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Daniel Greenfield: The War on You - How the Left and Silicon Valley are Destroying Freedom and more...
Daniel Greenfield: The War on You - How the Left and Silicon Valley are Destroying Freedom
 Liberals working at "open platforms" like Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (with management complicity) discriminate against conservatives' views have operated without fear of government intervention under the Obama era. How, under the Trump administration, do non-liberal opinion-holders expressing views privately, online, or among co-workers and friends become affected? Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow who addresses the issue of liberal / government over-reach in his The Point blog on FrontPage Magazine, addressed a David Horowitz Freedom Center audience on 19 June '19. The talk (videoed here) is entitled "The War on You - How the Left and Silicon Valley are Destroying Freedom." Mr. Greenfield begins: "I hope your cell phones are turned off. I’m not saying this because I’m worried about interruptions. If you have a really creative ringtone and it goes off during the talk, I might try humming a few bars. But Alexa, Siri, and the rest of the smart assistants never stop spying… am I allowed to say spying, or is James Comey going to pop up and object… and I’m going to say some very not nice things about Silicon Valley and you can never tell when those girls are listening. If I come back home and there’s an Amazon Prime package with a horse’s head in it, I’ll know why. ... The internet used to be about empowering individuals. Then the big dot coms like Google came along and made it a gated community. If you wanted to exist on the internet, you had to play by their rules. Then social media came along and made the individual the center of the internet again. You saw what Aunt Sally wanted you to see, instead of what Google wanted you to see. After Trump won, the wheel began turning again. Social media is being censored, fact checked and transformed into another Google where somebody in San Francisco decides what you should see. And what you shouldn’t see. Take YouTube, its whole pitch is that it’s about You. These days it’s censoring a whole bunch of you's, PragerU, Steven Crowder, James O’Keefe, because there’s no room for You on YouTube. ... "  (Mr. Greenfield's speech transcript continues below-the- fold). Freedom Center editor and writer, Mark Tapson, discusses the normalizing of liberal fascism in the mainstream - and discrimination against libertarians and Republicans.  How discrimination by political affiliation has enabled Big-Tech to enforce a legal form of segregation. Follow Mr. Greenfield's curated "The Point" on FrontPage Magazine.  See transcript below: "The War on You"- How the Left and Silicon Valley are destroying freedom - by Daniel Greenfield "There’s no room for You on the internet. That’s because Silicon Valley and the Left have a few things in common. They both believe that bigger is always better, that people can be reduced to numbers and that the right side of history is just a click away. And they’re both cults. The Left and Silicon Valley both get high on their own visions of the future. Conservatives don’t live in the future. We exist in the past and the present. We’re grounded in reality. And sometimes that makes it harder for us to take on movements that exist in fantasy land. That think believing in progress means never having to deal with the messy realities of human nature. Today, conservatives are struggling with the Dot Coms and the Left because both of them have a dream, and the dream is a world in which everyone is reduced to a group and there are no conservatives. How did we get here? Once upon a time, we used to have political debates. These were an ancient concept handed down to us from the Greeks in which people with different ideas got together into a room and discussed them. What a concept! We don’t have debates or discussions anymore. What we have is a culture war. In a culture war, you don’t have discussions. What you do is express your hatred for the other side and try to destroy them because you can’t coexist with them. You kick members of the administration and just ordinary guys wearing Make America Great Again caps out of restaurants and bars. You do it because they’re disgusting and subhuman. You kick them out for the same reason that a few generations ago, Democrats kicked black men out of bars and restaurants. That’s against the law now, but kicking people out of bars because you think they’re Republicans is legal. At least it’s legal in New York as determined by a Democrat judge. The old kind of segregation went out of style. The new kind is really popular. In 1960, only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. And only 5 percent had a problem with their son or daughter marrying somebody from another party. What I would call, bipartisan marriage. Fast forward to the Obama era and 86% of Americans were on board with interracial marriage and 40% disapproved of bipartisan marriage. That’s the new segregation. The new segregation is defined not by your DNA or your skin color, but by what you believe. There are rumors that some Washington D.C. government office buildings have two sets of water fountains. One marked Progressive and the other Conservative. The Conservative water fountain is about half the height of the other and never gets cleaned. If the conservative gets caught using the other water fountain, he can be found hanging from a piece of abstract modern art. That’s a joke. But not by that much. Compare the cushy digs at the CFPB to how many of our soldiers are living on food stamps. There are two very different living standards in government. That’s why USDA employees in D.C. are kicking up a fuss at the idea of having to move to Kansas City. Missouri? Come on now. That’s where the feudal serfs working the farms we regulate live. That’s no place for a good member of the D.C. government club. Segregation means that USDA government employees and farmers, Ivy League institutions and people who believe in biology, California dot com tech platforms and conservatives, and New York restaurants and Trump supporters don’t mix. I’ve called this a civil war. But a civil war doesn’t capture the scope of it. It makes you think of guys in blue and gray shooting cannons at each other. But when those guys in blue and gray stopped fighting, they mostly treated each other decently. During WW1, soldiers from both sides could take a break and throw snowballs at each other. What we have is much uglier and grimmer than a shooting war. We have a culture war. And I don’t like the term culture war. Because