On Wednesday, right-leaning political personality and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html">&#8220;Intellectual Dark Web&#8221;</a> icon Dave Rubin announced the launch of a previously teased venture whose goal is to combat the status quo of rampant Big Tech censorship, de-platforming, and de-monetization practices: <a href="https://locals.com">Locals.com</a>.
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If you’re a creator and you want to own your own community, set your own rules, post video and audio to a curated feed, chat with supporters, sell tickets to events, build your own network with other creators and much more, join us on <a href="https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0">https://t.co/WLIO0Cxwe0</a>
The future is now. <a href="https://t.co/JfSRcGbMDq">pic.twitter.com/JfSRcGbMDq</a>
&mdash; Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) <a href="https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1202288504006307841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 4, 2019</a></blockquote>
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With the tag line of &#8220;Own your community, Own your future,&#8221; Locals pitches itself to content creators as a one-stop &#8220;home for all your content&#8221; through which creators can &#8220;[p]ost videos, photos, podcasts, messages, and polls,&#8221; as well as &#8220;[s]ell tickets to events, and offer exclusive content to your supporters.&#8221; The site advertises that it can strengthen content creators&#8217; relationship with their fans by removing the Big Tech middlemen and serve as a networking/community hub by allowing content creators to easily and freely associate with others. Perhaps most importantly, Locals tells creators to &#8220;[s]et your own rules&#8221; for interaction, in marked distinction with the &#8220;inconsistent and unfair moderation&#8221; of Big Tech.
Rubin, who is currently the only person publicly identified with launching the Locals project, spoke exclusively with The Daily Wire for a wide-ranging interview about the origins and importance of Locals.
&#8220;Everyone knows there is a massive problem with Big Tech,&#8221; Rubin began. &#8220;We have all outsourced all of our ability to communicate with each other to these Big Tech behemoths — no one really owns their content or knows what their terms of service are.&#8221;
Creators have very little access to their own audiences, Rubin continued, because Big Tech companies are clearly manipulating their algorithms and engaging in clandestine shadow-banning-type behavior. With the status quo, content creators have no way of ensuring that they can actually reach all of their followers and subscribers.
&#8220;For someone like me, from a libertarian/classical liberal way of thinking,&#8221; Rubin went on, &#8220;it’s time to reverse this. It’s time for creators, who are the real drivers of social media — the people who are generating clicks and creating podcasts — to be in control. It&#8217;s time for a new model.&#8221;
Locals, Rubin explained, &#8220;is a community-based app and desktop website where you can post audio, post video, communicate with your fans, and so forth. It’s subscription-only, so that takes care of all the bots and trolls and anonymous haters. One of the reasons that everyone hates everything online is that you have smart people arguing with these pink fox anime avatars on Twitter.&#8221;
Rubin&#8217;s signature &#8220;Rubin Report&#8221; program is the very first Local, he said, and he promised that more big-name creators will be rolled out soon. It will be up to each content creator to decide how much to charge for access to his/her Local, beginning with as little as three dollars per month. Each Local not only sets his/her own rules, but also owns his/her users&#8217; data — &#8220;so that, even if you leave Locals,&#8221; Rubin noted, &#8220;you can still communicate directly&#8221; with your fans.
Suffice it to say this is a very different model than the one currently deployed by Big Tech giants like YouTube.
&#8220;There are so many people out there around the world who have all this great stuff to say, but these platforms are controlled by external platforms who manipulate,&#8221; Rubin said, coming to a crescendo. &#8220;I want to give every creator the chance to be truly independent. I created a tech company, not a platform.&#8221;
Combatting Big Tech censorship is an increasingly popular political agenda for the American Right. Freshman Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has made taking on Big Tech a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-josh-hawleys-bill-taking-big-tech-josh-hammer">focal point of his first year</a> in office. Earlier this week, furthermore, numerous leading conservative thinkers co-signed an <a href="https://americanmind.org/essays/for-real-american-greatness-a-tech-new-deal/">essay</a> for the Claremont Institute&#8217;s American Mind online journal that called for a &#8220;Tech New Deal&#8221; intended to ultimately &#8220;ensure[] America can extend its greatness well into the digital age.&#8221;

Dave Rubin

Dave Rubin Launches ‘Locals,’ A New Venture To Combat Big Tech Censorship

Censorship

Facebook

Free Speech

Intellectual Dark Web

Josh Hawley

Technology

Twitter

YouTube

The Daily Signal, the Heritage Foundation&#8217;s investigative reporting, news, and commentary outlet, says that one of their videos, a YouTube testimonial from a pediatrician about gender transition surgery for children, was censored by YouTube for &#8220;hate speech.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/11/05/youtube-wont-let-a-medical-doctor-say-this-sentence/">According to the Daily Signal&#8217;s</a> Kate Trinko, the group&#8217;s 2017 video starring Dr. Michelle Cretella, &#8220;pediatrician with many years’ experience and the executive director of the American Academy of Pediatricians,&#8221; was pulled off YouTube because, in the video, Cretella suggested that, “if you want to cut off a leg or an arm you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a penis, you’re transgender.”
&#8220;The Daily Signal recently learned that our video of Cretella had been removed from YouTube. In its place, YouTube displayed this message: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech,&#8221; the group says.
Attempts to contact YouTube proved futile. &#8220;Over the past few months, The Daily Signal worked with YouTube to try to reach a resolution. Ultimately, we were told the only way we could get the video back on YouTube was to delete the previously mentioned sentence.&#8221;
That amounts to censorship, the Daily Signal says, and it should scare anyone who seeks to put material up on the platform.
The Daily Signal admits that Cretella&#8217;s statement is controversial, but that doesn&#8217;t make it &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; even under a broad definition. It simply makes it &#8230; controversial. The topic itself &#8212; transgenderism and gender transition measures for children &#8212; is a hot topic, and Cretella&#8217;s point is that society views some bodily alterations with scorn and others with an open embrace. Cretella&#8217;s statement doesn&#8217;t even reference transgenderism or gender transition surgery specifically.
But, it seems, a YouTube viewer reported it for hate speech anyway, and YouTube agreed with the designation.
YouTube began an effort to scrub &#8220;hate speech&#8221; from its platform last year, and added a description of &#8220;hate speech&#8221; to its terms and conditions: “Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube. We remove content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on any of the following attributes.&#8221; Those attributes include “Gender Identity and Expression” and “Sex/Gender.&#8221; Since then, the company has been adding categories to what it considers &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; including statements that claim one group is superior.
The Daily Signal says they &#8220;agree with the spirit behind YouTube’s hate speech policy,&#8221; and that they believe &#8220;transgender individuals, and any individual struggling with gender identity issues, should be treated with love and respect.&#8221; They also say that &#8220;private companies, including YouTube, should be allowed to set and enforce their own rules.&#8221;
They do not believe that Cretella&#8217;s statement rises to the level of &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; and they do believe that consumers have the right to protest what they believe to be unfair treatment.
YouTube has met with criticism over its censorship policies from both the left and the right. Recent changes to YouTube&#8217;s hate speech criteria have resulted in <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/youtube-holocaust-censorship-hate-speech-google-facebook-1444090">educational videos being removed </a>and <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/05/youtube-hate-speech-policy-nazi-holocaust-sandy-hook/">ever-expanding &#8220;hate speech&#8221; categories</a>. The issue of policing hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute, however, makes enforcing any type of &#8220;hate speech&#8221; code shockingly difficult.

YouTube Space, London

YouTube Bans Daily Signal Video On Gender Transitions Over ‘Hate Speech’

Transgender

Conservative non-profit PragerU is facing off with tech giant YouTube in court on Friday over the platform’s continued restriction of dozens of PragerU videos that the nonprofit says has far more to do with ideology than any supposedly “neutral” criteria imposed by YouTube.
Ahead of the legal showdown, PragerU has figured out a creative way to give the public — and YouTube employees — a chance to see some of the videos the platform has decided to restrict from children and others.
As the organization announced in a Facebook post this week, PragerU will be driving a box truck with giant LED screens around Silicon Valley on Thursday to promote its content and its cause. Organizers of the mobile screening say they plan to spend a lot of time directly in front of the YouTube headquarters as well HQs of some other big tech companies.
In an interview with <a href="https://pjmedia.com/trending/prageru-truck-to-blast-banned-videos-on-screens-in-front-of-youtube/">PJ Media</a> Tuesday, PragerU’s Chief Marketing Officer Craig Strazzeri summarized the plan of action and their rationale for rolling out the LED screen-covered truck.
&#8220;We rented a box truck with LED video screens on the side and we’re going to be playing all the PragerU videos that YouTube has restricted,&#8221; Strazzeri told the outlet. The plan, he said, will be to buzz the towers of industry giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook ahead of their big day in court Friday.
&#8220;It’s obvious that our videos are educational and appropriate for young people,&#8221; he said, countering YouTube’s defense that they are applying a consistent standard for restricting content.
&#8220;All young people should be watching our videos,” Strazzeri added. “We do hope that lots of people will be given the chance to see our videos.”
The restricted video truck stunt, Strazzeri suggested, is part of their effort to not just win in California court but “win in the court of public opinion.&#8221;
The case that kicks off Friday is one of two lawsuits — one state-level and the other federal — PragerU has brought against Google/YouTube related to the restriction of its educational content. The federal case was heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in August and is still awaiting a verdict.
The state-level case provides the nonprofit a chance to level additional complaints regarding breach of contract and consumer fraud.
PragerU maintains that YouTube handles their content differently than other publishers, unfairly limiting the reach of some videos by designating them as restricted. The organization’s consumer fraud complaint stems from their contention that YouTube promises to be an ideologically and politically neutral platform but instead allows bias to influence how it treats content and publishers. <a href="https://pjmedia.com/trending/round-2-prageru-lawsuit-claims-google-youtube-violated-calif-law-on-free-speech-discrimination/">Tyler O&#8217;Neil</a> summarizes the case:
<blockquote>
In the California case, PragerU brought four separate claims against Google and YouTube: that the companies violated the free speech protections of Article 1 Section 2 of the California Constitution; that they violated the Unruh Civil Rights Act by engaging in political and viewpoint discrimination against PragerU; that they violated the state&#8217;s business code through unfair competition; and that they breached the implied terms of their contract.
</blockquote>
Over 80 of PragerU&#8217;s videos have been &#8220;restricted&#8221; and over 40 have been demonetized by the platform. The nature and specifics of the content, PragerU says, do not warrant such action and similar content online that has not be restricted or demonetized is evidence of viewpoint discrimination and unfair practices.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/leaked-google-doc-describes-shapiro-peterson-james-barrett">Leaked Google Doc Describes Shapiro, Peterson, PragerU As ‘Nazis Using The Dog Whistles’</a>

