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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:15:54
A Police State
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Dennis Prager here.
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Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
Good to be with you.
I wrote in 2020 that the lockdowns were, quote, the title of my column, a dress rehearsal for a police state.
I have made it a moral obligation upon myself not only to always tell the truth to the best of a human ability to do so, but not to exaggerate.
So this is language I had never used.
Broadcasting now exactly 40 years, I have a very long track record of understated speech.
So if I say that the Democratic Party, which is the party of the left, not of the liberal, is aiming to produce a police state, then I mean it.
You can say I'm wrong, obviously, but you cannot say that I am engaged in hyperbole.
At least deliberately engaged in hyperbole.
There has never been a leftist that opposed a police state, just as there has never been a leftist that valued truth.
There are liberals who oppose police states and there are conservatives who do.
The definition of a leftist is coercion.
I can use whatever means are available to get my way.
It is an amoral proposition.
Morality does not enter into it because what the leftist believes is morally right by definition.
And so that is a prelude to the FBI raid on a former president's home.
To the best of my knowledge, an unprecedented act.
A man who even might be a future candidate.
He is a past president and the last nominee of the Republican Party to be president.
It is clear that people on the left have never accepted the fact that he was president, and with their repeated impeachments, which went nowhere, all they did was cheapen the word impeachment.
It once loomed As a last resort for a president of extraordinary corruption, and now it only means whomever the Democrats oppose.
If Ron DeSantis were to run and win, they would impeach him.
They would find a reason to do so.
If you don't hate the left, again, not liberals, Liberals are naive, and naivete allows evil, but they are not evil.
If you don't hate evil, as the great book, the Bible puts it, those who love God, you, it's a command, you must hate evil.
There is a piece in the Daily Telegraph about what the left has done to the great state, once great state of California.
I should read excerpts to you.
I just want to note once again, the corruption involved in the raid, what the left has done to the FBI and the CIA and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, is what it has done to everything.
It touches, it ruins it.
I have to believe morale at the FBI among the regular rank-and-file FBI agents has to be low.
I grew up on television shows about the FBI. They were heroes in my life.
I assumed that the FBI was there to protect me, not to protect a political party.
That's why when we speak about corruption in the Ukraine, In Ukraine, not the Ukraine.
In Ukraine, I remind people that we have no moral leg to stand upon as the corruption in the United States almost entirely due to the left rivals that of third world countries.
Indeed, that was in the statement of some third world countries.
There are third world countries that I would presume have less corruption than the United States of America.
Half this country believes that the FBI is a weapon of mass destruction used by the left to suppress its opponents.
I am in that half.
I am in that half with a great sadness.
It brings me no joy to tell you that the American Medical Association has been rendered a farce that the American Bar Association has.
That the National Education Association has.
That the FBI and CIA have.
I don't know what animates a leftist.
To be on such a low moral level as to ruin something as beautiful as what America became.
You have to be sick.
I don't understand how you can be a normal human being.
In other words, have the normal perceptions of life and have gratitude in your life and think clearly and be a leftist.
I don't understand it.
The gulf between us is not just a moral distinction.
It is that we don't understand you and I guess you don't understand us.
How could people be so awful as to believe America?
It's been the greatest experiment in freedom in history.
We must be really sick to believe that.
We've got to be really sick to believe that humans are divided between male and female.
That is really off the charts.
So to think that we are what we think the left is, is remarkable.
What positions do we take that betoken, that represent moral...
Or psychological sickness?
I can't think of any.
We want people to be able to arm themselves?
Well, as I have said, and not only I, it is the first thing every totalitarian, every police state does is confiscate weapons.
I don't want the state to be the only place where weapons are owned.
Unless you trust the state.
I don't trust the state.
I don't trust the state anywhere.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The whole point of the American project was to have a small state so that you and I, the individual, can loom large.
That was the point of the founding of this country.
Tell me what is sick about the idea that I don't want the state.
The state is the author of all the genocides of the 20th century.
No big state, no genocide.
100 million people plus were slaughtered by big states.
And I want big states to be the only place that owns weapons?
Is that a sick idea?
Is that goofy?
So tell me.
It's interesting.
I'd like to hear what I do in my emails.
And they're sick.
And they usually end up either cursing me.
Or throwing a bunch of epithets at me.
Which, by the way, sustains me tremendously.
I believe in the saying, when you're over the target, the flack is the thickest.
1-8 Prager 776. Later on, I will read to you Donald Trump's statement about this unprecedented attack on a president, former president.
Presidential candidate and perhaps future presidential candidate.