it makes you think that this is an argument about whether Beethoven’s Fifth or Marvel’s The Avengers are better. Culture is an expression of who we are. In 1960, most Americans could still share a common culture. Democrats and Republicans could eat in the same restaurants, live in the same neighborhoods and even marry each other. That’s getting harder and harder these days. These days people get fired when their employers find out they’re conservatives. Or they’re forced to hide who they are, to go along until they’re asked to do something repugnant, as an engineer at Pinterest was recently asked to do, and then they’re forced out and fired anyway. Every conservative has stories about what he’s comfortable saying at work and what his lefty colleagues are comfortable saying at work. Or in school, on a date, in a church or synagogue. Or at a family reunion. Here are three recent new segregation stories from this month. Steven Crowder was demonetized by YouTube. Kyle Kashuv was denied admission to Harvard for things he said when he was 16 years old. Rep. Will Hurd, a black Republican and former CIA officer from Texas, was booted from speaking at a cybersecurity conference for being against abortion. And there’s a particular line from Rep. Will Hurd’s segregation story, a black man facing segregation, this time, not because of his skin color, but because he opposes partial birth abortion. If Martin Luther King could have lived to see that one, it might have blown his mind. Black Hat, which was the cybersecurity conference that decided it couldn’t have a liberal black Republican who doesn’t like Trump, but also doesn’t believe in killing babies, discuss cybersecurity lest its experts be too traumatized by his violation of segregation norms, put out a statement. Here’s what it said, "We misjudged the separation of technology and politics.” Isn’t that a great line? “We misjudged the separation of technology and politics.” As in, we thought that cybersecurity and abortion were two separate things. We thought that we didn’t have to segregate our cybersecurity conference because even people whose views on abortion we might disagree with have something to say about technology.” And the woke crowd forced them to recognize that there’s no separation. If you can’t separate technology from politics, then you have to segregate people whose politics you disagree with. Think about what no separation between technology and politics, the one that got a cybersecurity conference to boot a black pro-life Republican, means when you post pro-life content on Facebook? On Pinterest, this meant that pro-life content was censored, first by falsely labeling it as pornography, and then by falsely labeling it as harmful disinformation. When Project Veritas tried to report on it, its videos were censored by YouTube and Twitter. No separation between politics and technology means no room for anyone who disagrees with the politics of the people who control the tech platforms. And that means segregation. When you can’t separate ideas from people, then you have to separate people. Because there’s no room for both. “We misjudged the separation of technology and politics” is the new segregation in a nutshell. Conservatives are being banned from social media because there’s no separation between technology and politics. They’re kicked out of restaurants because there’s no separation between politics and food service. They’re fired from their jobs because there’s no separation between politics and work. What does it really mean when there’s no separation between politics and anything? What does that do when your politics aren’t the right kind of politics? What does living in a society in which there is no room for disagreement because there is no separation between politics and anything else? That is the brave new world we’re in. The whole premise of a liberal society, one where Republicans and Democrats can work in each other’s companies, play softball games together, marry each other and share the internet is that we can separate politics from our daily lives, we can put the politics away and just live together. When we can’t do that, then the country is divided, segregated, forced into a permanent culture war. When the Left says that there’s no separation between politics and life, what they’re really saying is that if you don’t have the right kind of politics, you don’t have a right to live. Maybe in another country. Or somewhere in Missouri. But nowhere near us. Citizenship in their society is conditional not on where you were born or your citizenship documents, that’s why they’re opening the border to illegal aliens, but on your politics. If you don’t have the right kind of politics, then at best, you can exist segregated into economic and digital ghettos, temporarily tolerated if you keep your mouth shut. If all relationships are based on politics, then the only possible relationship between the leftists who believe that and everyone else is either no relationship, segregation, or a civil war. What really brought on the crisis is that the tech guru in San Francisco can swipe his phone and see a post on his Facebook feed from your Aunt Sally gushing about how much she loves Trump. And he decides that there isn’t enough room on the internet for him and for Aunt Sally. That’s the new segregation. The old segregation confined people you didn’t want to mix with. But the internet makes it really hard to do that. There’s no breathing room. We’re all existing in the same digital space. And that’s driving the new segregation. If bars and restaurants kick out Republicans, are you really surprised that Silicon Valley is searching around for a solution to the conservative problem? Silicon Valley has always been a strange mix of the technological and the pseudo-spiritual. Its gurus, notice the word, need to believe that what they are doing isn’t just making them rich and giving them the ability to afford a better class of speedboat, mansion and orgy, but is making the world a better place. Their progress has to be progressive. When President Trump won, it was a huge culture shock for them because he won by using their platforms. He didn’t just win in Missouri or Georgia. He won on Facebook and Twitter. That’s what set off the so-called fake news and disinformation and hate speech crisis. The big dot coms had a dark night of the soul. Google those videos of Google executives crying the day after Trump won. The tears are real. Their heartbreak is authentic. They’re breaking down because their platforms were supposed to be tools for moving America and the world to the Left. The Arab Spring using Twitter was awesome. Trump using Twitter is, “Oh no, that’s not how this is