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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:21:20
Suspension of Disbelief
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Dennis Prager here.
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Subscribe at PragerTopia.com Hello, everybody!
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
I was reading last night a book.
I'll get you the title, I don't remember it.
A book about the Founding Fathers and their attitudes towards God, the Bible, and Christianity.
And I was reading an excerpt from things that Thomas Jefferson wrote and said, which were truly critical of Christianity.
And I was thinking, all these leftists, all these Democrats, which has now become, unfortunately, almost indistinguishable, who say that the Christians in America want a Christian theocracy.
and that...
Should they come to power, they will suppress dissenters, people who think differently, etc.
On what is their basis?
When Christians were far more powerful in the past, they didn't do that.
The things that Jefferson said were so critical.
And even somewhat in a mocking tone, he sort of revered the Bible without its miracles and believed in providence.
They all did, Benjamin Franklin certainly.
But it just reminded me to remind you that the history of Christianity in the United States is not one.
That in any way bears resemblance to the history of Christianity in Europe, where the number of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants alone, not to mention the terrible, terrible persecutions of Jews, has no analog in the United States.
One of the first things that George Washington did as president was visit a synagogue.
You wouldn't have had that in Europe.
This country is a different country.
It's becoming like other countries.
The left doesn't believe America is special, that American values are special, or exceptional, whichever term you like.
You wonder, what is special?
If the United States is not exceptional, then is there any country that has been?
And they would probably have no answer to that.
What is special is they, or them, if you prefer.
They're special.
Because they were raised by parents and schools that told them how special they are.
Where is my favorite sign?
No, that's not it.
Damn, I threw it away.
That school sign that I saw, schoolroom sign that I saw in the New York Times, the world is better because you are in it.
I don't know what grade it was.
I assume something like fifth grade.
What a stupid message.
Plus, it's not true.
What has any fifth grader done to have made the world better because he or she is in it?
Well, again, as I pointed out, it's the opposite of the way many of us were raised.
If my father had said to me, you know, Dennis, the world is better because you are in it.
I would have believed that even though he was never drunk, that he was actually drunk.
Now, this country has been special.
The Christianity of this country has been special.
The Christians of this country who founded it, even though Jefferson was not a Christian, but he...
It was rooted in that culture.
It was a Christian culture.
If not religious specifically, it was sort of like Christmas.
For some, it is religious, and for others, it is not a religious holiday, but it is nevertheless Christmas, Christ Mass.
If it weren't for Christianity, there would be no Christmas.
All of these charges are lies.
Christian nationalism.
Do you know how often the New York Times has a piece on that?
Have you met a Christian nationalist lately?
Much of my life is with Christians.
I have to say, I haven't met a Christian nationalist yet.
I haven't met a QAnon follower yet.
I haven't met anybody in the alt-right.
I spend my life in the right, and I never met anybody in the alt-right.
I don't even know what it is.
It obviously means alternative to the right.
So how could it be right?
How could alt-right be right?
It's an alternative right.
Okay, it's an alternative right.
Whatever that means.
I've never seen QAnon.
I don't know what it stands for.
Christian Nationalists.
Woof, woof, woof, woof.
Is Rick here, Sean?
Is Rick here?
So, Rick, you're a Christian, Rick, right?
Are you a Christian nationalist?
No.
Do you know what it means?
No idea.
Okay, thank you.
I have a living Christian just who stepped in, one of the people who makes the show possible technically.
He's a bearded Christian at that.
He's a bearded Christian, but he's not a nationalist Christian.
The left has always been, there is never an exception, a world of the lie.
If truth prevailed in America, there would be no left.
There would be liberals, there would be conservatives.
But the answer to the puzzle I have held all of my life, or nearly all of my life, do they believe their lies, is by and large they do.
When the New York Times writes about Christian nationalism, it believes it.
It makes it up.
That Trump is a fascist, it makes it up.
And people have believed it.
He was president for four years.
Where was the fascism in the country?
