"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
- George Orwell, 1984.
The internet is a pretty straightforward thing, right? You create content, publish it, promote it and it's out there for everyone to see and share. It's the greatest tool of free speech the world has ever known. Except when it's not.
PragerU, an educational website that sums up big ideas in concise, shareable videos, is currently embroiled in a battle against censorship with the internet's most popular search engine: Google.
A year and a half ago, some students alerted PragerU that their videos were being flagged as inappropriate for minors and restricted on YouTube.
This came as a surprise at first to the PragerU staff. There had to be some kind of a mistake, they thought. PragerU videos are not only some of the cleanest on the internet, they feature Pulitzer Prize winners, MIT scientists and professors from Stanford, Harvard and Yale, among others. Yet, they were being restricted. Why?
Glenn interviewed Dennis Prager about PragerU's challenges, asking why he thought this was happening. Prager didn't mince words in his reply.
"I really did believe all my life that there was one thing that did unite Americans," Prager said. "And that is ... free speech. But I was wrong. The left, in particular, does not believe in free speech because it threatens their power."
To drive this point home, PragerU CEO Marissa Streit joined Glenn on radio to discuss an article in USA Today that had wrongly associated PragerU with a Nazi Twitter account and the alt-right website The Daily Stormer.
This is not just about PragerU being silenced. This is about another point of view that is being silenced.
The mainstream media has made it clear what it thinks of the educational website. But PragerU has yet to receive a straight answer from Google concerning the apparent censorship.
Fortunately, the folks at PragerU aren't the kind to take things lying down. They recently mounted a legal campaign in hopes of resolving their own issue and, hopefully, preventing others from being censored online by Google in the future.
A new video released by PragerU outlines the situation and calls for people everywhere to get involved in defending free speech online by signing a petition at StopOnlineCensorship.com
"This is not just about PragerU being silenced," Streit says in the video. "This is about another point of view that is being silenced. Tomorrow it's going to be your point of view that's being silenced."
Watch the video:
Join Mercury One and get involved
Disturbed by the blatant censorship of PragerU videos, Glenn's charity, Mercury One, recently announced a new education initiative in which 50 percent of all money raised would go to PragerU in support of its mission.