supposed to work.” Transgender activists are supposed to use Twitter to complain about representation in video games. Instead this guy, who talks about banning Muslims, is running Twitter. Trump’s victory challenged their conviction that they had dedicated their lives to the right thing. That’s also where the new segregation is coming from. Google spent $114 million on diversity initiatives in just one year. Facebook’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg banned, All Lives Matter slogans at Facebook. Do those sound like companies that have any use for conservatives? Of course they’re banning conservatives from social media and from the internet. That’s what you do in a culture war. The whole point of a culture war was that you can’t share a culture with these deplorable bitter clingers. First, you destroy their culture. And they’ve done a pretty good job of that. Then you build a culture in which conservatives don’t exist except as villains. If you’ve watched a TV show, seen a movie or read a comic book after 2002, you know that’s the existing reality. Finally, you try to wipe out the people themselves. When Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, or whatever billion-dollar internet company was caught at it now, rigs its algorithms, shadowbans and bans, demonetizes and deplatforms conservatives, writes new terms of service which are only enforced one way, that’s not just bias, it’s segregation. We better not catch you on our Silicon Valley platform after dark. Think about terms like disparate impact and how they apply here. It’s no different than the “No Coloreds Allowed” signs. And should be treated the same way. We’re in this war because one side, the Left, wants a world in which there is no room for separating technology and politics. And that means there’s no room for conservatives, black or white, not just at a cybersecurity conference, but on Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest or anywhere else. Once upon a time, American taxpayers, 90 percent of them conservative, by the standards of today’s social justice whiners, paid for DARPA and for the creation of the internet. Including Google. Today, they don’t want to share the internet or the country with us. This war snuck-up on conservatives because we don’t think this way. Conservatives are okay with having a separation between technology and politics, and food service and politics, and entertainment and our politics. We don’t need the waiter serving us to share our views. And we don’t need the person whose plates we’re clearing away to agree with us about everything. We are more casual, more relaxed and less fanatical. We’re the guys who keep saying, “Can’t we work this out.” And the other side says, “No way in hell”, because they, sincerely believe, that we’re evil. Would you agree to work things out with evil people? Would you try to coexist with Nazis? The question is, what do we do? How do we fight? The Freedom Center in its incarnations was one of the first organizations to recognize what the Left really was, informed by the understanding of David Horowitz, who had been there. And David Horowitz has spent a lot of time trying to convey the nature of the war to conservatives. But the stakes are becoming more obvious every day. Once we recognize the battlefield and the nature of the war, there are many ways to fight. Conservatives are facing political segregation by businesses and institutions, dominated by the Left. And we have to be willing to describing it as not just unfair or biased. We have to call it what it is. Segregation. Once we understand that, we’ve defined the problem and how it can be fought. When urging the adoption of a Civil Rights Act in response to segregation, President Kennedy said, "I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public--hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.” "This seems to me to be an elementary right," he added. It’s an elementary right that conservatives are starting to lose. And that many Republican elected officials are not paying attention to. We haven’t had racial segregation in restaurants in this country in a long time. Today we have political segregation. Most Americans are okay with interracial marriage. Many oppose bipartisan marriage. Most civil rights legislation in this country failed to protect political affiliation. The Left weaponized identity politics, building legal protections for its own minority activist groups and then using them to strip away protections from conservatives. What happened to Steven Crowder is an example of that. The Left has wrecked the black community, it’s perpetuated bigotry and division to perpetuate those laws that it could use as weapons to shut down speech and grow its power. And, under the guise of fighting racism and a thousand isms, the Left has brought back segregation to this country. It brought segregation to government and the educational system a long time ago. But now it’s beginning to impose a digital and real iron curtain of segregation across the country. And if we’re not clear about what it is and what we’re fighting, we will lose. This is segregation. Its goal is to erase us, to cancel us, as the new jargon goes, to impose a nightmarish world in which there is no separation between politics and life. And everyone with the wrong politics gets sent to the back of the bus. Or destroyed if they don’t go quietly. We’re not just fighting for free speech. We are fighting to end the New Segregation. Generations after Kennedy’s speech, the right of all Americans to be served in facilities open to the public, like restaurants, is under siege, and their speech faces an unprecedented threat from platforms which almost completely control the routing of speech on the internet. If we don’t fight for that elementary right, there will be no other rights left. What’s really going on here underneath the surface? Why is a part of the country trying to segregate the other part? Why do they think this way? What has made them define humanity around politics? To deeply religious people, life is defined by religion. It’s how you see and explain the world. It’s why you’re here. It’s why you live and why you die. It defines your relationship with other people. These days, America isn’t a deeply religious country. It’s a deeply political country. The secular religion of politics completely defines how the Left sees everything. Politics isn’t something you do at the ballot box. It’s what you believe. It’s how you shop. It’s who you’re friends with. It’s what you watch and read. It’s who you marry. It’s whether or not you even have children. A growing trend among millennials is not to have children because they think that the