PragerU Finds Creative Way To Bring Attention To YouTube ‘Censorship’

Prager University

On Tuesday, Blaze personality and &#8220;Louder With Crowder&#8221; host Steven Crowder <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHHQl3ND6bk">went live on his YouTube channel</a> to present evidence he believes shows YouTube and Google censoring 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard and removing her videos and YouTube channel from American search results at key times.
Crowder, who came across the evidence as a result of his prior dealings with YouTube &#8212; including enduring a coordinated attack on his ability to monetize his channel, pushed by Vox Media &#8212; claims that, following former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton&#8217;s attacks on Gabbard, Friday, YouTube throttled Gabbard&#8217;s channel, removing it from American search results, even though the channel and videos remained visible in other countries.
Crowder and his team report that they used several different VPNs to conduct searches for Gabbard&#8217;s content, each VPN for a different nation. The team then recorded the results of their experiment. Crowder released the videos on his Twitter feed Tuesday afternoon during his live broadcast.
The first video shows results for Gabbard on Friday, after Clinton claimed that Gabbard was a Russian asset and that Russia was assisting in promoting Gabbard in order to upend the 2020 presidential election with a viable third party candidate.
&#8220;We searched for Tulsi Gabbard, her channel and her videos all showed up first,&#8221; Crowder claimed on his livestream. &#8220;When we switched our VPN to the United Sates &#8230; nothing.&#8221;
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YouTube search results on Sunday, October 20th for &quot;Tulsi Gabbard&quot; first set to US results, then Spain via VPN. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CrowderExposesYouTube?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CrowderExposesYouTube</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist</a> <a href="https://t.co/ZZXwFoeEMF">pic.twitter.com/ZZXwFoeEMF</a>
&mdash; Steven Crowder (@scrowder) <a href="https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1186729969784803328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The second video shows Gabbard&#8217;s results returning to normal on Sunday, well after she had passed out of social media&#8217;s trending topics. The results, Crowder says, &#8220;magically switched back to being identical.&#8221;
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YouTube search results on Sunday, October 20th for &quot;Tulsi Gabbard&quot; first set to US results, then Spain via VPN. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CrowderExposesYouTube?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CrowderExposesYouTube</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#YouTube2020ElectionBlacklist</a> <a href="https://t.co/ZZXwFoeEMF">pic.twitter.com/ZZXwFoeEMF</a>
&mdash; Steven Crowder (@scrowder) <a href="https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1186729969784803328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Crowder called the results &#8220;chilling,&#8221; and suggested that the searchers were proof that YouTube&#8217;s algorithm can be altered and that YouTube can effectively control the flow of information to its users.
The late-night Internet host then went on to say that he believes, based on his own experience working with YouTube in the wake of his channel&#8217;s demonitziation, that it is a YouTube employee (or employees) &#8212; a real person or persons &#8212; &#8220;flipping the switch&#8221; on Gabbard&#8217;s channel and not simply a result of a flaw in YouTube&#8217;s master algorithm or location-based search result tailoring.
Months ago, when Crowder was demonitized by YouTube, following a protracted battle with a far-left journalist, the team at &#8220;Louder with Crowder&#8221; noticed that the organic reach of their videos was declining, resulting in a dearth of new users, despite what Crowder claims were record views: &#8220;Our views were better than ever, so was our retention &#8230; all the most valued metrics according to YouTube.&#8221;
Crowder says his team then began to dig into reasons for the decline in his organic reach, eventually discovering what Crowder terms &#8220;peculiarities&#8221; and &#8220;tomfoolery&#8221; in YouTube&#8217;s search function. Trying to find one of his own &#8220;Change My Mind&#8221; videos, Crowder says he ran a YouTube search using the basic search term, &#8220;Steven Crowder change my mind.&#8221; When nothing showed up, he and his team ran similar searches, he says, and alerted viewers, who reported the &#8220;exact same result.&#8221;
Other viewers claimed Crowder was &#8220;doctoring&#8221; photos of his own search results, because they had no trouble with their search function.
The issue, Crowder says he and his team discovered, only applied to American viewers. Using alternate VPNs, the team discovered that &#8220;blacklisting on this channel was occurring in the United States exclusively.&#8221; Crowder claims that he was sent proof of this phenomenon from &#8220;all across the world.&#8221;
When Crowder did an impromptu video on the issue &#8212; and asked his audience to consider whether the same phenomenon could happen to others, including political candidates who ran afoul of YouTube and its parent company, Google &#8212; he says he received a phone call from someone at YouTube who said they could make changes that would &#8220;ameliorate the situation.&#8221;
Crowder now charges that his conversation with a YouTube &#8220;higher up&#8221; demonstrates that YouTube employees can manually control the algorithm, leaving situations like Tulsi Gabbard&#8217;s the fault of subjective censorship from within Google&#8217;s ranks.
Crowder says he will continue to gather evidence of YouTube&#8217;s alleged censorship and has encouraged his audience to do the same.
Gabbard, meanwhile, is already embroiled in a lawsuit against Google, YouTube, and parent company, Alphabet, alleging similar censorhip on Google&#8217;s AdSense platform, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/technology/tulsi-gabbard-sues-google.html">according to the New York Times</a>. Gabbard&#8217;s litigation centers around claims that Google throttled Gabbard&#8217;s AdSense ads when she was trending on Twitter during the first Democratic debate, even though she and her team had purchased ads on key search terms related to her campaign.
You can watch Crowder&#8217;s full report here:
<iframe title="PROOF: YOUTUBE CENSORED TULSI GABBARD | LOUDER WITH CROWDER" width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YHHQl3ND6bk?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The Presidential Candidate Forum on LGBTQ Issues

REPORT: Steven Crowder Claims YouTube Is Selectively Censoring Tulsi Gabbard

Steven Crowder

Tulsi Gabbard

No, no, no. Hell, no!
That&#8217;s my response to the latest trial balloon floated by the White House to join with Silicon Valley on a creepy program monitoring Americans&#8217; &#8220;neurobehavioral signs&#8221; to (purportedly) prevent gun violence.
President Donald Trump&#8217;s old friend, former NBC head Bob Wright, has been pushing an Orwellian surveillance scheme called &#8220;Safe Home&#8221; — &#8220;Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes&#8221; — that would cost taxpayers between $40 million and $60 million. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, reports that the plan could incorporate &#8220;Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home,&#8221; as well as &#8221; fMRIs, tractography and image analysis.&#8221;
Here&#8217;s the big lie: Wright&#8217;s group promises that privacy will be &#8220;safeguarded,&#8221; profiling &#8220;avoided&#8221; and data protection capabilities a &#8220;cornerstone of this effort.&#8221;
There&#8217;s so much bullcrap packed in that statement it should be banned as a global warming pollutant. Anything involving Google should trigger automatic danger warnings of invasive data mining. We do not need the federal government partnering with Google to red-flag citizens. We need the federal government to red-flag Google.
Let me remind you that Google has already admitted to data mining children&#8217;s emails without consent and in violation of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act. This school year, untold thousands, if not millions, of children were required to sign on to Google email and Chrome in order to access homework, schedules and classroom discussions — without obtaining parental consent. Thanks to &#8220;1-to-1&#8221; programs forcing students across the country to use laptops and tablets when paper and pencil would suffice, iPads loaded with Google for Education are metastasizing in tech-crazed, fad-addled school districts oblivious to privacy concerns.
At my high school sophomore son&#8217;s school, every student was told to download an app called &#8220;E-Hallpass,&#8221; which is seamlessly connected to their Google login, to track how much time students spend in the bathroom. It&#8217;s all in the name of &#8220;safety,&#8221; of course. And there&#8217;s no opportunity for parents to provide their preemptive feedback or consent.
Minnesota educator Jennifer Dahlgren told me this week: &#8220;Too many schools use Google docs and sheets to store and share (private) student information, as well as using Google as their secure email! I have brought this up in staff meetings as a concern and no one else seems bothered. Not good!&#8221;
Just last week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a settlement with Google/YouTube over its violation of the federal Children&#8217;s Online Privacy Protection Act. YouTube had been stealthily mining data of unsuspecting YouTube users under the age of 13. It will reportedly pay a pittance for this massive child abuse — somewhere between $150 million to $200 million, which amounts to just a few months&#8217; of YouTube ad revenue. In other words: a hill of beans.
Earlier this summer, Google agreed to a $13 million settlement over its Street View program, whose roaming cars in more than 30 countries secretly collected emails, passwords and other personal data from Wi-Fi networks. The Wall Street Journal reported on how the company&#8217;s dishonest dismissal of the breach as a &#8220;mistake&#8221; was exposed by investigators who found that &#8220;Google engineers built software and embedded it into Street View vehicles to intentionally intercept the data from 2007 to 2010.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not just Google. Under the cloak of &#8220;science,&#8221; Big Tech and Big Government are on the cusp of instituting a mental health social credit score system incorporating dubious predictive analytics.
Who defines &#8220;mental health&#8221; risk factors? There is no consensus on how much mental health predicts violence. And don&#8217;t forget: The mental health profession is filled with partisan zealots who think all Trump voters are dangerous. Camera-hogging psychiatrists and psychologists clog left-wing news shows recklessly and fecklessly pretending to &#8220;diagnose&#8221; the president himself through their own unhinged political lenses.
Mental health data mining in schools is already happening. The Pioneer Institute reported that federal, state and local governments splurged on more than $30 billion in 2018 to implement social-emotional learning monitoring in K-12 public schools. I&#8217;ve reported on Google apps previously such as ClassDojo (which collects intimate behavioral data and long-term psychological profiles encompassing family information, personal messages, photographs and voice notes) and on federally funded TS Gold testing (which monitors &#8220;developmental domains including social emotional, physical, language and cognitive development&#8221;). Students are rated and recorded on their ability to do things like &#8220;respond to emotional cues,&#8221; &#8220;interact cooperatively&#8221; and &#8220;cooperate and share ideas and materials in socially acceptable ways.&#8221;
Who defines &#8220;socially acceptable?&#8221; Liberal educators who are mindlessly addicting our kids to Silicon Valley technology and brainwashing them to conform or be excluded?
The last thing Washington should be doing is handing over yet another set of keys to Silicon Valley spies with a voracious appetite for our private information — and our children&#8217;s precious minds. You want to make children safer? De-platform Google and the other data-mining predators from public schools now. It&#8217;s insanity to let them roam free.
Michelle Malkin&#8217;s email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

