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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:13:39
Blind Faith
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Dennis Prager here.
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Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Dennis Prager Show, coming to you from Miami, Florida.
Not Miami Beach, but Miami.
And I'm here for some intense speeches and talks and thoughts, and I'll tell you as much as possible during the course of the week.
I'll be here for a week.
I hope you had a good weekend.
When coming to Florida in the summer, I must admit to some primal fears.
The combination of heat and humidity is a tough one for me.
So I have a reflection, as I often do, on this whole issue of heat.
The South has been a boom place in America for the last half century.
Vast numbers of Americans have moved to southern states for good reason.
The people are nicer is one good reason.
The weather is certainly nicer.
People prefer warmth to cold as a general rule.
Interesting, no?
With all the talk about heat, people prefer heat to cold.
People die from cold far more than they die from heat.
And what made all of this possible is something called air conditioning, one of the miracles of the modern period in which we live.
And, of course, air conditioning, which has made habitation in the South year-round possible, and not just possible, desirable.
There's far more movement from the...
North to the south in the United States, then from the south to the north in the United States.
Correct?
So, people obviously prefer it here.
And why do they prefer it here?
Well, I gave you some of the reasons, including, as I said, preferring warmth to cold, and the nature of life here.
People are simply generally nicer.
They're nicer in the South than in the North.
They're nicer in the flyover country, as it is disparagingly called, than it is on the coasts.
If you took a poll of Americans who had been to both places and said, where are people friendlier?
As a general rule, New York City or Tampa, Florida?
The number of votes for New York City would be, shall we say, minimal.
And it has all been made possible by air conditioning, which has all been made possible by fossil fuel.
Fossil fuel has been God's gift to the human species.
Without it, we would all be living in a primitive world of fire, and that would be it.
We would be lighting fires to warm ourselves in cold climates.
We would bake in warm climates having no air conditioning.
It is an interesting question, and I think, shall we say, an illuminating question to ask your friends or relatives who are burdened by the alleged existential threat.
Posed by global warming.
Would you say that, overall, fossil fuels, fossil energy has been a blessing or a curse to humanity?
Has it been overwhelmingly a blessing or not?
I mean, you could pose it any way you want.
Ask your college-age child.
Or nephew or niece or grandchild.
Has fossil fuel been a blessing in human history?
Or largely a curse?
I'll bet if they go to college, where they become, unless they are inebriated or very strong, they become foolish and stupid.
Most of them would probably say it has been on the curse side rather than the blessing side.
I'm sitting here broadcasting in a room in Miami where the temperature is 69 degrees.
The exact temperature that I like it when I broadcast because I expend a lot of energy in a broadcast and I like the surrounding to be cold.
It would have been inconceivable a hundred years ago.
Just a hundred.
Obviously less than a hundred.
To tell somebody in Florida, you know, you'll be able to go into any place you want when it's 100 degrees and 80% humidity and have it at 69 degrees and not humid.
It's hard to even imagine anybody saying it, and it's hard to imagine anybody who heard it not thinking the person was out of his mind.
There's so little perspective on what is a blessing and what is a curse.
It is part of the sick world of the left.
They don't know what is a blessing and they don't know what is a curse.
They don't know that America has been largely a blessing, certainly in the recent past, in the last half century.
It has been a blessing, not a blessing for blacks when they were slaves or under Jim Crow.
Not a blessing for Native Americans.
I fully acknowledge that.
But since those things were universal, wars of people coming into new places against people already living there, and since slavery was universal, the issue in judging America is not...
To compare it to everybody else who did the exact same thing is to compare it to everybody else when we did something very different.
Make the freest country in the history of the human race.
Yeah, that's a very big deal.
And that was done here.
When you don't know what is a blessing, including fossil fuel, including freedom, you are...
There's something wrong with you, something profoundly wrong.
So some reflections on the comfort in which I am sitting in a rather warm place, Florida, in July.
The California Globe has a very scary article.
A teacher attended the National Education Association convention last week.
Brenda Lebsack, and I would like to have her on the show because the number of teachers, she's a California teacher, former school board member, who writes, Brenda, four kids, the number four.
This originally appeared in the Daily Signal.
I'm going to look that up, Brenda, four kids.
Yes.
Wow.
Amazing stuff here.
Listen to this.
As a teacher, I attended the National Education Association convention last week, and my worst fears were confirmed.
Public schools are no longer a safe place for families who hold traditional values or for families who believe gender as in male-female binary is biologically determined.
Do you know that five years ago, certainly ten years ago, that sentence would have been incomprehensible to Americans?
Public schools are no longer a safe place for families who believe in the male-female binary.
They wouldn't even know what binary is about.
Wait a minute.
Public schools are not safe for families that believe that the human race is divided between male and female?
You've got to be kidding.
It was also evident that the teachers' union is a lobbying arm of the Democratic Party.