great flying global warming monster is going to eat them all up. When you decide to kill or die, not to have children because of your beliefs, those are beliefs every bit as compelling as religion. Politics is the force that gives their lives meaning. It has the redemptive power of religion. It’s what gives their bright period of existence on earth a purpose. So of course they’re going to kick infidels and unbelievers out of their restaurants and their sites. Because another, and maybe better way of describing this culture war, is a religious war. This is about two value systems. Two belief systems. And two very different convictions about why we’re here, in this country and on this planet, trapped together in one country. America was always multicultural in some ways. It had people from different religious persuasions and people who weren’t that persuaded about religion. But this is something very different. It’s a struggle between fundamentally opposing ideas about life, morality and purpose. No separation between politics and technology, or food service or anything else really means something else. No separation between church and state. The Left has embedded its secular belief system into entertainment, into business and technology and education and into government. These last two are violations of the separation of church and state. Each generation has come out as indoctrinated as the graduates of the Islamic schools of ISIS. Of course they did. We sent them to schools run by fanatical missionaries for somebody else’s religion. And then we wondered why their belief system and values had become so different than our own. Our educational institutions are centralized. They’re machines for inducing conformity. We always knew that. Somewhere along the way, the conformity that they were inducing wasn’t working for a corporation or being patriotic, but hating this country and dedicating themselves to destroying it. Centralized institutions are fundamentally un-American. They’re machines for destroying individuality and eliminating the You. Silicon Valley, which collects every piece of data about everyone, is an even bigger machine for centralizing and destroying the individual, and replacing him with a trending mass. Because this is a war on You. And by “You”, I don’t just mean conservatives. I mean the individual. The objective of every totalitarian collectivist movement is the destruction of the individual. A crisis, fear and hate, are used to mobilize groups. Peer pressure maintains intimidation and conformity. The term culture war is most often associated with Communist China. China wasn’t stamping out Republicans. It was spreading internal terror. Just like the Soviet Union, Cuba and the 2020 Democrats who keep attacking each other for not being socialist enough. This isn’t just about a policy. It’s about destroying individual initiative. Why did nothing get done in the Soviet Union? Because there was no individual initiative. Why is China so actively building ghost cities that nobody needs? Because there’s no individual initiative. When there’s no individual initiative, there’s just an on and off switch. You turn the switch on when you want everyone to work. If you don’t turn it off, the workforce wears out and nothing happens anymore. But you don’t have individuals trying to improve their lives and making decisions for themselves. In the Chinese version of the Ugly Duckling fairy tale, he doesn’t turn into a swan, he gets eaten. That’s socialism in a nutshell. You join the party. You shout all the slogans. Or you get eaten. On social media, you tweet the right things. Or you get banned. At work or in school, you take all the toxic masculinity and evils of whiteness courses, you repeat back the propaganda, or you get eaten. At a New York restaurant, you pretend to be progressive. Or, instead of eating dinner, you get eaten. What the radicals care about is destroying the individual and forcing him to conform to the mass. It’s a war on you. And the culture war is their weapon to radicalize the people in their bubble, the Warsaw Pact sanctuary states for illegal aliens where abortion is legal until a child’s 4th birthday and the only people who have guns are celebrity bodyguards, into demonizing, segregating, taking away the rights and eventually killing everyone else. Does that sound too scary and extreme? Hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe over a hundred years of history are wrong. Maybe the hundred million people killed by these same movements won’t do here what they did around the world. Maybe they’ll just bankrupt us, destroy our culture and reduce us to a third world country. That’s the best case scenario. But, I want you to look carefully at the climate of hatred. Trump derangement syndrome. The escalating violence. The growing bans. And imagine that they were happening in an African country somewhere. Imagine that it was the Hutus who were passing discriminatory laws, building discrimination into workplaces and into businesses, engaging in violence and treating members of the outside group as a national security risk, spying on them (and it is spying) and arresting them for being in the opposition. What would you think? This isn’t the civil war. I’ve called it that, but the civil war was basically civil. We have fundamental disagreements about the laws that govern our country. The Democrats have rejected the legitimacy of every Republican president elected this century. They’ve built up their secessionist governments and their activist judges who insist that they are the ones in charge. They’ve even tried to sign treaties with other countries and collude with foreign governments. At some point, a blue state cop might take a shot at an ICE member and that will be a Fort Sumter moment. And that’s civil war stuff. But there’s worse things than a civil war. In a civil war, you disagree about power, policy and government. In a culture war, the enemy becomes the other. A creature so evil and opposed to everything good and true that he has no right to exist. That’s not the Civil War. That’s Communism. It’s Nazism. If you’re here, you’re probably the you, I’m talking about. You might be a conservative. You might be a Trump supporter. Or you just might be a classical liberal who holds unconventional views on some subjects, such as the prohibitive nature of Muslims flying planes into big buildings, or the right of the Jews to have their own country, instead of their own Democrat lobbying group militantly fighting for such vital Jewish issues as Planned Parenthood. Any of those things would make you one of the You to what is becoming a radical movement. But everyone who thinks for themselves is a You. And the