scholar on all things Middle-East – and circus related, Andrew Klavan, explains Barack Obama’s policy for that troubled region. Think of it as Smart Diplomacy for Dummies…
Here are almost all the videos and audios I have either posted on my blog or uploaded to my YouTube & Vimeo dealing with the Palestinian Conflict or Israel. New videos will be added at the top. UPDATES appear just underneath.
Does Israel discriminate against Arabs? Is it today’s version of apartheid South Africa? Olga Meshoe, herself a South African whose family experienced apartheid, settles the question once and for all.
Why don’t the Palestinians have their own country? Is it the fault of Israel? Of the Palestinians? Of both parties? David Brog, Executive Director of the Maccabee Task Force, shares the surprising answers.
When the state of Israel was founded in 1948, it was done so with the approval of the United Nations. But today, Israel’s enemies routinely challenge the legitimacy of its very existence. So, under international law, who’s right? Israel? Or its enemies?
As Israel is under attack from Hamas in the Gaza strip and BDS — Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — right here in America, Bill Whittle makes the historical and moral case for Israel, and shows just who, indeed, are the tyrants and aggressors in the Middle East
In which our host, Andrew Klavan, points out that the leftists behind the current Boycott, Divestment and Sanction, or BDS, efforts against the State of Israel are not at all anti-semitic. They just hate Jews and want to kill them…
Israel is a vibrant democracy with full rights for women and gays, a free press and independent judiciary. You would think that the United Nations would celebrate such a country. Instead, the UN condemns Israel at every turn to the point of obsession. How did this happen? Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights, explains in five eye-opening minutes.
Are Israeli Settlements the Barrier to Peace?
Is Israel’s policy of building civilian communities in the West Bank the reason there’s no peace agreement with the Palestinians? Or would there still be no peace even if Israel removed all of its settlements and evicted Israeli settlers, as it did in Gaza in 2005? Renowned Harvard professor and legal scholar Alan Dershowitz explains.
Kenneth Meshoe – Black South African Member of Parliament, Talks About Israel and Apartheid
Is Israel an Apartheid State?
Kenneth Meshoe, Member of Parliament in South Africa, Talks Israel
The History of the Middle East Conflict in 11 Minutes:
Why Israel can’t withdraw to its pre ’67 borders line:
Larry Elder On Israel (Plus: “Son of Hamas”)
A Challenge To Medved on Jewish/Israeli History
Medved Makes Short Order of Some Tired Ol’ Mantras
BDS: The Attempt to Strangle Israel ~ Dershowitz
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement says it’s fighting for Palestinian rights, but it’s really just trying to destroy Israel. Jonathan Sacks, author and former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, explains how.
The Middle East Problem ~ Prager
UN vs Israel ~ Dr. Anne Bayefsky
Anti-Israeli Views at the NYT & the U.N. Exemplified ~ Prager
A Pro-Palestinian Call Taken ~ Prager
Caller Asks Dennis Prager About Palestinian History
Israel Palestinian Conflict: The Truth About the West Bank