This is a new country.
What is our time factor, Mr. Sean?
So I'm debating whether to begin this Daily Telegraph piece for you.
I don't know what the politics of the Daily Telegraph in Britain are, but I will tell you that they wrote a piece that is just.
It is so devastating about California and how people are leaving, the rich are leaving and the poor are leaving.
Former head of the British Labour Party who was brought into Facebook is going back to Britain.
As troubled as Britain is, and the National Health Service in Britain is collapsing, as troubled as Britain is, it is, as the Telegraph piece puts it, it is way ahead of California.
There is nothing like California in the Western world today, because California has a veto-proof, A complete monopoly on political power.
So you look to California for an answer to the question, if the left could do whatever it wants, what will it do?
And the answer is destroy.
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Daily Telegraph has a devastating piece.
California is no Garden of Eden.
It is now a woke basket case whose rich and poor are fleeing alike.
That Nick Clegg has become the latest Facebook executive to announce he's fleeing Silicon Valley for Britain, where he will spend half his time, says a lot about California.
Britain is on the brink of a deep and protracted recession.
With inflation set to rise to 13%.
And yet, for Nick Clegg, who is the former head of the Labor Party, big, big, big Brit, basket case Britain seems to be preferable to California.
Rich and poor are calling time on the Golden State.
Billionaire's Larry Ellison.
Founder and chairman of Oracle.
Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir.
Elon Musk of Tesla.
Have all relocated their companies to cheaper, friendlier states.
Even Mark Zuckerberg's main residence is Hawaii.
For everyone else, with remote work becoming mainstream in COVID lockdowns, net emigration has hit record highs.
In 2021, the population of California fell by 117,500.
People are fed up of soaring taxation, the high cost of living, groaning regulation, an authoritarian impulse on full show during COVID and stagnating job growth.
Full show, I guess we would say full display in American English.
The heavy-handed state continually fails to solve the lethal social problems that are on permanent display, from mass shootings to spiraling homelessness.
California's dynamism and sense of possibility, where despite high prices and social strains, those with hustle and good ideas could become fantastically successful, has been sucked dry.
Why would you stay?
That's what it says.
I guess it was written for me.
Why do I stay?
Because there are too many people here I love.
That's the reason.
The sad truth is that California is reaping what it has sown, not simply with its heavy-handed regulation, but in its deep and committed embrace of wokeness.
Which permeates from its courts via Hollywood to schools and hospitals.
The ideological disintegration of the state was always going to hasten its economic decline.
The California rot long in place became pronounced in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020. Amid soaring crime rates, the mayors of both LA and San Francisco announced plans to defund the police.
How do these people face themselves?
And the answer is, conscience is a very weak part of the human condition.
I talked about this yesterday, and it was the first time I ever put it that way.
In some people, the conscience is quite strong, but that's because they have developed it.
It's like in some people, triceps and biceps and...
Other muscles of the body, glutes, are really strong.
But they're made strong by the user.
The conscience in an Eric Garcetti is like an appendix.
It's like an appendix.
It is useless.
They slashed hundreds of millions from budgets.
It wasn't the smartest plan.
LA was experiencing a terrifying rise in homicides.
California's committed progressivism has been evident in its embrace of illegal immigrants, offering driver's licenses and free health care.
Blacks and Hispanics, according to US census data, fare worse in California than almost anywhere else in the US, with a third of Latinos living in poverty compared to the 21% average elsewhere.
How's that?
If you want to know what the left would do if it's in power, just look at California.
If you think that schools are fine, if you think the unemployment is fine, the homelessness is fine, the crime is fine, then you should vote Democrat.
Since 1990, the black population of Los Angeles County has dropped by nearly 200,000.
More than half now express interest in leaving the state.
Woke hasn't worked.
And yet, like so many whites, these blacks will continue to vote Democrat.
They are fleeing what Democrats produced, and then vote Democrat.
We'll be back.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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The corruption of medicine by the left.
The imbecilic nature of universities because of the left.
It confirms that sort of every generation there arises an evil.
And I don't know why.
It just does.
But there are some that are more indefensible than others.
The indefensible nature of left-wing evil in America is that they're doing it against a good society.
See, when the Russian Revolution took place and the genocidal Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they weren't ruining a wonderful country.
The czar was corrupt.
The czar was a dictator.
The life of vast numbers of Russians was awful, economically especially.
By and large, evil has arisen in very difficult circumstances.
Left-wing evil in America has So, in a sense, I regard the American left as more morally despicable than the Bolsheviks in Russia.