MALKIN: Stop Mental Health Data Mining Of Our Kids

Google

Mental Illness

Trump Administration

I learned last week from a Silicon Valley whistleblower, who spoke with the intrepid investigative team at Project Veritas, that my namesake news and opinion website is on a Google blacklist.
Thank goodness the Big Tech giant hasn&#8217;t taken over the newspaper syndication business yet. Twenty years of column writing have allowed me to break news and disseminate my opinions without the tyranny of social justice algorithms downgrading or whitewashing my words. But given the toxic metastasis of social media in every aspect of our lives, especially for those who make their living exercising the First Amendment, it may only be a matter of time before this column somehow falls prey to the Google Ministry of Truth, too.
Armed with internal memos and emails, former Google software engineer Zachary Vorhies exposed how MichelleMalkin.com (online since 1999) was placed on a news blacklist banning my content from appearing on newsfeeds accessed through Android Google products. I do not advocate violence, publish porn or indulge in vulgarity or profanity (other than my occasional references to Beltway crapweasels). But I triggered the Google Social Credit System and there&#8217;s no going back.
My apparent sin: Independently growing a large organic following of readers on the internet who share my mainstream conservative views on immigration, jihad, education, social issues, economic policy, faith and more.
Other conservative victims of the Google ban hammer include: Twitchy (a Twitter aggregation site I founded in 2012), FrontPage Magazine (founded by prolific conservative author and journalist David Horowitz), the Daily Caller (founded by Fox News host and journalist Tucker Carlson), Legal Insurrection (founded by Cornell University law professor and investigative blogger William Jacobson), NewsBusters (founded by Media Research Center in 2005), The Gateway Pundit (founded by grassroots social media pioneer Jim Hoft in 2004), the American Thinker (another of the veteran conservative blogs founded in 2003 by Thomas Lifson), LifeNews.com (an independent, pro-life news site founded in 1992 by Steven Ertelt), the Catholic News Agency and The Christian Post.
I suspect, because so many of the blacklisted sites belong to the original generation of conservative bloggers, that Google&#8217;s ideology-based censorship significantly predates the timeframe of the documents that Vorhies (who worked at Google for eight years) shared with Project Veritas. Indeed, my first substantiated censorship by Google/YouTube, which was covered by The New York Times, occurred 13 years ago in 2006. Around that time, it also became clear to me that humans, not algorithms, were manipulating Google Images to prioritize unspeakably crude photoshopped images of me disseminated by left-wing misogynists. And not long after, my heavily trafficked blog posts started dropping off the search engine radar altogether.
Several previous Google insiders have confirmed that the Big Tech giant discriminates against right-leaning journalists, pundits and personalities — not to mention free-thinking employees within its own workforce who&#8217;ve been persecuted, fired and even harassed by police for their whistleblowing. Leaked documents also show that a small cadre of meddling social justice overlords at Google Central Command manually manipulate search engine results — despite the company elite&#8217;s brazen denial of the practice at a recent congressional hearing.
In the early days of New Media, entrepreneurs on the left, right and center rallied around the transparency and open access mantra, &#8220;Information just wants to be free.&#8221; Now, in the wholly disingenuous names of &#8220;trust&#8221; and &#8220;safety,&#8221; the overlords of the internet want to throttle information with which they disagree. Google employees actively demote content on YouTube deemed &#8220;controversial queries,&#8221; according to internal documents from Vorhies, including the following phrases:
—Abortion is barbaric.
—Abortion is wrong.
—Abortion is murdering.
—Abortion is a crime.
&#8220;Do vaccines cause autism,&#8221; &#8220;climate change hoax,&#8221; and &#8220;Girl speaks about the danger in Germany due to rape refugees&#8221; were also all red-flagged as dangerously &#8220;fringe&#8221; by the Google P.C. police. So was President Donald Trump&#8217;s factual statement that immigration chaos has led to &#8220;people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they&#8217;re coming into this country,&#8221; which one open borders employee complained was &#8220;explicit bias&#8221; that &#8220;we should take a stand on.&#8221;
So they&#8217;re for foreign killers and rapists coming into this country? Noted.
Internal staff complaints catalyze search engine manipulation, so political agitation among Google employees is a harbinger of speech clampdowns to come. Just last week, more than 1,000 Google employees lobbied the company to shun any contract work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Given that Google works with the hate racket and smear machine known as the Southern Poverty Law Center, you bet I&#8217;m worried that my immigration blog and column archives (not to mention all my reporting on the treasonous Silicon Valley CEOs in my upcoming book, &#8220;Open Borders Inc.&#8221;) will trip the Google Social Credit wire.
With Google&#8217;s homegrown menaces squelching our freedom of expression, damaging our reputations and livelihoods through slimy and secretive blacklists, and hampering our ability to do honest research — not to mention mining student data in schools by tethering children to Google apps/email/Chromebooks and holding their academic progress hostage to Google&#8217;s high-tech leash — who needs foreign enemies? China ain&#8217;t got nuthin&#8217; on America&#8217;s &#8220;Don&#8217;t Be Evil&#8221; thought control freaks.
Michelle Malkin&#8217;s email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com. To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Google Logo Projection

MALKIN: Triggering The Google Social Credit System

Project Veritas

On Friday, Google issued a new set of &#8220;<a href="https://about.google/community-guidelines/">community guidelines</a>&#8221; for employees of the company.
&#8220;Community guidelines exist to support the healthy and open discussion that has always been a part of our culture,&#8221; states the first paragraph. &#8220;They help create an environment where we can come together as a community in pursuit of our shared mission and serve our users.&#8221;
Among the latest guidelines are statements such as: &#8220;be responsible,&#8221; and &#8220;be thoughtful,&#8221; as well as &#8220;respect each other.&#8221;
Further, the guidelines read:
<blockquote>While sharing information and ideas with colleagues helps build community, disrupting the workday to have a raging debate over politics or the latest news story does not. Our primary responsibility is to do the work we’ve each been hired to do, not to spend working time on debates about non-work topics.
Avoid conversations that are disruptive to the workplace or otherwise violate Google’s workplace policies.</blockquote>
If something should arise that might be viewed as a violation of the policies in place at Google, the guidelines state that managers &#8220;are expected to address [such] discussions &#8230; &#8221;
The document also addresses demeaning language: &#8220;Don&#8217;t troll, name call, or engage in ad hominem attacks — about anyone. This includes making statements that insult, demean, or humiliate (whether individually or by reference to groups) other employees, our extended workforce, our business partners, or others (including public figures), or that violate other standards of conduct or policies against harassment and bullying.&#8221;
The guidelines note that employees must be careful about the potential dissemination of private company data.
Google&#8217;s latest set of guidelines are a revised version of a document from <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-community-communication-guidelines-2018-6">last year</a> in which &#8220;trolling, name-calling, and ad hominem attacks&#8221; were prohibited. The document also contained more generalized policy regarding respect and avoidance of &#8220;discussions or behavior&#8221; that are &#8220;disruptive.&#8221;
These revised guidelines come on the heels of several controversies in which the tech giant has been involved, the most prominent of which was the firing of engineer James Damore.
In 2017, Damore authored an internal memo, titled: &#8220;Google&#8217;s Ideological Echo Chamber.&#8221; The 10-page document, which hit a nerve inside the company and was eventually leaked, posited that &#8220;differences in distribution of traits between men and women&#8221; could be a factor in the lack of female representation in tech. Damore went on to address potential solutions to the issue. The former Google engineer also wrote about the ways in which he believed the company was oppressing dissenting viewpoints.
The TL;DR version posted at the top of the document <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.pdf​">states</a>:
<blockquote>Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety.
This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.
The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.
Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression
Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression
Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.</blockquote>
After the memo leaked, Damore was fired from Google for allegedly &#8220;perpetuating gender stereotypes.&#8221; In a statement following the termination, Google CEO Sundar Pichai <a href="https://fortune.com/2017/08/08/google-anti-diversity-memo-sundar-pichai-letter/">said in part</a>:
<blockquote>First, let me say that we strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves, and much of what was in that memo is fair to debate, regardless of whether a vast majority of Googlers disagree with it. However, portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.</blockquote>
Damore proceeded to file a lawsuit against Google for discrimination, eventually moving to settle &#8220;through arbitration&#8221; in October of 2018, reports <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-19/ex-googler-s-anti-conservative-bias-case-headed-to-arbitration">Bloomberg</a>.
Google and YouTube (which was acquired by Google in 2006) are coming under intense scrutiny as more and more conservative outlets and content creators are alleging discrimination on the basis of political ideology.
PragerU, a YouTube channel that features conservative educational content, has <a href="http://www.bgrfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/PRAGER_U-_v_GOOGLE-YOUTUBE_complaint_10-23-2017_FILED.pdf">filed a lawsuit</a> against the video platform for alleged demonetization and restriction of videos.
According to a statement on PragerU&#8217;s website, the channel filed the suit in the &#8220;United States District Court for the Northern District of California to stop Google and YouTube from unlawfully censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech.&#8221;
Here&#8217;s a video in which an attorney representing PragerU details the case:
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Google Issues New Employee Guidelines To Address ‘Raging Debate Over Politics’

