Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew [...]]]> Arguably, one of the best things about Monday is the posting of a new PragerU video online. The brief films are aimed primarily at young people who are poorly served by modern education which seems reluctant to teach the vital historical component of how we got to where we are today.

Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts remarked to interviewer Mark Levin on Sunday, “The problem is that the educational establishment don’t believe in great men and women any longer. They see for ideological reasons of their own, and the idea that no one is greater than anybody else, and so they won’t teach about heroes.”

History bereft of humans — both heroes and villains — is pretty hollow, so PragerU fills a big hole.

Founder Dennis Prager testified before a Senate committee last summer about his purpose in creating the videos and dedication to defending free speech in America.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media treats PragerU like an insect being dissected in a high school biology class, analyzing the details at length while missing the big picture. That’s what appeared in the New York Times Sunday front page article titled, “It’s Fox News for Teenagers, in Short Videos.”

That title makes the PragerU videos sound dumbed down which they definitely are not. The most recent edition, from January 6, features a discussion by Brit Niall Ferguson about the life and influence of Margaret Thatcher, a piece suitable for an educated adult desiring a brief refresher on the unique prime minister.

Still, the article provides history I didn’t know, one example being that Dennis Prager initially envisioned a traditional college but a brick-and-mortar edifice would have be prohibitively expensive.

The Times article was reprinted elsewhere, so click freely on the link following to read the whole piece:

Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time, New York Times, January 4, 2020

BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera.

He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the game was on.

“How many genders are there?” Mr. Witt asked before turning and staring deadpan at the camera. Some people laughed and walked away. Most, knowing the camera was rolling, engaged.

“As many as you want?” a recent Ph.D. student responded, a little confused to be confronted with this question.

After some of the footage was edited in the back of an S.U.V. in a parking lot nearby, the video headed to Prager University, a growing hub of the online right-wing media machine, where Mr. Witt is a rising star and the jokey, Ray-Ban-wearing embodiment of the site’s ambitions.

Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.

The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.

Mr. Witt, 23, said he was raised in a relatively liberal home by his mother, and when he arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was already leaning conservative. But he found his zeal for the culture war on campus. One of his classes offered students extra credit for going to a political protest. Mr. Witt submitted that he would go to a nearby speech hosted by the right-wing star Milo Yiannopoulos. The teaching assistant told him that would not count, he said.

He was frustrated, feeling lonely and at home watching videos on YouTube. The site prompted him with a bright animation made by PragerU. He can’t remember the first video he saw. Maybe railing against feminism, he said.

“I must have watched every single one that night,” Mr. Witt said. “I stopped going to class. Pretty much all the time I was reading and watching.”

He did not graduate from college.

The videos are five minutes each, quick, full of graphs and grand extrapolations, and unapologetically conservative. Lessons have titles like: “Why Socialism Never Works” (a series), “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”

To the founders and funders of PragerU, YouTube is a way to circumvent brick-and-mortar classrooms — and parents — and appeal to Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

Mr. Prager sees those young people as more indoctrinated in left-wing viewpoints than any previous generation, but also as more curious about the right. For these teenagers, consuming conservative content is a rebellion from campus politics that are liberal and moving left.

“We find more of them are open to hearing an alternative voice than many of their elders,” Mr. Prager wrote in an email. “Many suspect they have been given only one view, and suspect that view may often be absurd.”

The way PragerU presents that “alternative voice” is in the measured tone of an online university, carefully avoiding the news cycle and President Trump. That is part of its power.

“They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution.

“PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black.

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.

On PragerU’s website, there is little differentiation between its video presenters. So the late Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer appears on the same page as Michelle Malkin, the commentator who has defended overtly racist elements of the right. There’s Bret Stephens, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host; George F. Will, the anti-Trump conservative commentator; and Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. For a teenager approaching the site, each headshot in the same size circle, it would be hard to tell the difference between them all. (Continues)

Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today [...]]]> Author and radio show host Dennis Prager has been doing interviews for the upcoming national release of the documentary No Safe Spaces that he produced with Adam Corolla.

Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today that starts with what young people are taught. As he remarked, “The university has substituted indoctrination for education.”

The Left fears unrestricted speech from conservatives and moderates, so it has trained a victim class of overly sensitive liberal young people by posing any disagreement as an attack on their superior values and probably racist in some way.

Unfortunately the demand for politically correct speech doesn’t stop at the campus; instead the silly and distracting rules of the left have permeated our society up and down.

The Fox News segment begins with part of the movie trailer, then gets to the interview at around 1:35 in the video following:

MARTHA MacCALLUM: Dennis Prager joins me now. Radio host of the Dennis Prager Show. Dennis, great to see you. Thank you for being on tonight.

DENNIS PRAGER: Great to be with you. Thank you.

MacCALLUM: So, I mean, just watching that trailer. And I watched, you know, pieces of the film today. It is so disturbing that we’ve gotten to a point where you can’t have these discussions on college campuses, which is exactly the place that you should be having them. When Art Laffer gets shut down — you know, the designer of the Laffer curve and the Reagan economy — you just have to wonder, what is so deeply upsetting and controversial about Art Laffer?

PRAGER: What’s deeply upsetting is that the man is not on the Left. That is all it takes. It’s unprecedented in American history that there is a such a large percentage of young people — or, of that matter, old people — who believe the First Amendment needs to be changed. And those are the polls. About 50 percent of millennials believe that the First Amendment should be modified to ban hate speech. But of course, the whole point of free speech is that what you consider hate speech is irrelevant. What I consider hate speech is irrelevant.

When I was a kid, Nazis — real Nazis — what I mean “real” is not people who were called Nazi by the Left because they don’t agree with them. I’ve been called “Nazi,” and I’ve devoted my life to Judaism and to the Jewish people, and write a Torah commentary, and built a synagogue. And I’ve been called a Nazi. Google has an email that declares Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Prager U — my website, Prager University — Nazis.

But real Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, where there were Holocaust survivors, because they’re such cruel human beings, these Nazis. Jewish groups and liberal groups all said, “Of course. In America, even real Nazis can march in a Jewish neighborhood.” That’s America.

It’s changed, and that’s the first time in American history that this is the case. And it started at the university. That’s what this film is about.

MacCALLUM: You say that it’s dangerous to send your kids to American universities.

PRAGER: That it’s what to send your kid to university?

MacCALLUM: That it’s dangerous.

PRAGER: What was the word? Oh, “dangerous.” Well, I have a very good motto on this. Sending your child to college is playing Russian roulette with their values. And I mean it. I’m not happy about it. I love the life of the mind.

I went to Columbia. I love intellectual work. I read and I write. But the university has substituted indoctrination for education.

MacCALLUM: What do you think — you know, we talk about triggers a lot, right? Triggers that send people into safe spaces. But what do you think triggered this? You know, when you try to sort of trace back the anthropology of how we got here, where do you think it begins?

PRAGER: Well, my theory is that there is a huge distinction — a gulf — between liberal and left. Liberals and conservatives agree on far more than liberals and leftists do. But liberals don’t want to acknowledge this because they’re afraid to.  But this emanates from the Left. The Left, from Lenin to the present-day university anywhere on earth has never countenanced free speech. So, wherever it gains power — and there’s nowhere it has more power than at the university — it suppresses free speech because it can’t deal with free speech. We might actually prevail if we’re allowed to speak.

MacCALLUM: Yeah. I mean, if you — you know, if you are — if you feel strongly enough about your arguments, you should never be afraid to have someone present the other side because you shouldn’t worry that they’re going to able to poke holes in it because you feel so strongly about what you believe.

I want to ask you about something that happened today. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito wrote an opinion that he was defending — National Review went after a climate scientist named Michael Mann for his hockey stick theory. And National Review said, essentially, that the methodology that he used was debunked, in their opinion, in their analysis. And they tried to get that overturned, and the Supreme Court said they’re not going to hear that case. And Alito wrote a very passionate defense of freedom of speech on this. What are your thoughts on that?

