Joel B. Pollak is editor-in-chief and in-house counsel at Breitbart News. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he also has a degree in Jewish Studies from the University of Cape Town. He ran for Congress in 2010 in his hometown of Skokie, IL and worked as a Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute, as well as speechwriter to the Leader of the Opposition in the South African Parliament. He enjoys improv comedy, rock 'n' roll, and the literature of liberal apostates and iconoclasts. His wife Julia is a Ph.D. Fellow at the Pardee Rand Graduate School and his daughter Maya is unbelievably cute.
Since the NSA and PRISM scandals broke, sales of George Orwell's 1984 have been soaring. The story of an all-seeing, all-knowing state is suddenly relevant again. Yet long before Orwell focused his literary imagination on official propaganda, he attacked the deceptions of mainstream and partisan media as precursors to tyranny.
12 Jun 2013
Anthony Weiner, the former congressman from Brooklyn and Queens who resigned in 2011 after lying to the media and public about an errant sexual message on Twitter, is surging through the Democratic primary in the race for mayor of New York City. The New York Observer reports Wednesday that Weiner is far ahead of his rivals in name recognition: "Their best efforts are no match for Mr. Weiner's selfies [self-portraits]."
12 Jun 2013
Continuing a trend set by President Barack Obama, the left--as voiced by MSNBC--continued to heap abuse on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for the crime of bipartisan cooperation, with Chris Hayes taking to the airwaves on All In to accuse Rubio of secretly working behind the scenes to undermine the legislation.
12 Jun 2013
MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes tried to rewrite history on Tuesday, describing the late segregationist Gov. George Wallace of Alabama as a Republican. Wallace was a Democrat--as were most Jim Crow-era leaders.
12 Jun 2013
While superficially similar, the protests in Istanbul's Taksim Square are quite different from those in Cairo's Tahrir Square, which brought down Hosni Mubarak's regime in 2011. In Turkey, the Islamist party is already in power; in Cairo it had been suppressed for decades. The protests are a backlash of the secular, liberal and urban Turkey that hearkens back to Kemal Atatürk for inspiration, and forward to Europe in its aspirations.
11 Jun 2013
Four years ago, she was so afraid of questions about her subprime mortgage banking failures that she withdrew her name from consideration as Secretary of Commerce. But on Monday, Penny Pritzker passed a committee vote on her confirmation--unanimously.
11 Jun 2013
As Americans reel from Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, Zimbabwe is currently embroiled in its own scandal over leaks: 'Baba Jukwa,' a member of the country's insular elite, has been spilling the beans on Facebook about President Robert Mugabe's election-rigging and the corruption of the ruling Zanu-PF party, according to South African news website News24.
11 Jun 2013
The Andrew Breitbart documentary Hating Breitbart is about to break an obscure but fitting Hollywood record: namely, the record for defying media critics. According to Paul Bond of the Hollywood Reporter, the Breitbart film has recorded the largest-ever gap between audience ratings (96 percent) and critics' ratings (0 percent) on the popular industry website RottenTomatoes.com.
10 Jun 2013
On Monday morning, Anne Bayefsky was one of the few voices to oppose the anti-Israel madness of the execrable Richard Falk, the 9/11 Truther who is a Special Rapporteur at the UN Human Rights Council. The Human Rights Council, incidentally, is something the U.S. government chose to ignore until President Barack Obama decided to give it legitimacy--a policy both Susan Rice and Samantha Power fully support.
10 Jun 2013
Following his provocative lecture on the "European Spring" to a conference of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles on Sunday, I sat down with Dutch political leader Geert Wilders, who leads a party that demands an end to immigration from Islamic nations and advocates leaving the European Union.
10 Jun 2013