The NEA seems to think there are many gender options, and that's why teachers and students must always address themselves with their preferred pronouns.
It thinks this pronoun practice is essential and will create a more inclusive society.
So I have to ask you once again, this comes up almost daily, If you have a child or grandchild in a public school and they go the preferred pronoun way, teaching your five-year-old that whether you're a he or a she is just a preference.
There's nothing objectively true or accurate about it.
Why would you keep your child in such a school?
And the only answer is it's convenient.
And I don't put that down.
Deeply convenient, because there's a very good chance both parents work, so you might think, how can I homeschool?
However, if your child turns out to be an idiot, to be morally and personally confused and profoundly depressed because life is chaotic, then you will say, I should have done something.
So I'm warning you before it's too late, take your child out of such a school.
1-8-Prager-776.
I'm Dennis Prager.
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Hi everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
A teacher is writing about attending the National Education Association convention last week.
If you don't understand that there is an irreparable divide in this country, this should convince you.
By the way, if you think there is a irreparable divide, that somehow or other left and right can just come together because you would like that to happen.
Who wouldn't like that to happen?
What you're doing is you are allowing wishful thinking to dominate rational thinking.
The left is sick.
It is sick to tell children that they're not a boy or a girl, but just what they prefer to be.
Do you understand?
Sick.
If sick applies to anything, then it applies to this.
But this is now dominant.
This is the National Education Association.
It is a child abuse group.
It is the National Child Abuse Association.
I have no joy in telling you these things because I love this country, I worry about children, and I don't like to be a source of depressing news to you.
So let me just say, because I like to acknowledge the elephant in the room, it is human nature.
To tune out, literally or figuratively, when hearing bad news.
People don't like pain.
And what is happening in our schools, if that is not painful to you, it only means either you agree or you don't want to know what is happening.
I did the Happiness Hour last Friday.
On the subject of despair, I had never quite tackled that subject on a happiness hour, and what I said essentially was, and it was really, I got it from a wonderful Bible commentary in writing the next volume of my Bible commentary, The Rational Bible.
The third volume is coming out, by the way, in October, Deuteronomy.
The most important thing you can read is the Bible.
It's the source of Western civilization, which is under its greatest attack since the French Revolution.
As Os Guinness writes, you have a choice.
Do you follow the French Revolution or Sinai?
I have always put it, do you follow the French Revolution or the American Revolution?
But he goes back even further because the American Revolution was based on Sinai.
Anyway, you can't despair.
So I was reading this commentary, and he, in the context of one of the stories, in the fourth book, the book of Numbers, he writes that God considers despair a sin.
I got just shaken.
I thought that was awesome.
So I'm just asking you to hear what I'm talking about when I tell you about the ruining of children's happiness and health, mental health, psychological health, emotional health, by teachers in the United States of America and by this sick organization called the National Education Association.
And don't despair.
Fight!
That's the answer.
I'm not despairing.
And I have as clear-headed an understanding of the chasm, the moral, psychological chasm between left and right.
If you really want children to say preferred pronouns, fine.
But we have nothing in common at that point.
You want to You don't think you want to, but you do want to hurt children.
You think you want to do something good.
What is the good you are achieving, however?
Do you really want to confuse five-year-olds, or for that matter, fifteen-year-olds, about whether they are a boy or a girl?
If this thing is real, why has it never been real in history?
Has the left discovered a truth about the human condition that nobody knew about for all of history?
The greatest minds, the greatest scientists, the greatest thinkers in history didn't know about this, but the left in America today does?
Do you believe that garbage?
Nonsense?
Wow!
They discovered something nobody knew about.
Public schools are no longer, this is a piece by a teacher.
We'll put it up on DennisPrager.com.
First appeared in Daily Signal.
I'm reading it from California Globe.
Not a website I'm familiar with, but the teacher is identified.
The NEA seems to think there are many gender options, and that's why teachers and students must always address themselves with their preferred pronouns.
It thinks the pronoun practice is essential and will create a more inclusive society.
What does that even mean, a more inclusive society?
It will include children who don't know if they're a boy or a girl, but it will exclude those who believe That we're hurting children by advocating this.
It'll exclude far more than it will include, certainly exclude anyone who believes in biology, let alone God.
That was demonstrated firsthand when each state delegate who spoke during the three-day convention July 4th to 6th was encouraged to state his or her name and preferred pronouns before addressing the assembly.
Pronouns I heard were he, she, they, and hex.
What's hex?
One delegate even announced they had a uterus before addressing the assembly.
Apparently because that was something we all needed to know.
Wow.
Gives you an idea of how many sick people are teaching your children.
But you'll keep sending them there because it's inconvenient to take them out.
Yep, it will definitely have an effect in most cases on the family income.
That is correct.
So you have to figure out, do I want to sacrifice my child?
