The Daily Signal - Dennis Prager on YouTube Censorship and Free Speech

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Dennis Prager’s commentary is in high demand. His PragerU videos get millions of views on social media, and his audience is growing. But not everyone likes his message. He’s run into censorship trouble with YouTube, which led him to file a lawsuit. Our colleague Virginia Allen recently sat down with Prager, and today we’ll share that exclusive interview. We’ll also share a brief conversation Kate Trinko had with Joanna Duke, the Christian wedding artist who recently won a lawsuit against the city of Phoenix. We also cover these stories: Congress prepares to launch new sanctions on Turkey Fort Worth police chief says there's "absolutely no excuse" for black woman’s death Attorney General William Barr blasts "militant secularists" in scathing Notre Dame address The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, October 16th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Daniel Davis. Dennis Prager's commentary is at high demand. His Prager U videos get millions of views on social media and his audience is growing. But not everyone likes his message. He's run into censorship trouble with YouTube, which led him to file a lawsuit. Our colleague Virginia Allen recently sat down with Prager and today we'll share that exclusive interview. We'll also share a brief conversation that Kate had with his last. Joanna Duke, the Christian wedding artist who recently won a lawsuit against the city of Phoenix.

And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Well, members of Congress are pushing for new sanctions against Turkey after calling President Trump's sanctions insufficient. Turkey has ramped up its attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria after President Trump announced the withdrawal of U.S. forces last week. The president received near universal backlash from that announcement as the Kurdish death toll mounted and ISIS militants being held by the Kurds reportedly escaped. Senators are working on a bipartisan measure aimed at forcing Turkey to stop the offensive.

The bill would place sanctions on Turkey's political leadership and the country's energy sector and also prohibit U.S. military support to Turkey, which is a NATO ally. The president had previously put a 50% tariff on Turkish steel imports. The chief of police in Fort Worth, Texas, says there was absolutely no excuse for the death of an African-American woman who was shot by a white police officer in her home on Saturday. The victim, 28-year-old Tatiana Jefferson, pointed a gun at her bedroom window after hearing questionable sounds outside her home and was subsequently shot by a white police officer. Jefferson was up late playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew when the shooting occurred. The incident was recorded by the officer's body camera. The officer, Aaron Dean, resigned and was then arrested on murder charges.

President Trump is lashing out at CNN and its president, Jeff Zucker, after Project Veritas, a conservative watchdog group, published an undercover report alleging anti-Trump bias at the network's DC Bureau. The president tweeted sarcastically on Tuesday, Now that we have found out that CNN is a virtual fraud, rumor has it that Jeff Zucker will be resigning momentarily. The Project Veritas report was released in two parts and includes on-the-record accounts from a man named Carrie Porch, a freelance satellite technician and contractor at CNN's DC Bureau.

Porch recorded conversations with different people at CNN and alleges systemic and intentional bias against President Trump. Those videos can be found on Project Veritas's YouTube page. CNN disputes the credibility of the video, however, saying that none of the individuals on camera were actually journalists with CNN. Attorney General William Barr didn't mince words when talking about secularism in American society at a recent address at Notre Dame on Friday. Barr, who is Catholic, says he sees no progress in an age where people push progressivism as a valuable movement in society. Barr said, among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives. But where is the progress? We are told we are living in a post-Christian era, but what has replaced

the GJO Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is the system of values that can sustain human social life? He also said that the lack of fostering religious values have done more to harm American society than help it, and I quote, this is not decay, this is organized destruction. Secular forces and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia, and an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. Up next, we'll play Virginia Allen's exclusive interview with Dennis Prager. Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at Letters at Daylor. DailySignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. I am joined on the Daily Signal

podcast by Dennis Prager, co-founder of Prager University, host of the Dennis Prager Show, and author of several books, including his most recent The Ten Commandments, Still the Best Moral Code. Mr. Prager, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right. So let's jump right in by talking for a moment about the history of Prager University, you co-founded Prager You in 2011 as a multimedia organization that would exist to articulate through video and Judeo-Christian values on which America was founded. And those values that you really hope to focus on were free speech, free enterprise, a moral foreign policy, and the rational case for God's existence. Why did you see the need for an organization like Pragerview to exist? And did you ever think that it would be

as successful as it has been? Let me answer the second one first. That's easy. Had somebody told me, you know, you will get a million views a year, I would have said, I know me. Wow, from your mouth to God's years. Had somebody said a hundred million, I wouldn't have even said from your mouth to God's years. I would have said you're out of your mind. Had they said a billion, I wouldn't have even responded. I would have thought they were mocking me. But we get a billion views a year all over the world. Just on my fireside chat alone, my weekly personal chat, aside from our weekly videos, I get 700,000 views. And I asked them to count how many, mostly young people from foreign countries sent questions into me just on the fireside chat 51 countries sent in questions not just

listen and i know why that's to answer your first part the great tragedy of the last hundred years is that people in the west forgot how to make the case for the west americans forgot how to make the case for america christians forgot how to make the case for christianity jews forgot how to make the case for christianity jews how to make the case for Judaism and Americans forgot how to make the case for Americanism. So we're losing everybody. The case has to be made every generation. Every generation is a tabula rasa, is a new clean slate. You don't teach them this stuff.

