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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:14:53
Death in Canada
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Hello, my friends.
I'm Dennis Prager.
There is a piece, believe it or not, I actually just checked again because it's a little unexpected to place the proper word in its place.
From the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the CBC, I'll never forget, Prime Minister Harper said to me at a PragerU gala where I interviewed him, I have a dialogue with him to be more precise, both are true, it's interview and dialogue.
He said, the CBC, he said, Dennis, you must understand, is worse than CNN. Okay, I have no comment, but I'm just telling you why I'm surprised that the woke CBC would have this report.
Here is the title.
It's from Nova Scotia.
It's one of the provinces of Canada.
I may be the only American in America who can name all ten provinces.
No, who even knows there are ten provinces.
And I've been to nine of them.
I can't tell you.
What is it?
Something in my craw.
Sticks in my craw?
Is that the proverb?
Yes.
What's a craw?
It's like your stomach.
Like your gut.
Okay.
That I have not been to...
What is it?
PEI. Prince Edward Island.
In fact...
Okay.
Be that as it may.
I have a fair acquaintance with Canada.
There's Nova Scotia.
On the east side of the country.
The system is obviously broken, says NS Mann, whose wife died in ER. Again, I need you to understand, this is a CBC report that just came out.
CBC, what does that stand for?
I said Canadian Broadcasting Company.
I did say it.
Did you?
Yeah.
It's okay.
For the Hathoff...
For the Holthoff family, a trip to the emergency room at the Cumberland Regional Health Care Center on New Year's Eve turned into a nightmare.
Gunter Holthoff of Tidnish, Nova Scotia.
It's a very unhappy article, but I'm sorry.
I just have to reflect for one moment.
Sean, would you please put Tidnish down on the list?
It is a word I would have made up if it didn't exist already.
Said his wife, Allison, began feeling sick the morning of December 31st, but thought she had just had an upset stomach.
When it worsened throughout the morning, Holthoff drove his wife to the nearest emergency department in Amherst, Nova Scotia around 11 a.m.
He said he carried Allison into the hospital on his back.
She was obviously in pain, he told CBC News in an interview Sunday.
I was rolling her in the wheelchair and she could hardly sit up.
The pair waited more than six hours in the emergency department waiting room.
All right, I want that to sink in, ladies and gentlemen.
The vaunted socialist care system.
Would it...
If somebody were in the distress that this woman was in, in the United States, is there anywhere where what happened to her would happen?
It's an open question, so listen.
They waited more than six hours in the emergency department waiting room and then in a room inside the unit as Allison's pain worsened.
Holthoff said it was after 6 p.m.
before they saw a doctor and Allison received any treatment.
By then, he said, it was too late.
After they were triaged, Holthoff recalled the nurses asked for a urine sample.
When he took Allison to the bathroom, he couldn't support her alone, and she fell to the floor.
I couldn't get her up myself, so I went outside the door, and I just asked for help.
Two security guards had to assist her.
When Holthoff took Allison back to the waiting room, He said she was no longer able to sit in the wheelchair the hospital had provided because of the pain she was in, so she ended up lying on the floor.
I told the nurses and the lady at the desk there a couple of times, it's getting worse.
And nothing happened, he said.
So the security guards in time, they brought a couple blankets out, and they brought us a cup of water, and I used it to put some ice on her lips.
As more time passed, Allison told her husband she felt like she was dying.
He approached the nurses a few more times.
Around 3 p.m., the couple were taken to a room with a bed, but no medical equipment.
Holthoff said he had to help Allison use a bedpan and use paper towel from a roll on the wall to clean up.
At some point there, she was getting worse.
And she started to scream out in pain.
A nurse came in and checked Allison's blood pressure again and saw it was alarmingly low.
Holthoff said that's when things started to change and the care became more urgent.
When they finally saw a doctor, they still hadn't received any test results.
Then as the nurses prepped Allison for an x-ray, Holthoff said he watched as her condition worsened.
She was in so much pain she couldn't breathe.
He tried to comfort her, ensured her the doctors would determine what was causing their pain.
The next thing is, her eyes rolled back in her head, and her chest started rising.
Something started beeping, he said.
The next thing you hear is over the PA, code blue, code blue in x-ray.
Holthoff said the room flooded with people.
While he was sent to the hallway.
A doctor later told him they resuscitated Allison three times, to no avail.
Even if she would have survived at that point, she had too long a time without a sufficient blood flow to the brain and vital organs, it would have been not a life worth living, he said.
I'm looking at a picture of her as I read this to you.
It's very sad.
Since that day, Holthoff said he feels left in the dark.
The results of Allison's autopsy haven't been released, and he hadn't heard from anyone in government except the local member of parliament for at least a week after her death.
Holthoff said the health care system failed his wife, and he doesn't want her death to be in vain.
We need change.
The system is obviously broken.
Or if it's not broken yet, it's not too far off.
Something needs to improve.
I don't want anybody else to go through this.
I want a spot where if my kids break their legs, we can take them to the hospital if anything happens.
Allison Holthoff, 37, was mother of three school-age children.
Yep.
And then they write a problem with the system.
Listen to this.
