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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show

01:16:15

Greatness

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	You want to hear something very moving, ladies and gentlemen?
	My technical producer, Sean, just wished me a good show.
	After all these years, I'm very touched.
	My friends, I have an interesting subject for you.
	Since I have always talked about everything in life, this would go under that heading.
	What are the characteristics of a great person?
	I developed this idea just recently, wrote about it.
	It's not out.
	It's not published yet, so you're hearing it first right here.
	There's a related question.
	Should people aspire to be great people?
	There's a big problem as soon as I raise that question because people confuse powerful slash famous with great.
	That you can't be a great person if you're not famous or powerful.
	And that is a real bad development in the modern period.
	So people don't aspire to greatness unless they're in major positions of influence.
	Terrible, terrible mistake.
	I have said very often, so some of you may actually recall this, that the famous are rarely significant and the significant are rarely famous.
	That's a very important guideline here.
	So what I say to you here, do you aspire or do you want your children to aspire to greatness?
	You're probably thinking, how can I aspire to it?
	I'm not some major public figure.
	That's such a terrible mistake.
	Before I give you my four characteristics of a great person that I came up with, I'd like to ask you all to think for a moment.
	And I'd like you to think about this too.
	Present company aside, do you know any great people?
	I think I know a lot, actually.
	I think you do know a lot.
	That's correct.
	I think you do.
	I think I do.
	That's right.
	Right.
	Okay, that's very sweet of you, Sean.
	I agree with you, but that's not the point.
	No, no, no.
	Okay, I said present company aside, so we can...
	Yes, right.
	All right, fine.
	No, it's a very serious question, actually.
	You who are listening to me now, do you know someone, or more than someone, whom you would describe, not good, which is very important, the most important, and not nice, Not charming, not wealthy, famous.
	No, those do not constitute being a great person.
	Great is well above good, and good is not common.
	There are a lot of nice people, and as I have been saying certainly for the last three years, but more than that, nice people do a lot of harm.
	Not because they're nice, that that would be stupid.
	Of course not.
	But because they don't know, they don't have the wisdom to choose what is good.
	Wisdom and niceness are not the same at all.
	In fact, there are great people who are not that nice.
	Nice is important.
	I much prefer to sit next to a nice person on the plane or have a nice flight attendant or have a nice neighbor than a not nice neighbor or not nice person next to me.
	But nice is not a prerequisite for being a great person.
	What was your question, Sean, about great?
	Oh, is a qualifier for great not doing harm.
	Not doing harm means you're not bad.
	Bad people.
	Those who do harm are bad.
	There are a lot of nice bad people.
	Let's put it that way.
	I'm debating whether to say this, but I would be dishonest to you.
	In the name of trying to sound above politics.
	But the number of nice people who vote Democrat and thereby harm the society is very large.
	And I fully acknowledge that they're nice.
	I don't think that they can acknowledge it about us.
	It's interesting.
	The Young Turks, which is truly representative of the left in every way.
	In its intellectual and moral depth, decency, in every way.
	It's the perfect podcast.
	And they were attacking me again.
	I seemed to annoy them a great deal.
	And they said, he's not nice.
	It's funny because I've been called everything fascist, well, six herb, sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted.
	But it was the first time I ever recall someone saying, I'm not a nice person.
	I know I'm a nice person.
	It doesn't matter to me.
	But they can't chew gum and walk at the same time intellectually.
	I can acknowledge how many nice people there are who are doing harm to the society.
	Anyway, back to the subject.
	The subject is being a great person.
	Everyone should aspire to it, few people do, thinking they're disqualified because they don't have the power or fame or wealth to be great.
	You know, is Bill Gates a great person, one of the richest human beings on earth?
	No, he seems to me to be an extremely harmful human being.
	I don't know if he's personally nice, nor does it interest me in any way.
	While he was president, Donald Trump was not nice.
	But he did achieve greatness as a president.
	With all his personal flaws.
	The amount of good he did in his presidency is remarkable.
	So, who is a great person?
	I want you to understand it is something everybody should aspire to, even though they may think it's not humble.
	That's another problem with people aspiring to greatness, is that they may think, oh my God, if anybody heard me say that, you know, I hope to be a great person.
	We have so confused great with fame and great with power that If you even say, I want to be a great person, you will be laughed at perhaps by friends.
	But you shouldn't.
	You shouldn't be.
	It's an aspiration that you should have.
	So I have four characteristics of people who are great.
	None of them have to do with wealth.
	None of them have to do with power.
	And there are many great people who are not well known at all.
	That's why I asked you, do you have anybody in your life that you would say is a great person?
	They're good to have in one's life.
	Characteristic number one is courage.
	You cannot be a great person if you are not courageous.
	That fact alone disqualifies the great majority of people, since most people are governed by fear.