objective is to turn you into a They. The culture war is physical, it’s intellectual and it’s moral. It’s often petty. Kicking people out of restaurants is petty. If it happens once or twice, you just go on your way and laugh it off. Going into Facebook jail once or twice is no big deal. My original Facebook account was banned. But when it keeps happening, when there’s a pattern, it’s not something petty. It’s the system. The culture war is a pattern of events that might be individually petty, that in some cases you could put down to individual error or somebody having a bad day, to a company making a bad decision or a manager overreaching his authority, but when it happens enough times, it’s a culture war. And when you go behind the scenes, as Project Veritas did, you come away with evidence that it’s not an accident, it’s calculated discrimination. Just like it was in the South. The pattern makes a statement. The statement is you have no right to be here. No right to exist. It starts with the people who stick out the most. The ones who wear a Make American Great Again cap to a New York City bar or post provocative stuff on social media. But once the squeaky wheels are greased, as they say in Brooklyn or New Jersey, and the nails that stick out get hammered in, as they say in Washington D.C., or the ugly ducklings all get eaten, as they say in the People’s Republic of China, then it moves on to the people who aren’t obvious, but are still a problem. And in the end, everybody is a problem. In Cambodia, Brother Number 3 was having people killed because they wore glasses. In Cuba, they went after the saxophone because it had been invented by a Belgian. And Belgians were colonialists. If you think you won’t run afoul of them at some point, the odds are that you’re wrong. Radicals don’t just deal with problems. They create problems. Because their entire reason for existence is solving problems. And if you’re an individual, you’re a problem. The Left is fighting to segregate the country around their politics. That is where the struggle lies. Segregationist institutions should be condemned as the vanguard of a new confederacy dividing the country between the masters in San Francisco and the workers in Georgia. The same one that insists on creating sanctuary cities and preventing federal law enforcement from doing its duty. Its segregated schools, where it admits students based on race and expels students for their views, or their gender, should be treated the same way Eisenhower dealt with segregationist schools. Segregationist companies should be treated the same way that restaurants that wouldn’t serve black people were. How in the world can a diner in a small southern town be a public accommodation while Facebook and Google, which are pretty much the only game in town for half the planet, aren’t? There is room for legal activism here, but also moral activism. That includes civil disobedience, breaking the rules of a segregationist system as a form of protest. Every person who gets banned, fired or expelled should not be forgotten. They are part of a larger story and a bigger movement. It is our duty to keep their stories alive and to use them as examples of the new segregation. These stories have a legal purpose and a moral purpose. They mobilize our movement. By describing this war as segregation, we are making it clear who is dividing the country, who is discriminating, who is oppressing and who has the power and is abusing it. Leftists have spent generations claiming to be victims fighting for justice for the oppressed. That is the entire source of their moral power. To win, we have to take it away from them. We have to take it away from them the same way we took it away from their grandparents who were preaching Marxism and praising the Soviet Union. And some of those grandpas, like Bernie Sanders, are still with us and even running for president. The Left has used its power to segregate this country, to deprive people of their rights, and to turn us against each other and destroy our future. They have the power. We are fighting to take it back. The moral authority that they claim fighting segregation vested them with is our moral authority. The moral authority they claimed fighting for freedom from religious compulsion is our freedom. This is the new civil rights movement. Our civil rights. Our freedom. The freedom to speak, to believe, to think for ourselves and to build a united country, instead of a politically segregated banana republic. Religious war or culture war are different ways of saying what we believe and how we see ourselves. We believe in an America where people are free to believe and to live together. They don’t. Every time they censor, silence and banish, they show what they are and what the stakes are. Most Americans don’t like living this way. Conservatives, independents and even leftists are being traumatized, driven into frothing rage and kept that way, helplessly, trapped in fight or flight mode. That stress isn’t just bad for our society, it’s bad for their physical and mental health. In Oleg Atbashian’s book, he mentions that when Karl Marx was asked for his definition of happiness, he said, “Struggle.” That’s still the twisted definition of happiness for a lot of lefties. What does defining happiness as struggle really mean? It means that you’re only happy when you’re fighting someone else and when you’re making other people miserable. Or, as Orwell put it in 1984, picture a boot stamping on a human face forever. To people for whom happiness is struggle, their only joy in life comes from stamping on somebody’s else’s face. That’s the resistance, it’s the entire leftist campaign of terror and the new segregation. Struggle tears apart our society, not in pursuit of a happier society, but a more miserable one in which we are permanently trapped with our hands at each other’s throats. This is the leftist nightmare we’re living in. And it is our duty to call it out. The media claims that Trump has divided this country. The truth is that the media was dividing this country back when Trump was studying plans for another hotel. The left divided this country in the name of the endless struggle. Every time they win, they don’t sit back, they move on to another struggle, more reasons to divide and tear apart this country. One of the most important questions we have to ask ordinary Americans, independents, people who just don’t care, is do they want to go on living this way? Our society has been torn apart. Families, neighbors and colleagues can’t live together. And part of our moral power comes from offering a better way to be a united nation again. When America fought for Independence, many thought that a