BETWEEN THE LINES

WHAT I TOLD WESTERN CONSERVATIVE CONFERENCE

Exclusive: Joseph Farah shares his acceptance speech for lifetime achievement award

Editor’s note: The following is an edited transcript of Joseph Farah’s remarks to the Western Conservative Conference in Phoenix Saturday night where he accepted a lifetime achievement award for his journalism career from the Western Center for Journalism.

I can’t remember the last time I got an award like this for journalism.

Most of the honors I get these days are – how shall I put this? – unintentional. What do I mean by that?

I’ll just give you an example. Every year I wind up on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of the top purveyors of “hate.”

You might not think of that as an award. But that kind of acknowledgment, knowing the source, represents a high honor for me.

I think you all know what the SPLC is about. 

It is itself a left-wing hate group whose main preoccupation is demeaning, marginalizing and slandering Christians and conservatives, trying to portray them as racists, bigots, misogynists, Islamophobes and homophobes. 

The intent always with the SPLC is to incite hatred and even violence. 

Occasionally, it gets so bad that one of its many deranged followers decides to take what the SPLC spews at face value – as one did who invaded the offices of the Family Research Council with the intent of murdering all staff there, leaving Chick-fil-A sandwiches in their mouths.

Ironically, the only guy wounded in that armed attack was an African-American security guard hero who was shot, but still succeeded in disarming the perpetrator.

So, when the SPLC puts me on its hit list, I do two things:

• Number 1, I thank God that I’m doing something right to warrant their attention;
• Number 2, I make sure my concealed carry permit is up to date.

Floyd Brown, the president of the Western Center for Journalism, and I were trying to figure out yesterday how long we have been conspiring together. Neither one of us is entirely sure, but I know it goes back at least to my days in Los Angeles in the late 1980s when I was still a part of what we euphemistically call the “mainstream media.” Why do we do that, by the way? Why do we use that term? What’s “mainstream” about them? I’ve seen even on Fox News recently some of the hosts talk about CNN, ABC, NBC and CBS as the “mainstream” – like it’s a putdown. It’s not a putdown, it’s a compliment for which they are unworthy, to put it mildly.

Fox News has ratings that exceed all those broadcast and cable news shows and, in terms of revenue, all of them COMBINED.

It took Donald Trump to come along give the establisment media a name that is accurate – FAKE NEWS.

But, I digress. When I first got to know Floyd Brown in the 1980s, I was either running the news department of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, then the flagship of the Hearst newspapers, or I was running another Southern California daily newspaper as editor in chief and about to be recruited to run the historic Sacramento Union, then the oldest daily West of the Mississippi.

So, let’s say that was 30 years ago. It was still possible in the most left-wing state in the country, in the decidedly left-wing news media, in the city where the most important industry is Hollywood, for Joseph Farah – a politically incorrect Christian – to work in that world, even to be successful doing it.

That’s not that long ago.

But look how our media culture has declined, decayed and been thoroughly corrupted since then. And, even then, the media were out of the “mainstream” in terms of values.

You want a point of comparison?

Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center serves in one of the most important points of power and influence in the media – determining for Google which online news outfits are legit and not legit.

Do you realize that? 

I don’t think most of you really do. But that’s how insane things have gotten. 

They’re the new gatekeepers. 

They’re the so-called experts on what’s real and what’s fake – the biggest pack of scoundrels and liars the world has ever known. They’re con artists, racketeers.

Now, you’ve heard a lot at this conference already about the crisis we face in the independent media today – and that’s very important. 

It is not overstated. 

It’s an existential threat in every sense of the work. As the guy who started the first independent online news site more than 20 years ago, I can tell you I have never before seen anything quite this scary – and we lived through and survived the dot.com bomb and many other crises over that time.

Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon – the Digital Cartel, as I call them – these are the new masters of the universe. 

They are rapidly taking over the world, 

becoming monopolistic, predatory, setting the rules for free speech, limiting the ability of conservative and Christian content companies to disseminate their work on an even playing field.

Five years ago, or 10 years ago, if you went to Google News, it would not be unusual to see WND stories linked prominently on the page. After all, we were around before Google was. Today it never happens. It’s not because our search engine optimization is not up to date. 

It’s because Google has empowered the SPLC to make sure sites like WND are not considered legitimate news. 

Worse than that, we’re bigots, haters.

That’s lethal stuff. It’s part of a scorched-earth policy the cartel is employing.

Look if there are two things I actually know about, they are:

No. 1: Journalism standards, practices and ethics. I spent more than 40 years immersed in these things. I used to win awards for this kind of work back then – and not just from the Western Center for Journalism.