PRAGER: It’s depressing to think that, if this did go to the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t be 9-0, as I said I have no issue — I mean, obviously, I don’t agree on everything liberals believe, but they’re my allies. And liberals need to understand, we are your allies on free speech. That’s why there are so many liberals in our documentary because this is a unity between us. This is a very serious thing that is happening. If so many young people think, “Oh, well, what I think is hate speech, that should be banned” — 2,000 demonstrators against Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley last week? I mean, my God. They can have the furthest radical leftist show up and we don’t do that.

MacCALLUM: Yeah. Dennis Prager. “No Safe Spaces” is the film. I recommend everybody watch it. Thank you very much.

PRAGER: December 6th, goes national. Nosafespaces.com.

The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a [...]]]> Sunday’s Los Angeles Times front-paged a story about Dennis Prager and his efforts using PragerU videos to educate young people and others about American history and principles, among various other topics.

The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a fair representation of the news despite its decided liberal orientation and open-borders philosophy.

As an influential provider of conservative-leaning ideas, Dennis Prager has come under a lot of criticism from the left, particularly Silicon Valley.

On July 16, Prager appeared before a Senate hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines to defend his work — see my report including video and transcript, Dennis Prager Responds to Google Censorship against PragerU.

To critics who call his videos biased, he remarked during his testimony:

DENNIS PRAGER: 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, and 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.

PragerU presents a variety of historical subjects, from the current failure of Europe to confront hostile Islam to the importance of the Protestant Reformation in creating modern freedoms. Most are essays presented by experts, from well known persons to professors you never heard of. All are interesting, and their Monday morning appearance is a good start for the week.

How a Los Angeles-based conservative became one of the internet’s biggest sensations, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2019

WASHINGTON —  Earlier this summer, as Donald Trump assembled online activists at the White House to thank them for their role in getting him to the Oval Office and – Trump predicted – keeping him there, one guest didn’t rush to claim credit.

Los Angeles-based Prager University, a registered charity, is legally prohibited from politicking. It isn’t truly a university and doesn’t have a campus. But the digital empire created by Dennis Prager, a 71-year-old conservative radio host and erstwhile Never Trumper, is having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.

The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times, according to the group’s own count. Independent analysis done for The Times by Tubular Labs, a video measurement company, largely backs up that claim. PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups. It ranks among the top 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.

Its videos are becoming a staple on college campuses, where Prager is dead set on overturning liberal orthodoxy. PragerU boasts that thousands of college and high school teachers screen its videos in their classrooms.

All that has caused considerable consternation on the left.

“It is a sophisticated campaign to indoctrinate young people,” said Tara McGowan, chief executive of Acronym, a nonprofit that advises progressives on digital campaigning. “The amount of money they are putting behind it is alarming and significant. They seem to have created a savvy way to push an ideology onto an audience and get a tax break in the process.” (Continues)

The article goes into great detail about funding, including the identities of major contributors. If you are interested in Prager’s philosophy of education, the Times article provides almost nothing. For that, the best introduction is probably his Senate testimony:

One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.

PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may [...]]]> On Tuesday, a Senate committee held a hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines, a topic long overdue for investigation.

One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.

PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may anger the far left. (Actually, we are a nation of citizens.)

The educational five-minute videos are aimed at a young audience to fill in the historical gaps left by the liberal education establishment, but the restrictions placed on some items are nonsensical: Mr. Prager learned from the first witness, a spokesman from Google, that the video about the Ten Commandments was put under restriction because it mentioned murder — negatively, of course, but those algorithms are strict!

Seriously, you would think that a major web publisher like PragerU would get responsible human attention.

DENNIS PRAGER: I will take just a moment because my opening comment is under five minutes just to respond on the issue of the Ten Commandments video that was a placed on the restricted list by Google; the representative from Google mentioned that a reason that it would be on the restricted list was that it contains mentions of murder, so I was thinking, I have a solution that will I think appeal to Google. I will re-release it as that the Nine Commandments. That should solve the problem of including murder in my discussion of the Ten Commandments.