Or sacrifice some income.
That is what it amounts to.
In the teachers' union's preamble, it says, NEA is to be the national voice for education managed by and for the public good to advance the cause for all, capital A-L-L, individuals.
However, as I read the 70 new business items, From what I observe,
the NEA's goal is for public education to be a training ground for political activism, while demonizing anyone, including students and their families, who does not share.
Those same political beliefs.
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Prager, coming to you from Miami, Florida, the place to be at the end of July.
Actually, Florida has come to denote for half this country freedom.
It's a very remarkable thing.
I mean, I have lived long enough to see the evolution of Florida from essentially being portrayed as a fuzzy, warm, nothing happening of any seriousness place for people from the Northeast to retire to.
That's what it was.
And remarkably, it is now the dynamic center of the renaissance of healthy, happy, constructive it is now the dynamic center of the renaissance of healthy, happy, constructive values I agree.
So, by the way, that's a great example.
If something doesn't give you hope, I'm going to continue to remark on this.
Insight that I had, thanks to reading one of the commentaries that I read, that I read, doing my Bible commentary, The Rational Bible, where the writer wrote, despair is a sin.
Whoa!
That hit me.
That hit me as hard, I think, and I mean this completely, sincerely, as Ronald Reagan, whom...
Made me a Republican with one comment.
And the comment was, government is not the solution, it is the problem.
And I knew I had a life-transforming sentence.
When people say their lives are changed by a PragerU video, which is five minutes, other people...
Can sneer at the idea that five minutes can change you, but in my life, a sentence has changed me twice, and probably more than that, but I don't recall them well.
When I realized that every genocide of the 20th century was made possible by large governments, I came to hate large government.
Hate it.
I hate big everything.
Big pharma, big labor, big teachers.
Big almost always means harmful.
Can you give me an example where it doesn't?
The one example where it wouldn't, I guess, is big armed forces.
You have no choice.
I mean, you need a certain number of people.
So, like everything else, the big has an exception or two.
But you are forbidden to despair.
I read to you last hour a report from the National Education Association annual meeting that just took place this month.
The true sickness that pervades the teacher's profession?
I would like to ask everyone who believes in traditional American, let alone Judeo-Christian values, and who has a child in a school, public or private, unless it's a charter school or a religious school or a public school whose values they know are not nihilistic, why do you keep your child there?
Are you just betting it won't affect your child?
It's quite a bet to make.
I, as I've said to you on a number of occasions, I was right about the lockdowns and I was right about the vaccine.
um I never told anybody not to get the vaccine, but I publicly announced I wasn't taking it.
My wife doesn't take it.
Didn't take it.
And it turns out that they all lied to you.
As I assume now, anything that comes from the CDC is a lie, unless it's, you know, that water is H2O. I assume that's true.
Although if the CDC announced, or the FDA announced, that water was composed of hydrogen and oxygen, I would check it.
I would check it.
So listen to these leaders here.
You'll recognize their voices.
Is the video up of them, Sean, on the show?
Salem News Network has my show videoed in case you're aching to see me.
Which I don't think vast numbers...
You got that wrong?
What did you say originally?
It's Salem News Channel.
If Sean got that wrong, it's a bad sign.
That is really a bad sign.
Salem News Channel, is that correct?
Anyway, so in addition to me, you get to see these videos.
But most, the vast majority of you are listening.
Here is a clip of the promises made by these frauds like our president.
When they said to their people around the world, take the vaccine, it will protect you from getting the virus.
So, did they believe what they said?
Yes, I think they believed it.
I spent years debating whether leftists believe what they say.
America is systemically racist.
You're not a boy or a girl unless you decide to be.
And there was a collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
The Hunter Biden notebook was Russian disinformation.
So the people who say this, do they believe it when they say it?
And I think they do.
So it's an interesting question I don't have the answer to.
If a liar believes their lie, are they lying?
Do you have to know what you say?
Is not true in order for what you said to be characterized as a lie.
So maybe it is a lie, but it doesn't make you a liar.
Maybe that's true.
I'm looking for the benefit of the doubt here.
But I knew we were being lied to.
And here are the examples of all these leaders telling you That if you take the vaccine, you won't get the virus.
And then they took the vaccine and got the virus.
Here goes.
You're okay.
You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
Hey folks, guess you heard?
This morning I tested positive for COVID. When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected.
Dr. Fauci says he has COVID again.
If you've done the right thing and gotten vaccinated, you deserve the freedom to be safe from COVID-19.
Trudeau.
This morning, I learned...
I tested positive for COVID-19 as well.
The three doses that have been prevented, not just from serious illness, but from getting this virus, this Omicron variant, and therefore giving it to others.
It's fascinating.
All right, we're good.
It's fascinating the confidence with which these people said you won't get infected.
Actually studied the issue.