	The left, by the way, knows that people are governed by fear, and that is why all of my life, and even preceding it, but certainly all of my now long life, they have appealed to fear, they have induced fear, what I have called hysteria.
	If I rewrote the book that I explain the left and America in, Still the Best Hope, I strongly urge you to read it.
	It is more relevant today than even when I wrote it.
	I wrote that they rely on hysteria, but the better word is fear.
	We continue.
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	So who is a great person?
	um.
	I have established a working definition.
	of four characteristics in a person.
	First is courage.
	You can't be a great person if you are not courageous.
	And the left knows this, and that is why they try to suppress the courageous.
	They try to kick them out of colleges, for example, if a professor should open up his mouth.
	They try to shut them down.
	Amy Wax, remember her, at the University of Pennsylvania Law School?
	She wrote a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, was it?
	Yeah, that's where it was.
	With a professor at a law school at UC San Diego, or San Diego State, I don't remember, but it was San Diego.
	And all they said was, the best values were good old middle class bourgeois values.
	Basically, graduate college, get a job, get married, And then have children after you marry.
	She was called a racist.
	250 law professors at another truly decrepit institution called the University of Pennsylvania.
	If you give money there, you are harming the country.
	I don't know how you rationalize.
	Well, people don't rationalize.
	Let's put it this way.
	They don't use reason.
	They use feelings.
	Well, I went to Penn, and it was wonderful for me.
	What a truly stupid notion.
	You went to Penn, it was good for you, and therefore you will continue to give to Penn even when it is bad for people?
	Or Yale, which may be the worst of all the Ivy League.
	It's a true intellectual and moral wasteland.
	Anyway, they tried to get her fired, or at the very least, since she had tenure, they successfully got her not to teach the opening or the first-year class in law because she wrote what I just told you about.
	They hate middle-class bourgeois values.
	They hate them.
	They're so boring to leftists.
	Who are you to tell people they should graduate high school, get a job, get married, and then have children?
	Those are white supremacist values.
	So anyway, they govern by fear, knowing that most people are not courageous.
	Climate change is a perfect example of governing by fear.
	They've already begun to ruin the economies of the Western world, and they're sort of thrilled by it.
	And that is because they want to undo the Western world as we know it.
	Everything about this middle-class value system, they loathe.
	Oh, you'll have your suburban house with a white picket fence and two-car garage.
	Remember the contempt with which leftists would speak of that?
	Ah, but to be in a, I don't know, 125-square-foot apartment in Manhattan with no car, needless to say.
	That's great.
	That's a quality of life.
	That everybody should aspire to, except for the wealthy environmentalists who have their own airplanes, let alone homes.
	It's a very odd thing.
	Back to the fear issue.
	The more fear you have, the odds are the less courage you will have.
	It is possible to have fear and be courageous, by the way.
	The guys who stormed Normandy Beach had fear and were courageous.
	So you can have fear and be courageous.
	Courageous people do not lack fears.
	They don't give in to them.
	That's the first characteristic of a great person, courage.
	How do you attain courage?
	By wanting to be courageous.
	That's how you do it.
	One of the methods that I recommend to people is confront that which you fear.
	You fear flying?
	Fly.
	It is literally as simple as that.
	If you need to take a sedative, take a sedative.
	If you need to take three friends, take three friends.
	But you have to fly.
	Number two.
	What are the four characteristics of a great person?
	An unyielding, unswerving commitment to truth.
	It is completely related to courage because almost all courage involves telling the truth.
	And that's what gets people in trouble.
	It is a lie that this is a systemically racist country.
	It's a gigantic lie.
	It was a lie that lockdowns work.
	It was a lie that it was good to keep kids out of school for two years.
	But people were afraid to take this on because they would be hurt.
	It is almost impossible to be committed to truth and not be hurt.
	It is almost impossible.
	Is the key to a good world.
	Truth.
	When true is called a lie, and when lies are called truth, that's when you really enter a literally Orwellian phase of life for your society, and you're in deep trouble.
	That is what we have now.
	The Columbia Journalism Review, amazingly, amazingly, given the Columbia School of Journalism being so woke, published a scathing indictment of the New York Times and Washington Post for reporting for years on Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
	It was all a lie.
	And they got a Pulitzer Prize for that lie.
	Truth is almost everything.
	Back in a moment.
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	Hello, my friends.
	Writing something recently, and you know writing is the mirror of the mind.
	It is also the producer of the mind.
	It is not possible to overstate the positive effect of writing on your mind.
	I don't mean writing a book for publication, just writing.
	Publishing your own mind, even, or your own computer.
	So who is a great person?
	That's what I'm dealing with.
	Four characteristics.
	The first is courage.
	The second, which is almost the same, but not the same.
	Deeply related is commitment to truth.
	So, you know who comes to mind, and I never would have said this, I never even would have thought about saying this more than three years ago, Robert Kennedy Jr., a man who has devoted his life.