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) targeted YouTube and their parent company Google for profiting off of and promoting the far-left network &#8220;The Young Turks&#8221; after commentator Hasan Piker ranted about how &#8220;America deserved” the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, that killed 3,000 innocents. As Crenshaw has noted in the past, Google, and Big Tech in general, have been quick to smear and censor mainstream conservative voices.
During a Twitch livestream on Tuesday, Piker, the nephew of &#8220;Young Turks&#8221; co-created Cenk Uygur, said the United States &#8220;deserved 9/11&#8221; and nastily mocked Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL, for losing his eye during his second deployment overseas from an IED explosion.
&#8220;This guy has the understanding of foreign policy of, like, a 12-year-old. What the f***. What the f*** is wrong with this dude? Didn&#8217;t he go to war and like literally lose his eye because some mujahideen — a brave f***ing soldier — f***ed his eye hole with their d***?” Piker mouthed off. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t that how he f***ing lost his dumba** eye, because he got his f***ing eye hole f***ed, by a brave soldier?&#8221;
In tweets expanding on his vile commentary, Piker wrote, in part, &#8220;dan crenshaw [sic] is crying on a comedian&#8217;s podcast about how not offended he was about a joke made against him almost an entire year ago. right wing victimhood is a brain disease.&#8221; He also added the following asterisk: &#8220;crying from his remaining eye.&#8221;
Quote-tweeting Piker, Crenshaw posted: &#8220;The only thing that offends me is your inability to use capital letters in any of your tweets. But really it is the fact that Google/YouTube profit from and promote The Young Turks and by extension your disgusting defense of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against Americans.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">The only thing that offends me is your inability to use capital letters in any of your tweets.
But really it is the fact that Google/YouTube profit from and promote The Young Turks and by extension your disgusting defense of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against Americans. <a href="https://t.co/703Vy4r9dT">https://t.co/703Vy4r9dT</a>
— Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) <a href="https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1164628229367488512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 22, 2019</a></blockquote>
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At a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in June, the congressman grilled Google and Facebook executives over their anti-conservative bias. &#8220;You do not have a constitutional obligation to enforce the First Amendment, but I would say that you absolutely have an obligation to enforce American values and the First Amendment is an underpinning of American values,&#8221; Crenshaw <a href="https://crenshaw.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=89">underscored</a>.
Uygur, the co-creator and main voice at “The Young Turks” network, penned an <a href="https://dparchives.library.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/pennsylvania?a=d&amp;d=tdp19911122-01.2.24&amp;e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------">op-ed</a> at the University of Pennsylvania promoting the denial of the Armenian genocide in 1991. &#8220;Any historian can prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jewish Holocaust took place,&#8221; he wrote. &#8220;Armenians claim that there was another genocide in this century. They claim that the Turkish government, between the years of 1915 and 1923, carried out a genocide of the Armenian people. They claim that the truth of this matter is also beyond reproach. … Well, I question it. The claims of an Armenian Genocide are not based on historical facts. If the history of the period is examined it becomes evident that in fact no such genocide took place.&#8221;
In 2016, Uygur rescinded the op-ed. &#8220;I rescind the statements I made in my Daily Pennsylvanian article from 1991 entitled, &#8216;Historical Fact of Falsehood?[&#8216;] When I wrote that piece, I was a 21 year-old kid, who had a lot of opinions that I have since changed,&#8221; the host said in a <a href="https://legacy.tyt.com/2016/04/22/rescinding-daily-pennsylvanian-article/">statement</a>. &#8220;Back then I had many political positions that were not well researched. For example, back in those days I held a pro-war rally for the Persian Gulf War. Anyone who knows me now knows that I am a very different person today.&#8221;
YouTube hit mainstream conservative comedian Steven Crowder with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48082/youtube-demonetizes-crowder-free-speech-advocates-daily-wire">video demonetization</a> in June for calling then-Vox commentator Carlos Maza a &#8220;lispy queer.&#8221;
Last August, Big Tech players like Facebook and Google cracked down on content from Infowars owner Alex Jones. &#8220;Facebook removed four pages controlled by him, while Google removed the official &#8216;Alex Jones Channel&#8217; on its platform,&#8221; <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/06/apple-pulls-alex-jones-infowars-podcasts-for-hate-speech.html">CNBC</a> reported. &#8220;The YouTube channel for InfoWars, the media company owned by Alex Jones, still remains live. Pinterest also removed the InfoWars board, while Spotify took down his most well-known show completely.&#8221;
In May, Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook, Inc.) <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46720/facebook-instagram-ban-far-right-figures-laura-amanda-prestigiacomo">permanently banned</a> &#8220;dangerous individuals and organizations&#8221; from their platforms, including Jones, self-described investigative journalist Laura Loomer, Infowars&#8217; Paul Joseph Watson, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
As noted by The Daily Wire&#8217;s Molly Prince, an internal Google memo claimed prominent conservatives, such as Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, PragerU&#8217;s Dennis Prager, and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, are all Nazis.
WATCH:
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Dan Crenshaw

Crenshaw Blasts YouTube/Google After ‘Young Turks’ Commentator Says ‘America Deserved 9/11’

Last week, at the invitation of Sen. Ted Cruz, I spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Google&#8217;s having placed more than 60 Prager University videos on its restricted list. Any family that filters out pornography and violence cannot see those particular videos on YouTube (which is owned by Google); nor can any school or library.
This statement is as much about what I and PragerU stand for as it is about Google. Those interested in viewing the presentation can do so <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llt6kiwKwVI">here</a>:
It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate. But I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube&#8217;s (and for that matter, Twitter and Facebook&#8217;s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.
In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.
Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University — PragerU, as it often referred to.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the U.S. Navy at the start of World War II. My father&#8217;s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on anti-Semitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.
He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one&#8217;s country leaves a terrible hole in one&#8217;s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.
And it breaks my heart for America because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it.
I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network — an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America&#8217;s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age 35, PragerU has achieved some success.
My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or &#8220;haters&#8221; only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.
PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime ministers, four Pulitzer Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO; or the former prime ministers of Norway, Canada or Spain; or the late Charles Krauthammer; or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
Yet, Google, which owns YouTube, has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. &#8220;Restricted&#8221; means families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.
Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments &#8230; Yes, the Ten Commandments!
We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given.
But of course, we know why: because they come from a conservative perspective.
Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America&#8217;s crowning glory — free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, &#8220;First they came after conservatives, and I said nothing. And then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.&#8221;
Thank you.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

PRAGER: America, Google And Me: My Senate Speech

Dennis Prager

A newly-published leaked document contains what appears to be an email exchange among Google employees participating in a &#8220;transparency-and-ethics&#8221; discussion that includes a reference to PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro as &#8220;nazis using the dog whistles.&#8221;
The <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/on_peterson-REDACTED.png">document</a> was published by <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/25/breaking-new-google-document-leaked-describing-shapiro-prager-as-nazis-using-the-dogwhistles/">Project Veritas</a> Tuesday, a day after the conservative group released its report on how political and ideological bias influences the ways in which Google connects users to content. The group obtained the &#8220;newly leaked document from Google&#8221; via their tipline.
&#8220;The email apparently was sent as part of the Google &#8216;transparency-and-ethics&#8217; group internal communications and suggests that content from PragerU, Jordan Peterson, and Ben Shapiro should be disabled from the &#8216;suggestion feature,'&#8221; Project Veritas reports.
&#8220;Today it is often 1 or 2 steps to nazis, if we understand that PragerU, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro et al are nazis using the dog whistles you mention in step 1,&#8221; reads the <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/on_peterson-REDACTED.png">email</a> that appears to have been sent to over a dozen other Google employees. &#8220;I can receive these recommendations regardless of the content of what I&#8217;m looking at, and I have recorded thousands of internet users sharing the same experience. I don&#8217;t think correctly identifying far-right content is beyond our capabilities. But if it is, why not go with Meredith&#8217;s suggestion of disabling the suggestion feature?&#8221;
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BREAKING: LEAKED <a href="https://twitter.com/Google?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@Google</a> doc from &#8216;transparency-and-ethics group&#8217; calls <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@benshapiro</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/prageru?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@prageru</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jordanbpeterson</a> &#8220;nazis using the dogwhistles&#8221; and recommends the disabling of the &#8220;suggestions&#8221; feature. FULL ARTICLE: <a href="https://t.co/oIdcykyWTk">https://t.co/oIdcykyWTk</a> <a href="https://t.co/MyC2cOthue">pic.twitter.com/MyC2cOthue</a>
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1143578145666326528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Project Veritas published the document a day after its exposé on Google which contains testimony from a whistleblower, additional leaked internal documents, and undercover video footage of an interview with the head of Google&#8217;s &#8220;<a href="https://qz.com/1501998/google-created-a-responsible-innovation-team-to-check-if-its-ai-is-ethical/">Responsible Innovation</a>&#8221; team, which monitors the responsible implementation of A.I. technologies.
&#8220;They want to act as gatekeeper between the user and the content they want to access, so they&#8217;re going to come in and they&#8217;re going to filter the content,&#8221; the whistleblower told Project Veritas&#8217; James O&#8217;Keefe. &#8220;They&#8217;re going to say, &#8216;We don&#8217;t want to give the user access to that information because it&#8217;s going to create an outcome that&#8217;s undesireable to us.'&#8221;
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48804/whistleblower-heres-how-google-functions-highly-james-barrett">The Daily Wire</a> reported, in the video O&#8217;Keefe and the insider discuss &#8220;leaked internal documents appearing to show how the search engine manipulates what information users see based on its &#8216;fair and equitable&#8217; priorities, which at times filters out or deemphasizes factual information that its creators deem &#8216;unfair.'&#8221;
YouTube, which is owned by Google, has since pulled the video &#8220;due to a privacy claim by a third party.&#8221; This is the second Project Veritas video focused on Big Tech bias YouTube has pulled in two weeks.
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BREAKING: YOUTUBE/GOOGLE HAS REMOVED OUR GOOGLE INVESTIGATION as it was approaching 50K likes and a million views. IMPORTANT: Please download it on <a href="https://twitter.com/bitchute?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@bitchute</a> and repost it. <a href="https://t.co/chDsGF0QCk">https://t.co/chDsGF0QCk</a>
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1143330626784960512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 25, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48824/youtube-pulls-project-veritas-video-google-bias-james-barrett">YouTube Pulls Project Veritas Video On Google Bias</a>

Ben Shapiro

Leaked Google Doc Describes Shapiro, Peterson, PragerU As ‘Nazis Using The Dog Whistles’