Joe Biden is so much closer to a fascist than Donald Trump that it takes a suspension of credulity to deny it.
Yes, SOC, my friends.
Suspension of credulity.
I like that one.
1-8 Prager 776. Christians seem to have dealt in America quite well with criticism and even mockery.
An artist, so-called artist, puts his...
Puts a crucifix in a jar of his urine, and it goes around the country from museum to museum as piss Christ.
Any Christian violence as a result of that?
What would happen if a picture of Muhammad were in urine, or a Quran?
The author would be in hiding if he would survive.
The so-called artist.
The left picks on Christianity because they know they won't be hurt.
They won't critique Islam or Muslims because they fear they will be hurt.
And because Islam is an alternative to Christianity, and that's good, that's fine.
The only thing that in large numbers can withstand...
The left is Christianity.
Although the left has taken over much of mainstream Protestantism, mainstream Judaism, and mainstream Catholicism.
Well, just thought I would bring to you the record of your fellow Christian in America has been pretty darn tolerant.
Not always, not perfectly.
But in comparison to humans rather than angels, it has been uniquely tolerant, American Christianity.
I will touch on that and many other subjects tonight in a speech in Los Angeles for the Republican Jewish Association.
Anyway, it's up at DennisPrager.com.
You should attend the speech if you are in Southern California, or in Northern California and want to take the drive, or in Arizona and want to make the drive, or in Michigan and want to fly in.
Big speech tonight.
Republican Jewish Alliance, that's what it is.
Back in a moment. Back in a moment.
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It's a very sick party, the Democratic Party.
It's gone from wrong to sick.
California will be a sanctuary state because Democrats run it.
A sanctuary state.
I'm not talking about people who cross the border illegally.
I'm now talking about children who say that they are the other sex.
So you have two parents in Texas, for example.
One says to their 12-year-old girl, You're not a boy, darling.
You have struggles, and we will work through them.
But God or nature made you a girl.
You are not a boy, and maybe social media are encouraging you in that direction, but you have no idea what you're getting into if you start taking puberty-blocking hormones.
The other parent says, I affirm you.
You say, Michelle, you say you're a boy, then you're Michael, of course.
You know at 12 years old what your sex is.
Absolutely.
You can't drive.
You can't drink.
You can't smoke a cigarette.
You can't vote.
But you can change your sex.
Of course.
You know best.
You're 12. And now, since you can't do that in Texas at 12 years of age, you can't screw up a kid's life with hormone...
Blocking, puberty blocking hormones.
Therefore, they can now go to California and have it all done.
Just one parent simply needs to take the child to California and despicable doctors will ruin your child's life.
Sick, sick doctors.
The whole medical profession is becoming sick.
Because the left ruins everything.
It touches everything.
Every single thing.
It is as simple as that.
It is like fire.
It burns whatever it touches.
So California, under this awful human being called Gavin Newsom, this empty bag, Of leftist ideas will now be a sanctuary state for children, children, who don't want to listen to their parents, of course, but want to listen to the social media and the left.
Of course you're a boy, Michelle.
Absolutely.
Yeah, sex is just genitalia, so you just get rid of them.
Especially if you're a boy and they're external.
And you're a girl, as soon as we can, we'll just cut off your breasts.
Because we're doctors and we know what's good for you at 18. Yeah.
18-year-old can't smoke a cigar, but can have her breasts removed.
Sick!
The left is sick.
And liberals won't acknowledge it.
Liberals don't even know about this.
Liberals live in such a cocoon.
I mention this to you.
I won't, of course, even hint at whom I'm speaking about.
It's not important.
But a liberal in New York whom I know very, very, very well.
Good person.
Sweet person.
I happened to mention Jordan Peterson, and he had no clue who he was.
If you are in any way involved in the intellectual life of the West, let alone America, and don't know who Jordan Peterson is, then that is a bad sign.
We know all the leftist people.
Ibram X. Kendi.
What conservative doesn't know about Ibram X.
Kendi?
Who typifies the left-wing intellectual universe?
you But they don't know.