	He could have so easily sailed on his name.
	Into the love of fellow liberals and leftists.
	Be adored.
	He's bright.
	He's eloquent.
	Just had to keep his mouth shut about what he seems to have discovered.
	I paid almost no attention to him all of my life.
	I didn't have any particular affection or hostility.
	Just didn't register.
	Since I now know that the combination of drug companies and, or if you will, big pharma and big medicine, their commitment to truth is nil.
	I mean, literally nil.
	They have commitment to other things.
	And even, by the way, among doctors whose biggest commitment is to safety.
	That's what they tell themselves.
	You still have to have, first and foremost, a commitment to truth.
	When the Mayo Clinic lists, as I often point out on their website, at least they did last I checked, that cigars are as dangerous as cigarettes, it is obvious that the Mayo Clinic is more committed to health than it is to truth.
	Because it's a lie.
	It's a pure, unadulterated lie.
	It is as big a lie as blue is yellow.
	By the way, blue is the opposite of yellow, if you do work in color.
	The more blue, the less yellow.
	So he is a perfect example of someone committed to truth.
	He has had nothing to gain.
	And so he has, in fact, he has exhibited all the traits of great.
	He has incredible courage, in his case, as in most cases, but not all, because there's always an issue of physical courage.
	But he has the courage to tell the truth.
	And the American Medical Association has neither courage nor commitment to truth.
	The American Medical Association is composed of mediocrities, the opposite of great people.
	It is easy to be a mediocrity.
	It is difficult to be great.
	When their day of death arrives, If tombstones were honest, they would say, for the heads of the American Medical Association, here lies a mediocrity.
	So the second characteristic of greatness is commitment to truth, wherever it leads.
	Big one.
	Number three.
	In order to be a great person, you may not strive to be loved by everyone.
	This I have mentioned to you, but I don't expect you to have remembered it.
	We should strive to be loved by friends and by a spouse.
	And that's it.
	Anything else where wanting to be loved is dominant, We'll make you do the job badly.
	A teacher who wants to be loved will not teach well.
	A political leader who wants to be loved will not lead well.
	A parent who wants to be loved will not be a good parent.
	Every parent wants to be loved.
	But it cannot direct your parenting.
	We continue.
	Hello everybody, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
	It's a very disturbing piece.
	Reportedly from Die Welt, which is a very mainstream German newspaper.
	Die Welt, a paper based in the home country, this is a conservative review, revealed last week a long expose.
	Of what many of us have long known, I'm reading from the column here, all those sudden deaths, heart attacks, and strokes we've been witnessing over the last two years were indeed observed during the Pfizer clinical trial that supposedly showed the shots to be 100% safe and effective.
	The company simply covered up the severe adverse events.
	By kicking those participants out of the trial and or suggesting that the deaths had nothing to do with the experiment.
	Remember, the CDC announced a few weeks ago that it had finally studied, I guess, a potential association between the COVID shots and strokes.
	Turns out the agency had the opportunity to study it already in 2020 before a single human being outside the trial was injected.
	Patient number 11621327 was more than a mere number.
	He was a human being found dead from a stroke in his apartment just three days after the second dose.
	Typically, with a novel product in trial, any death, even one not so sudden, Makes the product suspect until it is proven innocent.
	Yet in this case, Pfizer simply dismissed the death as not related to the vaccine, just as the company did with patient number 115-21497, who died 20 days later from cardiac arrest.
	There is a man in my life, I believe, died from the vaccine.
	The article also provides more details on the Buenos Aires trial site, the largest one in the world, in which attorney Augusto Ruh was severely injured with pericarditis and liver damage.
	Instead of being recorded as a severe adverse event, he was marked as having had COVID, even though he tested negative, and was summarily removed from the trial.
	Rue was on this man's podcast last July and told him that Pfizer refused to help treat his injury because officials felt it had nothing to do with the vaccine.
	Insurance also refused to pay for treatment because the insurance company blamed it on him willingly joining the trial.
	That is really the old Catch-22.
	Wow.
	The insurance won't pay for him because he joined the trial, and Pfizer won't pay for him because it had nothing to do with the vaccine in the trial.
	DeVelt reports that on August 31, 2020, 53 of those in the trial of Buenos Aires were unblinded and removed from the trial against the protocol, which calls for this only, quote, in emergencies.
	By the end of the second dose, a further 200 individuals were removed from the trial, meaning that overall more than 250 of the original 1,231 participants were terminated, thereby making the entirety of the data from the largest trial site irrelevant to use thereby making the entirety of the data from the largest trial site irrelevant to use
	Overall, 21 participants in Pfizer's Phase III trial died, as compared to 17% in the control group before they were unblinded, which should have been a red flag before the shot ever took off.
	Pfizer claimed there was no evidence anyone died from the vaccine, but after it's been revealed that a number of people in the trial suffered heart ailments and strokes, the company's defense holds no water.