Because the Bolsheviks were fighting against something bad, the czarist regime.
The left in America is fighting against something good, America.
So there's something particularly loathsome about the American left that I cannot apply to the German left or to the Russian left or any of the other left, or the Chinese left.
They were...
Mass murdering systems.
Obviously, the left is not yet a mass murdering system in the United States.
May I continue to be able to say that for the rest of my life and the rest of your life if you're 20 years old?
They may not have to in order to gain all the power that they want.
And they are gaining all the power that they want.
I long ago realized that gratitude is the mother of goodness and ingratitude is the mother of evil.
It's in my happiness book, which I wrote in 1999. Happiness is a serious problem.
Ingrates are particularly disgusting human beings.
Those of us who walk around, as I do, in a perpetual state of gratitude, To the people in my life?
To America?
To my religion?
I mean, there's so much.
To my wife, my family, my friends.
I mean, I pinch myself at how lucky I am.
Is there any leftist who pinches him or herself about how lucky he or she or Tree or Zee is?
Tree, how you doing?
He smiled.
He smiled.
Who wrote that?
Remember that book, The Giving Tree?
It was a huge, huge bestseller.
He was the cartoonist for Playboy.
I don't remember his name.
I'll look it up.
Oh my God, that was a popular book.
It sounds close, but no cigar.
So we've got to get the real name here.
The Giving Tree.
Shel Silverstein.
I thought you said Michelle.
Shel Silverstein, yes.
I read it.
It's a short book.
A lot of parents read it to their kids.
It just keeps giving.
It was a fine book to the best of my ability to recall.
But it's too non-political for today.
People on the left don't read sweet things to their kids.
They read about how crappy America is and other stuff.
There's a great story.
Great.
No, no, no, I take it back.
Great is a very unhelpful word.
Something could be great and awful, right?
You could say Stalin was a great leader, but you don't mean morally great.
He had leadership qualities.
There is an amazing story out of, let's see, where is it out of actually?
Mountain View in the city of Port Townsend in Washington State.
An 80-year-old woman has been banned from a YMCA pool after she demanded a transgendered employee leave the women's locker room.
Yep.
YMCA. Young Men's Christian Association.
Another institution.
The left is ruined just as they did.
The Salvation Army, one of my favorite institutions in the country.
I raise so much money for them each year.
My annual appeal for them and their leadership went cowardly woke.
Yep.
Here's an interesting question that I never thought of until this past year.
Can you know people?
Can you say you know a person, including yourself, if the person has not been tested?
That's a biggie.
We return.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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MyPillow.com, promo code PRAGER. Can America turn into a police state?
I must tell you, 40 years of broadcasting, this month is the 40th anniversary.
I never asked this question because it actually never occurred to me.
Freedom is the emblem of America.
That's why the French gave America, and not itself or any other country, the Statue of Liberty.
Liberty is the opposite of police state.
It's not a left-wing value, just as truth is not.
It is hard to know what a left-wing value is.
What are Bill Gates' values?
Why is he buying up so much farmland in America and other land?
What does he actually stand for?
I think one of the things he does is a reduction of the human population.
Alex Epstein has brilliantly analyzed this.
It's really ultimately the environmentalist movement is an anti-human movement.
Environmentalists regard the humans as a blight on Mother Earth.
Anyway, back to the police state.
Why did the FBI raid Mar-a-Lago?
Of course, it left Hillary Clinton's wiping clean of her server completely left alone.
When you use the power of the state, which is, by the way, unlimited, when you use the power of the state to suppress political dissent and enemies, Then you have become a police state.
We are on our way to that.
The guns issue is primarily about that.
People don't like to talk about it, and I fully understand that.
I've never talked about it in this way.
Does the state have all the weapons, or do citizens have weapons as well?
That's the ultimate gun question.
Governments to have unlimited power.
You have a gun, you have power.
You have free speech, you have power.
You are a nothing.
The state is everything.
State uber alles.
California, Illinois, and New York have declared states of emergency.
The right to declare a state of emergency must be rescinded.
It is so abused by the left as to be a much greater nemesis than blessing in a society, the ability of the state to declare a state of emergency.
It has been raped like everything else that is...
Worthwhile in society by the left.
The motto of the left, what is the great line from the devil in Goethe's Faust, which Karl Marx loved?
Everything that exists must be destroyed.
I believe that that is the line.
I have come to see leftism, not liberalism, for the thousandth time.
As a diabolical creation.
I'll tell you why I believe it is diabolical.
Because it is completely destructive.