Republic wouldn’t work because it would degenerate into mob rule and crowds killing each other over chariot races and a Pretorian guard presiding over the whole mess. George Washington thought that political factions were a terrible idea. But America didn’t succumb because, even when we wore blue and gray and killed each other on battlefields whose names were once legendary, we were brothers and sisters. The recent campaign against Confederate memorials is a fundamental misunderstanding. Americans didn’t honor Confederate soldiers and generals because we agreed with their cause. If we thought that the Confederacy was right, why the hell did we spend 360,000 lives, not to mention the countless men who lost arms and legs, to defeat the Confederacy? Why does just about every city have a Union Station or Union Plaza or a Union something? We honored the other side as part of rebuilding a Union. We understood that we had to live together, to respect and honor each other, even if we disagreed to the death. It’s not just the monuments of dead southern men being toppled now. It’s the idea of coexistence. What those monuments represent is coexistence with people we disagree with and maybe even hate. And what toppling them represents is a refusal to coexist. The Confederate monuments paradoxically represent Union. And toppling them represents segregation. If there’s no separation between politics and life, then all that’s left is a civil war. Or a segregation in which the winners segregate the losers. What we can’t have is a united country built on a plurality of views. What we can’t have is America. We can live together as individuals. But when people form into a collective, when they go to war, not just against armies, but against identities, when their movements declare that whiteness or masculinity are evil, there’s no room for us to coexist as individuals. There’s no room for a You. Only for an Us and a Them. History is full of examples of how that story ends. We are no longer in the blue or gray. We’re no longer Republicans and Democrats. If we were, we could find common ground. We could marry each other, eat at the same restaurants and share the internet. Some of us believe in living in the America we know as individuals and accept our flaws and faults. Others have enlisted in fighting for a new world. A world in which there is no room for any human flaws or faults, which must be ground up and fed into a terrible machine, in which society must revolve around denouncing racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and whatever other crime of bigotry comes down the pike, and their perpetrators must be made examples of and destroyed. In which we must recognize and confess our sins, against the environment and utopia, and be punished for them. There is no room for us in that world. And no room for the individual. That is why the war is being waged in Silicon Valley, the birthplace of a new world, in which there are no individuals, only algorithms, and where everyone thinks differently in the same way. That is the world we must rise up and fight. There are a thousand ways to fight, but the first is to remember that we are individuals. And what they hate is our individuality. That is what mass movements always hate the most. We can win by fighting them, by building our own society, while refusing to let them overwhelm ours, but there are times, and perhaps I’m being too optimistic, we can win by reminding them of their own humanity. By reminding them of the world they have left behind. It can’t always work. Or even often. But there are stories out of the Soviet Union and Communist China where it did. The Left keeps promising its followers a better country. What they have created is a country torn apart by anger and hatred. They can never achieve a better country. Their promise of a better world is a lie. We must call them out on it. The Left is making the terrible roller coaster plunge from a movement of individuals recruited by playing on their pain, their aspirations, their idealism and their greed, to a hateful collective mass. The culture war is a symptom of the great and terrible fall. As they become more of a mass movement, their hatred for the other, and obsession with destroying You, is going to increase tenfold. In the midst of that moment, there is room for reminding those giving up their humanity to rage against gender and race, to become formless shapes quivering under the toxic sun lamp of ideology, of what it is to be human, to be an individual, to think for yourself. Thinking for ourselves, being individuals, is still our greatest weapon against the Left and Islam. At times it may leave us at a disadvantage, but we must never forget that our souls are our greatest treasure. Totalitarian movements don’t just seek to break our bodies. They want our minds, our hearts and our souls. When we refuse to give them up, when we never stop fighting the lies and never give up our humanity, we win. Thank you for coming out. Thank you for being part of the good fight. And, most of all, thank you for being you!"      The gentiles who hid Anne Frank - remembered on the 90th anniversary of her birthday and diary publishing
He is Victor Kugler, the Mr. Kraler of her diary. As the principal business partner of Otto Frank, Victor Kugler assumed managerial control of the Franks’ Amsterdam spice-importing business when Nazi persecution forced the Frank family into hiding. It was Victor Kugler who kept the business going and obtained food rations under what was the harshest German wartime occupation in all of Western Europe. Without Victor Kugler, Anne Frank and her family would have starved to death a month after going into hiding.
Several years after the end of the war, when the Dutch spice business collapsed following the Indonesian revolution that nationalized Dutch holdings, Victor Kugler emigrated to Toronto, Canada. There, he led a quiet life where nobody knew who he was and what he had done during the war. Only twenty years later he began to reveal his story.  The modern-day saga of this Righteous Gentile, who was honored as such at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, is told here in semi-documentary style, largely in his own words as told to Torontonian, Eda Shapiro, herself of Eastern European Jewish background; and by many others who knew him, as compiled by well-known Toronto writer-journalist Rick Kardonne.Interview (video) with Rick Kardonne, November 2014 at L.A. Museum of Tolerance: Q: Why is Victor Kugler the missing link in the Anne Frank saga?
Without Victor Kugler, the Franks and everyone else would have starved for a month. Q: After a month? A: After a month - for lack of food and lack of business.