I'm not the first to say this. Even liberty. Liberty is a value, not an instinct. People don't want liberty. They want to be taken care of. The American Revolution said, no, take care of yourself and your family. your community. You have recently completed a documentary called No Safe Spaces, and the film examines

how America has become a dangerous place for ideas. The film releases on October 25th of this year. Can you share a little bit more about the movie and what you hope it achieves? This is a great movie, and people will say, well, of course he's in it, of course he'll say it. It's not true. I expected a good movie. I am in it, but I'm not the reason for its excellence.

The people who made the movie did a great job. People will leave. I've seen it four times, and I'm interested in a fifth time. That is how good it is. And it is about the greatest threat to free speech in American history. We're living through it right now. People don't understand the significance of their own times. They usually need historians to tell them.

but let me tell all of your listeners this is the first time in American history free speech is threatened really really threatened the campus is the most obvious example you will understand this threat which is to liberalism as much as to conservatism

the left is a threat to liberalism liberals don't know this but it is and this film it's not just a documentary it's a movie will make you cry and laugh because Adam Carolla inevitably makes you laugh.

He's just extremely funny. I look forward to seeing it. Oh, you will love it. You will love it. No safe spaces. Please, folks, see it. Now, the movie was rated PG-13, and you've been open about your disapproval of this rating.

It's absurd. Can you explain a little bit more about why you felt that movie? There's a cartoon character where the... I forget. I think the first... First Amendment is shot. It's a cartoon. I mean, when I think of the cartoons where somebody got shot, trampled, put into a grinder, eaten,

and I was a very innocent kid, this is, there's no blood. It's a cartoon. It's an absurdity to it. What can I say? anyway people should take their kids we're not going to make something that kids shouldn't see of course not yeah yeah thank you now i want to shift gears and talk for a moment about preger you's relationship with google and youtube uh which youtube is a subsidiary of google preger you filed a lawsuit against google because youtube was restricting your videos and the u.s district court judge dismissed

the lawsuit but you filed an appeal with the ninth Circuit Court in Seattle. Can you explain why YouTube was restricting your content and where the appeal stands right now? I cannot explain why YouTube was restricting and is restricting our content. We have 100 videos now. We put out a video a week. We have 400 videos up there. About 100 of them are now restricted. Restricted means that if your family has a filter against pornography and violence, you can't see our video. I know you're shaking your head and you're right to. So do you know that to this day we have never gotten an answer?

Why have you put them up? So frustrating. Well, Senator Cruz, in my presence in the U.S. Senate, and you can watch it. It's on ironically YouTube. Senator Cruz asked the representative from Google, why did you censor Mr. Prager's video on the Ten Commandments? And the representative said, well, because it mentions murder. and I did everything to control myself not to burst out laughing.

You have put a, you don't want kids to hear that God said thou shalt not murder? That shouldn't be heard by kids? Is that a joke? Sounds like one. How did he leave in adultery then? You don't want kids to hear about adultery? Well, sure enough, by the way, after the hearing, they restricted five of the Ten Commandments videos.

Now, I want to make clear for those who don't watch our videos, I don't make most of them. 90% are by other people. I happen to have made the Ten Commandments video. So now you have appealed this case, but how do you see it as being so critical in this debate over free speech and censorship? If we lose, then Google

Google, which owns YouTube, Google will have been given a green light to do all the censoring at once. Google is a left-wing organization. The left has always censored thoughts that doesn't agree with. Liberals allow other thoughts. Leftists do not. That's why liberals need to understand that the threat to liberalism doesn't come from conservatives or social leftists.

Alan Dershowitz understands this, but most liberals do not. But if we lose the case, that's it. then there's nothing left and the greatest conduit of information in the history of humanity will be free to be a left-wing censoring organization. That's how big it is.