They don't know what's going on in the country.
That's the reason the liberals continue to vote Democrat.
All they know is the MAGA Republicans threaten democracy, one of the biggest lies ever told by a president of the United States to the country.
Biden is truly a loathsome human being.
The world is worse because he is in it.
Let's put it that way.
To paraphrase the sign up in this fifth grade class, or whatever grade class it was, that I saw.
Wow.
Such it is, my friends.
I live in a state governed by bad people.
Gavin Newsom and the Democrats in the two houses.
How is it that they got such power?
How did such foolish people, fools, destructive people get so much power?
I blame the voters who vote for them.
It's just, who else do you blame?
They didn't take over by coup.
They were elected.
There is good news coming out of Europe.
Sweden just elected a right-wing with the most votes to be Prime Minister of Sweden.
Follows quite a few other countries.
There's no uprising in this country that's been affected.
Well, there was the election of Donald Trump.
But the left in this country is way more left than the left in Europe.
The left in Europe is economic left.
The left in the United States is cultural left.
It's a big difference.
The left in Europe doesn't want to destroy Europe.
The left in America wants to destroy America.
Big difference.
So there is good news.
And I will bring it to you whenever I find it.
What's our timing, mister?
We're ready to go.
Back in a moment.
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Hi everybody.
Really, really important book just published.
The Great Reset.
Boy, if you'd have told me that I would be endorsing a book called The Great Reset five years ago, I would have thought you're out of your mind.
By the way, that is not a positive statement about myself.
Just for the record, I should have known about this five years ago.
But I didn't.
Now I do.
My eyes haveth beeneth openedeth in the last couple of years.
So here's a book explaining it just out.
Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown.
Yes, permanent lockdown.
I will say this.
I will forever be proud of the fact that in April 2020, I tweeted and wrote an article and broadcast.
That the lockdown was the greatest worldwide mistake in history.
I was right.
The book is called The Great Reset.
Mark Morano, M-O-R-A-N-O, is my guest.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com.
I'm willing to be humiliated, Mark.
When did you know there was a Great Reset taking place?
Great question.
This is actually, this phrase was only first uttered by the chairman of the World Economic Forum in 2014. So don't feel too bad, that exact phrase.
However, the concept of the Great Reset, in other words, rule by the expert class, by an expertocracy, by the administrative state, by a managerial class, really began in earnest in the United States, the quest for it, during Woodrow Wilson's administration.
So it's been around.
In the old days, it could have been called the New World Order, but that, of course, had more to do with foreign policy, I think, and national sovereignty.
This essentially really came to fruition in March of 2020, when the COVID lockdowns hit.
The global institutions and the progressive left love the idea of politicians having this much power.
And in June 2020, the chairman of the World Economic Forum, which meets every year in Davos, announced a great reset was necessary, a rare, narrow window of opportunity by which to reset the world, reset capitalism using COVID and climate.
COVID and climate.
good.
So it's, yes, the idea, you began with the idea of the, what was it, the educated class ruling?
The world, what was that exactly?
It's an ideology, yeah, the ideology goes back to Woodrow Wilson promoted the administrative state.
And they actually believe, keep in mind, this is a utopian ideology that believes that if we, the unwashed masses, are left to our own devices, we create racism, inequity, climate destruction, white supremacy, that we need to be guided by the expert hand.
Remember Adam Smith's invisible hand?
Well, this is government's expert hand.
And the idea here, and it goes back through Franklin Delano Roosevelt and everything else, is we're not smart enough to manage all aspects of our life.
We don't see the bigger picture.
We need the PhDs.
We need the experts, the government bureaucrats who are going to focus on how to bake our lives best.
And they're not going to give us a direct say.
Now, keep in mind, everything from, if you go to a restaurant now and you get a paper straw, do you remember voting to get rid of plastic straws as the paper one dissolves in your drink?
Now they're getting rid of gas-powered cars in California and 17 other states.
Did anyone actually vote to get rid of gas-powered cars?
They're getting rid of meat-eating.