From the beginning, you knew, first of all, it's not a vaccine.
Secondly, it's an experimental vaccine.
So those two things alone should assure people that maybe we're not being told the truth.
Now, these people want to control your lives, so that's a factor, but there's another one.
There's very little That if you're told an expert said something, that should suffice for you to accept it unquestioningly.
Let me say that there is more questioning in the religious world, as I've experienced it, than there is in the secular world.
People are more robotic in their responses in the secular world than they are in the religious world.
The opposite of the lie that you're told, religious people just have blind faith.
There is no blind faith that I have encountered, at least among large numbers of religious Jews or Christians, that compares to the blind faith that secular people have.
And their willingness to ruin society on the basis of their blind faith, like the Greens.
That is pure blind faith that the heating of the earth will cause mass extinction of humanity.
That's blind faith, not religious faith.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Here's another, if you will.
Another illuminating moment in the history of the lying about vaccines.
If you've been given misinformation about vaccines, it is from world leaders, the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH. All misinformation has come from the people who are in charge of the New York Times, CNN, the FDA, etc.
They are the purveyors of misinformation.
When you know that, you have much more clarity about truth.
So I portrayed for you all these leaders, science leaders, so-called science leaders like Fauci, world leaders like Biden, Prime Minister and the Prime Minister of Australia.
Get the vaccine.
You won't get the virus.
You won't get Omicron.
You won't get COVID. Then they all came down with COVID. Doesn't matter.
Are you getting lists in the Washington Post of lies told by Biden?
Which dwarf in importance lies told by Trump?
There is no comparison.
God knows there's no comparison, which is of some comfort to me that God knows it.
There's no comparison in the amount of lying by Joe Biden versus Donald Trump.
That's the misinformation.
So here's Deborah Birx on Fox this weekend.
She was, as you will recall, the spokesman on the issue in the White House through 2020. Go ahead.
70. I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection, and I think we overplayed the vaccines, and it made people then worry that it's not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization.
It will, but let's be very clear.
50% of the people who died from the Omicron surge were older, vaccinated.
So that's why...
We oversold.
No kidding.
So where did you get the misinformation from?
The dissenting doctors like the ones who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration?
The dissenting voices like mine?
Where did you get the misinformation from?
The left or the right?
It continues to this day.
My wife was in a, I think it was a doctor's office.
I guess it had to have been.
Or no, I think it was actually at a pharmacy where they give the...
It was a pharmacy.
She was in a pharmacy.
And she saw a father masked, of course.
Three-year-old daughter masked, of course.
Of course, I say because you'll understand why the of course when you hear the rest of the story.
The girl was crying and crying about, Please, Daddy, I don't want to get this shot.
I don't want it.
I don't want it.
And really, you know, just beside herself.
And the father, who's an idiot, gave his three-year-old daughter, had his three-year-old daughter vaccinated because he is among the blind faith.
Blind faith in secular life dwarfs the amount of blind faith in religious life.
Every religious person I know, has spoken some questioning attitude with regard to faith.
Not the secular.
There's no blind faith as there is among the irreligious.
That this father would give his daughter of three years of age this vaccination, the chances of which hurting her In the short or long run are far greater than helping her.
The chances of it helping her are close to zero.
The chances of it hurting her are unknown.
I can't give you a number.
But it's greater than zero.
This man is, her father is a man of blind faith.
As are half the secular people of this country.
Especially its elites.
They sneer at those of us who are religious.
One of the most remarkable things in the world is when the secular with blind faith mock those of us who are religious as having blind faith.
Just keep that in mind, my friends.
Half the conservatives in this country are secular, and they're wonderful people, but they do not understand that they are sitting on a branch that they are cutting off.
Secularism is a branch of the religious tree from which it emanates.
When you stifle the religious water that made it possible to live, that branch will break.
Secular conservatives will not have secular conservative children or grandchildren.
It's the way it works, and certainly not great-grandchildren.
As I approach my 40th anniversary, Of broadcasting, I can summarize the 40 years and a half my whole life.
One overriding message.
Please, know the consequences of secularism.
I'm Dennis Prager, shall return.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hello everybody, Dennis Prager here.
A change of pace.
To happier times in American life.
One of the reasons to read history is to read about misery as well as happiness, and the usual combination of both.
One of my favorite authors is Amity Schlaes.
She's been on the show a number of times, and she has made two new videos for PragerU.
We're eventually going to have a video, five minutes on every single president, even ones we don't like.
But their president, what can we do?
She presents two of this week's three.
This week we have three PragerU videos on the jazz age.
Presidents Harding and Coolidge.
There's a third video by another scholar, Kenneth White, on Hoover.
But Amity Schlaes, whose book on Coolidge I have read.
I have come to believe Calvin Coolidge is one of the greatest presidents in American history, and she has also enabled me to believe that Harding is very, very poorly judged in, not that he was judged as poor, which he was, but he was poorly judged in that it was not really accurate.