There is no redeeming feature to leftism.
From Lenin to Soros.
And it is not rational.
Its entire purpose is to destroy what is good.
The nuclear family.
Justice.
Standards.
That's why I see it as a diabolical thing.
And by the way, just to tell you how dramatic that is, I've never believed in the devil as such.
I respect many people who do believe in the devil, but it is hard to explain the left.
Klaus Schwab and George Soros and...
AOC, it is hard to explain these nihilist creatures in any rational way because nothing they say makes sense.
It's not a matter of differing.
I differ with people on capital punishment, but I don't believe that people who oppose capital punishment are diabolic.
It's not a matter of I disagree with the left.
It is that they are completely destructive.
People I disagree with who can be fine human beings.
It's a given.
This is not a matter of disagreement.
It is a fatal threat to all that is good.
Donald Trump issued a statement.
I'd like to read it to you.
These are dark times for our nation.
As my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.
Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before.
After working and cooperating with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.
It is prosecutorial misconduct.
The weaponization of the justice system and an attack by radical left Democrats who desperately don't want me to run for president in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and conservatives in the upcoming midterm elections.
Such an assault can only take place in broken third world countries.
Sadly, America has now become one of those countries.
Corrupt at a level not seen before.
Donald Trump tells more truth than the New York Times or the Washington Post or your local teacher.
Yes, Donald Trump, the pathological liar as so described.
Tell me a lie that he has said that is as great As the 51 heads of intelligence agencies who said a month before the presidential election in 2020 that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
Tell me a lie that Donald Trump said that was equivalent to that.
One.
Tell me one.
The size of the crowd is at his inauguration.
If he lied about it, this is not a consequential lie.
When it comes to consequential lies, The left has almost a monopoly.
America has now become one of those countries corrupt at a level not seen before.
They even broke into my safe.
What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee?
Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.
The political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years, and now the fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia scam, impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two, and so much more, it just never ends.
It is political targeting at the highest level.
Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid-wash 33,000 emails after, he capitalizes, after they were subpoenaed by Congress.
Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable.
She even took antique furniture and other items from the White House.
I stood up to America's bureaucratic corruption.
I restored power to the people and truly delivered for our country like we have never seen before.
That's correct.
The establishment hated it.
Now as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me and the Republican Party once more.
The lawlessness, political persecution, and witch hunt must be exposed and stopped.
I will continue to fight for the great American people.
Statement by the last president.
Prior to this one.
Hmm.
1-8 Prager 776. Before I get back to the 80-year-old woman in the state of Washington, I don't think I reported this to you.
Popeye comic strip getting woke.
Getting woke makeover.
With, quote, more characters who aren't heterosexual.
After nearly a hundred years in existence, the Popeye comic strip is reportedly getting a woke makeover, with the strip's latest cartoonist promising more ethnic diversity and, quote, more characters that aren't heterosexual.
Cartoonist Randall Milholland described the Popeye character as being gender fluid.
Popeye is gender fluid.
He's neither a man nor a woman.
He's both and more.
I feel bad for little kids today.
Hey, everybody.
I am Dennis Prager.
Uh, what's really something?
Josh in New Jersey wants to know if they can frame Trump for something.
That's my theory, not just mine.
They claim it's did he take stuff from the White House, but they're looking for January 6th evidence.
This Attorney General turns out to be a truly weak human being, Merrick Garland.
I even remember thinking, well, the Senate man seems to have honor and stature when Barack Obama nominated him for the Supreme Court.
He turned out to be another two-bit leftist.
They're a dime a dozen.
They're interchangeable.
That's why a few things drive me crazier.
Then when an American says, I vote for the candidate, not the party.
Really?
Can you name a Democrat that will not wreck this country?
That is not a leftist?
What Democrat would you vote for that would be different from Merrick Garland or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Richard Blumenthal or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi?
Tell me.
Who would be different?
It's a way of avoiding the fundamental question of what ideology is wrecking the country and which party has that ideology.
Simple as that.
Another story prior to my going back to the woman in Washington State.
80-year-old woman.
Kicked out of the YMCA because she didn't want a biological man in the women's locker room as little girls got undressed.
But to the left, that is a civil right.
You're a man who says you're a woman, and you can, in fact, be in a women's locker room as women get undressed.
Yes, it's a civil right, and you're called a hater if you don't agree with them.
You're a hater.
A hater of what?
A hater of transgendered people?
If I don't know you're a man, then I don't care if you're transgender.
But if it's obvious in any given way that you're a man and you claim you're a woman, we have a problem.