CBC News asked Nova Scotia Health how many deaths had occurred in emergency departments in 2022, but the department declined to say.
And I'll tell you why.
I don't know of an exception.
When things get really really big, they get really really bad.
That's the way life works.
When there are more people in a bureaucracy, there is less sense of urgency in dealing with people.
The further you are removed from the person you are to serve, The less likely you are to give a damn about the person you serve.
Is it true for every single person?
Of course not.
But is it generally true?
Of course, yes.
Well, this is the way it works.
Yes.
I'll tell you, I don't remember.
I would say at least ten years ago.
I went to give a speech in Toronto, and maybe 15 years ago, I had debilitating sciatic pain from my spinal cord down my leg.
And, by the way, despite all of my fear of the medical bureaucracy, I always know doctors save me.
I have wonderful surgeries to relieve it.
I'm pain-free.
I've been three years.
Anyway, I couldn't walk the distance, and I was wheeled in a chair from the flight.
I want to tell you what the woman wheeling me told me.
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Hi everybody, I'm Dennis Prager.
So here is the remainder of my story I just read to you from the CBC. It's important that you understand the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
You understand it's not from a conservative source, from a left-wing source.
The story of what happened to this couple and the completely unnecessary death of his wife because they waited so many hours before being treated at an emergency room in the province of Nova Scotia.
But this is not new.
So about, I would say, 15 years ago, I was actually wheeled from...
My flight to Toronto, I could stand and walk, but not a distance without terrible pain.
And the distance in many countries, when you come in from a foreign country, until the immigration area is often very long.
Anyway, I was wheeled, and the woman asked me, why do you need a wheelchair?
We were just talking.
Completely legitimate question, obviously, because she saw me walk to the wheelchair.
And I told her I had a terrible sciatic, which prevented me from walking any serious distance.
And she said, oh, I have that.
So I remember thinking, wait a minute.
She's wheeling me, and she has sciatic pain?
I felt guilty, actually.
But, obviously, she was able to do so.
I don't know the degree of pain.
And I said, well, what did your MRI say?
Because that's how you know the degree of severity of a herniated disc, which is usually the reason for sciatic pain.
She said, oh no, I haven't had my MRI yet.
And I said, well, why not?
That's the most important thing right now.
She said, no, no, no, I'm scheduled, and I'll have it in four months.
All I can tell you is my wife needed an MRI a couple of years ago, and in her case, I've had too many MRIs.
They were within days.
In my wife's case, she was willing to pay $400 and have it that day.
At night, in fact.
Because that's what private enterprise allows for.
It gives people freedom.
Is that a perfect introduction to my next guest?
Right?
How ironic.
I didn't even plan it that way.
There should be healthcare available for the indigent.
Okay.
Clearly.
And that's it.
The rest of us should be in a private system.
The bureaucracy being created in the United States is going to go the way of the CBC, even though it's private.
Doctors are increasingly employees.
They're not even called doctors any longer.
Or physicians any longer.
They're called healthcare providers.
And they're sheep.
If you, uh...
Hey, got that University of Minnesota Medical School thing there, Sean, where they took a pledge?
I'd like to replay that.
That should be on our list of items that I play for you routinely.
The pledge to be woke physicians.
The next generation of physicians.
We'll be very different from the previous generations.
We've gone from virtually every doctor worked for himself, which is the most beautiful way, to doctors now working for giant healthcare providers and hospitals.
You have a different mindset when you work for yourself.
You just do.
That do work for themselves.
They're called concierge doctors, but obviously they treat people who can afford them.
They work for themselves and they don't work for any large health group.
I'm old enough to remember when a doctor would come to your house.
I'll never forget it.
When I was a kid, I got the measles, I think, Dr. Leibowitz came to the house with his black bag.
I mean, that's almost entering a Norman Rockwell painting when I think about Dr. Leibowitz coming with his black bag to my parents' home in Brooklyn, New York.
This is what took place at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Anything to do with anything public in Minnesota is rotten to the core, and it's not the only state in which that is true.
But this is particularly egregious.
Here's the pledge the incoming class at the University of Medical School took.
With gratitude.
We, the students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Medical School Class of 2026, stand here today among our friends, families, peers, mentors, and communities who have supported us in reaching this milestone.
Our institution is located on Dakota land.
Today, many indigenous people throughout the state, including Dakota and Ojibwe, call the Twin Cities home.
Did you get that?
What does that have to do with being a doctor?
Naming the tribes displaced in order to form the Twin Cities of Minnesota.
I wish some historian would then recount whom those two tribes, the Dakota and the other one, displaced.
Until you go back into prehistory.
Why don't they just say, we who live in America have displaced, and then name all the tribes.
Why only the Twin Cities tribes?
Why is it mentioned?
In order to create contempt for the United States of America.
That isn't the animating and animating impulse.
There is another animating impulse, contempt for Christianity, contempt for the Bible, contempt for religious Americans.
Continue, please.
Recognize this acknowledgement is not enough.
We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the health care system.
You hear that?
You hear that?
This is a pledge of doctors.
To combat structural violence embedded in the healthcare system.
Yes, you future doctors of Minnesota and the rest of the country, you're entering a profession that is essentially evil.
Structural violence.