	And here we are over two years later, and the shots are still on the market, promoted like manna from heaven.
	And even, by the way, it's interesting.
	They complained about manna from heaven more than we complain about the shots.
	In the Israelites.
	In the Israelites, yes, they complain more.
	Well, anyway, it's a long article and we're putting it up.
	It's already up at DennisPrager.com.
	Last hour I talked about something I have just developed, the four characteristics of what constitutes a great person.
	And one of them is commitment to truth.
	And, as you know, I say every day, and I give data every day, that truth is not a left-wing value.
	It doesn't produce great people.
	It doesn't even produce good people.
	Truth is everything.
	I mean everything.
	The lack of pursuit of truth by the medical profession in the last few years has turned me around.
	I now respect Bobby Kennedy Jr. more than I respect any doctor in the American Medical Association leadership.
	I mean, there's no comparison.
	I respect my plumber more than I respect the doctors who run the American Medical Association, and for that matter, almost every other medical association.
	Yesterday I covered the question of why are there masks in hospitals?
	All it would take is exactly what I spoke of last hour.
	It would take courage.
	It would take commitment to truth.
	And it would take being prepared to be an outlier.
	But if doctors were committed to truth and had courage, they would not show up at work until the mask mandates were removed for hospital doctors.
	And if you are too scared to enter a hospital because the doctors are not masked, then you wear your mask and you're protected.
	I don't get it.
	Why should he or she have to do the same thing?
	Why is keeping people scared now, oh, not now, it's been all of my life, one of the roles of the medical profession?
	I don't know.
	I have no answer to the question.
	50,000 people die a year of secondhand smoke was the tip-off to me.
	And it was carried on.
	And then what they do is, they...
	The lack of commitment to truth in the medical profession, just dismissing people as anti-vaxxers, they think, and they're right, they could get away with that.
	That's what the left does.
	It doesn't deal with, let me explain to you why this isn't true.
	For example, what are there supposed to be, I think 40 years ago, tests on the safety of vaccinations on children?
	I don't mean COVID vaccinations.
	This is a subject I am embarrassed to say.
	I bought the lie that people like Bobby Kennedy Jr. were just crackpot anti-vaxxers.
	I bought it.
	I will have to answer to God for not pursuing truth and being seduced by the mainstream media being lied to and believing it.
	I'm embarrassed.
	But I won't do it anymore.
	So I'm a sort of penitent.
	I never used the term anti-vaxxer.
	I simply ignored him.
	But having seen what I have seen now from the medical profession, when I see the University of Minnesota medical students line up like members of a cult, And they are members of a cult.
	Leftism is a cult.
	Repeat after me.
	I am standing on conquered land.
	I am standing on conquered land.
	I will fight racism in medicine.
	I will fight racism in medicine.
	It's worse than actually what I just said.
	That was just a synopsis in my mind.
	Sean, get that up.
	We played it a long time ago.
	University of Minnesota Medical School.
	Alan, let's try to find that.
	I want to play it for people.
	Tell me if you believe them or Bobby Kennedy Jr. My friends, a food shortage could be coming.
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	Better stop the things you do.
	I'd like you to hear, I played it for you at the time, but I'd like you to hear what is being produced by the left.
	It's utterly destructive effects on American medicine.
	Here are your future doctors, sheep in a cult, taking an oath at the University of Minnesota Medical School at the beginning of the semester this past fall.
	With gratitude.
	We, the students of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Medical School Class of 2026, stand here today among our friends, families, peers, mentors, and communities who have supported us in reaching this milestone.
	Our institution is located on Dakota land.
	Today, many indigenous people throughout the state, including Dakota and Ojibwe, call the Twin Cities home.
	We also recognize this acknowledgement is not enough.
	We commit to uprooting the legacy and perpetuation of structural violence deeply embedded within the healthcare system.
	We recognize inequities built by past and present traumas rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, the gender binary, ableism, and all forms of oppression.
	As we enter this profession with opportunity for growth, We commit to promoting a culture of anti-racism, listening, and amplifying voices for positive change.
	We pledge to honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine.
	Knowing that health is intimately connected to our environment, we commit to healing our planet and communities.
	We vow to embrace our role as community members and strive to embody cultural humility.
	We promise to continue restoring trust in the medical system and fulfilling our responsibilities as educators and advocates.
	We commit to collaborating with social, political, and additional systems to advance health equity.
	We will learn from the scientific innovations made before us and pledge to advance and share this knowledge with peers and neighbors.
	We recognize the importance of being in community with and advocating for those we serve.
	So they took an oath, the incoming class at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which which undermines hundreds of years of achievement of Western medicine.
	They took an oath that sex is not binary.
	These are your future doctors.
	That the medical system has structural violence.
	Wow.