It's a critical time in our history. It is. Now you've been working with young people all across America and even the world for a very long time. Have you seen a shift in the thinking of young people over, let's say, the past,

10 years? Well, I don't know. I don't want to say yes, but I don't answer what I want to say. I answer what I believe. This is what I do not believe, but no. They are more open to hearing something that is a left-wing propaganda, which is all they get. They're from kindergarten. If I stand in front of a college audience which I often do and as for example it's on it's on YouTube Dennis Prager at the University of Wyoming why socialism makes you selfish they've never heard that they think socialism is altruistic but in fact it's narcissistic and they loved it they was it was an overflow audience they had never heard this

before they don't hear this at college So there are a lot of kids who just think, I'm curious. I'm just curious. Is there another side? Whereas the generation before them wasn't even curious about another side. So in that regard, I truly am hopeful. And what do you see as maybe being the one or two most important issues that we really need to be focused on educating young people about right now?

I think that if you just teach the American Trinity, that's what I call the three values on every coin. Liberty and God we trust, ePeluribus Una. If we just taught that, we were being great shape. Liberty needs to be taught. It's not an instinct. E pluribus Unum is the antithesis of multiculturalism, is the antithesis of race-gender class. We're all one. We become all-American.

whatever your race, ethnicity, gender, period. I forget gender, it's a phony word, sex. And in God we trust that we get our rights from God. That's the Declaration of Independence. That's not Prager. If we don't get them from God, we get them from man. But if we get them from man, they're worthless. And what does the future hold for Prager, you?

As you said, you all are racking up the video views. you have over 2 billion views on your videos. Do you have any plans on slowing down? Well, look, it's an interesting, of course not, but I will open up personally. I don't think almost ever how much I or we have accomplished. I think about how much we have not accomplished. And there are still billions who have not been touched

by a single idea of ours, and that's all I think about. I wish every kid in the world, I wish every adult in the world, you could just see our videos. If you want to reject their ideas, reject their ideas, but at least be exposed

to the central ideas that we promote. There is something beautiful in the male-female difference. It is not oppressive, it is liberating. It is enhancing. The notion that there are 56 genders is not only sick, it's unhappy. I spoke to Camille Paglia for an hour on my radio show. She says she is genderless.

She doesn't identify male or female. But she is on our side. She had this idea of obliterating male and female, even though I personally have gendered dysphoria. She says it. She's honest. What does that have to do with society? Society can raise kids to be boys and girls.

There's something beautiful about that. Who would have anticipated? By the way, I did. And it's in writing. You don't have to take my word for it. As soon as the argument for same-sex marriage was given, gender doesn't matter. I said we're in trouble.

I'm against same-sex marriage because I believe that marriage, I'm all for rights for gays, totally. but my wife and I are the godparents of a gay couple's children we're we these are a lot of these are beautiful people but but as soon as the argument was given gender doesn't matter I knew we were ruined gender does matter that's why I was against same-sex marriage I think marriage is between a man and a woman if we want a civil ceremony with rights I I am totally on board I do not want a gay person hurt. But I do not want the message sent gender doesn't matter.

It does. We certainly thank you for all the work that you're doing at Prager You to educate young people and America and people all across the world. May I just re-mentioned people to see No Safe Spaces? Yes, I was going to ask you. Go to NoSafspaces.com. They'll see where it's playing and they will see the trailer. And I would just one final, if I can.

Please. Okay, I don't want to go over your time. No. I'm trying to make the case for the greatness, the rational and moral greatness of the Bible in my continuing series, The Rational Bible. Great. And how can our listeners find other Prager You videos? Go to Prageru.com and binge.

Great. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. My joy. All right. I want to tell you about our favorite morning newsletter. It's called the Morning Bell, and it'll change the way you experience the news. Every weekday, we at the Daily Signal, deliver the top news and commentary directly to your inbox, all for free.

Morning Bell gives you quick access to the policy debates shaping Washington, analysis from experts at the Heritage Foundation, and commentary from top conservatives like Ben Shapiro, Michelle Malkin, Dennis Prager, and others. It's super easy to sign up. Just go to DailySignal.com and click the ConnectBunk. button in the top right corner. As soon as you sign up, expect the newsletter in your inbox the very next day. Joanna Duke operates a small business in Phoenix, Arizona, called Brush and Nib. Her company celebrates weddings, but she and her colleague are also Christians, which means they can't celebrate same-sex weddings in accordance with their conscience. They recently won a lawsuit

against a local ordinance in Phoenix, which would have penalized them for following their faith. Here's our colleague Kate sitting down with Joanna. So we're joined today by Joanna Duka, who owns Brush and Nib, and the lawyer who's been representing her, Caleb, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. Okay, so this case began in 2016. What happened then and how did it start? I'm an artist. My business partner and I, she's also an artist, and we started this business in 2015 because we love art and we love to create.