And as regards the swastika, yes, there is a swastika; it is again in the commandment of do not murder wherein I show that murder — there are people who believe murder is all right even today, and I use the swastika and the hammer and sickle as two examples. I would think we would want young people to associate the swastika with evil; that was why I had a swastika.

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’s (and for that matter Twitter and Facebook’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 NY. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the US Navy at the start of World War II. My father’s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on antisemitism 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’s country leaves a terrible hole in one’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’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 of 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 “haters” 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, and 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. “Restricted” means that 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, as we have seen. 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’s crowning glory – free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, “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.”

Thank you.

Peter Caddick-Adams presents a brief review of how close a thing the invasion was, how easily it could have been a disaster if the many deceptions had failed to make the Germans think [...]]]> PragerU’s Memorial Day video focuses on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies gambled big to take back Europe from the Nazis.

Peter Caddick-Adams presents a brief review of how close a thing the invasion was, how easily it could have been a disaster if the many deceptions had failed to make the Germans think Calais was the target rather than Normandy.

But even with the remembered heroism, it’s hard to see the Greatest Generation passing away with the years. The coming D-Day will be the 75th anniversary, and fewer than 500,000 WWII veterans are alive today out of more than 16 million who served.

Below, Dick Winters (1918 – 2011) is remembered for leading an assault that took out a battery of German guns that threatened the Normandy invasion.

Fortunately, the invasion succeeded and Europe was saved from German fascists. (Only now, the continent is threatened by muslim fascists who were invited by Chancellor Merkel — also noticed by PragerU with its video of Douglas Murray’s remarks.)

But back to today’s video and its transcript:

There were 36,525 days in the twentieth century. Of these, none was more consequential than June 6th, 1944. D-Day: the Allied invasion of Normandy in Nazi-occupied France. It did not end World War II, but without it, the Nazi war machine would not and could not have been defeated.

We, of course, know the good guys – America, England and its allies – won. But in 1944, there was no certainty of success. In fact, there was just as much doubt as confidence. Winston Churchill’s senior advisor, Field Marshal Brooke, wrote in his diary, “I am very uneasy about the whole operation. It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.”

Brooke’s fears were entirely reasonable.

First there were tens of thousands of men and millions of tons of material and supplies that had to be moved one hundred miles across one of roughest bodies of water in the world – the English Channel. And it had to be kept secret. If the Germans knew where and when the allies were landing, they could mass forces against them and turn the beaches of northern France into killing fields.

To prevent this, the Allies took every possible precaution. Their air forces destroyed bridges, roads and railways that might be used by the Germans to rush troops to the invasion site. Everyone knew the attack was coming; the key was to keep the Germans guessing.

Fake radio chatter was broadcast to suggest the beaches near Calais would be the landing point. Double agents leaked fake details of units forming in South East England. And movie set designers built phony tanks, planes and ships to support the ruse of an army preparing to cross near Dover for the benefit of German reconnaissance pilots and spies.

The Germans swallowed it all. But the Nazis were not the only enemy the Allied forces faced. Mother Nature was just as threatening.

The 23,000 paratroopers and glider-borne infantry jumping into Normandy needed moderate winds to be effective. The twelve thousand Allied aircraft needed clear skies. The invasion fleet of six thousand vessels needed calm seas. And there had to be a low tide to expose Nazi obstacles and mines. When high winds and rain began pummeling the Channel, Allied supreme commander General Dwight Eisenhower postponed the invasion date of June 5th by twenty-four hours. That might not sound like a significant delay, but it was. All forces were concentrated and ready to go. All the plans, all the deceptions, could be exposed at any moment. Then came a new forecast. The weather appeared to be breaking. There might be a 12-hour window of opportunity.

Eisenhower gave the order: We go. Immediately, the greatest invasion fleet ever assembled set sail. On board were over 130,000 young soldiers.

Consider for a moment who these soldiers were. The average age of the American GI was 21. Most had never seen combat or even been fifty miles from their hometown. As they sailed toward the French shoreline, Eisenhower wrote a press release in case of catastrophe. D-Day was an all-or-nothing affair. A new invasion strategy would take months, if not years, to devise.