	Did they leave anything out?
	No, they didn't leave anything out.
	And also, wait, I find this also interesting.
	We will not reject any indigenous medicine.
	So it's a perfect example.
	They're not committed to...
	What if indigenous medicine doesn't work?
	Or is that a racist question?
	It is at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
	The left destroys everything it touches.
	I used to say ruins.
	I now say destroy.
	The everything has stayed the same.
	Who is this piece of crap doctor who led this chant?
	The dean, the head of the medical school.
	What a lowlife, what a frightening cult leader this man is.
	I wish I knew his name.
	I'd announce it regularly on the show.
	There are a lot of listeners in Minnesota.
	Let's try to find out his name.
	The topper is the students wrote it themselves.
	The students wrote it themselves.
	Some students, obviously.
	Yeah, they wrote it.
	I didn't know that.
	And why didn't he say, I'm sorry.
	You don't write your oath.
	You don't like our medical school?
	Go to another one.
	The medical school writes your oath, not you.
	Well, you know the answer to the question.
	What is the answer to the question?
	He believes everything in it.
	Oh, of course.
	He believes in it.
	Exactly right.
	That is 100%.
	I don't know.
	Don't guess.
	Okay.
	That was the man who read it?
	Robert Englander was the man speaking?
	He's the associate dean?
	Robert Englander, if you have any decency, you should resign immediately.
	You...
	You are ruining your medical school and your profession.
	You are the reason, sir, and the rest of you wimps at the University of Minnesota Medical School, you are the reason people like me, a whole lifetime of respect for medicine, has contempt for your profession now.
	Contempt.
	I will still go for surgeries.
	I have no choice.
	I know I would prefer to have an indigenous person operate on me, but I don't know how to find them.
	Is there any institution that has retained its decency, its integrity?
	Is there?
	I'm serious.
	Is there?
	There are people who have, but is there an institution?
	I can't think of one.
	Maybe they should name it the Black Rock Medical School.
	Yeah, 1-8 Prager 776. You have to fight, everybody.
	You fight by being open to being disliked.
	It is a liberating feeling.
	We'll return.
	Hi, everybody.
	So sure enough, Columbia University has just become another cesspool.
	It's actually voted the least free...
	Speech University in America.
	They're doing the same thing.
	They've dropped the Hippocratic Oath for the incoming students of their medical school.
	And they...
	I can't get the entire...
	Maybe I can get the...
	I don't know if the entire pledge is a little over a minute.
	The 140 students led by Lisa Melman, a Senior Associate Dean for Student Affairs, and the Samuel Rudin Professor of Psychiatry.
	That institution was corrupted when I was a kid.
	Remember, what was it, a thousand psychiatrists said Barry Goldwater was mentally unfit to be president?
	The field of psychiatry.
	It's very sad to me because I actually think there's a lot of truth in psychiatry.
	But psychiatrists are the lowest of the low.
	They sort of graduate fools from these psychiatric studies.
	We enter the profession of medicine and the appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past.
	See?
	Why would they recite the Hippocratic Oath when they could make up their own?
	We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression effected in the name of medicine.
	We take the oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity.
	What does that mean?
	What does restoration mean?
	Do you know?
	I know what truth means, but of course they don't mean truth the way we mean it, that which is true.
	This is the tragedy.
	Truth is everything, but they have corrupted the word.
	To fulfill medicine's capacity.
	Now, what do you think the verb is?
	You're not reading it, so I'm going to read it to you again.
	This is awesome.
	We take this oath of service.
	This is the Columbia University Medical School.
	The students chanting.
	The herd, the sheep students doing their sheep herding.
	To begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity.
	To fulfill medicine's capacity to...
	Now you would think the word would be heal.
	Are you ready?
	To liberate.
	Right.
	You don't know what it means, and I don't know.
	What does that mean?
	What was restoration?
	Did we decide what that meant?
	We didn't decide what restoration meant, no.
	I acknowledge the past and present failures of medicine to abide by its obligations to do no harm and affirm the need to address the systemic issues of the institutions I uphold.
	I promise to critically examine the systems and experiences that impact every person's health and ability to receive care.
	I vow to use this knowledge to uplift my patients and disrupt the injustices that harm them as I forge the future of medicine.
	I promise this is the incoming class of doctors.
	I would not see a doctor.
	If I were a young person, and I knew that my doctor who was around my age went to Columbia University Medical School, I would probably choose a different doctor.
	Although, it is a fair question, if you are a moral idiot, a sheep, and a fool, can you be a good doctor?
	No, it's a fair question.
	I promise to self-reflect.
	Oh yeah, we do, we have the video?
	Okay, so take it away.
	We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past.
	We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression affected in the name of medicine.
	We take this oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity to fulfill medicine's capacity to liberate.
	I promise to take care of my future patients by engaging in dialogue.
	All right, hold on.