We do what we do.
It's a problem.
This is a nuanced fact of life.
Maybe you don't belong in a women's prison.
Where one, at least one, but I think numerous, biological males impregnated women prisoners.
So she was kicked out, the 80-year-old woman.
She didn't want this biological male in their locker room.
Did you hear about this?
The assistant coach?
The longest tenured football coach in the Big 12, Cale Gundy, for the University of Oklahoma, the Sooners as they're called.
He resigned this week, saying that he had read aloud, quote, a word that I should never under any circumstance have uttered off the screen of a player's iPad during a film session last week.
So he uttered the N-word, It was part of something he was reading.
I'm telling you that medieval laws of blasphemy were not as intense as the laws of blasphemy that the left have erected in our country.
To call a black person the N-word is despicable.
Period.
End of issue.
to say the N-word in the context of something you're reading is not despicable.
It's so sad that he had to apologize.
size.
"The unfortunate reality is that someone in my position can cause harm without ever meaning to do so," Gundy wrote in a statement posted to his Twitter account.
In that circumstance, a man of character accepts accountability.
I take responsibility for this mistake.
I apologize.
He made a mistake.
He is fired from his job.
How will he make a living?
Does he have a history of racism?
Is what he did racist?
Gandhi said, in the moment, That in the moment he did not even realize what he was reading.
And as soon as he did, I was horrified.
I want to be clear, the words I read aloud from that screen were not my words.
What I said was not malicious.
It was not even intentional.
That's right.
Still, I am mature enough to know that the word I said was shameful and hurtful, no matter my intentions.
But with a word, a word as opposed to a deed.
Intentions matter.
Good intentions don't matter in terms of result, but they matter in terms of how we judge many actions.
There's accidental homicide and there's premeditated murder.
It's all a matter of intentions.
The head coach, Brent Venables, who served as an assistant alongside Gundy from 1999 to 2011.
Imagine how close these guys must be 12 years together.
Thank you.
Accepted Coach Gundy's resignation.
He has a profile in courage.
He should have said, I don't accept his resignation.
He meant no harm.
He made a mistake.
On the left, mistakes are fatal.
Not their mistakes.
We'll be back.
During August, which is fundraising month for PragerU, almost every day I feature a member of PragerForce, a young people's organization.
There's now 20,000 members around the world.
And here is a...
A member of Prager Force, who is a child of a Japanese father and a Mexican mother, and who is married to a Japanese woman and is living in Japan, Seijin Shirotori.
So, Seijin, are you right now in Japan?
Am I talking to you in Japan?
That's correct, sir.
So why are you clearer than when I talk to people in Glendale, California, where my studio is situated?
No, it's actually disturbing.
I tried to prepare as much as I can.
So what time is it in Japan?
Yes, it's at 2.30 in the morning.
Oh, I really am grateful to you.
What time do you normally go to sleep?
Maybe around 12 or so, I think.
But this is definitely worth it.
That is extremely kind.
I knew it was not a good hour for you.
So, are your wife and child sleeping?
Yes, they are.
Very nice.
So, Gene, welcome.
What prompted you?
Again, I want to repeat to people, you were born in the U.S., but your parents were born...
Outside of the U.S., correct?
Your mother in Mexico and your father in Japan.
Well, my mother was born in the U.S. My great-grandparents came from Mexico.
So you speak obviously fluent English and fluent Japanese.
Yes, thank you.
Do you speak Spanish as well?
I'm working on it.
I do speak Korean.
Why do you speak Korean?
Well, so I am a unificationist.
It's kind of a religious reasons.
Oh, sure.
Yes, yes.
The Unification Church.
I'm very familiar with it.
Reverend Moon.
That's correct.
Right.
Did you marry your wife in a Unification Church ceremony?
That's correct.
I was matched by Reverend Moon, and yes, we've been together since 2009. We're very happily married.
How does he know whom to match you with?
That's a very good question.
I think maybe kind of, I guess, spiritually attuned.
But, I mean, my parents were also matched by Reverend Moon.
And many other people are so.
And, of course, there's some marriages that break.
But I know a lot of marriages which have lasted.
And I think...
Really seeing my own parents, they love each other so much, and even though for certain circumstances there, my dad's in Japan, my mother's in the U.S., but they still have a very good relationship, and I can see that really, like an ocean, one across, ocean across does not change their love for each other, and just I've always felt the warmth of their love as I grew up.
And also my dad gave me pretty clear guidelines and I think really in my church we say that family is the school.
I think that my family was a living example of that.