Do you know?
What does that even mean?
Do you know?
Embedded structural violence?
ESV! And the sheep took the pledge.
Hello, my friends.
I want to note that a number of you are calling in from around the country noting that you had a similar experience in the United States.
I find that believable and depressing.
John in Chicago said he waited five hours in Chicago.
Betsy in Cleveland says she's waited eight hours in ER. I don't know what to say.
It is ironic that I should have mentioned the staggering benefits to all in private enterprise and entrepreneurship.
One of my favorite people has written on this, Alfredo Ortiz.
The Real Race Revolutionaries, How Minority Entrepreneurship Can Overcome America's Racial and Economic...
What is it, divide?
It doesn't have the last word here.
Divides, yes.
That is a bold statement by a bold man.
Alfredo, congratulations on your book.
Thank you very much, Dennis.
It's an honor to be on your show, as always.
Alfredo is the president of a group that I adore.
If there was a stronger word in English, I would use it.
The Job Creators Network.
So, this is his thesis.
Minority entrepreneurship can overcome America's racial and economic divides.
To whom is your book dedicated?
Well, the book is dedicated to my wonderful mother, Gloria Ortiz, who did so much for me and sacrificed so much of herself to pull us out of the poverty that we lived in and got me through.
I was the first one to finish high school, Dennis, first one to finish college, and first one to finish grad school.
And that was thanks to a wonderful God and the hard work and sacrifice of my mother and three or four educators that took great interest in my life and my future.
Well, I'm very touched to hear that.
I actually meant, and it was my fault, you're dedicating it to what readership?
Who do you want to read the book?
Yes, I'm so sorry about that.
No, no, no.
It's completely my fault.
You answered me perfectly.
Well, actually, I want everybody to read it, because whether you're a Democrat or Socialist on the left, or whether you're a Republican or Conservative on the right, I think this provides the narrative that really we should be focusing on, which is...
I'm not discounting that racism exists, let me be very clear.
It does exist, and I was a victim of racism myself multiple times, so I understand it exists.
But I also know that having run the Job Careers Network for the past 10 years, Dennis, that entrepreneurialism is truly the way out, and it's truly the answer and solution for this racial and economic divide that exists in our country.
And the answer is not more government and intervention.
It's less government and less intervention.
It's lower taxes and lower regulation.
And this is not just a hypothesis.
This is a, you know, this is a what we know to be true because we saw it after the Tax and Jobs Act.
When you had lower taxes and less regulation, guess who's right?
Minority small businesses, blacks, Asians, Hispanics.
I mean, we had the best economic years and results that we've ever had.
And so, you know, this is something that we want to push across the board, across this country, and quite frankly, challenge the narrative of the left.
That is correct.
That is...
So that really raises the question for me, and I guess my listeners.
How appealing is this idea in the Hispanic community, which is becoming obviously a larger and larger percentage of the American population?
Dennis, it's huge.
I mean, Hispanics are by far one of the most entrepreneurial ethnic groups that is out there.
And, you know, we had great success, like I said, under the Trump administration in that environment of lower taxes and less regulation.
In fact, Hispanics never had it better off.
And frankly, I think that's why the growth and why we're seeing the shift of Hispanics more to the Republican Party, because they do know and they did see the prosperity that existed in that environment of lower taxes and less regulation.
All right, hold on.
I have a big question.
Hold on, if you would.
Alfredo Ortiz's book is up at DennisPrager.com.
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Hi, everybody.
I'm Dennis Prager, and I am going to discuss Ukraine. - Thank you.
And I know that a certain percentage of you will differ with me and I welcome your dissent.
Because I'm a conservative, I welcome dissent.
If I were on the left, I would suppress it.
There is no example of the left ever being in power since the Russian Revolution, now over a hundred years ago.
That allowed for dissent.
The more dissent, the more free speech, the less power the left has.
That is always the case.
It's in your kid's high school, in your college, in your workplace, in business, anywhere.
I had this woman on yesterday.
Remarkable woman.
She was the president of Levi's Jeans.
20 years.
Magnificent career.
Loved and respected woman of the left.
A supporter of Elizabeth Warren.
And she spoke out repeatedly on behalf of left-wing issues.
And then she also spoke out against school lockdowns.
A vile, despicable act on the part of teachers, unions, and the medical profession.
If you wanted to harm children, that's what you would have embarked on.
It is unforgivable what the medical profession, the epidemiologists, the CDC, and teachers unions did to children.
It is unforgivable.
So she spoke out against it, and they got rid of her at Levi's.
She was slated to be the next head, the CEO. They told her to go on an apology tour.
She refused.
I had her on yesterday.
It was really remarkable to talk to her.
I asked her if she lost friends.
She said virtually all of them.
Because she said that kids shouldn't be locked out of school.
The left can't deal with dissent.
I can.
I welcome it.
And I will get it.
Which is sad to me because I have a great...
I have some very great moral and political and American arguments for supporting Ukraine.
First, let me deal with two big issues that my friend and a man I have tremendous respect for, and I have never believed I have to agree on every subject with people I respect.
If I have to agree on every subject with anyone, I will agree with no one.
The only person I agree on every subject with is me.