And we were creating primarily for weddings, creating custom wedding invitations, custom vows, and vows and signs, celebrating marriage. Art is an extremely close part of who we are. As any artist can attest, your art is incredibly personal, and it's an extension of you. And we are women of faith, so we wanted our art to be an extension of our faith and to communicate messages that were consistent with that faith.

While we learned, very sadly, that our city, the city of Phoenix, had an ordinance, a criminal penalty was attached to it, that if we wanted to create consistently with our faith, we could face not only fines and criminal penalties, but jail time potentially. That was incredibly serious. We were not going to violate our convictions as artists and as women of faith. But we had a lot on the line and we needed to stand up to this law

because every artist should be free to create consistently with who they are and not have the government making those expressive decisions. So specifically you were concerned that this ordinance would make it that if a couple, a same-sex couple approach you and asks you to make wedding invites, that you would have to design for them, that you would be required by this ordinance to do it. Is that correct? Yes. Brianna and I serve all people.

We always have, and we always will. But we can't as artists express every message. And one of those include messages that celebrate marriage that is not consistent with what we believe about marriage as Christians. So that was one of the messages that was at issue in this case. And we believe that, you know, this is an issue that people have opinions on on all sides. And every person should be free to make the decision about what messages to express on. that. The government shouldn't be deciding that and that's what we were arguing in this case, that artists need to be the ones making that decision and the government was wrongly infringing

on that with this law. So one of the frequent pushbacks we hear from the left is, well, would these business owners, would they be unwilling to make a birthday invitation or a graduation invitation for a customer who is gay or lesbian? Would that be a problem for you? Absolutely not. Again, we serve all people. We're happy to create all kinds of custom art for anyone, including members of the LGBT community. Okay. So to take a Take a step back. So you said you started Brush and Nib with your co-owner back in 2015. Starting a small business, that's a risky move, I would say. Why did you decide to do this and how has it been? Art is our love. So when we met each other at our church college group and started talking about our love for art and I was going out and starting at calligraphy business, we decided to start working together and ended up forming the business officially in the spring of 2015.

And it was a process as any person who has started a small business can attest. It's a lot of work. There's a lot you don't know. We spent considerable time on the phone with various agencies trying to figure out how do we file this paperwork and that and what are all the steps here. There's not really an easy checklist for starting a business. And then as we're in the middle of all that

and also honing our artistic skill and what's our style and our aesthetic going to be, then we learn about this Phoenix law. And it all kind of just came together at that point. So you said you do a lot of wedding invites in your business as well as, I guess, writing the vows and memorial realizing those. Yes. So how does that process look? If a couple comes to you, do they have an idea? Do you suggest ideas to them? How does it go? So they usually come with a theme or a general idea of what they want, maybe some colors that they're focused on.

And then they come to us because they like our artistic vision and they want to see what's going to be our interpretation of their general ideas. So we will sit down and sketch out some concepts, show them to them for consideration, and then we'll have kind of a back and forth, start painting out some of those details. So it's a very customized, very personal process. It takes a long time. It can take us a couple of months sometimes to finish, say, a wedding invitation project. because we really want every piece to be one of a kind. These are fine art invitations, not just something that you can sort of get printed

run of the mill anywhere else. And when people come to us, they want something really artistic and unique for that special day. And you don't get sick of the wedding business? I've heard it could be a hard one. Do you have to deal with Bride Zillas or any of that? Every once in a while.

Yeah, we've had some fun stories, but we've had some great clients too. So, yeah, it's like any business. But, yeah, weddings are definitely a big deal. There's a lot of stress involved for brides, but we try to make it as special of a process as we can. Okay. Well, let's go back to the legal process.

So this has been going on since 2016. It's now 2019. Yes. So what's been happening in the past three years? And Caleb, feel free to jump in here if you want to. Well, just at a high level, I mean, we did suffer two losses initially in the lower courts. And so that was discouraging. But we came to the Arizona Supreme Court, made the case for the freedom of artists to

express through their work. And the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in our favor. a huge win. I can't even describe how exciting that was for us. And we hope exciting for all Americans who value freedom and their freedom to speak consistently with their beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be. And what were the implications of that when, Caleb? Does it affect anyone besides Breschen Nib or how does it work? I think the court made very clear that artists shouldn't be forced to speak messages that violate their faith. And that should be a victory. It should be celebrated by all Americans, whether or not you or even agree with Russian Nib's position on

marriage. Joanna were talking earlier. She was talking about how encouraging it was to receive messages from people who disagree with her beliefs about marriage, but affirm and agree with her stance on free speech for all Americans, for all artists, that no artists should be forced to speak a message, should be even threatened with jail and fines if they don't speak a message that violates their faith. And that was the core fundamental holding of the Arizona Supreme Court. So I think we should all celebrate that as a win for all Americans. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast, brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation.

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