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April 8, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
08:23
Dennis Interviews Dan Crenshaw
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I have a remarkable man on who I want to talk to and have been wanting to talk to for a very long time.
He's a Congressman from the 2nd District of Texas, very well known to many, many Americans.
Former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw.
And Congressman, it is an honor to be with you.
Oh, it's an honor to be with you, Dennis.
I'm surprised this is the first time we've spoken.
We really should have...
We really should have done this earlier.
I've been watching your videos for a very long time.
Oh, very, very touched to hear that.
If I may say, if some of you are not aware of the congressman Soldi by his name, he is the one with the eye patch.
By the way, you may not know this, and then I want to get obviously to many things, including your book.
The most famous man a generation ago with an eye patch was the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan.
Yeah.
Yeah, as I'm sure you know.
Well, this you won't know.
So I was sent by Israel when I was 21 years old.
I was sent to the Soviet Union because I knew Russian and Hebrew.
So I was sent in to smuggle in religious items and smuggle out names of Jews who wanted to leave.
I went for four weeks, and the way in which Jews would signal that they were a Jew to another Jew was to cover their eye.
Isn't that fascinating?
I did not know that.
Is that because of Moshe Dayan?
Yes, because of Moshe Dayan.
Exactly.
I was there right after the Six-Day War.
So he was a huge hero.
He was a reason for the renaissance of Soviet Jews.
So just a little, the power of the patch, if you will.
Yeah.
He's quite the figure when I visited Israel in my eye patch on.
And I was there during Purim, so everybody was dressed up.
And so it was unclear to people whether that was just me.
But there was a lot of, especially Israeli security guys, they would look at the patch and they would say, that's not a costume.
We can tell, because it's specially fitted.
And they're like, that's real, isn't it?
So they know.
Oh, that's so interesting.
Yeah.
And they're like, are you dressed up as Moshe Dayan?
I'm like, yeah, sure, I guess I am.
Why not?
That's a lovely great story.
All right, Dan Crenshaw, you have a terrific book out, Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage.
What's your thesis?
Well, this is a response to the petty outrage culture that has truly infected our nation.
And much has been written about that outrage culture.
Much has been written about the media and how terrible they've been, the emotional reactions that they elicit from people.
I reference books like The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt quite a bit in my book.
So there's a lot of really good literature on the problem.
And of course I identify the problem.
But mostly this book is a solution.
And every chapter is a lesson in mental resilience.
And those lessons are derived from my experience in combat, from the SEAL team.
So you will learn a lot about me in this book, but it's not an autobiography.
You'll learn about perspective from darkness, which is the name of the chapter, and what it's like to gain perspective, to literally live in darkness, in my case, and how that builds mental resilience and stops outrage.
What I point out is all of these lessons, whether it's building perspective or learning to live with stillness or learning not to quit.
These are all elements of living with better mental strength.
And there's something for everybody in here.
I think you'll like a lot of the references I have in here because I use the Bible a lot as a reference to what it means to live with duty, what it means to live with purpose.
The Bible talks about suffering and actually the importance of running to hardship as opposed to running away from it.
And a lot of these lessons are...
Are really applicable to today.
Again, I wrote it in response to petty outrage culture, but it's perfectly applicable to real challenges that we're facing now.
You know, the book is mostly about challenges that aren't real, that are destroyed, but that are still mentally devastating to weaker people.
But now we have a real challenge, and it's a better time than ever to do away with all the pettiness and actually be strong and remember what that American spirit is of strength and resilience.
Compared to now, the bringing of a conservative speaker to campus and creating a safe space seems a bit trivial, doesn't it?
Yeah, it really does.
And you know what coronavirus will do for America?
It will give us perspective.
Because I really hope that when students go back to college next fall, that microaggressions will seem laughable to them.
I mean, they better.
And if they don't, then we've learned nothing, and that would be a shame.
That is exactly right.
How do you explain the petty anger, as you call it?
Well, I don't try to too much.
Again, better books have been written about that.
If you want to understand where the petty anger comes from, read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind.
It's a fascinating book.
The Righteous Mind, written by Jonathan Haidt, I think should be read by every conservative.
But what he finds is that there's this culture of safetyism that is manifested where students have come to believe that words can actually harm them.
And that's a new thing.
And part of that is helicopter parenting.
Part of that is just the quite literal coddling by administrators.
So when students have bad ideas...
Well, administrators and teachers and parents used to squash those bad ideas and say, hey, stop it.
That's not how you're supposed to think.
This is the right way to view this.
And that's okay.
You're supposed to.
You're supposed to be a parent and an adult and do that.
But we stopped doing that and instead said, hey, if you feel this way, it must be right.
If you feel this way, you should live your truth.
But that's not correct.
You're not supposed to do that.
So Jonathan Hyde talks about the great untruths that have occurred, and that's one of them, that your feelings are correct all the time, and that's just objectively not true.
So that's a few reasons why we're here.
I'd like to point out another thing, which I think is interesting, about why our current progressive left is, and you may disagree with this because you've been around longer than me.
But I think our current progressive left is different from the old guard of the progressive left.
And I explain it this way.
I have this feeling that there was this sort of kind of fakeness to the old progressives, where they spoke in revolutionary terms, they made big, big promises, but deep down they knew that conservatives would always buttress them.
Deep down, the conservatives would always say, no way, we're not doing that.
And then the progressives could be like, well, at least we wanted to do the big stuff, even though they knew deep down it wouldn't work.
They knew it was unsustainable.
They knew the second and third order consequences were too severe.
And they allowed conservatives to buttress their worst instincts.
Here's the problem.
Even if they didn't believe it themselves, they raised an entire generation that does.
And so that's how you get true believers like AOC. I mean, she's a true believer, right?
The squad are true believers.
Is Nancy Pelosi a true believer?
Sorry?
Is Nancy Pelosi a true believer, in your opinion?
No, I don't think so.
That doesn't strike me as true.
She's an opportunist.
Yeah, I think so, too.
But you're in Congress, so I was just curious.
I don't know.
I don't get to speak with her personally.
You'd really have to ask somebody like Kevin McCarthy, who's, God bless him, he's doing that every day.
No, I don't think so.
I would put her in the category of this kind of old guard, right?
Right, so the actors created true believers.
Yes, but she created the true believers and now she coddles them.
All right, let me take a quick break here.
This is an important man in America.
I think he has an even bigger future than his present, which is already big.
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