And the same for you, and the same for everybody else.
But if I don't mention Tucker, then I'm sort of not mentioning the elephant in the room, and he is one great asset, one great elephant, as it were.
But, for example, we should be preoccupied with our borders, not Ukraine's borders.
I don't understand why that is a choice.
Why can't we be preoccupied with both?
We have the money.
If we didn't spend such staggering sums that we waste in this country, we would have more money.
But that's a separate issue.
The fact is that it's not either or.
And it's not Ukraine's borders and our borders.
Because they're different issues.
Ours is illegal immigration.
Theirs is the wiping out of a state.
Okay, so just for the record.
So I don't understand the...
I take it back.
I understand the arguments in English.
I understand the English.
I don't understand the point.
If we didn't give Ukraine a penny, would we be more preoccupied with the American border?
Answer that, please.
If you have the argument in your mind, first we have to take care of our borders.
We didn't take care of our borders the day Joe Biden became president.
The problem is Joe Biden, not Ukraine.
If...
We had a Republican president, and certainly Donald Trump, both would have been taken care of.
He would have armed Ukraine, and we would have had border security.
I wish he had finished building the wall to begin with, but that's another matter.
So just, I want to get rid of that argument, and then I'll get rid of another one in a moment.
The notion that we have to be preoccupied with our borders has nothing to do with arming Ukraine.
Nothing.
We should be preoccupied with our borders.
We were not under Biden before Putin invaded Ukraine.
Is that correct?
So the issue is a non sequitur.
Okay.
Next.
We have too many problems here.
Let's fix those first.
This has been said by Americans who opposed every war that we were in.
World War I, World War II, there was not much opposition to World War II, to be honest.
There was a fair amount to World War I, although generally speaking there was great support for it.
And then, of course, Vietnam.
That was very unpopular among half the population.
And the argument was given, let's take care of our problems first.
The argument is endless.
Since we will always have problems, what you're really saying is, let's not help any other country that is at war.
I supported our staying in Afghanistan.
What I realize is, it's not meant to insult anyone obviously, but everyone taking a position on any matter has to ask, how much of it is emotion and how much is it rational?
The argument, what are we going to do, stay in Afghanistan forever?
It was an emotional argument.
It was not a rational argument.
Let's say the answer is yes.
What did it cost us?
Very, very few American casualties and a much more stable country.
Not to mention, which matters to me, because I'm religious and I think God will ask me, how did you help others during your lifetime?
And I don't understand religious Americans being isolationists.
I understand secular Americans who are isolationists, but not religious Americans.
We're in the richest country on the face of the earth, and we shouldn't help countries that are being devoured by evil?
To which the answer is always, oh, so you want us to be the world's policemen, Dennis?
I do, in fact.
Because if we're not the world's policemen, China will be, or Russia will be, or even worse, the United Nations will be.
That's why.
The world will not have a policeman.
Those of you who say America should not be the world's policeman, you are simply using the left's argument of defund the police.
Except you're doing it on a global scale, and they do it on a domestic scale.
You are just as much for defund the police on Earth as they are defund the police in America.
I don't hold that.
The world stinks.
And America has been a blessing until the left has started to ruin it.
It is less of a blessing today.
That is a fact, tragically.
But it is still better than most.
Now, let's go to specific arguments with regard to Ukraine.
China is watching and has been shocked, shocked, by the American and Western response.
Now, I may eat my words, they may invade Taiwan in any event, but my take is this has forestalled an attack on Taiwan.
The world has come to the aid of Ukraine and is giving Russia a very bloody nose, a bloody eye, a bloody nose, bloody cheekbone, a smashed face.
China is watching.
China is also watching the staggering superiority of American weapons to Russian weapons.
That is not a little thing.
In China, where the only thing that matters to that despicable regime is power.
Now, Xi is in trouble.
So he might invade Taiwan, because that's what tyrants do to deflect from their incompetence.
But otherwise...
What has happened in Ukraine, I think, has forestalled an attack on Taiwan.
I'll take your calls.
All right, everybody.
I made an argument for arming Ukraine, partially by responding to the arguments that I find to be incoherent.
Even when articulated by people I adore, like Tucker Carlson.
And it doesn't in any way diminish my respect or regular listening to him.
Again, people have a tendency, and everybody has to fight it, and you can win if you fight it.
Oh, I really like X. I've gotten these letters all through my career.
Like, you know, I really, really adored you.
Listening for 20 years, and then you said, and I realize I can no longer listen to you.
And I've actually read some of them on the air, not because I'm hurt, but because I wanted to exemplify this tendency in people.
It's called splitting.
It's a psychological thing.
You're either perfect, Or a piece of crap.
I got the term from Dr. Stephen Marmer, the psychiatrist who comes on the Happiness Hour periodically and has done some PragerU videos.
It's a psychological term.
You're either perfect or garbage.
People do that to parents.
First they're perfect, then they see a flaw.
They're awful.
Now, there are positions, like the never-Trumpers, who lost me.
I admit it.
People that I had adored myself, and then took the position that a Democrat, that it is better for the country to have a left-wing regime, and I use the term regime, now that we have political prisoners, than Donald Trump.