In an op-ed for <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/donald-trump-jr-2020-election-donald-trump-democrats-2016">Fox News</a> published Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr., son of President Trump and executive vice president of the Trump Organization, presents the case for why the stakes are even higher in 2020 than they were in 2016, and it starts with one straightforward assertion: &#8220;We are no longer dealing with the party of Hillary Clinton, let alone the party of Bill Clinton.&#8221;
&#8220;My father and his re-election campaign are all that stand between the prosperous, faithful, and peaceful America of the Trump economic boom, and the revenge-hungry, far-left extremist party of &#8216;The Resistance,'&#8221; writes Trump.
That Resistance &#8212; formed in response to his father&#8217;s stunning victory over Clinton, whom all the politicians, pollsters and political analysts deemed the prohibitive favorite &#8212; is steered by &#8220;a previously marginalized radical fringe,&#8221; which has rapidly become &#8220;the ideological vanguard of any future Democratic administration,&#8221; he writes.
&#8220;It&#8217;s important for voters to recognize what kind of a country lurks beneath the relentless, cheap attacks on family and country that serve to frame the Democrats&#8217; campaign as a return to &#8216;normalcy,'&#8221; he states.
Among the goals of even the self-described &#8220;moderate&#8221; Democratic presidential hopefuls is a call for radical policies, including those that would move us closer to &#8220;open borders.&#8221; &#8220;In a few short years, supporting ever greater numbers of poor illegal immigrants and opposing any serious attempt to enforce existing laws have become articles of faith on the left,&#8221; he writes.
Along with the Democrats&#8217; &#8220;march toward open borders&#8221; is their increasing embrace of a socialist agenda, which &#8220;actively encourages the subversion of the American economy.&#8221;
As demonstrated by the Left&#8217;s unfair castigation of the Covington Catholic high schoolers, he suggests, the Democrats &#8220;long for a country that will tolerate absolutely no dissent&#8221; from their radical agenda. &#8220;Democrats want a country where Catholic high schoolers can be harassed in the street for wearing MAGA hats and then smeared as racist bigots in media, threatened with expulsion, and ruined simply for not immediately giving in,&#8221; he writes.
And the Left is applying that same free speech-suppressing approach to social media, where Big Tech is finding ways to shut down voices of dissent from the Right. With Democrats fully in charge, there will be no one to check their abuse of power.
&#8220;If you don&#8217;t like how they would remake America, you might as well just be yelling into the void,&#8221; he warns. &#8220;The Democrats will defend their allies in Silicon Valley from any consequences for their sustained, unmitigated campaign to censor all but the most milquetoast of views from the internet.&#8221; (<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/donald-trump-jr-2020-election-donald-trump-democrats-2016">Read the full op-ed here</a>.)
Trump&#8217;s warnings about the clamp-down on speech by Big Tech come amid a series of reports suggesting a concerted effort to squeeze out right-leaning voices on social media platforms. In an interview that aired last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48210/google-ceo-youtube-will-begin-targeting-content-james-barrett">admitted</a> that the world&#8217;s leading search engine &#8220;rank[s] content based on quality&#8221; and is working to &#8220;prevent borderline content,&#8221; and that YouTube is now implementing the same approach. By &#8220;borderline content,&#8221; Pichai explained, he means &#8220;content which doesn&#8217;t exactly violate policies, which need to be removed, but which can still cause harm.&#8221;
The same week the interview was published, YouTube <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48090/youtube-announces-mass-ban-all-hateful-content-james-barrett">announced</a> sweeping changes to how it was handling content it deemed &#8220;discriminatory&#8217; or &#8220;harmful&#8221; to the community.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">WATCH: Steven Crowder On YouTube Demonetizing Him: Here&#8217;s What This Is Really About</a>

Donald Trump Jr: Here’s Why The Stakes Are Even Higher In 2020

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

Donald Trump Jr.

In a chilling move that suggests Big Tech is coordinating to censor conservative voices, YouTube deleted a video produced by Project Veritas exposing alleged censorship of conservative and Christian content by Pinterest. Along with YouTube&#8217;s removal of the video, Pinterest put the whistleblower who provided the documents featured in the report on administrative leave and permanently banned pro-life group Live Action, which was listed on its &#8220;porn domain block list,&#8221; as shown in the video. Twitter also appears to have joined with the other platforms in targeting Project Veritas, hitting founder James O&#8217;Keefe for supposedly violating someone&#8217;s personal privacy through his journalistic investigation and blocking content involving Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro.
As <a href="http://www.dailywire.com/news/48249/watch-whistleblower-pinterest-censors-conservative-james-barrett">The Daily Wire</a> reported, Project Veritas released an exposé video on Pinterest featuring testimony from an employee of the company and internal documents he presented to O&#8217;Keefe indicating that the popular social media platform was quietly censoring some conservative content and voices. Among those that appear to have been targeted by the platform is Shapiro, who was censored in a &#8220;zero tolerance moment,&#8221; Live Action, links to which were blocked on the platform, and a video series exposing Planned Parenthood, which was included in a censor list as a &#8220;harmful&#8221; &#8220;conspiracy.&#8221;
Since the release of the report, Pinterest has placed the whistleblower, Eric Cochran, on administrative leave and permanently suspended Live Action&#8217;s account.
But it&#8217;s not only Pinterest which is cracking down on those involved in the exposé; on Wednesday, YouTube deleted Project Veritas&#8217; video report, citing &#8220;privacy&#8221; violations and informing the organization that it could not show the name of the employee at Pinterest who placed Live Action on the block list or the documentation of that action.
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YouTube has REMOVED our Pinterest Insider story The battle is on SUPPORT the insider who leaked the documents and got fired HERE: <a href="https://t.co/FLBzuLE65R">https://t.co/FLBzuLE65R</a> <a href="https://t.co/zWLfW2leRQ">pic.twitter.com/zWLfW2leRQ</a>
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1138939941134786561?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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In a statement to The Daily Wire, Project Veritas said that while YouTube outlines the content supposedly in violation in the video, the platform &#8220;does not give us any recourse by which to make the requested &#8216;blur&#8217; since they&#8217;ve taken down the video.&#8221; Doing so would be &#8220;anathema to presenting information the public has a right to know,&#8221; the organization argues.
&#8220;The established media and technology are so afraid of investigative journalism they need to censor it,&#8221; O&#8217;Keefe tweeted Wednesday. &#8220;YouTube calls REPORTING on someone by showing their face and name, and how they added a pro-life group to a porn blacklist, a &#8216;privacy complaint.&#8217; Would they do this to NYT?&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
The established media and technology are so afraid of investigative journalism they need to censor it. YouTube calls REPORTING on someone by showing their face and name, and how they added a pro-life group to a porn blacklist, a &#8220;privacy complaint.&#8221; Would they do this to NYT?
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1138953443811500033?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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As reported by <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2019/06/12/twitter-suspends-project-veritas-for-leaking-pinterests-internal-documents-classifying-ben-shapiro-as-a-white-supremacist-n2548132">Town Hall</a>, Twitter has also hit O&#8217;Keefe for the Pinterest exposé, specifically evidence that Shapiro was targeted by the platform, which was censored for exposing &#8220;other people&#8217;s private information,&#8221; according to a Twitter insider.
&#8220;Twitter has decided that investigative journalism is in violation of their terms of service &#8211; @Project_Veritas has been temporarily suspended from posting for tweeting internal communications from @Pinterest which show them calling @benshapiro a &#8216;white supremacist,'&#8221; O&#8217;Keefe tweeted Thursday. &#8220;What does this mean for journalists around the world? For their sources in government, tech, education, etc? Is Twitter your newspaper&#8217;s editor?&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
What does this mean for journalists around the world? For their sources in government, tech, education, etc? Is Twitter your newspaper&#8217;s editor?
&#8212; James O&#8217;Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1138817877472157696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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In an interview with The Daily Wire Thursday, O&#8217;Keefe called the situation a &#8220;watershed moment&#8221; for both free speech and Big Tech. &#8220;I think that this is a watershed moment in the history of the First Amendment and Big Tech,&#8221; he said. &#8220;What we have seen here is one brave individual come forward, risking everything, in order to combat the collusion that we&#8217;re witnessing among these powerful companies. What Eric wants is for twelve more people in the industry who are likewise concerned about free speech and transparency to come forward. If they do, we will see real change.&#8221;
Pinterest has responded to some of the allegations presented in the YouTube-blocked video: &#8220;Religious content is allowed on Pinterest, and many people use our service to search for and save Pins inspired by their beliefs,&#8221; the company said in a statement to <a href="https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/11/tech-insider-blows-whistle-on-how-pinterest-listed-top-pro-life-site-as-porn-bible-verses-censored/">Project Veritas</a>. &#8220;To protect our users from being targeted based on personal characteristics such as their religion, we have policies in place so that ads and recommendations don&#8217;t appear alongside certain terms.&#8221;
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48249/watch-whistleblower-pinterest-censors-conservative-james-barrett">WATCH: Whistleblower: Pinterest Censors Conservative, Pro-Life Content; Pinterest Reacts</a>

BIG TECH CRACKDOWN: YouTube DELETES Project Veritas Video On Pinterest Censorship

James O'Keefe

On Monday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki apologized to the LGBT community for not taking &#8220;more definitive action against conservative pundit Steven Crowder&#8217;s channel,&#8221; according to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/18660473/youtube-lgbtq-susan-wojcicki-carlos-maza-steven-crowder">The Verge</a>, which is a publication of Vox Media.
Speaking at the Code conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, Wojcicki said, &#8220;I know that the decisions we made was very hurtful to the LGBTQ community and that wasn&#8217;t our intention at all. That was not our intention, and we were really sorry about that, and I do want to explain why we made the decision we did.&#8221;
Vox journalist Carlos Maza, who is gay, had pressured YouTube to punish Crowder for his remarks regarding Maza; ultimately YouTube decided not only to demonetize Crowder but also punish other creators in an incident dubbed the #VoxAdpocalypse.
When demonetizing Crowder, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">YouTube stated</a>:
<blockquote>
Even if a creator&#8217;s content doesn&#8217;t violate our community guidelines, we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action. In the case of Crowder&#8217;s channel, a thorough review over the weekend found that individually, the flagged videos did not violate our Community Guidelines. However, in the subsequent days, we saw the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior, took a deeper look, and made the decision to suspend monetization. In order to be considered for reinstatement, all relevant issues with the channel need to be addressed, including any videos that violate our policies, as well as things like offensive merchandise.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Maza <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48138/voxs-carlos-maza-whines-about-ted-cruz-defending-amanda-prestigiacomo">wasn&#8217;t satisfied</a> with YouTube demonetizing Crowder. He stated, &#8220;Conservatives have spent years arguing that even basic content moderation is a form of &#8216;censorship.&#8217; Their goal is to scare platforms like [YouTube] away from enforcing their hate speech policies. And it&#8217;s working, because YouTube doesn&#8217;t have the guts to protect its creators. You can&#8217;t give these people an inch. They won&#8217;t stop crying &#8216;liberal bias!&#8217; until they&#8217;re allowed to use hate speech with impunity. And that&#8217;s exactly what [YouTube] is allowing them to do.&#8221;
After Axios journalist Ina Fried pressed Wojcicki to expand on her apology to the LGBTQ community, Wojcicki responded:
<blockquote>
First of all, I&#8217;m really, personally very sorry. It was not our intent, YouTube has always been a home of so many LGBTQ creators, and that&#8217;s why it was so emotional. And that&#8217;s why I think this really &#8230; Even though it was a hard decision, it was harder that it came from us &#8212; because it was such an important home. And even though we made this decision &#8230; we have so many people from the LGBTQ community and we&#8217;ve always wanted to support the community openly in spite of this hard issue that we have right now.. As a company we really want to support this community. It&#8217;s just from a policy standpoint, we need to be consistent &#8212; look, if we took down that content, there would be so much other content that we would need to take down.&#8221;
We don&#8217;t want to just be knee-jerk; we need to think about it in a very thoughtful way; be able to speak with everyone; we&#8217;ll speak with people in the LGBTQ community, make sure that we&#8217;re incorporating that going forward in terms of how we think about harassment, and then make sure that we are implementing that in a fair and consistent way going forward.
</blockquote>
Video below:
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
&#8220;Are you really sorry for anything that happened to the LGBTQ community? Or are you just sorry they were offended?&#8221;
Watch <a href="https://twitter.com/SusanWojcicki?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SusanWojcicki</a>&#8216;s response at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CodeCon?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CodeCon</a>: <a href="https://t.co/5MqJxL8QVS">pic.twitter.com/5MqJxL8QVS</a>
&#8212; Recode (@Recode) <a href="https://twitter.com/Recode/status/1138231255445598208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 10, 2019</a></blockquote>
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WATCH: YouTube CEO Apologizes To LGBTQ Community After #VoxAdpocalypse

