Ben Weingarten

Reader. Writer. Thinker. Commentator. Truth Seeker.

Tag: Google

Heather Mac Donald on Corrosive Identity Politics, Multiculturalism and Unjust Criminal Justice

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My Guest

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal and author most recently of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Mac Donald, the archetype of an unassuming academic, makes for an unlikely counter-cultural figure. She draws protests and outrage on college campuses across the country because she has the gall to challenge the prevailing progressive orthodoxy about subjects like identity politics, multiculturalism and criminal justice.

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How to Listen to the Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten Podcast

Welcome to Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten, a podcast featuring compelling long-form conversations with exceptional thinkers and doers on the most important ideas and issues of our time, and all time.

Our discussions focus on topics ranging from national security and foreign affairs, to economics and politics and philosophy and culture with a classical Liberal bent and a grounding in history — challenging the prevailing progressive orthodoxy with a contrarian counter-narrative based in individual liberty, limited government, free enterprise and a strong, national interest-oriented and prudently used defense.

There are several ways you can consume the podcast, summarized below for your listening pleasure:

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The Social Media Giants’ High-Tech Lynching of Counterjihadists

Apropos PragerU’s lawsuit against Google/YouTube on grounds of discrimination against and censorship of conservative speech, I recently prepared a comprehensive analysis, kindly published by the Gatestone Institute, on the ongoing war on counterjihadist speech by the social media giants.

In the piece, I extensively document the egregious efforts by Big Tech to snuff out and chill any content dissenting from the prevailing progressive orthodoxy regarding Islamic supremacism, while conversely aiding jihadists both directly and indirectly.

It is simply breathtaking both the kinds of messages social media companies will block, and the lengths to which the companies are willing to go to censor ideas they do not like on phony “hate speech” grounds. Absent pressure from the marketplace, i.e. all of us who use these services, things are going to get far worse.

Read the whole thing here.

The Mushiness of the Mushy Middle, Quantified

From Politico’s article on how Google can use its search algorithm to control what people see during elections, and thereby manipulate their outcomes:

Republicans, take note: A manipulation on Hillary Clinton’s behalf would be particularly easy for Google to carry out, because of all the demographic groups we have looked at so far, no group has been more vulnerable to SEME—in other words, so blindly trusting of search rankings—than moderate Republicans. In a national experiment we conducted in the United States, we were able to shift a whopping 80 percent of moderate Republicans in any direction we chose just by varying search rankings.

Of course as J. Christian Adams points out in a must-read piece on the Left’s Catalist voter database, Democrats did not seek (or require) moderate support in order to win the presidency in 2012.

 

Featured Image Source: PJMedia/J. Christian Adams.

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