If there was ever a purely emotional argument, that was it.
People have to fight their heart.
And you shall not follow your heart or your eyes after which you prostitute yourselves.
Deuteronomy.
I should read my commentary on Deuteronomy.
The Rational Bible is the third of five volumes to come out.
That's where I get my values from.
I don't follow my heart.
I follow my values and my faculty of reason.
I follow my heart when I choose what music I want to hear that night.
What restaurant I'd like to go to.
What movie I'd like to see.
Okay, let's go to your calls here.
Cleveland, Joe.
Thank you for calling, Joe.
Hello.
Dennis, it's an honor to speak with you today, although I have a very different opinion about Ukraine.
I believe you have it backwards.
I think when the U.S. acts as the world's policeman, what it's really doing is motivating and supporting authoritarian states such as China to increase their own military spending.
China is doing two things.
They're doing a road and belt initiative, and they're increasing their military.
The military is specific for Taiwan and the China Sea.
The road and belt initiative is more commerce-orientated for the whole world.
For the past number of decades, the U.S. has focused on using the military to engage with the rest of the world.
Rather than diplomacy and free-market economics.
That has hurt us badly.
It's leading to the current ongoing collapse of our nation.
The problem is the out-of-control military-industrial complex.
They supported a coup in Ukraine in 2014. Valerie Nuland bragged about this, that she spent a billion dollars to bring that about.
And the point of doing that...
It was to further expand the U.S. military-industrial complex using Russia as a kind of foil.
Tell me, you think that our intervention in Ukraine is motivated by the military-industrial complex, not by geopolitical or moral forces?
Is part of how the military-industrial complex operates.
No, no, no.
But please, you know, after you tell me how much you adore me, I'm certainly placed in a position of just wanting to respond as gracefully as possible.
I just want to understand, do you believe that if we didn't have a military-industrial complex, we would have allowed Ukraine to be attacked and devoured by Russia?
There are no moral or geopolitical or American interests in defending Ukraine, is what you're saying.
It's purely cynical profiteering by the military-industrial complex.
Number one, that is correct.
Number two, the U.S. is the one that instigated the conflict.
In other words, the only reason that Russia has invaded Ukraine, passed to Crimea, granted Russia clearly wanted Crimea, is that the U.S. instigated the conflict.
It is not to Russia's benefit to have a kind of civil war amongst its close relatives.
Why didn't they invade while Trump was president?
Because there was no reason to.
The only reason they invaded now is because the U.S. carried out a coup in 2014, and then their allies shelled.
But Trump was president from 2016 to 2020.
That's right.
And the Ukrainian government shelled eastern Ukraine for years.
And Russia begged them to stop, tried every approach they could, and then finally, you know, a little over a year ago now, they attempted negotiations and then finally gave a kind of...
Okay, all right.
Listen, I gave you a lot of time.
Thank you.
I've got to let you go, only because of time.
I appreciate your call very much.
I know you articulated what many people think.
I'd like to note another thing.
Finland and Sweden, which had always resisted joining NATO, are they also military-industrial complex dominated?
Is the entire Western Europe basically a bunch of...
Sheep, pacifists until now?
Have they had this massive military-industrial complex operating in their countries as well?
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All right, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
Defending American intervention in Ukraine.
I've given you a whole series of arguments.
It reminds me, by the way, these are the sorts of things that you might want to listen to again or play for people who differ with you and where you agree with me.
So there's something called PragerTopia where you get every show without commercials.
And now at PragerTopia, there's PragerTopia Unlimited.
You have access not only to every show without commercials, but to every one of my hundreds of lectures at the Prager store.
I presume it includes my Bible commentary.
Not the new one that I wrote.
That's a separate issue.
Obviously, that's a book.
But I did give hundreds of lectures prior to the writing of the book.
That's at pragertopia.com.
For those still unpersuaded, the last point that I made is worth noting again, that Finland and Sweden, which had never joined NATO, want to now.
That's how scared they are of Russia.
Now, why would they be scared?
Do I believe there's a military industrial complex?
Yes, I do.
Do I believe that it makes foreign policy like this?
No, I don't.
If there were no military industrial complex, whatever that precisely means, we would still have intervened.
Intervention doesn't come free.
It costs a lot of money.
I don't know where all the money goes.
I would like to know where all the money goes.
The amount of corruption on planet Earth can drown the planet.
As for the argument that the Ukrainian government is corrupt, I don't know how corrupt it is.
I'm sure it is.
I can now say with great sadness that America is in no position, with the Democrats running the country, of speaking about any other corrupt country.
The amount of corruption in this country because of the Democratic Party can drown this country.
So if you don't aid corrupt countries, you can't aid America.
Most of you know that to be true.
The corruption is staggering.
The deep state in the United States?
The vicious, vile, lying heads of intelligence in this country, 51 of whom signed a statement a month before the election in 2020, that the Hunter Biden notebook was Russian disinformation, every single one of them lied on behalf of the Democratic Party.
The heads of the CIA, the DIA, the FBI, they work for the Democratic Party.
That is as corrupt as it gets in any third world country.
Sorry.
Okay, let's see here.
I'll take another dissenting call because I'm not a left-winger.
I welcome dissent.