The initial battle reports were seriously troubling. At Omaha Beach, overlooked by cliffs honeycombed with trenches, cannon and machine-guns, the Americans took heavy losses. “I might have killed hundreds that morning,” reflected German soldier Hein Severloh, manning one of the bunkers. The rough surf also took its toll. Dr. Harold Baumgarten, with the U.S Army’s 116th Infantry, remembered, “Some of the fellows were pulled under by their wet combat jackets and heavy equipment. We couldn’t help; they just drowned.” Further along, Army Rangers also took heavy casualties as they scaled the cliffs under intense gunfire. However, by mid-day – with US naval support – the Germans, low on supplies and ammunition, began to fold. Nazi reinforcements, including hundreds of tanks, which might have made all the difference, were not ordered to Normandy until the afternoon. Before the Germans could mount an effective counter-attack, the Allies had secured all five landing beaches.

Churchill had expected twenty thousand to be killed on D-Day. Fortunately, heavy though they were, the losses were much lower. Of the 156,000 Allied personnel who hit the beaches that day, ten thousand became casualties. Of these, five thousand were killed.

No one died in vain.

Their sacrifice meant an end to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Another year of bitter fighting lay ahead, but D-Day – June 6, 1944, was a pivotal step on the road to forever removing the Nazi tyranny from Europe and the world.

I’m Peter Caddick-Adams, author of Sand and Steel: A New History of D-Day, for Prager University.

Top leaders like President Bill Clinton and California Governor Jerry Brown have shamefully changed their positions entirely, from protecting [...]]]> The Fox News host used the Prager University video format to review the disturbing recent history of the Democrat Party — how the one-time friend of the American worker went to permissive globalist to achieve power.

Top leaders like President Bill Clinton and California Governor Jerry Brown have shamefully changed their positions entirely, from protecting American citizens to recruiting foreigners who prefer the big government freebies that Ds provide. Plus a big amnesty from Democrats will leave many recipients feeling grateful at election time.

For example, Cesar Chavez is remembered by the left as an icon, but he acted to keep illegal aliens out of the United States.

Around 1975, Gov. Jerry Brown objected to a mass influx of refugees because Americans needed help. (Lately not so much.)

Here’s a transcript of the video, with Tucker Carlson narrating:

Illegal Immigration — It’s about Power, Prager University, October 29, 2018

I recently watched a group of protestors, most of them young, denouncing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. They were waving Mexican flags and shouting: “¡Si, se puede!”—”Yes, we can!”

This is now the rallying cry of the open-borders left, but it wasn’t always. In fact, I wondered if a single person at the protest knew where it came from.

The slogan first became famous fifty years ago, thanks to Cesar Chavez. He was the founder of the United Farm Workers union. When Chavez said “Si, se puede,” he meant something very different: “Yes, we can… seal the borders.”

Cesar Chavez hated illegal immigration.

He was Hispanic, obviously, and definitely on the left, but he fought to keep illegal Mexican immigrants out of this country. He understood that peasants from Latin America will always work for less than Americans will. That’s why employers prefer them. Chavez knew that. “As long as we have a poor country bordering California,” he once explained, “it’s going to be very difficult to win strikes.”

In 1969, Chavez led a march down the center of California to protest the hiring of illegal immigrant produce pickers. Marching alongside him was Democratic Senator Walter Mondale, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the longtime aide to Martin Luther King.

Ten years later, Chavez dispatched armed union members into the desert to assault Mexican nationals who were trying to sneak across the border. Chavez’s men beat immigrants with chains and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses fire-bombed and their cars burned.

Chavez wasn’t embarrassed about any of this. He bragged about it.

No matter. Chavez remains a progressive hero. President Obama declared his birthday a commemorative federal holiday.  It’s an official day off in half a dozen states.  There’s a college named after him, and dozens of public schools.

Cesar Chavez’s life is a reminder of how much the left has changed—and how quickly.

Until recently, most Democrats agreed with Chavez. They opposed unchecked immigration because they knew it hurt American workers. And they were right.