	Put it on pause.
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	Hi, everybody.
	I'm Dennis Prager.
	Welcome to the show, or welcome back.
	What has been happening at the southern border of the United States is nothing less than an obvious desire to create a different country than the one we have had by enabling millions upon millions of people to illegally enter the country.
	I'm thinking about some of my left-wing correspondence and the world of falsehood that they inhabit.
	When I speak about the left's advocacy of open borders, I will get letters saying that that is a lie.
	The left is not for open borders.
	Gaslight is the term.
	When you're told that what you see and know is not true, nobody does it as effectively as people on the left, and the frightening part is they believe it.
	Let's keep our borders open for millions upon millions of people, but don't accuse us of being for open borders.
	Hmm.
	Well, a very important book has just been published.
	Or is just being published.
	I'll find out actually when exactly.
	Overrun.
	That's the title of the book, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History by Todd Bensman.
	B-E-N-S-M-A-N. I have Todd Bensman on the line from Austin, Texas.
	Todd Bensman, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
	Thank you so much for having me.
	I appreciate it.
	Your background, as I learned just before going on now, is really in the intelligence sphere.
	So your specialty is threats to the country from an intelligence standpoint coming through the border.
	Is that correct?
	Yes, that's correct.
	Ten years with the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
	But I will say that I am also a recovering journalist.
	Before that 10-year stint, I was a reporter for 23 years.
	Newspapers.
	At the time, this is not related to your book, but at the time that you were a reporter, was it mainstream media?
	And if so, do you think that they were at that time more or less committed to truth?
	Yes.
	First of all, I do regard that I was in mainstream media.
	I worked for the Dallas Morning News for 10 years and CBS and Hearst.
	And I do believe that the media biosphere in this country has bifurcated in half.
	Along partisan lines, really sad to see it's not the same media it was when I was working there.
	I mean, it doesn't even really pretend to be most of the time.
	So I mentioned you'll find this of interest, and I know my listeners will.
	It just came up on the Google feed on my name a couple of weeks ago.
	I had forgotten that the LA Times wrote about me.
	In the 1980s, when I was beginning my time as a talk show host, so it's been 40 years, and they wrote in glowing terms.
	The LA Times wrote about me in glowing terms 40 years ago.
	And they published me regularly.
	And today I am sexist and tolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted.
	The rapidity of the deterioration is breathtaking.
	So your answer doesn't surprise me.
	Anyway, you obviously know this field.
	I began by saying that the left denies that it's for open borders.
	Is that denial credible?
	Well, it depends on how far left you want to go.
	The book Overrun contains a 10,000-word chapter on how a really far-left fringe of the Democratic Party coalition was able to ascend to real power for the first time.
	over more moderate Democratic Party coalition groupings and seized control and were given control of the immigration portfolio.
	Traditionally, the Democratic Party, think mainstream figures like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, even Jimmy Carter to a certain extent were I mean, you had to follow the law.
	Obama used to be asked, why don't you stop deportations?
	And his answer was, I can't.
	It's the law.
	I'm not a king.
	But that is no longer the case.
	They have ceded control.
	The middle has ceded control to its left over this policy.
	That left is interested in three or four things.
	Ending all immigration enforcement because it's illegal and immoral.
	And akin to Jim Crow laws.
	Two, in borders.
	We don't want borders.
	We don't want deportation.
	We don't want detention.
	And that civil rights extend to U.S. civil rights extend to the entire globe.
	And so anybody who wants to come into this country should be allowed to come into this country, despite the laws they want to treat the INA like the federal marijuana law.
	And that is a huge difference.
	That's a sea change from just a few years ago.
	Even Bernie Sanders was a border hawk all the way up until 2016 compared to where he is now.
	Okay, so what I said was valid.
	The left is for open borders, but the liberal of the Democratic Party was not, which is part of my extremely well-developed, if I may say, thesis that there is a huge difference between liberalism and leftism.
	But unfortunately, liberals vote for the left, and that is the calamity of the United States in a nutshell.
	So what is Joe Biden?
	Well, Joe Biden was a traditional moderate liberal Democrat.
	But, you know, the book is filled with quotations from him when he was a senator voting in favor of the wall in 2006 and giving campaign stump speeches about, you know, we have to control the border.
	It's a sovereign duty of the United States and there's drug trafficking and all sorts of terrible things crossing the border.
	But, you know, he became beholden to the very far left.
	In about 2018, 2019, when there was a field of 10 or 15 different candidates, and they all needed that sliver of the far left that had become very animated and politically powerful by their visceral opposition to Donald Trump.
	They needed that group to just get over the goal line.
	And I think that he...
	Just caved to them and still is caving to them to this day.
	All of those kind of people, what I mean by that is they're coming from what I call the migrant advocacy industrial complex, which is this pretty large constellation of migrant advocacy NGOs and they're very far left on the very, very fringe Antifa kind of left.