Q: How long was he able to sustain them? A: From June 1942 to August '44. Q: How did you come across this story? A: I wrote for the Canadian and Jewish publications for over 15 or 20 years. And one of those who read me who who led the Likud organization in Toronto, met Irving Naftolin, who was a World War Two vet. Irving Naftolin was married to the late Edith Shapiro (not my Edith) but late Edith Shapiro - who was a teacher and journalist. She had all of the memoirs of Victor Kugler - who had lived in Toronto since 1955. Edith Shapiro took them in and after she died he brought them to me because of my journalistic activities for the Jewish press in Toronto. And I got the memoirs in a brown paper bag. My job was to take all of these notes out of the brown paper bag and organize them into a book and this is the result. Q: Is the lesson of Anne Frank and the righteous Gentiles who stood up for their Jewish neighbors- getting lost, do you feel, in this generation? A: In some quarters, yes, but in others, no. We have an excellent publication in Toronto called the National Post that constantly brings up the righteous Gentiles. So among some media outlets yes, but not all of them.  Q: Looking back at at the Holocaust and and it's lesson for today - if - and and we see this in France - we see the the society turning against their Jewish community their Jewish citizens and it's spreading throughout Europe . . . A: Yes? Q: Are there Gentiles who will stand up again to protect the Jews, and in fact, even those who express support for Israel which is ... A: I think there are good people, righteous Gentiles in every country. I think so. Q: What were the risks that Victor undertook? A: Being caught by the Gestapo. Which he was eventually and he was sent to a slave labor camp because he wasn't Jewish. But the Franks and the Van Pels's were Jewish so they were sent to Auschwitz. Only the Red Army liberated them - they were sent to Bergen-Belsen where they died of disease. That was three weeks before the British invaded and liberated them. Q: What was special about Victor? A: He was a religious Lutheran - and he had friends - and he said "I had to do this for my friends." He had grown up you know in unfavorable social circumstances - nothing to be about being Jewish because he wasn't Jewish. But this left an imprint on him which he did for the rest of his life. Q: Was he typical of the Dutch public's attitude towards their Jewish neighbors? A: First of all he was born in Austria. So he could have been but the Dutch were not a hundred percent sympathetic to the Jews like the Danes were. Q: So the Austrians weren't, the Dutch weren't, and yet because of his friendship ... A: Yeah, with Otto Frank. And the Swedes did receive all of the Danish Jewish refugees and they were in Sweden for the rest of the war. Q: Is protecting Jews now a matter of history or would you consider it a potential for the future? A: Both, both. Q: Do you see anti-semitism as a potential resurgence? A: I do but I think that a lot of these so-called liberal media types are more responsible. Actually in Canada, the very conservatives, if anything, are friendlier to Jews now Q: But the CBC - would you consider them liberal press? A: Liberal press - and not very . . . occasionally they run a good piece but . . . not reliable. Rabbis Hier and Cooper: Anne Frank at 90 – Six points she might have added to her diary today:
Wednesday, June 12 would have been Anne Frank’s 90th birthday. Through her iconic diary, she has become the global symbol of 1.5 million other virtually forgotten innocent Jewish children murdered by Nazi Germany and its willing European collaborators during the Holocaust. So how would she have updated her diary today? Here are six possibilities, according to Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
  75th anniv of D-Day, & WWII felt at L.A. National Cemetery's Memorial Day
There is a concern is that this 75th anniversary of D-Day will be the last milestone (until 2024) for most of the living survivors.
 Rep. Ted Lieu's address to Memorial Day ceremony at L.A. National Cemetery 
Why Girl Scout, Lisa Lu, an L.A. Memorial Day Ceremony leader, is heading to West Point. 
Mr. Greg Lee, Chairman of California State Commander Veterans Council and Calif. Commander of Jewish War Veterans sat on the stage as representative of California Veterans Associations.  In this exclusive interview, he reveals how did Jewish military casualties graves become able to be marked with Star of David tombstones.    TurningPoint USA group presents Robert Spencer on UCLA campus - under heavy security
 While the audience was very supportive, the security was very tight. A few older students (who appeared to be Muslim) arrived late and after listening for awhile, departed early.   As socialists inject anti-Zionism to dominate progressive parties, how many Democrats will follow British Jews rightward towards Republican candidates?