One study by a Harvard economist examined the effects of the mass migration of Cuban refugees to this country in 1980—the so-called Mariel boatlift. He found that American workers in Miami with a high school education saw their wages fall by more than thirty percent after the refugees arrived. If you believe in supply and demand, this is not surprising.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown opposed letting Vietnamese refugees into California on the grounds that the state already had enough poor people. As he put it at the time, “There is something a little strange about saying, ‘Let’s bring in 500,000 more people’ when we can’t take care of the one million Californians out of work.”

First term Senator Joe Biden of Delaware agreed; he introduced federal legislation to curb the arrival of the Vietnamese.

Two decades later, leading Democrats were still wary of mass immigration, especially illegal immigration. As Bill Clinton put it in the 1995 State of the Union address, “…Americans… are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”

No prominent Democrat would say anything like that today without being denounced as a racist. Clinton got a standing ovation.

As late as 2006, there were still liberals who cared about the economic effects of immigration, legal or illegal. “Immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants,” explained economist Paul Krugman in the New York Times. “…We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skilled immigrants. Mainly, that means better controls on illegal immigration.”

That same year, Senator Hillary Clinton voted for a fence on the Mexican border. So did Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and 23 other Senate Democrats.

Not anymore.

Twenty years after Bill Clinton told Americans they had the right to be upset about illegal immigration, his wife scolded the country for enforcing border controls.

So, what changed?

Not the economics of it. The law of supply and demand remained in effect. It’s not a coincidence that as illegal immigration surged, wages for American workers stagnated. What changed is that Democrats stopped caring about those workers. About the middle class, really.

Why?

Here’s the answer, in four simple facts.

One: According to a recent study from Yale, there are at least 22 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.

Two: Democrats plan to give all of them citizenship. Read the Democrats’ 2016 party platform.

Three: Studies show the overwhelming majority of first-time immigrant voters vote Democrat.

Four: The biggest landslide in American presidential history was only 17 million votes.

The payoff for Democrats: permanent electoral majority for the foreseeable future. In a word: power.

That’s the point, no matter what they tell you; American workers be damned.

I’m Tucker Carlson.

As [...]]]> The left’s censorship is a worsening problem these days, since the liberal overlords of Silicon Valley and beyond demand that the little people to conform to their globalist open-borders worldview. Liberal censors insist, for one thing, that their foolishly idealized view of diversity be obeyed as gospel, even when the facts clearly indicate otherwise.

As a result of the harassment, critics of sharia and its parent ideology political islam have gotten a lot of trouble. Not only are their lives in danger because of murderous jihadists — Dutch freedom fight Geert Wilders has required 24/7 security for years — but critics who cite chapter and verse of the koran’s commands for violence against infidels often have their sources of financial support shut down.

Arguably top on that list is author Robert Spencer who has been informing the free world about the threat of aggressive sharia for years through his many books and website JihadWatch.org.

Robert Spencer appeared with Tucker Carlson a year ago about being dropped by PayPal.

Lurking in the background and pulling strings is the fake hate spotter the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that has parlayed bogus accusations against honorable people into a multi-million-dollar empire. These days, the left is working to impoverish conservatives by cutting off normal means of making donations such as Paypal.

Robert Spencer described his struggles in a recent video that was derived from an article in PJ Media:

Robert Spencer: The Left Moves Fast to Silence Me, By Robert Spencer, PJ Media, August 27, 2018

First Alex Jones was banned by nearly all the social media giants. Then Twitter banned Gavin McInnes. Then Facebook blocked Dennis Prager’s Prager University videos, although it later backtracked and apologized. Then Patreon and GoFundMe banned me, and make no mistake: you may dislike Jones, McInnes, Prager, and me, but this isn’t over. The Left is moving quickly now to silence all dissent, and there is no telling who could be next. It could be you.