That's why I'm connected to the church.
That's why I'm connected to God.
I love Jesus.
I love Reverend Moon.
I love Dr. Hak Jahan Moon.
We call them True Parents.
My church also connected me to you and PragerU, I feel.
On my church's website, there was an article, Judaism, Sexual Revolution, Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality, and I was blown away by it.
So, yeah, I love my movement so much, and I love being unificationists.
I love everything that comes with it.
I love that I could have this opportunity to talk with you today.
You're like my hero, so thank you so much.
You're a fascinating person.
I'm curious, then I'm going to get to you and PragerU.
I'm curious, do Japanese accept you as completely Japanese because you don't look fully Japanese?
Well, I guess they don't think I'm fully Japanese.
I'm sure they feel like, oh, I guess he doesn't seem Japanese.
So I think maybe some people would think of me as like...
Half Japanese or maybe not.
But I think since I can speak the language...
Right.
So in daily life, do you feel that you are treated differently?
Not really.
Good, good.
I was just curious.
All right, I'm going to come back to you in a moment, folks.
This is Fundraising Month for PragerU.
We have PragerForce people all over the world, as you see.
Hey everybody, this is the Ultimate Issues Hour, one of the three dedicated hours of the Prager Show, of the Dennis Prager Show each week.
Male, female on Wednesday, happiness on Friday, Ultimate Issues on Tuesday, third hour of the show.
By the way, if you can't hear, or do not hear, or wish to hear again, any hour or all of my shows...
Go to PragerTopia.com where you can hear them without even commercials.
PragerTopia.com Today's topic is the topic of my column this week.
My column comes out on Tuesdays.
To my amazement, there are over 1,000 of my columns on the internet.
20 years, 50 columns a year.
And there were columns before that.
Every Tuesday, I write it over the weekend or even on Monday.
If I have the idea clear, it comes out fast.
There is no answer to the question, how long does it take me to write a column?
You can say a week.
You can say two hours.
The thing I need most is clarity about what I want.
The thing I need most is a topic.
I spend more time thinking about the topic than anything else.
Then what do I want to say?
And then it comes out fast in my fingers.
Why are so many young Americans irreligious?
This country will not survive if it remains secular.
It is as simple as that.
You don't have to be a believer to say that.
Most believers don't even say that.
You don't have to be an atheist to deny it.
Many atheists understand the indispensable value of religion to America's success.
So let me put it bluntly, as the numbers and percentages of young people who are completely irreligious, who describe themselves as nuns, N-O-N-E-S, No religious affiliation.
As those numbers increase, the likelihood of America's future success decreases.
The hole left by the death of religion, specifically Christianity and Judeo-Christian values.
Biblical values is another term for Judeo-Christian.
Jews and Christians share the vast majority of the Bible.
The Old Testament.
Its demise is the demise of the country.
If you live in a make-believe world where it doesn't matter if people have the values that form this society, there's nothing I can say.
If you really believe that it's irrelevant to society's well-being, whether people affirm The Bible, as their central moral text, there's nothing I can say except that willful naivete in adults is not a beautiful trait.
You've got to be willfully naive to dismiss the indispensability of religion.
So why are so many young Americans secular and completely irreligious?
Which is sort of a euphemism, not a euphemism, excuse me, a sort of a synonym of secular.
Why are so many?
So there are two gigantic reasons.
One is...
They swim in a secular sea.
No, swim in a secular ocean.
Everything in society has become secular.
Irreligious.
Godless.
Gott frei.
God free.
Right?
School.
1962. In...
I believe the worst decision...
Well, no, that's not true.
The Supreme Court decision on slavery, on runaway slaves, that's got to take number one.
So there were a few horrific decisions.
One of the worst was 1962, where you couldn't say in class, class could not say something to the effect, we ask for thy blessings.
Oh God, on our teachers, our schools, our parents.
That's a real subversive prayer, isn't it?
We wouldn't want kids saying that.
It says God in it.
God has to be removed from schools, and it's been removed.
The central doctrine of teaching in American history, the Bible, and God.
The Yale insignia, yes, the symbol of Yale University is in Hebrew from the Old Testament, from the Book of Leviticus.
The Book of Leviticus is one of the most obscure in the Bible, and yet Yale has its insignia from it, and the Liberty Bell has a verse from it.
Proclaim liberty throughout the lands unto all its inhabitants.
Leviticus 25, I believe it is.
That's how steep the founders were in the Hebrew Bible.
So my question for this Ultimate Issues Hour, why are so many young people, including the children of religious people, irreligious?