 At the top layer, the reason is an obsessive hatred of the Jewish state of Israel that has been building for decades, but which went into overdrive after the second Palestinian intifada and the failure (due to Palestinian rejectionism) of the Clinton-brokered peace talks of 2000. A generation of Labour youth has now reached political maturity believing that Israel represents some kind of demonic evil. Quite ordinary party members therefore think nothing (indeed they are proud) of turning up on anti-Israel demonstrations alongside supporters of murderous anti-Semitic terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. It is often argued that anti-Zionist fanaticism started out in anti-colonialist, rather than traditionally anti-Semitic, Leftist traditions positing the Palestinians as a kind of pet, Third World liberation movement. But by now, what's the difference? Traditionally anti-Semitic and modern anti-Zionist tropes are largely interchangeable. In both incarnations, real-world Jews are (and were) targeted for delegitimization, boycotts, and, ultimately, destruction. (Read more)   Question: We've had a year of the Labour Party getting closer to office and what's the condition of Zionism and Zionists in the political zeitgeist in Britain today in the UK today? Answer: Well, I don't know if you heard the Labour MP John Ryan Sunday evening - Labour Friends of Israel. She's not even Jewish she was almost crying because what's happened to the Labour Party is really is what's happened to Zionism in the country. It's just tragic. We're on a downhill slope from last year when I spoke to you we have a Conservative government that is sleep-walking towards Brexit with no real discernible leadership. Everyone agrees on that and we, on the other hand, we have a Labour possible government who haven't really increased in the polls normally with them they would be miles ahead but they're not because of this man Corbyn. Because his refusal to eject anti-Semites on his party and because of the general fear by so many Jews in Britain that anti-semitism is taking a real hold on what was a great supporter of the State of Israel, the Labour Party. Question: Hasn't the the Jewish community in the UK traditionally been a liberal-minded politically? Answer: Very much so - very much like the Jews of United States of America great Democratic supporters so who I mean I happen to know that many of our great rabbis have been quietly Labour supporters but not anymore. How can they be? Labour does not have any of the values that we espouse - particularly with regard to the Middle East and the growth of the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe particularly with that and also because they condemn the United States and Israel as two colonialist powers and that's how they see the world. It's becoming a Left/Marxist party that no one wants to touch with a bargepole! Question: When you say Marxist - meaning that the beginnings of socialism leading to communism? Answer: The people who are now running the Labour Party want to reject all previous Labour members of parliament who had an idea that Tony Blair was the correct leader. The New Labour- as it used to be which was so successful in popular they want them all out they want to start again. Question: What was the the the psychological adjustment that it took for liberal British Jews to say that this this party which I've voted reflexively for so long- to be able to say are you going to vote against them now? Answer: Because of the way they treated first of all the Jewish MPs who are in the Labour party. They and of all the tweets and the terrible anti-semitic slurs against them that they and they realized now that we are in a very toxic atmosphere politically and they don't know what to do. No one really wants to leave and go on aliyah. They have no intention of leaving Britain this idea that Jews are going to be leaving Britain I don't think it's going to happen we just have to fight to make sure that the Conservative Party comes to its senses and can win the next general election or Question: The Jewish population of Britain are they supporting the Conservatives now against Labour? Answer: I would think there's very few Jews that I know that would vote Labour in the next general election. How can they when they are controlled by a small clique of left-wing previous Marxists and Communists? British Parliamentarian, Joan Ryan's remarks to AIPAC Policy Conference 24 March '19:
"As a member of the British Parliament, I am proud to be with you all today. I am proud to be a Zionist, I'm proud to be a staunch supporter of the world's only Jewish state and I am proud to be chair of Labour Friends of Israel, a group in the Parliament that promotes support for a strong relationship between Israel and Britain. Over the past four years, Britain's Labour Party, of which I've been a member for 40 years, has been transformed. Once, a close friend to Israel and an unwavering ally of British Jews, it has been taken over by the far left. It is now, despite the best efforts of some decent members, riddled with anti-Semitism. It now seeks to demonize and delegitimize Israel. It is now led by a man who proudly declares Hamas and Hezbollah to be his friends. I would never have believed just three years ago, that the party which backed a Jewish homeland even before the Balfour Declaration, would have sunk so low so fast. And so along with eight other members of Parliament, we made a choice. We decided that words were simply not enough. We walked away from the Labour Party. Why did I, a non-Jewish friend of Israel, travel to your conference to tell you this? I did so to remind you that things can change quickly; to remind you that we must stay on our guard and to remind you that we must stand our ground. We must condemn anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism unequivocally wherever we find it, whenever we find it. We must always call out politicians from whatever side of the aisle who question Israel's right to exist and engage in vile anti-Semitic tropes about the loyalties of British or American Jews to their countries. I served as a minister under Tony Blair and I saw that sticking to your convictions is not always popular. But it is always right. When I announced my decision to leave the Labour Party, I received an unprecedented torrent of abuse and hate mail. So too have many of my Jewish friends and colleagues. But those threats only strengthen my resolve. Threats will not stop me doing my job. Threats will not stop me standing by British Jews against the far left and the far right.
And let me tell you, threats will not stop me standing up for Israel. Why? Because I never forget that Israel is not just a Jewish state but a democratic state, in a neighborhood where democracies are few and far between. Because it is a state with the rule of law in a region not blessed with an abundance of independent courts. And because it is a country where Christians, Muslims and Jews are free to practice their faith in an area where many nations still practice religious intolerance. We should support Israel not just because it is Jewish but because the values which underpin it are worthy of our support. I'm a former teacher. I always told my students never give in to a bully. And I can tell you, I never will. That is why I made the stand, spoke out and I took action. And that's what I'm going to keep doing. So to you, the members of AIPAC who serve on the front lines to ensure that Israel remains our cherished friend and ally, I deliver this message from your friends in Britain. Thank you for your support for Israel. Let us stand together, proud of each other and proud of Israel in the battles that lie ahead. Thank you. "   More Recent Articles |
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