Ian in Redmond, California.
Hello.
Oh, hi, Dennis.
Pleasure to talk to you.
You hear about this new Rambo doctrine being discussed again in Texas, saying that any political leader voting to send troops to a conflict must first send their firstborn to the front lines before being allowed to vote on sending troops?
I haven't heard about it.
Oh, Dennis, oh, look.
Mystically, magically, suddenly no more wars that America has to send troops to.
How about that?
I don't understand your argument.
Is that what you would like?
We should send no troops anyway?
Anyway, we're not sending troops.
What happened to my call?
Oh, I'm sorry.
I feel bad.
Okay, I hope you can get back in, but a lot of people are calling.
I don't know what happened.
I don't quite understand it.
Look, every war we have been in, people have opposed sending troops.
Nobody is for sending troops to Ukraine.
I'm not.
So I don't know why that issue was raised.
Forgive me.
Okay, Bradenton, Florida.
John, hello.
Hey, Dennis.
Hi.
I'm glad you can hear me.
You haven't listened, and of course there's a deep state, and of course Hunter Biden and all that stuff.
I'm just chiming on what you just lately said over the break.
Yeah, but that's not what you called on, so tell me what you called about.
No, that's not what I... Right.
Well...
There's a lot of history here.
Somebody mentioned 2014. In 2014, Obama added a line item to the NATO doctrine that was going to bring Crimea.
And a month later, Putin took Crimea.
And that was 2014. That's just history.
This reminds me of the Bay of the Cuban Missile Crisis history.
All right, hold on there.
The summary of the call was, is Dennis in favor of Ukraine joining NATO?
The answer is no.
That's what I thought you were going to say.
Anyway, thank you for calling.
Hi, everybody.
The Ultimate Issues Hour, third hour every Tuesday.
This is really an ultimate issue today.
I've never actually raised it on an Ultimate Issues Hour.
It's the subject of my column.
My nationally syndicated column comes out every Tuesday.
There are 1,000 of my columns on the internet.
And you can start at number 466 and do fine.
I write about big stuff.
And this week's is really big stuff.
Is the conscience reliable?
So the more I have thought about it, the more I have realized...
That conscience is largely a useless term.
In fact, it'll come as a great surprise to you to know that the word does not even appear in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
That's a big deal.
The word for conscience in Hebrew is a new word, matzpun.
Excuse me, yeah, matzpun, yes.
No, no, matzpun is a compass, matzpen.
I think it is.
Anyway, it's the same root.
It's like the compass of one's moral direction.
But let me make it clear.
People who say, and I've engaged in this all of my life, people who say, God and the Bible are completely unnecessary.
I answer to my conscience.
I don't have to answer to a God.
I'm accountable to my conscience.
My conscience directs me, not God, not the Bible.
That's what they say.
But there's a very, very big problem that is 100% invalidating of that response.
And that is that people who do terrible evil have as clear a conscience as people who do great good.
Okay?
That should answer...
That should tell you that the notion that you answer to your conscience, for me, is not a particularly, shall I say, confidence-inducing response that you will do the right thing.
Every communist and every Nazi and every torturer answers to his conscience and sleeps well at night.
The people who sacrificed virgins and children and enemies, these people slept well at night.
Their conscience was clear.
Their conscience told them that sacrificing people to the ancient gods, or to them were their contemporaneous gods, was a good thing.
The conscience is really...
Another term for how you feel about it.
That's really what it is.
You can develop a really robust conscience, and I think you should.
I think I should.
All of us should.
That's a good thing.
But for those of you who have gone to college and have been taught that God and the Bible are unnecessary for a moral order, because people have a conscience that tells them what is good, you don't need a God to tell you murder is wrong.
Which is true.
A lot of people believe, and by the way, the word is believe.
They don't know it's wrong.
They believe it is wrong.
Because if there's no God, it's all a matter of opinion.
But they do believe it.
I would say, thank God they believe murder is wrong.
That's true.
But that is not reliable for most of humanity.
The reason your conscience tells you that murder is wrong is not because that's what your conscience automatically tells you.
It's because your conscience has been shaped by the forces around you.
The people who chop off healthy girls' breasts because the girl says she's a boy sleep well at night.
Their conscience tells them, yes, I'm a surgeon and I could...
Eliminate.
I could cut off an 18-year-old girl's breast because she says she's a boy.
I'm a good guy.
That's what they say.
It's so easy to prove the conscience is largely worthless.
The people who believed in slavery in the Civil War had as clear a conscience as the people who hated slavery.
Correct.
Or even more dramatic, Nazis had as clear a conscience as the Allied troops who fought them.
The people who ran the gulag, killing 20 to 40 million Russians and other Soviet citizens versus Stalin, their conscience was clear too.
The people who slaughtered 60 million people in China under Mao by means of forced starvation.
You think they tossed and turned in bed at night?
So, if you want to say, I don't need God, I don't need the Bible, I'm accountable to my feelings, you're honest.
But accountable to your conscience is meaningless.
Meaningless.
The worst people on earth have clear consciences.
1-8 Prager 776-877-243-7776 It's a very important subject because people don't think it through.
They don't realize.