So, Amity Schlaes, welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show, and you can watch her at the Salem Podcast Network.
No, not the Salem News Channel, right, Sean?
We have too many Salems.
I've got to talk to Salem.
They have great stuff, but too many names.
All right, Amity, great to see you, and I mean it literally, see you.
Tell us, before anything, why the 20s were called the Jazz Age.
Well, that's when we got jazz.
That's when it became popular.
Some of that, it was a joyous period.
I think not like Great Gatsby, actually a little more genuine.
People felt good in the 20s because so many good things were happening.
That was the...
It was the era when we got indoor plumbing.
It was the era when we got radios.
It was the era when we got electricity in the house.
And it was the era when we got Saturday off.
So people began to think of possibility and not just in dancing or listening to music.
I am so happy I asked you the question and I had a feeling you were the right one to ask.
Any one of those things would have made people so heady.
I mean, optimistic, gleeful, but that list, indoor plumbing, radio, what else was on that list?
It was a phenomenon.
Saturday.
Oh yeah, Saturday Off.
Again, any one of them.
And jazz, of course, is about as happy a musical genre has ever existed.
And of course...
I assume it was deeply related to the end of World War I. Well, I think there was, you know, you may be the music scholar.
Music internationalized.
The radio played music.
That was different too.
So it wasn't what we could play on our piano, but also what we could hear on the radio.
It wasn't just the concert hall.
You know, pretty soon it would be the record.
The Victrola.
So you get the music in the home.
Even instruments you don't know how to play, you can hear.
Well, it was a blessing and not so much a blessing.
Almost every home had a piano, and today almost no homes have a piano.
It was routine to play an instrument for kids, and of course now it isn't.
When I think about the 20s and then...
In the 1900s and the 20s in the 2000s, the juxtaposition is a bit sobering, isn't it?
Well, there was a sense of opportunity.
If you're a data hog, one of the things about the 20s was the patent rate, which was through the roof.
They still study it, you know, at Harvard Business School.
And what is a patent?
It's a metric of hope.
You have an idea?
You think it can be commercialized.
You might think you might find money for it.
You might be able to drive revenue.
You might have another idea.
I think the patent rate was as good a metric of hope as gas or a new car.
That's a brilliant way.
I've never thought about that, the patent rate.
How was the patent rate today?
Do you have any idea?
I do not know.
I was looking at historical statistics, but people who are patenting tend to like an assurance they own their property and that they might be able to find money to commercialize what they're doing.
That's a very important point.
When we return, I'll talk to you about Harding and Coolidge.
Two videos you have up.
Of the three of the Jazz Age presidents.
I'm speaking with Amity Schlaes.
We'll be back in a moment.
Hi, everybody.
I'm speaking with and to Amity Schlaes.
We have three videos up this week at PragerU about presidents.
We're covering all of the presidents of the United States with experts on each presidency giving the videos.
There were three presidents in the 20s, in the happy period known as the Jazz Age.
Two of them were Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, and she does the videos on them.
Herbert Hoover.
We have another scholar doing that one.
Why did Warren Harding have only two years as president?
Hardly.
We didn't have cholesterol drugs in that period.
We didn't have scans.
We didn't have antibiotics.
That's one reason.
Harding passed away.
We don't quite know what it was.
Maybe a stroke, heart failure.
That happened very often to leaders, dozens of them in the Senate.
But I think what you're getting at, Dennis, is he was having a bit of trouble.
He had two scandals, and he'd started out so well.
That's what your video taught me, and I got very interested in him as a result of your video, which, by the way, folks, is another reason to watch our videos.
It provokes interest in things you thought you were never interested in.
Most Americans don't know anything about Warren Harding or don't even necessarily know the name.
So Warren Harding is elected.
Let me see here.
What year?
1921. Is he elected in 21 or he becomes president in 21?
He becomes president in 21. I hope I didn't get that wrong.
No, no, you didn't.
It's me and I'm having an issue with the computer.
I can't.
Something telling me I'm connecting.
It doesn't matter.
Anyway, so Harding is elected.
After Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, the president during World War I, and the first quote-unquote progressive president, completely understandably, since he was president of Princeton, and it is not new that college presidents are on that side of the social and political spectrum.
So why did we elect, why did the American people elect Republican after Republican after Wilson until they voted for Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt?
What was the appeal of the Republicans?
Well, imagine 1920, which is very similar to now.
We have more inflation than we're admitting, one.
Two, we just had a few crises.
In that case, World War I and the influenza, a pandemic.
Business was a target of government.
People blame business.
And Harding and Coolidge come in.
Coolidge is vice presidential candidate.
And they build a very specific platform.
They even have a textbook that goes with the platform.
To rectify an era in tumult and turmoil.