	About the borders, about any kind of borders, about migration.
	Plus, they earn hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts.
	Not defense, but in contracts to manage the influx, the massive numbers that are coming through.
	So there's that as well.
	And I think also that Biden is not the man he was.
	I believe that they have taken advantage of a power vacuum due to his, I think, reduced capacity, mental capacity to understand any of this or to care about it.
	So maybe a little of both.
	Can you name names of people who are this core pushing for...
	Letting millions of people in legally or illegally.
	Is any given senator in the Democratic Party, is Richard Blumenthal, is Adam Schiff the congressman?
	I want names only so that we will be clear who is advocating for this.
	Well, there are, in the chapter of the book, Overrun, The chapter's actually called The New Theologians, because this is like a religion to people from over there, and they behave in policy as though they are, you know, like in the church pews of some...
	Yes, hold it there.
	That's a really important point.
	I want to remind people the book is overrun.
	It is up at DennisPrager.com.
	Todd Benzman, The Border Crisis, finally a book.
	Delineating it.
	Please go to AmericanFederal.com, AmFed as it's known.
	I know the man who runs it or owns it, Nick Grovich.
	I almost never mention names other than products.
	But I believe that this man is extraordinarily honest and extraordinarily knowledgeable about gold and silver, about precious metals generally.
	There's no obligation for you to contact, but you do need to get some precious metals.
	And I'm not happy that I have to tell you that, but I would be remiss if I didn't.
	I certainly have purchased my share.
	AmericanFederal.com 800-221-7694 This important book, just published two days ago, Overrun, is the book.
	Todd Benzman is the author.
	How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
	So I was asking you about the people in the Democratic Party who were pushing for this, and you said, in my opinion entirely correctly, it's like a religion.
	So I agree with you.
	Writing Theory of Life is that when traditional Judeo-Christian religions die, you simply get secular religions in their place.
	So it's completely in keeping with my own thinking, but I want to now push you on this.
	What does their religion consist of that we're morally obligated to accept every human who wants to live in America?
	What is this religion?
	In short, absolutely.
	The religion consists of this.
	Laws that are in place to detain are immoral.
	These are like concentration camps or detention centers.
	Immigration detention centers are concentration camps.
	That deportation is akin to Nazi trains that are moving people back to their deaths or flights, ice air flights.
	They call them death flights.
	There's a whole linguistics that has risen out of this that essentially holds that any sort of immigration enforcement is cruel.
	And a violation of human rights, not U.S. civil rights.
	They had to move that goalpost to a more international place that they call human rights and that the U.S. law is obliged to enforce human rights of non-citizens of the entire world.
	And so they want to eliminate detention, deportation.
	They want to decriminalize border entry.
	Illegal border entry.
	It's been illegal and prosecutable federally since 1996. They want to grant amnesties in a mass way to everybody who's already here illegally.
	They want to eliminate the fear, quote unquote, of deportation of people that are living illegally in the U.S. So they want to, and they have.
	Abolished ICE. ICE is abolished at this point.
	Literally, they've done all of these things.
	They've hit every one of these and achieved them in this country.
	They've created a vast sanctuary nation inside America.
	You do not get deported anymore or chased or hunted.
	What role are political considerations playing, in your opinion?
	In other words, the vast majority of these people will vote Democrat.
	That is what radically changed California, which, after all, had Ronald Reagan as its governor at one point.
	This was a stalwart Republican state.
	Now it is effortlessly Democrat.
	Is that a role or is it primarily this religious idealism?
	I think more so...
	It's the religious idealism.
	These people have been sidelined for 20 years.
	Their ideology has never been let in through the back door.
	And now it's the law of the law.
	Every single presidential primary candidate adopted all of their ideology for their campaigns.
	Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, everybody had all of their ideologies as part of their campaign platforms.
	All of a sudden.
	So I do think it's that.
	I think the cherry on top would be, you know, over time, the creation of because of the census, the way they count all people who live in a they don't differ.
	It doesn't differentiate between citizens and noncitizens.
	It's just people living in blue precincts that it could create more congressional districts.
	And result in more blue voting, blue seats in the Congress.
	That's more of a longer-term situation.
	But there's also something that needs to be mentioned here, is that the people that are inhabiting the White House advisory staff and the political appointments and all of the DHS agencies come from, and including Alejandro Mayorkas, they come directly from The migrant advocacy NGO world.
	And those NGOs earn hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts when there is mass migration.
	Oh my God, we have to help these poor people.
	Give us some money to do that.
	Even the ones that aren't getting contracts still benefit through retail fundraising.
	Oh my God, look at this poor child from Haiti.
	And so, you know, donate.
	Here's the donation button.
	And so there's this, you can't underestimate the importance of just the almighty dollar in all of this, just like in anything else.