I'm accountable to my conscience only means I'm accountable to myself.
It means nothing more than that.
Nothing.
There is no reason we should trust your conscience any more than we should trust your heart.
In fact, conscience, for the most part, is simply a euphemism for my heart.
But if you heard somebody say, I don't need God, I'm accountable to my heart, you would realize it's a very poor argument.
And they would never make it.
But that's what they're saying when they say, I'm accountable to my conscience.
My column is up at DennisPrager.com, my column is up at Town Hall, and it will go up at Daily Wire, American Greatness, and elsewhere in the course of the week, but you can see it now.
Send it to your college-educated son, daughter, brother-in-law.
Be very curious how they react.
The ones who are secular and think, oh, I don't need God or the Bible, I'm accountable to my conscience.
Pretty rational attack on that notion.
The dictionary definition is a person's moral sense of right and wrong viewed as acting as a guide to one's behavior.
It's an accurate, accurate definition.
That's right.
A person's moral sense of right and wrong.
In other words, your opinions and your feelings.
Whenever I make the common-sense argument that people need to hold themselves accountable to a morality-giving, morality-judging God, specifically the God of the Bible, and more specifically the God of the Ten Commandments, a flood of incredulous, frequently mocking responses immediately appears in the comments section and on atheist and left-wing websites.
The gist of the God-is-morally-unnecessary argument is this.
Unlike Prager and other religious people, I don't need God to tell me murder is wrong.
My conscience tells me that.
I don't need to answer to any God.
I answer to my conscience.
This response is held most widely among the best educated, i.e.
the people most likely to reject the existence of God and the necessity of both God and the Bible for either a moral order or for attaining wisdom.
Without which, a moral order is impossible.
That the great majority of secular people believe the conscience is all that people need to act morally is one more example of the low intellectual level secularism has produced.
Other examples include men give birth.
Sex is non-binary.
Western civilization is no better than any other civilization.
Colorblind is racist.
And people are basically good.
The truly foolish doctrine that people must affirm if they rely on the conscience to produce moral behavior.
They're related.
If you believe that the conscience will produce moral behavior, then you think people are basically good.
And that is why I have warned so frequently against the idiotic belief that People are basically good.
It is a destructive belief if you want a good world.
1-8 Prager, 7-7-6.
877-243-776.
Okay, y'all.
Dennis Prager here.
Ultimate Issues Hour.
The weakness and general uselessness of the conscience.
Because...
And I prove it.
This is not an opinion.
This is proof.
Bad people have clear consciences.
End of issue.
Okay?
You can't tell me the conscience is particularly reliable when people with opposite views on moral issues both have clear consciences.
So it's clearly not this independent Aspect of humanity that tells you the right thing to do.
You tell your conscience what the right thing to do is.
It doesn't matter.
Name the issue.
People who think that a non-born human, the human fetus, has value and has rights, have a clear conscience, and people who think that the unborn human has no rights.
Zero.
Have the same clear conscience.
So, of what use is it if the conscience could lead to completely opposite views?
Anti-communists and pro-communists, the people who like the doctrine that slaughtered 100 million human beings in the 20th century, both had clear consciences.
So it's not the world's most reliable thing, is it?
By the way, there are people who believe in God who did bad things.
That's true, too.
It's pretty damn tough to make good people, to be the single most important thing in society.
Global warming is in America.
And non-binary sex, not making good people.
Because the left is just, aside from awful, it's foolish.
I continue with my column, which is out today, and you should send it to everybody you know.
Just have them react, especially the secular in your family or extended circle who have contempt.
They may be sweet and kind, but deep down they have contempt for religious relatives.
No secular idiocy is greater than the belief that the conscience can replace God, the Bible, and Judeo-Christian values as a producer of moral behavior.
The reality is that most people's consciences are, to say the least, easily manipulated.
It is hard to imagine any aspect of human life more malleable than the conscience.
It is as malleable as putty and as sturdy.
In fact, the malleability of the conscience alone makes the case for God and Bible-based morality.
If the conscience were morally effective, what evildoer or supporter of evil would sleep well at night?
Yet people who commit evil, whether for personal reasons, such as murderers, thieves, and rapists, or for ideological reasons, such as Nazis, Communists, and Islamist terrorists, sleep as soundly as anyone else.
Raskolnikov, the murderer protagonist in Dostoevsky's Prime and Punishment, is an exception, but only because he is a fictional character.
Virtually every individual who has committed or supported evil has had a clear conscience.
That's why I answer to my conscience is both intellectually and morally meaningless.
Every monster and every moral fool quote-unquote answers to his conscience.
And his conscience tells him he is just fine, especially today in the age of self-esteem.
It is far truer to say that one's feelings and behavior produce the conscience than the conscience produces one's feelings and behavior.
Overwhelmingly, people do either what they want to do and then tell their conscience that what they did was right, or their feelings decide what is right and they simply label those feelings conscience.
I'll take your calls, and then I will continue with the article there.
Okay, Brian, Tustin, California, hello.
Hi, Dennis, thanks for taking my call.
I think you're completely wrong about this issue, and I think it probably, because you probably have a false understanding of what the conscience is exactly, and so you've got this whole philosophy, which is totally wrong and false, because people who commit...