And their logo on top of the platform was normalcy.
And I don't know about you, Dennis, but when I was in school, I thought that's terrible.
They want everyone to be normal, like a square peg in a square hole.
That's not what they meant at all.
By normalcy, Harding meant...
Normal business conditions, common sense, so business can thrive.
Why?
Take us past the crisis.
Put the crisis in perspective.
And I think that's key because nowadays candidates matter a whole lot more than platforms.
In that case, in 1920, it was a platform with two candidates attached to it, which is really different.
And Harding really followed what he had promised voters and tried to deliver and did deliver on some of it.
For example?
For example, at the time, it was very easy for a lobby to get new spending through.
I use the parent analogy.
The lobbyists and the congressmen would go to the president and say, like a son who got a job, Dad, I got a new job.
You always told me I needed to work.
I need a car.
And the dad would say, of course, darling, you got a job.
Thank you.
And then another child would come along, another department.
And say, Dad, I got a job.
I need a car.
And pretty soon, the father had bought five cars.
That was the situation with the way lobbying and appropriations worked, spending worked.
There was no overview for the president of what his world was spending.
And Harding saw that, passed a budget law that gave the executive control of the budget in a way he hadn't had before in a little research office, which we now call the Office of Management and Budget.
And that way the president could get a hold of spending and make some rational decisions.
That was one.
Forgive me, who did he run against?
He ran in 1920. Let's see, Cox Roosevelt, is that correct?
I have no idea, that's why I'm asking.
The thing that is important is it was FDR as a young man.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy running.
And, you know, the Democrats were a riven party at that time.
If there was a Ku Klux Klan problem, that was a Democratic problem.
The Republicans were the progressive party.
They were riven, too, between the Theodore Roosevelt people and the traditional conservatives.
And Harding said, this platform is going to make promises to the people and will execute.
Another was to privatize oil reserves that the government held.
Wartime, big government.
A third was to lower taxes.
At that time, taxes were over 50%.
That was hard for business.
You know, let's make it possible for business to provide jobs for veterans.
All these things were promised to voters.
And what I noticed about Harding and Coolidge, too, is they focused on execution.
They said, well, my job is not to be popular.
It's to get as much of that platform into law because that is the mandate we were assigned.
Well, I'd have voted for them.
All right, we'll hear more in a moment.
I'm talking with Amity Schlaes.
You have a book out on Coolidge.
You don't have a book out on Harding, do you?
Not yet.
You know, there's a new book called The Jazz Age in Harding, which I liked a lot.
And there should be more.
The Harding revisionist must come.
Hold on, hold on.
Tell us when we get back.
Amity Schley's my guest.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hi, everybody.
I'm having the joy of speaking with Amity Schley's two of the three videos.
We normally have one a week.
We have three.
The Jazz Age Presidents.
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
A happier time in American life a hundred years ago than today.
That would be true about most times in American history when I think about it.
So go to PragerU and watch these videos.
They're fun in the best sense of the word fun and fascinating.
Harding was only president for two years.
He was succeeded by his wonderful vice president, Calvin Coolidge.
Is it fair to say, Amity, that these three believed in the traditional view of the founders that government should be as small as possible?
I'd say these two.
Ah, so not Hoover.
Not Hoover, yeah.
Less.
Hoover was a very familiar type.
He was a great consultant.
That is, the smartest guy in the room.
And his desire to control and improve overcame, to some extent, his small government.
I like Hoover, too.
And I know Ken White will do a good job with you.
But Coolidge, in particular, was the essence of small government.
Would you say that only Reagan and Coolidge of the 20th century believed in small, of our presidents believed in small government?
Trying to think.
I mean, you can find a smaller or restrained moment in Jimmy Carter, in Ike in particular.
If you look at Ike's budgets, Eisenhower's budgets, he held the line.
Which is very interesting because he was a man of the military-industrial complex, and yet he wrote the warning against the military-industrial complex.
That phrase does come from Eisenhower.
So Ike's budget is really worth scrutinizing.
But in the case of Coolidge, he understood about growth, too.
He really understood small business.
He was a small-town lawyer.
That's where he came from, Western Mass.
Massachusetts, and so he paired his budget restraint with tax restraint.
He waged an aggressive campaign to cut taxes.
They were, well, in the 70s, I think, at the end of World War I, and he got the top tax rate down to 25%, which was very good, and the result was the happy growth I described, often very productive, those patents.
Watch Amity at PragerU.com.
You will love it.
Your kids will love it.
You'll learn a lot and read her book on Calvin Coolidge.
You are a joy to have on, Amity.
Honored to be here.
Thanks for teaching history.
History is almost everything.
We will return, Dennis Prager Show.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show, coming to you from Miami, Florida, the place to be in July.
Actually, I'm shocked, but I'm not finding it all that awful.
And I hate hot heat and humidity.