No. 2: That the God of Creation is real, that we live in a fallen world corrupted by sin and there’s a day of reckoning coming for mankind.

To me, journalism has always meant one thing – 

the search for the truth. 

I understand people have different ideas about what truth means, and I would never try to prevent others with different viewpoints from expressing them. I love free and open debate. 

But the Left doesn’t. 

We are seeing the Left bearing its fangs like it eventually always does, despite its rhetoric about diversity and tolerance. 

The Left is fundamentally totalitarian in nature and character when it gets power. 

And it has monopoly power again in the digital media – something I didn’t think I would see again when I founded WND 20 years ago. I thought we had them on the run. And we did. In fact, I believe the tide turned as late as November 2016 when they saw the election results.

I think that was their NEVER AGAIN moment. 

That’s when they pulled out all the stops. When did Google bring in the SPLC? Summer of 2017. That was a quiet but momentous act few noticed. The real haters, the real brown shirts, are policing the internet today.

Another cultural institution has fallen under the hammerlock control of the depraved and unhinged Left.

Let me tell you two quick personal anecdotes – both of which I just found out about yesterday.

• We just produced a new movie called “70 YEARS: Israel’s Prophetic Past, Present and Future,” and released it earlier this week. It’s selling very well, but, so far, we’ve tried twice to get it up on Amazon as a digital movie on demand, It’s been rejected twice because Amazon doesn’t think it’s suitable for all ages. Why? Apparently, because it is an overtly Christian movie about the Israel-centric nature of God. Amazon is perfectly willing to sell DVDs, but not digital downloads. Crazy when you think about everything else Amazon is willing to sell.
• The same day we got that news from Amazon, we got word from one of our advertisers that works with a big company called AppNexus. This powerful company boasts on its website that it BLACKLISTS 5,000 sites. You might remember last year Breitbart.com got blacklisted and has since taken a big hit in revenues as a result. At the time, I publicly challenged those blacklisting Breitbart, in the spirit of solidarity, to blacklist WND. Well, they listened to me. But here’s the best part. Do you want to hear the explanation for why AppNexus blacklisted WND? Because, the company claims, WND is a Manga site. Do you know what Manga is? Japanese cartoons! Now, needless to say, we don’t publish Japanese cartoons, but what if we did? Why would these blacklisters discriminate against a well-known and respected art form? It’s insanity. But this is what life is like for me – and the rest of the independent media.

This is war. 

It’s an existential threat not just to independent media but for free speech as we have known it in America. 

This is end game unless we can find an effective strategy to fight back.

I’m going to say one more thing about strategy – as a former leftist. The Left hangs together. They cooperate. They scratch each other’s backs. They form alliances – they call them “united fronts.” They get together around common causes. It’s effective. They also fight on offense, seldom defense.

Despite my love and respect for “conservatives,” I never describe myself that way. 

There’s something fundamentally defensive even about the world “conservative.” Obviously, it’s about conserving something. That’s defensive right there. 

The Left fights on offense, which always keeps us on defense. If we love freedom and justice and righteousness, we’ve got to fight on offense for those things – always.

How many battles are won on defense? How many wars on won on defense? How many political campaigns are won on defense?

We need each other more than ever. We’ve got to put away our little difference with each other and get on offense, supporting our friends along the way. We’ve got to stop acting like competitors. 

We have to fight boldly for the promotion of our values and realize we are all together in the crosshairs of the tyrannical Left.

And one last thing we need to do. Most of you here are like me – believers. I know you may not all be believers. We serve the Creator of the Universe – the omnipotent, omniscient, all-powerful God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God of miracles. 

So why are we losing? Because we are not praying enough. We are not listening enough. We are not invoking the power of the Holy Spirit enough.

So, let me just close tonight in prayer: Heavenly Father, we ask for your forgiveness for the way we try to wage war in the spiritual realm without calling on you first for the marching orders. 

We can’t do it without you. We are powerless without you. You promise your followers that they will be subject to persecution and we are feeling it. But our weakness is your strength. We ask you to do a mighty work in helping us to save this country from ruin, which is exactly where your adversaries are trying to take it.

We are your people who are called by your name and we humble ourselves and pray and seek your face and turn from our wicked ways trusting you will hear our cries, forgive our sins and heal our land.

May God bless you all.

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http://www.wnd.com/2018/03/what-i-told-western-conservative-conference/

My comments: Unless Bid Digital Media is STOPPED, America as Founded is FINISHED. Christians need to Wake-Up to this reality, and do all that they can to preserve an Open Internet.