June 4, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
05:04
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| And it was very persuasive. | |
| I contacted you. | |
| And I will say it because it's important that people know that my work touched your life. | |
| Hugely. | |
| And in particular, my book, Still the Best Hope, about the left, America, and Islam. | |
| And I only mention that... | |
| Because I want you, my listeners, to know the power of that book, which I rarely mention. | |
| I mostly talk about my Bible work now. | |
| But if you want to understand the left, America, and the Islamists, the book is still the best hope. | |
| You have a theory about anger and your peers. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Well, I've noticed in college, it's been very fascinating to me to see the way that people react to conservatives. | |
| And I've noticed that there's just this visceral, fierce reaction to them. | |
| They have like a Pavlovian-like response to conservatives. | |
| You know the psychological study where you ring the bell? | |
| For them, they hear the word conservative and they start foaming at the mouth. | |
| They have this instinctive anger. | |
| And I think that... | |
| A lot of the times, they're sublimating their anger and their rage about other things, and they're taking it out on conservatives because that's kind of the socially acceptable thing to do. | |
| I think a lot of the things that they're actually angry about are products of secular, humanist environments. | |
| I mean, not entirely. | |
| It would be too simplistic to say that's the entire reason. | |
| There are a few features of it that I think are very harmful and fill people with a kind of emptiness that then they direct towards conservatives. | |
| One of those, and we've talked about this a lot, Dennis, is how I think my generation has really been robbed of optimism and that it's been imparted to us that... | |
| Ten years away. | |
| The world is going to be underwater. | |
| We're going to be in the midst of a destructive climate crisis. | |
| It's going to end the world as we know it. | |
| People don't want to have kids. | |
| I've heard some of my friends say that they're afraid to have children because they don't want them to inherit this terrible world we're living in. | |
| Look at what Biden just said yesterday that you played on your show. | |
| Biden said that white supremacy was more lethal of a threat to America than ISIS or Al-Qaeda. | |
| How does that fill anyone with optimism? | |
| When these leftists talk about the state of America and the state of the world in such draconian terms, that's really scary to young people. | |
| It doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about issues. | |
| But they are catastrophizing these issues. | |
| And I don't think they understand the harm that it does to young people. | |
| I think, relatedly, young people are very risk-averse. | |
| I think that we're—I mean, obviously, we're really afraid to say anything wrong lest we be called— I think, you know, we're afraid to write anything or speak or have anything on the internet because we've been told that it will follow us around for the rest of our lives and our lives are going to be ruined if we, you know, are out of step in any kind of way. | |
| And I think, crucially, the biggest thing I've noticed, and this is something I really learned from you and from your books, is that there is no reverence for wisdom anymore. | |
| We live in a really, really hyper-competitive world where people are very obsessed with climbing the socioeconomic ladder, getting into an elite college, landing an elite job. | |
| Something like the Bible, which is filled with wisdom, is like this antiquated old book you just throw out. | |
| Even down to things like very few of my contemporaries I've noticed have hobbies or read for fun or have these kinds of worldly pursuits and interests. | |
| And again, I'm not saying all people, but I've kind of noticed this among my generation. | |
| And I think it's because in a way we've become psychic amputees. | |
| We've eliminated parts of our personality, parts of our interests, because we're... | |
| We're not focusing on anything that doesn't allow us to climb that ladder. | |
| And again, I think that's a result of the loss of wisdom. | |
| And that leaves people feeling really hollow, really purposeless. | |
| When there's so much that goes into a resume, there's not very much left in a person. | |
| I think all these things, it's very hard to pinpoint where they come from. | |
| But again, it fills people, as I said, with a sense of purposeless. | |
| Purposelessness. | |
| Right. | |
| And they direct that at conservatives. | |
| Because it's socially acceptable. | |
| That was a brilliant analysis. |
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