Answer number one.
There are two.
And they are equally important, in my opinion.
Answer number one is they are swimming in a secular ocean.
They are brainwashed into thinking that God and religion are irrelevant, or even worse than irrelevant, an impediment to a good society.
You know how many young people believe the following nonsense?
More people have been killed by religion in the name of God than anything else.
I deal with that in my column today.
I urge you to go to my website, you can get it, or to townhall.com.
Then it's prager.com or townhall.com.
I deal with that very question.
Oh, more people have been killed by religion.
By religion, they mean Christianity, by the way.
Because if you say how many people were killed by Islam, you're called an Islamophobe.
But if you say how many people were killed by Christians, you are called a truth-teller.
There's no such thing as a Christianophobe or Christphobe.
There are names of bigotry against every possible group, except Christians, which was my subject last week.
Right, Sean, last week was the hatred of Christianity or was there a few weeks ago?
A few weeks ago?
Yeah.
The greatest hatred in the West is against Christians.
And I say this as a Jew.
So that you can't claim, oh, he just has an axe to grind.
I do have an axe to grind.
It's called truth.
I have a truth axe.
I grind it regularly.
So reason number one for why so many young people have abandoned religion is that they are the recipients of a secular brainwash.
Kindergarten through graduate school.
No reference to the Bible.
They don't know a damn thing about it.
And that's the big one.
No Bible.
Not just no God.
God without the Bible is relatively useless.
There's a second reason.
Second reason is Christians and Jews, committed Christians and Jews, believing Christians and Jews did a lousy job in many cases in explaining the necessity of religion.
So I will give you a gigantic If you want to raise a child that takes God and religion seriously, teach them what is wrong with secularism.
If you can't do that, then they have no idea why God and religion are important.
I'll explain.
Hey everybody, Ultimate Issues Hour.
Why are so many young Americans alienated from religion?
There are two gigantic reasons.
One is the society, and one is the religious.
Secular society is an ocean.
They swim in it.
Don't even say Merry Christmas anymore.
The one national holiday with religious overtones.
Christmas has been fully secularized.
And you can't even mention it.
No more Christmas parties.
It's holiday parties.
No more Merry Christmas.
It's Happy Holidays.
No more Christmas vacation.
It's winter vacation.
So, there is nothing religious in the culture that was saturated with religion.
Herman Melville's great American novel, Moby Dick.
It begins with a reference to the Bible.
Call me Ishmael.
I don't think one out of a thousand college students today would know who Ishmael is.
Yes, this is the case.
They swim in an ocean of secularism.
But the second one is the failure of religious people, parents.
And churches and synagogues, rabbis, priests and ministers to make a convincing case not for the truth of their religion.
That was a mistake.
You can argue that till the cows come home.
The first thing you need to argue is the necessity of religion.
If you make it all a matter of faith, a handful of people will indeed come to your religion.
But it's clear that religious groups have largely failed to keep young people religious or to persuade the irreligious to take religion seriously.
I don't blame them.
This is not a blame game.
They just don't know how to do it.
I do.
And I'll tell you what I do and that every parent Who wants a religious child?
Every pastor, priest, and rabbi needs to do.
You first make the case of the bankruptcy morally, psychologically, emotionally, existentially of secularism.
That's the first thing you have to do, and nobody does it.
Not nobody.
There's no such thing as nobody.
Few do it.
The case for a religious life?
Starts with the bankruptcy of a secular life.
Are there wonderful secular people?
Yes.
Are there some happy secular people?
Yes.
Of course.
So what?
Does it mean that secularism is not a dead end?
Ultimately.
It is the root cause of the suicide of the West.
Where do you think men give birth comes from?
Religion or secularism?
Where do you think America is a systemically racist lie?
The lie of that comes from.
The secular world.
Now, there are many secular conservatives.
I understand that, too.
Talking the long run, my friends, in the long run.
Secularism is a dead end.
The secular American is running on the fumes.
of the religious foundations of this country, and they were religious foundations.
Read George Washington's farewell address on the importance of religion, the indispensability of it to a moral society.
This is news to most religious people, clergy or layperson.
The first thing you need to do is make the case of the bankruptcy of secularism.
How many young people know that it isn't religion that has killed the most people?
It's secularism.
Secular communism is the greatest cause of death of innocent people in modern history.
All right?
Just for the record, but it's never told.
They know about the persecutions of the church.
They know about Christians killing non-Christians.
And they should.
That's part of history.
But none of them are taught the secular bloodshed of the 20th century.