Patreon started the ball rolling when they deleted the account I had started to raise funds to renovate an old TV studio, which I had hoped to use for Jihad Watch videos. Patreon gave me no explanation for banning me other than that MasterCard had demanded that they do so, and the only explanation from MasterCard was published in Breitbart News:

A Mastercard spokesperson responded to a Breitbart News request for comment with the following statement. “As part of our normal process, we share information about websites that may have illegal content with the acquirer — or merchant’s bank — that connects them to our network to accept card payments. The acquirer would then review the site for compliance with legal requirements and our standards. They would then determine what action to take. In this case, the acquirer advised us that they decided to terminate acceptance.”

What “illegal content”?

Which website — Patreon or Jihad Watch? All I had at Patreon was a video stating my hopes to rebuild the studio, and a notice about an upcoming livestream. At Jihad Watch, all we have are news articles, almost all from mainstream news sources, with commentary. To what “illegal content” is MasterCard referring?

It is not (yet) illegal in the United States to criticize Islam and to oppose jihad mass murder and the Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others. It is, however, illegal to do so under Sharia. Is MasterCard operating according to Sharia blasphemy laws now?

Shortly after that, I started a GoFundMe page to make up for the loss of Patreon. But after a few days, GoFundMe canceled my account and refunded all the donations. GoFundMe sent me this explanation:

It seems you’re using WePay [GoFundMe’s service to pay those who receive donations] for one or more of the activities prohibited by our Terms of Service …

WePay is unable to process payments related to Hate, violence, racial intolerance, terrorism, the financial exploitation of a crime, or items or activities that encourage, promote, facilitate, or instruct others regarding the same.

There was, of course, no further explanation.

It’s very clear what’s going on. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) claims that I am a “hate group leader,” and that’s that: when the SPLC says “jump,” Patreon and MasterCard say “how high?”

Indeed, the SPLC’s infallibility in such matters is taken for granted by all the social media giants as well. This is despite the SPLC’s massive admission of error in the Maajid Nawaz case, in which they paid a $3.3 million settlement to a Muslim reformer they accused of being an “anti-Muslim extremist” (which is what they call me). The SPLC’s far-Left political agenda, in lumping legitimate groups in with the likes of the KKK and neo-Nazis in order to discredit and destroy them, is also obvious.

But GoFundMe, like Patreon and MasterCard, allowed me no appeal, no discussion, no questioning of the SPLC’s fiat.

And of course, it isn’t just the SPLC. It is now taken for granted by large segments of the American population, and by innumerable people elsewhere, that to oppose jihad mass murder of innocent civilians and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others is “hate” — or as GoFundMe puts it, “Hate” with a capital “H.”

I remember how flabbergasted I was in 2003 when I was on MSNBC with Keith Olbermann and Ibrahim Hooper of Hamas-linked CAIR, and Hooper called me a “hatemonger.” I thought, “It’s ‘hate’ to oppose jihad terror? That will never fly.”

But it has. And the outcome will be that more and more people will be afraid to oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression for fear of incurring these charges, and this discrimination and libel.

I’m going to be doing what I can to challenge GoFundMe’s uncritical acceptance of the SPLC’s smear of me, and the likely same uncritical acceptance by MasterCard/Patreon. But the SPLC has hundreds of millions of dollars and I don’t. And many who don’t realize how vulnerable they are will applaud what is happening to me because they don’t realize or believe how easily the same tactics can and will be turned on them. But they will be.

This is getting very serious. It won’t stop with me. After my adventures with Patreon and GoFundMe, MasterCard and Visa stopped processing donations for the David Horowitz Freedom Center, with which I am affiliated, although they backtracked after an outcry.

Despite this small victory, it is clear that the Left is moving quickly to silence all dissenting voices in the run-up to the 2018 elections. The freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society, and it is rapidly being destroyed in the United States. Not only are Horowitz, and me, and Jones, and Prager, and McInnes being silenced — the pressure on the credit card companies shows that the Left is now trying to make sure that we cannot make a living, and will be quite literally destroyed, personally as well as professionally.

There will be more victims. This totalitarian action needs to be stopped quickly, or it will destroy all who are not doctrinaire Leftists — and, without any doubt, the United States as a free society.