Partially, I guess, because it's been cloudy.
But maybe it's a good example of having awful expectations.
And then be pleasantly surprised that it isn't as bad as what you expected.
That's part of my theory, as you know, about not having expectations in life.
And then by not having good expectations, then you are pleasantly surprised all the time when good things happen if you don't have good expectations.
So there you are.
Anyway, here I am, and I will be all week.
Victor Davis Hanson speaks about how do we erode the world's greatest military.
Remember, it is not in any way hyperbole.
It is a fact of life.
It is a fact like gravity.
Everything the left touches, it ruins.
And an example I have not given often is the military.
But under the most destructive president in American history, An awful human and an awful president, Joe Biden.
Very bad things are happening.
Victor Davis Hanson begins, in American greatness, the U.S. Army has met only 40% of its 2022 recruiting goals.
40?
That's less than half.
Let me ask you, if you were a masculine...
Strong male, the very type we most need in the armed forces, male or female, that is what we most need.
Strong, powerful, confident, masculine males.
The type that feminists loathe, but actually secretly yearn for, which is another issue, but a related one.
Would you enroll today?
There's a good chance if you're that strong, you withstood the lie that if you get vaccinated, you won't get COVID. I played for you, all of the people, Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, the Prime Minister of Australia, the near dictator of Canada.
I have, well, it's the near dictator of Australia, too, for that matter.
I played for you all of them promising if you get the vaccine, you won't get COVID. Then they all got COVID. All of them.
But no leftist is ever held to any standard in regard to truth.
All branches of the military are facing historic resistance to their current recruiting efforts.
As I was saying, would a guy who resisted the lies, isn't that the very type you most want in the armed forces?
A person who thinks for himself and is strong-willed and can take the arrows shot at him for taking his lonely position?
Isn't that exactly one great criterion for who will be a great member of the military?
Well, that person clearly wouldn't enlist.
They couldn't get in to begin with.
You're not vaccinated?
We don't want you.
All branches of the military are facing historic resistance to their current recruiting efforts.
efforts.
If some solution is not found quickly, the armed forces will radically shrink or be forced to lower standards or both.
Huh.
Thank you, Left.
People who believe in nothing destroy people who believe in something.
They hate people who believe in something.
Such a crisis occurs importantly as an aggressive Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea believe the Biden administration and the Pentagon have lost traditional U.S. deterrence.
God, is that true?
That pessimistic view abroad, unfortunately, is now shared by many Americans at home.
In 2021, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute conducted its periodic poll of attitudes toward the U.S. military.
The results were astonishing.
Currently, only 45% of the Americans polled expressed a great deal of trust in their armed forces.
Confidence had dived 25 points since an early 2018 poll.
Well, military officials cite both the usual and a new array of challenges in finding suitable young soldiers, drug use, gang affiliation, physical and mental incapacities, and the dislocations arising from the COVID pandemic and vaccination mandates.
I have to tell my friend Victor Davis Hanson, for whom I have extraordinary respect.
He and everybody else have to stop using the pandemic.
The issue is not the pandemic.
The damage was done by the lockdowns, and we should all say the lockdowns, not the pandemic.
But they are too quiet about why such supposedly longer-term obstacles suddenly coalesced in 2022, as if their own leadership and policies have had no effect in discouraging tens of thousands of young men and women to join them.
A year ago, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley were assuring the country not to worry over Joe Biden's strange ideas of abruptly pulling out all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
The radical step was purportedly to coincide with Biden's planned 20-year celebratory event marking his role in ensuring an iconic end of the war on terror that began on 9-11.
2001. What followed was the worst U.S. military humiliation since Pearl Harbor.
I was just reading, by the way, I think it was in the New York Times, that the Taliban have now said that women must be veiled, or either they or the man in their life, because they don't have any free will under the Islamists.
Distinguish between Islamists and Muslims.
All Islamists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Islamists.
Islamists are those who want Sharia to govern the whole society forcibly.
And that's the Taliban.
We withdrew from Afghanistan, guaranteeing hurt and damage and death.
Guaranteeing.
I was completely opposed to it.
I found the argument, what are we going to stay there forever, to be simply ludicrous.
We've stayed in Germany forever, Japan forever, Korea forever.
So what?
Only good has come of it.
It is amazing the number of lines people come out with that mean nothing, absolutely nothing, or we had no...
Exit strategy.
Really?
Now, I am hardly a military maven.
I don't know military strategy at all.
But I have common sense, which I find works most of the time.
What does that mean to have an exit strategy?
What you have in war is a victory strategy, not an exit strategy.
How do we win, not how do we leave, is what military leaders should be involved with.
Every argument in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan made no sense to me.
It's not that I differed with it.
It made no sense to me.
Repeat it.
Just repeat it as if it makes a lot of sense.
We were losing almost no soldiers when we left.