This week, The New York Times ran a massive piece detailing the supposed radicalization of one Caleb Cain. Cain moved from political liberalism toward self-ascribed &#8220;tradcon&#8221; status from watching YouTube videos. The New York Times charted this nefarious move by following those videos. The suggestion by The Times was simple: If you watch typical conservative content hosted by people like me, you will eventually end up watching material hosted by alt-right figures. The only solution, presumably, would be for YouTube to downgrade material The Times dislikes.
This attitude isn&#8217;t only springing from The Times. Axios chief technology correspondent Ina Fried grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the weekend, essentially demanding that YouTube do something to marginalize videos Fried dislikes. Vox ran a full-scale propaganda campaign last week to get conservative comedian Steven Crowder kicked off YouTube for the great sin of making offensive jokes about one of Vox&#8217;s columnists. Taking their cues from Democratic leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, various media outlets have spent years suggesting that Facebook&#8217;s unwillingness to censor political materials led to Hillary Clinton&#8217;s unjustifiable 2016 presidential defeat.
And it&#8217;s not just targeting big tech companies. The far-left organization Media Matters for America routinely leads boycott attempts against advertisers who deign to sponsor conservative programs &#8212; even if those advertisers sponsor a wide variety of political programming. Pseudojournalists from organizations like Vox and Huffington Post spend their days calling advertisers for comment on various controversial statements by right-wing hosts from Tucker Carlson to Laura Ingraham to Sean Hannity. Their goal isn&#8217;t to follow the news but to generate a wave of advertiser-pullout announcements likely to do damage to those conservative hosts.
Such censoriousness is rarely, if ever, practiced on the political right. YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are never targeted by conservatives over their unwillingness to shut down opposing points of view; they&#8217;re criticized for their willingness to kowtow to the political left and its demands for speech suppression. Advertisers on left-wing programming can speak freely, secure in the knowledge that conservatives won&#8217;t be calling them up to rip them for sponsoring shows like Rachel Maddow&#8217;s.
That&#8217;s good. That&#8217;s how it should be. But for members of the political left, it isn&#8217;t.
There are two reasons for that. The first is obvious: Those on the political left long ago abandoned the traditional liberal notion that those who disagree have a right to speak. Instead, they must be deplatformed and their advertisers punished, lest their nefarious ideas spread and metastasize. &#8220;Repressive tolerance,&#8221; in the parlance of Herbert Marcuse, has become a mainstay of left-wing thinking.
The other reason is far more cynical: Many in the media want a regeneration of the monopolistic media control of the past. They long for the days when everyone consumed mainstream product to the exclusion of alternative sources. It&#8217;s no coincidence that YouTube and Facebook have been touting their elevation of &#8220;authoritative&#8221; news in recent years &#8212; they&#8217;re looking to appease a ravenous media eager to tear them down.
The media and Democrats have picked the right target: The lords of Big Tech are eager to please and frightened of blowback. They&#8217;re political liberals who can be intimidated into censorship while being simultaneously assured that they&#8217;re making the world a better place.
They aren&#8217;t. All it would take for this censorious moment to end would be a little backbone: Facebook, YouTube and Twitter announcing that they won&#8217;t censor people unless those people violate actual First Amendment principles like incitement and libel; advertisers announcing that they won&#8217;t pull their dollars based on astroturfed pressure tactics. But backbone is in short supply. And the glut of intimidation won&#8217;t relax anytime soon.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS 2019

The Media/Democrat Complex Strikes Big Tech

Last week, YouTube announced sweeping changes to how it handles user content that it deems &#8220;supremacist,&#8221; &#8220;hateful,&#8221; or &#8220;harmful&#8221; to the community &#8212; and very few voters are confident that the platform will end up applying its new rules fairly.
&#8220;YouTube has always had rules of the road, including a longstanding policy against hate speech,&#8221; the company announced in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48090/youtube-announces-mass-ban-all-hateful-content-james-barrett">statement </a>last week. &#8220;Today, we&#8217;re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.&#8221;
The announcement came the same day that YouTube revealed that it had officially demonetized all of the videos produced by conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder because of what appears to be a new interpretation of its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines">Community Guidelines</a> that takes into account &#8220;harms&#8221; to the &#8220;broader community.&#8221;
&#8220;Even if a creator&#8217;s content doesn&#8217;t violate our community guidelines, we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action,&#8221; YouTube explained in a statement Wednesday. &#8220;In the case of Crowder&#8217;s channel, a thorough review over the weekend found that individually, the flagged videos did not violate our Community Guidelines. However, in the subsequent days, we saw the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior, took a deeper look, and made the decision to suspend monetization. In order to be considered for reinstatement, all relevant issues with the channel need to be addressed, including any videos that violate our policies, as well as things like offensive merchandise.&#8221;
Crowder was not the only one to see his videos demonetized; others, particularly on the right, that YouTube determined to be &#8220;harmful&#8221; likewise saw their ability to make money on the platform cut off.
So do people have confidence that YouTube is going to be fair in applying its new policies? Rasmussen asked 1,000 registered voters what they thought and found that only about a quarter (26%) believe YouTube will be unbiased in its handling of content, while about a third (34%) feel certain that YouTube &#8220;will likely use new content rules to censor views that it disagrees with&#8221;; 40% are unsure.
Unsurprisingly, Rasmussen found some differences in perspective depending on political identification. &#8220;Republicans, by a 44% to 21% margin, believe YouTube will use the rules for censorship. Independent voters, by a 34% to 24% margin, tend to agree,&#8221; <a href="https://scottrasmussen.com/34-believe-youtube-will-censor-opposing-political-views-26-disagree-40-not-sure/">ScottRasmussen.com</a> reported Sunday. &#8220;Democrats, however have a different view. Thirty-three percent (33%) of those in Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s party believe YouTube will apply the rules equally while just 25% think they will become a tool for censorship (see <a href="https://scottrasmussen.com/crosstabs-june-6-7-2/">crosstab</a> results).&#8221;
The survey found that while 29% of respondents believe that YouTube is an unbiased platform, 20% believe it is biased against conservatives, and 44% are unsure. Only 6% said the platform was biased against liberals.
Though there are more people who believe the platform will not apply its own policies fairly, a vast majority (79%) still think the company should be allowed to determine how it handles users rather than being regulated by the government.
The results of the survey were published the same day that Axios published its <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48210/google-ceo-youtube-will-begin-targeting-content-james-barrett">interview</a> with Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussing YouTube&#8217;s crackdown on &#8220;borderline content.&#8221; After admitting that Google &#8220;rank[s] content based on quality,&#8221; Pichai said YouTube is implementing the same approach. &#8220;And so we are bringing that same notion and approach to YouTube so that we can rank higher quality stuff better and really prevent borderline content, content which doesn&#8217;t exactly violate policies, which need to be removed, but which can still cause harm,&#8221; he said.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">WATCH: Steven Crowder On YouTube Demonetizing Him: Here&#8217;s What This Is Really About</a>

Poll: Will YouTube Censor Opposing Political Views?