Nearly 100 million non-combatants were killed by secular regimes.
Not religious regimes.
The only religious mass murder of the 20th century was the Muslim Turkish regime murdering Armenians.
Everything else was secular, including Nazism and Communism.
1-8 Prager 776, did you teach this to your child?
Did you teach to your child that if there's no God, whether murder is wrong or right is solely a matter of opinion?
I'll bet you didn't.
I'll bet you your rabbi, priest, or minister didn't either.
When I ask kids if they'd save their dog or a stranger first in Christian or Jewish schools, I get the same responses generally as I do in secular schools.
To the credit of the...
Clergy who teach at these schools, they're horrified.
I did this once with a group of Christian kids at the Richard Nixon Library.
The teacher was really disturbed that their kids voted for the dog.
Same thing happened at a modern Orthodox school in Miami when I posed that question to their students and the rabbis.
We're pretty jolted by the response of their students.
You begin the case for religion by teaching the consequences of secularism.
That's how you do it.
Did your kids turn out religious if you wanted them to be religious?
Between the anti-religious ocean in which they swim outside of the home and the failure of the religious to make convincing arguments for religion, you have the alienation of so many young people from religion.
Your reactions are welcome, 1-8 Prager-776-877-243-7776.
A gigantic pincer movement against religious affirmation of young people.
The anti-religious secularism of all of their life, and the failure of the religious to make a convincing case.
Back in a moment, take your calls.
Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here.
Ultimate Issues Hour, third hour every Tuesday.
Why are so many young Americans irreligious is the question.
There are two overwhelming answers.
They swim in a secular ocean.
See my column today at DennisPrager.com on this subject.
It's about the secular.
The second will be next week, unless I write something else.
They breathe secular air, they swim in a secular sea.
An anti-religious secularism, I might add.
Religion is for stupid people.
That's the message.
I would say the vast majority of the truly deep people I have known in my life have been religious, but hey, how does that compare to professors telling you that religion is for dummies?
And the other reason is the failure of religious parents and religious clergy institutions.
To make a convincing case for religion, and I want you to know where you begin.
You don't begin with God exists, because even a large number of these kids who have no religious affiliation will say they believe in God.
It is meaningless.
Meaningless.
They might as well say they believe in Zeus.
You start with the necessity of God and religion.
The failure of secularism.
The secular have no compunction about teaching the failures of religion.
So why don't we teach the failures of secularism?
And I have no problem with teaching about the failures of religion.
We should.
But nobody talks about the failures of secularism.
The mother of the greatest amount of bloodshed torture An enslavement in history.
Communism.
Yep.
All secular.
All anti-religious.
Is it ever taught?
How many young people ever heard of Pol Pot?
It's pretty close to zero.
Yes, George Floyd is an internationally known name.
Pol Pot murdered a third to a quarter of his own people in the name of communism in Cambodia, is known to a select few.
All right, let's see here.
Palmyra, Indiana.
Tim, hello.
Hey, Dennis.
Hi.
It's good to talk to you.
Good.
Again, I told your screener my question.
I don't know how much you...
I just want to say, I agree with both of your first points, and I think you're spot on with those.
The only thing I was curious about was, what do you think, though, is the impact on young people today of some of these revelations they've seen, as I told the screen there about, like the rampant abuse of Native American kids at the reservation schools for the Catholics or something?
Do you think that hypocrisy or criminal behavior like that has also played into why young people are more opposed to this, opposed to religion in general?
Wow.
I am not aware, as you are, of rampant abuse of Native Americans by Catholics.
What do you mean by that?
What did they do?
Well, I mean...
Well, I've seen in the news stories where they've talked about revelations of things they found, secretly buried bodies of Native American kids and things like that that were at some of these schools.
And they were secretly buried?
What, were they murdered?
I'm just asking.
I heard about the graves.
I didn't follow the story.
So let me try to answer this.
If we taught the good that religion did, specifically even Christianity, if we taught the good Christianity did and the bad Christians did, it would be a good thing to do.
We don't teach the good.
But do these kids who hear about alleged abuse of Native Americans by some priests hundreds of years ago, do they hear about the fact that it was Christians who led the worldwide movement to abolish slavery?
Do you think there's one kid who knows that?
No, I don't think so.
And I mean, even beyond that, it was Christians, of course, who also stopped the foot binding practice in China.
Or Christians who stopped the burning of widows with their husbands in India.
That's right.
Sati.
That's right.
You know a lot.
It's a pleasure to hear from you.
I'll continue with some thoughts on this.
Dennis Prager here.
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