There was no call for us to leave.
It only announced to the bads of the world, China, the Chinese Communist Party in particular, we are in retreat.
That is the only message sent to the world by the United States of Americans.
The global aftermath was eerie.
Russia, in a few months thereafter, invaded Ukraine.
Iran proudly announced it would soon have enough fissionable material to make a nuclear weapon.
North Korea resumed its provocative missile launches.
China openly talked of storming Taiwan.
all right after the disaster of leaving Kabul.
1-8 Prager 776. Hello.
Hello, everybody.
Hey, Sean, are we on?
Why am I not hearing you right?
Hello?
Are we good?
Yeah.
All right.
I have an issue here.
I'm broadcasting from Florida.
All's good.
Okay, we're fine.
The military worries me a great deal.
What I've been reading to you about the...
Lack of enrollment, of enlistment, I should say.
Enrollment is okay, but enlistment is the term used for the military.
And the woke that now govern it.
I don't know what's more depressing, the leadership of the medical profession, the leadership of universities, or the leadership of the military.
When you think about leadership positions and who is in them, leadership of corporations, leadership of universities, of the military, all of these, I don't know what to say.
Is there any arena of leadership that is honorable, that has courage?
Is courageous leader in American life today an oxymoron?
Well, no, it isn't really.
Whatever you think about him, Donald Trump was courageous.
Anybody think Joe Biden is courageous?
Just out of curiosity, do his supporters think he's courageous?
Ron DeSantis is courageous.
If courage means...
That you will be attacked viciously by the majority, by those in power, then it's almost impossible to find a courageous Democrat.
AOC is not courageous.
She has nothing to worry about.
She can announce tomorrow that she is male, and she would be celebrated.
Correct?
By the way, I wonder, does AOC walk around with a preferred pronoun sign on her?
I am curious.
Back to the military.
Talking about the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
About a year ago, Austin and Chairman Milley took time out from assuring Americans that all would be well in Kabul.
Capital of Afghanistan.
To testify before Congress about the Pentagon's efforts to address, quote, white rage.
White rage, yes.
In the six-month aftermath of the January 6th riot.
Both were also asked to explain why the armed services were recommending soldiers read, among others, the often discredited, quote, anti-racist, unquote, theories of Ibram X. Kendi.
His polarizing doctrine asserts that the entire U.S. system of government, all social and political life, and our very culture are racist to the core.
As a result, Kendi's solution requires radical and overt racial preferencing and discrimination supposedly to fight such an insidious system.
Yet what was startling about the two officials' testimonies, Was the utter lack of data showing any general trends that white soldiers were any more or less likely to practice racial discrimination or chauvinism than other ethnic and racial groups in the military?
An array of officers defended various workshops and coursework in the military academies purporting that white rage is an existential problem in the military.
Wow.
That's what they're teaching at the military academies.
The subtext of the entire testimony debacle was that the two titular heads of the military wished to reassure progressive majorities in the U.S. Congress that they were sympathetic to the woke movement and, and along with other high-ranking officers, wanted publicly to virtual signal to that effect.
This is what is being taught.
Yeah.
If you know somebody in the military, I would be very interested in hearing from you how that person feels.
Of course, some of the best are being booted out because they wouldn't get vaccinated, even though the leading spokespeople for guaranteeing you, promising you.
That you won't get COVID if you get boosted, let alone vaccinated to begin with, have all gotten COVID. I've had it twice, as you probably know, and I am not vaccinated.
And I took ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and zinc for about a year.
And I got the very tough Delta variant.
I was back broadcasting in a couple of days.
I didn't know I had it.
At the worst of my symptoms, I was actually giving speeches.
I certainly would not have given those speeches if I knew I had it, but you don't test as soon as you feel lousy, or at least you didn't then.
I had chills.
That was the extent of it.
My only bad effect was for months I had a cough.
It was a nuisance, but it didn't stop me from functioning perfectly normally.
The second time I had it, I had basically nothing.
And I should have been hurt by it.
I'm not a young man, and I am, let's see, what else?
And I'm not vaccinated.
I feared the vaccine more than I feared COVID. Will history prove that my fear was correctly placed?
We'll find out.
But it's not a vaccine.
Oh, incidentally, Sean, I want to welcome a new station here.
And that, to me, is a very big deal, because I live to get my ideas to as many people as possible.
And that is, in Niles and Warren, Ohio, Real Talk 1450, WYCL. Wow.
I didn't know Niles and Warren had such fan clubs among my listeners.
That was about as serious an applause as anything that I've ever done.
I'll take some of your calls.
We have a lot to review.
I opened up the show with what's happening at the National Education Association annual meeting.
Which, of course, was closed to non-vaccinated teachers, by the way.
I have to make this appeal more frequently than I even have.
You have to get your kids out of most schools.
Dennis Prager here.
Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast.
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