On Monday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show,&#8221; the host discusses The New York Times&#8217; latest hit piece on &#8220;YouTube radicals&#8221; who are watching conservative content and forming their own opinions about it.
This New York Times article is the most dishonest tripe. I don&#8217;t know that there was an honest word in the article. It&#8217;s called &#8220;The Making of a YouTube Radical&#8221; by Kevin Roose, a fake journalist. I&#8217;m just going to pick it apart point by point. I can&#8217;t even give you just the broad overview. Every paragraph is a lie.
So, it starts out on the website, with lots of photos. It was all of these awful people, these radicals. You know who the radicals were? Ben Shapiro. Probably the most mainstream conservative voice in the country. And Dave Rubin, who is amiable to a fault. Dave Rubin&#8217;s whole show is he has people who have different points of view on and then they discuss them. Dave Rubin radically presenting both sides and taking the center of an argument. You know who else? Phil DeFranco. I don&#8217;t even think that guy is conservative.
This is my favorite one of all these pictures because they mixed them in with people who are maybe a little racist, maybe a little bigoted, maybe you&#8217;ve never heard of them, and who are really extreme. And then, in the middle of it, is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman, probably the most famous economist of the 20th century. He&#8217;s just a guy who supports free markets and free economics. He&#8217;s like a grandfatherly figure who won a Nobel Prize.
How does it begin? You see &#8220;The Makings of a YouTube Radical.&#8221; The story begins with all these pictures you scroll through and it says &#8220;Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction. He turned to YouTube.&#8221;
You scroll up. &#8220;Soon, he was pulled into a far-right universe watching thousands of videos filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny, and racism.&#8221; That&#8217;s how I would describe Milton Friedman: Conspiracy theories, misogyny, and racism. Because he talked about the color of the pencil, I guess that&#8217;s racist. Then the final, the final line, &#8220;I was brainwashed.&#8221; And here you see the point of the article.
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ldIehza3ZE0?start=830" width="560"></iframe></div>
From the very beginning, what The New York Times is trying to tell you, and what the whole Left is trying to tell you is that we don&#8217;t really have any choice. We don&#8217;t really have free will. We don&#8217;t really have the ability to watch whatever we want on the Internet. That&#8217;s what the Internet does, it lets you watch whatever you want. It&#8217;s not like the old mainstream media that keeps people out, they&#8217;re gatekeepers. No, on the Internet, you can see whatever you want. Their thesis is no you can&#8217;t. You really have no choice, and you&#8217;re just brainwashed, you&#8217;re brainwashed by yourself. You have brainwashed yourself with YouTube helping you along.
You&#8217;re reading this New York Times story and you think this guy doesn&#8217;t sound very radical at all. So far, this story is just about a guy who finds some right-wing videos on YouTube and he watches them. So, does it get any more radical than that? Are we going to actually get what The New York Times is promising? Well, this is what they write: &#8220;One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like &#8216;Refugee Invasion is European Suicide.'&#8221;
Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke. Mr. Cain never bought into the far right&#8217;s the most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Still, far-right ideology bled into his daily life. He began referring to himself as a &#8216;trad-con&#8217; &#8212; a traditional conservative committed to old fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman and he fought with his liberal friends.&#8221; By the way, that last part, that isn&#8217;t even true. He disagreed with his liberal friends; he didn&#8217;t fight with them.
What are they saying actually happened? They&#8217;re saying on the right-wing YouTube, there are people who are vicious, vile, racist, neo-Nazis. Caleb Cain never listened to any of them or really believed them at all &#8212; but they exist. Well, I thought the article was about the making of a radical. You said this was about the making of a YouTube radical and then you describe some views that actually are radical right before you say that the kid never believed any of them. The most radical thing that this kid did, according to The New York Times&#8217; own reporting, is he referred to himself as a traditional conservative. That&#8217;s it, guys. That&#8217;s it.
When they use the term, the &#8220;alt-right&#8221; on the Left &#8212; when they use that term &#8212; they&#8217;re just talking about you and me. They&#8217;re just talking about anybody who believes that the genders are different. They said, &#8220;he started to believe in gender norms.&#8221; Oh, he believes that men and women are different? OK. And then, he disagreed with his liberal friends. Ok, the guy who has conservative viewpoints disagreed with people who have different viewpoints. And, this is the most shocking thing of all, he dated a Christian girl. That&#8217;s the radicalization, is that a guy in 2019 in America dated a Christian girl and called himself a conservative.
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-michael-knowles-show/id1266577963?mt=2">Listen to &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show&#8221; on iTunes.</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/michael-knowles-show">Subscribe to watch &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show&#8221; on-demand.</a>

KNOWLES: Are You Radical And Brainwashed By YouTube?

Christianity

Conservatism

Media

Media Bias

Michael Knowles

New York

New York Times

On Saturday, The New York Times published a nearly 5,000-word <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html">article</a> featured at the top of its website on &#8220;the making of a YouTube radical.&#8221; The fact-free and defamatory rant smeared some of the most mainstream voices in political commentary and in many cases proved precisely the opposite of the points it purported to make.
&#8220;Caleb Cain was a college dropout looking for direction,&#8221; writes Times columnist Kevin Roose. &#8220;He turned to YouTube. Soon, he was pulled into a far-right universe, watching thousands of videos filled with conspiracy theories, misogyny and racism.&#8221; Which YouTubers does the article identify as &#8220;far-right,&#8221; conspiratorial, misogynist, and racist? One photo featured the Daily Wire&#8217;s own Ben Shapiro, a nationally syndicated radio host and one of the most popular podcasters in the country. Another photo depicted Dave Rubin, a gay, self-described liberal whose centrist interview show offers a platform for voices on the Right and Left of the political aisle. Bewilderingly, the editors placed in the center of the cover photo montage an image of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who spent much of the 1970s and &#8216;80s explaining basic economic concepts to live audiences on camera.
&#8220;I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole,&#8221; laments Caleb Cain, the subject of the Times investigation. But just about all of the personalities the Times cites eschew the &#8220;alt-right,&#8221; a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHXL00wY3nY">racial ideology</a> that defines itself as an &#8220;alternative&#8221; to traditional conservative thought. In fact, the Anti-Defamation League identified Ben Shapiro as the primary journalistic recipient of anti-Semitic tweets from the &#8220;alt-right&#8221; in 2016.
So the radicals the Times cites aren&#8217;t radical, and most of the &#8220;alt-right&#8221; voices described explicitly condemn the alt-right. How then did Cain become radicalized? He didn&#8217;t. As the Times finally admits,
<blockquote>
Mr. Cain never bought into the far right&#8217;s most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate, he said. Still, far-right ideology bled into his daily life. He began referring to himself as a &#8220;tradcon&#8221; &#8212; a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.
</blockquote>
Cain never embraced the &#8220;far-right&#8221; or the &#8220;alt-right,&#8221; no matter how many YouTube videos he watched. To the Times, even a &#8220;traditional conservative&#8221; is radical. The belief that men and women are different, the decision to date a Christian girl, and the audacity to disagree with one&#8217;s liberal friends suggest a radicalism so dangerous it merits a New York Times investigation.
And when did Cain hit rock bottom? The Times explains,
<blockquote>
By the night of Nov. 8, 2016, Mr. Cain&#8217;s transformation was complete. He spent much of the night watching clips of Ms. Clinton&#8217;s supporters crying after the election was called in Mr. Trump&#8217;s favor. His YouTube viewing history shows that at 1:41 a.m., just before bed, he turned on a live stream hosted by Mr. Crowder, with the title &#8220;TRUMP WINS!&#8221;
</blockquote>
What exactly is radical about watching a video titled &#8220;Trump wins!&#8221; on the night Trump won? Nothing, unless you, like The New York Times, believe there is no distinction between &#8220;alt-right,&#8221; &#8220;far right,&#8221; &#8220;traditional conservative,&#8221; and &#8220;Trump voter.&#8221; By watching a conservative comedian celebrate the Republican victory in 2016, the Times concludes, &#8220;Mr. Cain&#8217;s transformation was complete.&#8221; Except it wasn&#8217;t. As the Times reports,
<blockquote>
In 2018, nearly four years after Mr. Cain had begun watching right-wing YouTube videos, a new kind of video began appearing in his recommendations. These videos were made by left-wing creators, but they mimicked the aesthetics of right-wing YouTube, down to the combative titles and the mocking use of words like &#8220;triggered&#8221; and &#8220;snowflake.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Cain then started watching videos by left-wing YouTuber Natalie Wynn. He found the videos so persuasive that he eventually came to identify as a liberal, which presents a major problem for Roose&#8217;s argument. Roose writes, &#8220;The right-wing content Mr. Cain viewed in 2015 and 2016 often consisted of videos by Stefan Molyneux,&#8221; an anarcho-capitalist with dubious views on race. He then moved on to more mainstream conservative voices like Steven Crowder. By 2017, &#8220;Mr. Cain also watched many videos by members of the so-called intellectual dark web, like the popular [liberal] comedian Joe Rogan and the [liberal] political commentator Dave Rubin.&#8221; Finally, &#8220;during 2017, Mr. Cain began watching more videos from left-wing channels.&#8221;
Putting aside for a moment the internal inconsistency &#8212; did Cain begin watching left-wing videos in 2017 or 2018? &#8212; the author accidentally disproves his own thesis. Roose purports to show the rightward radicalization of a YouTube viewer. But if Cain was radicalized at all, he was radicalized to the left, not the right. He began near the fringes of right-wing YouTube and moved steadily to the Left.
The New York Times blames YouTube&#8217;s all-powerful &#8220;algorithm&#8221; for sending Cain down the &#8220;alt-right rabbit hole&#8221; that &#8220;brainwashed&#8221; him. In reality, Cain watched a bunch of different videos, rejected some opinions, considered others further, and over the course of a few years his opinions evolved. The free exchange of ideas opened his mind and made him think more critically. That process of exposure to diverse opinions isn&#8217;t &#8220;brainwashing&#8221; &#8212; it&#8217;s education.
Roose concludes his piece trying desperately to refute that very point. He quotes Cain warning, &#8220;I&#8217;ve learned now that you can&#8217;t go to YouTube and think that you&#8217;re getting some kind of education, because you&#8217;re not,&#8221; despite having just outlined three years&#8217; of Cain&#8217;s self-education.
Roose contends that YouTube has been &#8220;a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides&#8230;[and] allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences.&#8221; But hyper-partisans on the Left have always been able to reach mainstream audiences because they themselves are the gatekeepers. What YouTube offered was an opportunity for conservatives and independents who questioned leftist orthodoxy to reach a mass audience, which is why left-wing partisans are so eager to take back control.
The Times insists that YouTube offers no educational value because even most left-wingers would resist consciously stifling education. But if YouTube videos provide mere entertainment or, worse, provocation, the case for censorship is simpler. The Left has made this argument for half a century. In the 1960s, the liberal writer Lionel Trilling argued, &#8220;Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition&#8221; in the United States. According to Trilling, conservatives express themselves not in ideas but rather in &#8220;irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas&#8221; and which one must therefore dismiss.
As ever, the Left gets it exactly backward. The Times&#8217; investigation into the making of a right-wing &#8220;YouTube radical&#8221; follows a young man&#8217;s self-education through the free exchange of ideas as he shifted from the center-right to the center-left. In the end, the only radicals the Times piece reveals are the libelous liars who published it.