Acts against their conscience are not well.
They do not sleep well at night.
They're not happy people.
This is what's causing people to be so miserable and so evil, is that they go against their conscience, which I say comes directly from God, and I say that...
Why is there no word for conscience in the Old Testament?
You just made up.
There is.
Because it's a Latin word.
Hey, we're speaking different languages.
They spoke a different language in the Old Testament, but what they did is they mythologized the conscience, and if you look at the Ten Commandments, God shall not murder.
See, you're confused about...
Wait, wait, wait.
Finish your sentence.
Finish your sentence.
If you look at the Ten Commandments, which says, Thou shalt not murder, you didn't finish your sentence.
Finish your sentence.
I know, because you're interrupting me.
No, no, no, no, no.
I interrupted you by saying, finish your sentence.
If you don't finish your sentence, I will let you go.
Okay.
Okay, goodbye.
Okay, he monologued.
I'm sorry.
I try to take calls that differ with me, but they have to actually have a dialogue and make sense.
There's no word for conscience in the Old Testament.
In all the Hebrew, it doesn't exist.
We made it up.
It's fine.
It's a nice concept.
He knows that nobody who does bad sleeps well at night.
A man is an omniscient man.
Really?
That's really something.
Boy, do I wish that were the case.
I really do.
You should see the videos.
They have, it's videos, or they made films.
Of the Nazi guards at Auschwitz, the death and torture camp of Jews mostly, but not only Jews.
How much fun they had on their off hours, playing the accordion and singing and drinking and having a ball.
Yeah, a day of torturing and murder of children and their parents and grandparents.
And then they had...
They had a dance to attend.
I don't like wishful thinking, my friends, especially from people who defend religion.
In Numbers, there's a rebellion against Moses, the biggest rebellion of all, by Korach.
You think he didn't sleep well at night?
He was so certain that he was right.
He allowed a test for God to judge whether he or Moses was right.
Hi everybody, Dennis Pringer here, Ultimate Issues Hour.
Or...
Talking about the conscience and people who say, when I ask them if you're not accountable to God and the Bible for your behavior, What are you accountable to or whom are you accountable to?
And they say their conscience, which is useless.
In most cases, some people have a developed conscience.
There's no question about it.
But people on the opposite sides of any issue both have clear consciences.
People who defended slavery and people who opposed it.
Nazis and anti-Nazis.
Communists and anti-communists.
In every issue today, people who believe that the girl's breasts should be cut off if they say they're boys, answer to their conscience.
People who think we're mutilating young girls, answer to their conscience.
And I think this bothers a lot of people because we're so used to the word conscience.
I guess the only answer to my challenge is one made by the last caller.
It's not true that people who do bad things have clear consciences.
How does he know?
Why do they sleep well?
According to Roy Baumeister, one of the leading criminologists in the last half century in America, People with particularly high self-esteem are the murderers he deals with his whole life.
He has dealt with his whole life in prison.
Many of them sleep well at night, too.
Not all.
The ones who...
I'll give you an example.
I asked a murderer in Angola State Penitentiary.
I was talking to a murderer.
A man in life in prison for murder.
He was running a car repair shop at the penitentiary.
So, may I ask you, how do you deal with the fact that you'll be here until you die?
He said, I don't feel nearly as bad as the people whose loved one I murdered.
That guy had been rendered religious by the great warden at the time who used...
Religion to make people penitent in a penitentiary.
So his conscience bothered him because it was developed.
If you develop your conscience properly, that's great.
If.
Okay, let's go to Cala Mesa, California.
And Eric, hello.
Hey Dennis, thanks for taking my call.
Thank you for calling.
So, yeah, I'm kind of in line with you.
I believe the conscience needs to be, you know, formed over time, and I think it's based on what you believe.
I personally am Christian, and my conscience is based off of religious beliefs and how I was raised.
But, you know, other people are raised in different situations, and they're taught to believe certain things, and they're taught that those things are right.
So they have a different conscience than you.
Exactly.
So everybody's conscience is based on how they were taught.
Right.
You're right.
We're in 100% agreement.
It's like a glass.
You fill it.
You could fill it with poison.
You could fill it with a healthy drink.
That's what it is.
We have consciences.
We have a sense of right and wrong.
But maybe child sacrifice is right.
And in my case, being raised religious, I kind of feel like my conscience is almost like the voice of God because it's based off of my religion and things that I'm about to do or have done, I feel a certain way based off of the way I was raised and what I believe.
But, I mean, I'm even teaching my daughter that her conscience is the voice of God because I'm raising her religious.
So I'm trying to teach her right from wrong that way, and she's getting it.
Well, good.
You're a good man.
I thank you for the call.
Of course, if she goes to college, she may come back.
May.
It depends how well she's vaccinated against idiocy.
That's the most important vaccine you can get today.
Vaccine against college idiocy.
And then she'll come back and say, well, my conscience tells me.
So it's, look, there's no perfect answer to making good people.
It's the hardest project in human life.
And we pay little attention to it.
If we paid one-tenth the amount of attention and effort devoted to making good people as we do Fighting climate change.
We'd have a much better world.
Dennis Prager here.
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