	That's what counts in large measure for DEI deans.
	And administrators on college campuses, they now equal the number of students in many cases.
	They dwarf the number of professors.
	There are billions of dollars in salaries available for the diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators at our colleges.
	The book is Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History.
	Here's a question that every interviewer knows that when we ask questions, sometimes we think we know the answer for ourselves.
	Sometimes we even think we know the answer that the person will give.
	In this case, I don't know what you'll answer, and I don't have an answer.
	Why was the wall not completed under Donald Trump?
	Right, well...
	The wall was the very embodiment of Trumpism.
	He campaigned on it from the very beginning, from the announcement of his candidacy and to promise the big, beautiful wall.
	So from the very beginning, it drew the biggest target.
	So all of the candidates on the Democratic side, without exception, Right, but it wasn't completed during Trump's era.
	I know why the Democrats stopped it.
	Why did he stop it?
	Or did he not?
	I mean, did he not have the time?
	Why wasn't it completed in the Trump era?
	The Democratic forces and NGOs that were in opposition to Trump's legislative agenda did not want him to achieve anything.
	Mounted one litigation campaign after another, after another, after another.
	They tied it up in litigation.
	They shut down all avenues of funding that he needed.
	And it took him a little bit of time to go around them.
	Alright, I want more on this.
	Again, the book Overrun, Todd Benzman, we return.
	Overrun, How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.
	Published two days ago, Todd Benzman.
	It's up at DennisPrager.com, you can go anywhere you want to order the book.
	It's an important book.
	He's obviously a serious man and serious thinker.
	He's with the Center for Immigration Studies, which is a serious group.
	I tell you, a society cannot survive open borders.
	It should be...
	I think that an eight-year-old could understand that.
	I mean, all you need to say is, if you let anybody you want into your house, do you still have your house?
	Why is that not a dispositive argument?
	Well, this is the curious thing about this mass migration crisis.
	And by all nonpartisan numbers, it is by far the greatest mass migration crisis in history.
	The numbers are there.
	These are government numbers.
	This is not a partisan thing.
	But what's unusual, there are a lot of firsts about this.
	And one of those, among those firsts, is the fact that you have the first sitting president and administration that has taken the policy position officially that we will not Enforce our immigration laws.
	We don't want to do it.
	We're not going to do it.
	You can't make us, or you're going to have to make us.
	And this is something that we've just never seen before, not only in the United States, but also anywhere in the world.
	There is just no country that does this.
	No country just lets in everybody who wants to come in over the border, strangers.
	They don't even have IDs, most of them.
	Complete strangers from all over the world.
	Another first about this is that more than 40% of everybody reaching the southern border is not from Mexico or Central America like a lot of Americans might assume.
	I'm sorry, what percentage?
	43% reaching the border the highest ever by far.
	Are not from Latin America.
	They're not from...
	Mexico or Central America, they're from 150 other countries.
	I've been down there for two years.
	I've met Africans from every country on the continent, everyone from the Middle East.
	What do they do?
	I'm just curious.
	What do they do?
	They fly to Mexico City?
	Well, the majority fly to places like Ecuador and Brazil or Colombia, and then they cross through the Darien Gap.
	And then just march their way up to Mexico and then the southern border.
	Or they do, there is a lot of air traffic too, depending on what your passport, if you got the right passport.
	But it's an entire world is coming for this thing.
	They were told that the gates would be open.
	The selfies are coming back from the gates, from the open gates.
	And it's just encouraging, you know, more and more a snowball.
	Turned into an avalanche immediately on inauguration day.
	And no country does this.
	I mean, no country, even to ancient times, just simply abdicates border security.
	It's a basic sovereignty.
	It's an assumed sovereignty.
	But the United States, I guess, has decided it's going to be the very first.
	To experiment with this thing.
	We're the most woke country in the world at this time.
	Even the French have acknowledged that.
	Can Mexico stop this?
	Yes.
	Mexico did stop this in large part when Trump was president because...
	He told the Mexicans, if you don't do what we would like you to do, we're going to implement progressive trade tariffs up to 28% and destroy your economy.
	So he gave them a national interest to stop it on their southern border.
	But one of the things that the book details that US media missed in all of this is that the Mexican government, the Congress of Mexico, Led by the president of Mexico's political party,
	waited until Joe Biden was elected, that they confirmed that he was elected, and then passed a law within 72 hours of his election that had the effect of emptying all of their detention centers of family units and unaccompanied minors, high-maintenance population, and it had the effect of sending them straight to the U.S. border where they waited until Inauguration Day.
	And then the Biden administration exempted them from the rules that Trump was using to push them back.
	And so the flood was on, on inauguration.
	All right, folks, if any of you have a question on immigration, this is the man, Todd Benzman, the book Overrun, up at DennisPrager.com.
	Back in a moment.
	Dennis Prager here.
	Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast.
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