KNOWLES: Everything About The NYT ‘Making Of A YouTube Radical’ Piece Is Dishonest

A day after acknowledging that his videos did not violate its policies, YouTube decided to demonetize all of conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder&#8217;s videos in response to a left-wing Vox employee complaining that Crowder repeatedly made fun of him because of his identity. On the same day, YouTube <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48090/youtube-announces-mass-ban-all-hateful-content-james-barrett">announced</a> a mass ban on all content promoting one group as superior to another &#8220;in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.&#8221;
In an interview with <a href="https://www.axios.com/interview-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-youtube-8b2d17fe-1db6-4492-a8b0-af1b5e08697a.html?stream=technology&amp;utm_source=alert&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=alerts_technology">Axios</a> published Sunday but filmed before YouTube&#8217;s unveling of its new policy last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai signaled YouTube&#8217;s crackdown and its plans to expand the ban to include &#8220;borderline content.&#8221;
&#8220;Look, we aren&#8217;t quite where we want to be,&#8221; Pichai told &#8220;Axios on HBO.&#8221; While YouTube is improving on eliminating content it deems problematic, he suggested, they are still working toward even more extensive content-controlling measures.
Google, said Pichai, &#8220;rank[s] content based on quality.&#8221; They plan to apply that same approach to YouTube. &#8220;And so we are bringing that same notion and approach to YouTube so that we can rank higher quality stuff better and really prevent borderline content,&#8221; he said.
Pichai then offered a definition of what he means by &#8220;borderline content.&#8221; &#8220;Content which doesn&#8217;t exactly violate policies, which need to be removed, but which can still cause harm,&#8221; he said, in language echoing YouTube&#8217;s statement to Crowder days later.
The issue is &#8220;a hard computer science problem,&#8221; said Pichai, but an even harder &#8220;societal problem because we need better frameworks around what is hate speech, what&#8217;s not, and how do we as a company make those decisions at scale, and get it right without making mistakes.&#8221;
As <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48090/youtube-announces-mass-ban-all-hateful-content-james-barrett">The Daily Wire</a> reported, amid the Crowder controversy last week, YouTube announced sweeping changes to how it handles content.
&#8220;YouTube has always had rules of the road, including a longstanding policy against hate speech,&#8221; YouTube said Wednesday in a statement. &#8220;Today, we&#8217;re taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.&#8221;
&#8220;We will begin enforcing this updated policy today; however, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up and we&#8217;ll be gradually expanding coverage over the next several months,&#8221; the platform explained. Earlier this year, YouTube said it was going to crack down on channels that &#8220;repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies&#8221; by barring them from working with the YouTube Partner ad program.
The announcement came the same day YouTube told Crowder that it had decided to demonetize all of the videos of his popular channel &#8212; a decision that came less than 24 hours after the company admitted his videos &#8220;don&#8217;t violate our policies.&#8221;
&#8220;Even if a creator&#8217;s content doesn&#8217;t violate our community guidelines, we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action,&#8221; YouTube said in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">statement</a> Wednesday. &#8220;In the case of Crowder&#8217;s channel, a thorough review over the weekend found that individually, the flagged videos did not violate our Community Guidelines. However, in the subsequent days, we saw the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior, took a deeper look, and made the decision to suspend monetization. In order to be considered for reinstatement, all relevant issues with the channel need to be addressed, including any videos that violate our policies, as well as things like offensive merchandise.&#8221;

Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48089/watch-steven-crowder-youtube-demonetizing-him-james-barrett">WATCH: Steven Crowder On YouTube Demonetizing Him: Here&#8217;s What This Is Really About</a>

Google CEO: YouTube Will Begin Targeting ‘Content Which Doesn’t Exactly Violate Policies’

Are companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter open technology platforms or publishers with curated content? For years, Big Tech giants have tried to have it both ways, exploiting special legal protections to enrich themselves while behaving like publishers without the liabilities.
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees, Senator Dan Sullivan asked him directly, &#8220;Are you a tech company, or are you the world&#8217;s largest publisher?&#8221;
&#8220;I view us as a tech company,&#8221; replied Zuckerberg.
But Facebook changed its tune less than three months later. In a California courtroom, Facebook lawyer Sonal Mehta attempting to fend off a lawsuit by declaring the social media giant a publisher. &#8220;The publisher discretion is a free speech right irrespective of what technological means is used,&#8221; Mehta argued. &#8220;A newspaper has a publisher function whether they are doing it on their website, in a printed copy, or through the news alerts.&#8221; So Facebook is a platform for the purposes of avoiding difficult questions on Capitol Hill but a publisher for the purposes of beating a lawsuit.
Big Tech&#8217;s business model relies on this distinction between platforms and publishers, codified in a little-known provision of a 23-year-old law. The Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress in 1996, states, &#8220;No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.&#8221; In other words, online platforms largely cannot be held liable for the content they host, allowing technology companies to avoid issues of defamation and copyright infringement. This special protection allowed innovation on the Internet to explode over the passed quarter-century. The companies that led that innovation would retain those privileges so long as they did not behave like publishers.
This week, by demonetizing the channel of conservative comedian Steven Crowder, YouTube decided to operate as a publisher. No longer will the former platform even pretend to neutrality. &#8220;Even if a creator&#8217;s content doesn&#8217;t violate our community guidelines,&#8221; YouTube explained in a statement, &#8220;we will take a look at the broader context and impact, and if their behavior is egregious and harms the broader community, we may take action.&#8221; Regardless of its own stated rules and guidelines, YouTube may now arbitrarily shut down any channel it doesn&#8217;t like.
As Senator Ted Cruz explained directly to Mark Zuckerberg, &#8220;The predicate for Section 230 immunity under the CDA is that you&#8217;re a neutral public forum.&#8221; Once Big Tech companies choose to operate as publishers, they must lose those lucrative protections.
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Txq2eI8Pbdw" width="560"></iframe></div>
YouTube has made its choice. Conservatives should make them face the consequences.

KNOWLES: Time To Make Big Tech Choose

Internet

As reported by The Daily Wire on Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went after YouTube for their recent crackdown on BlazeTV&#8217;s Steven Crowder. The conservative comedian, after complaints from Vox&#8217;s Carlos Maza, had all of his videos demonetized by YouTube on Wednesday.
Maza, formerly of <a href="https://www.mediamatters.org/authors/carlos-maza/168">Media Matters</a>, flipped over Cruz&#8217;s vocal support for free speech and traded words with the Republican.
&#8220;This is ridiculous. YouTube is not the Star Chamber &#8212; stop playing God &amp; silencing those voices you disagree with. This will not end well,&#8221; warned Cruz on Thursday. In a subsequent tweet, Cruz posted: &#8220;This is nuts. YouTube needs to explain why [Steven Crowder] is banned, but [Samantha Bee] (&#8216;Ivanka is a feckless c***.&#8217;) &amp; [Jim Carrey] (&#8216;look at my pretty picture of Gov. Kay Ivey being murdered in the womb&#8217;) aren&#8217;t. No coherent standard explains it. Here&#8217;s an idea: DON&#8217;T BLACKLIST ANYBODY.&#8221;
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This is ridiculous. YouTube is not the Star Chamber &#8212; stop playing God &amp; silencing those voices you disagree with. This will not end well. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LouderWithCrowder?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#LouderWithCrowder</a> <a href="https://t.co/x8G4pm4gS3">https://t.co/x8G4pm4gS3</a>
&#8212; Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) <a href="https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1136627469946183680?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
This is nuts. YouTube needs to explain why <a href="https://twitter.com/scrowder?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@scrowder</a> is banned, but <a href="https://twitter.com/iamsambee?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@iamsambee</a> (&#8220;Ivanka is a feckless c***.&#8221;) &amp; <a href="https://twitter.com/JimCarrey?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@JimCarrey</a> (&#8220;look at my pretty picture of Gov. Kay Ivey being murdered in the womb&#8221;) aren&#8217;t. No coherent standard explains it. Here&#8217;s an idea: DON&#8217;T BLACKLIST ANYBODY. <a href="https://t.co/F6ez8XHzXS">https://t.co/F6ez8XHzXS</a>
&#8212; Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) <a href="https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1136634378044551169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Maza took a shot at Cruz and bizarrely accused YouTube of being biased in favor of &#8220;right-wingers.&#8221;
&#8220;A U.S. senator is coming to the defense of someone who spent two years calling me a &#8216;lispy queer,'&#8221; responded the Vox employee. &#8220;They do this because they know that [YouTube] cares more about looking fair to right-wingers than it does about stopping hate speech and harassment.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
A U.S. senator is coming to the defense of someone who spent two years calling me a &#8220;lispy queer.&#8221;
They do this because they know that <a href="https://twitter.com/YouTube?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@YouTube</a> cares more about looking fair to right-wingers than it does about stopping hate speech and harassment. <a href="https://t.co/c7Fp1oOGWr">https://t.co/c7Fp1oOGWr</a>
&#8212; Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) <a href="https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1136658345220349953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
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In follow-up tweets, Maza claimed that the censorship of right-learning creators on big tech platforms is not actually censorship and railed against so-called &#8220;hate speech,&#8221; a vaguely defined, subjective term.
&#8220;Conservatives have spent years arguing that even basic content moderation is a form of &#8216;censorship.&#8217; Their goal is to scare platforms like [YouTube] away from enforcing their hate speech policies. And it&#8217;s working, because YouTube doesn&#8217;t have the guts to protect its creators,&#8221; he wrote.
&#8220;You can&#8217;t give these people an inch. They won&#8217;t stop crying &#8216;liberal bias!&#8217; until they&#8217;re allowed to use hate speech with impunity. And that&#8217;s exactly what [YouTube] is allowing them to do,&#8221; Maza added.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
You can&#8217;t give these people an inch.
They won&#8217;t stop crying &#8220;liberal bias!&#8221; until they&#8217;re allowed to use hate speech with impunity.
And that&#8217;s exactly what <a href="https://twitter.com/YouTube?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@YouTube</a> is allowing them to do.
&#8212; Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) <a href="https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1136661003159134208?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Sigh,&#8221; replied Cruz. &#8220;This individual claims to be a &#8216;journalist.&#8217; Then he throws a fit &amp; demands that YouTube CENSOR views he doesn&#8217;t like.&#8221;
&#8220;Here&#8217;s a crazy idea,&#8221; offered the senator, &#8220;if you don&#8217;t like what [Steven Crowder] says, ARGUE AGAINST HIM. Make your case in what John Stuart Mill called the &#8216;marketplace of ideas.'&#8221;
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Sigh. This individual claims to be a &#8220;journalist.&#8221; Then he throws a fit &amp; demands that YouTube CENSOR views he doesn&#8217;t like. Here&#8217;s a crazy idea: if you don&#8217;t like what <a href="https://twitter.com/scrowder?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@scrowder</a> says, ARGUE AGAINST HIM. Make your case in what John Stuart Mill called the &#8220;marketplace of ideas.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/uzhMqz3lv5">https://t.co/uzhMqz3lv5</a>
&#8212; Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) <a href="https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1136731695741374464?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
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On Tuesday, YouTube conceded that Crowder&#8217;s videos &#8220;don&#8217;t violate&#8221; any of their policies after &#8220;conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged&#8221; by Maza. But the platform reversed course after the activist threw a Twitter fit, accusing YouTube of being anti-LGBT and encouraging LGBT employees at the company to &#8220;walk out&#8221; in protest.
&#8220;Update on our continued review&#8211;we have suspended this channel&#8217;s monetization,&#8221; YouTube capitulated on Wednesday. &#8220;We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.&#8221;

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