They want to make eating meat rare and expensive.
Did anyone actually vote to get rid of eating meat?
None of this is decided by the masses.
That is great.
That's terrific.
The reason it's terrific is you're doing what I beg people to do and the left never does, like Biden in his speech.
About MAGA Republicans.
He never gave examples of how people who are MAGA Republicans are actually bringing about fascism.
Give us two, three examples.
You just gave example after example.
That's right.
Who voted for any of this?
It's superb.
That's the key.
I call it the Chinification of America.
And this began actually in earnest under Obama.
If you remember...
He tried with a supermajority in the House and Senate to pass a climate bill.
It ended up passing the House after two votes, and it failed in the Senate.
Harry Reid never brought it for a vote because people like Al Franken and like seven or eight other Democrats refused to sign on it because of the economic damage of the bill.
So he decided to go through executive orders in the administrative state and the EPA regulating no vote of Congress necessary.
Same reason why the Green New Deal was never voted on.
But here's the bottom line about the Great Reset and everything.
You want examples.
Our current energy system is being intentionally collapsed right now.
Our transportation system is being intentionally collapsed.
When you ban gas-powered cars, you're creating intentional car shortages.
That's all California's edict.
Biden administration loves it.
Our high-yield agriculture, which has been the model of the world since the great agriculture...
All right, we're continuing in a moment.
The book is The Great Reset.
Hello, y'all.
Dennis Prager here with Mark Marano.
This is a very important book, The Great Reset.
By the way, you can watch me, you can watch my guests like Mark Marano at Salem News Channel.
We're videoed now, have been for a while.
In addition to audio, The Great Reset, Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown.
So, there's no doubt in my mind that Mark Marano is right.
Klaus Schwab has actually used the term.
Is that your dog?
The dog thinks he's right, too, yes.
That is right.
It is not often that we get a dog as well as a guest.
What's your dog's name?
This dog is named Piper that you're hearing bark.
Piper.
All right, Piper.
Piper.
Shh.
Your dad is on national radio, Piper.
That is really funny.
I used to live on a sort of farm, and I would broadcast from there, and people heard roosters in the background periodically.
I want to understand something.
Qui Bono?
Who benefits?
Answer that.
In this idealized vision of the World Economic Forum and all those who support it, who benefits?
Well, that's a good question.
First of all, it's an ideology.
So sort of the intellectual class benefits because they get to do the managerial planning of all aspects of society.
In the intellectual class, if you will, the unelected bureaucracy, academia benefit.
Academia also benefits because they get the government grants and money.
I point out in this book that the science is actually not science.
It's actually studies paid for by government to come up with science to support policies already made.
And so it becomes a gravy train of funding for them.
The corporate media benefits, because as part of this, Bill Gates has given something $300 plus, $300 million plus, sorry, to media, from everything from PBS to all sorts of media, and does these interviews, and he sort of gets paid advertisements for that.
So the media benefits.
But the international organizations truly benefit.
The World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organization.
They get more power.
It's as old as politics itself.
It's power politics.
And of course, every tin pot politician in America benefits.
Whether it's the mayor of Chicago, the mayor of LA, under this guise of a great reset, they become virtual dictators.
We're still living under a COVID emergency, Dennis.
Biden's kept extending it.
It's extended now into next year.
And he wants to add to that a climate emergency.
But right now, when we have this COVID emergency, every mayor and governor was able to ban churches, close churches.
Close gyms, close schools, give you stay-at-home orders, cancel weddings and funerals.
But hey, Walmart was open.
They got to literally be a dictator overnight and make this.
That has a great appeal to many politicians.
So that's who benefits.
It's power, money, and ideology.
As old as politics itself.
Power, money, ideology.
PMI. So, big...
Big corporations are on board, and the reason?
The reason big corporations are on board, there's a point where, you know, you could say fascism is government corporate collusion, but now we're getting to a point where, is government telling corporations how to run their business through environment, social governance, or are corporations now telling the governments how to run?
So it's actually a hard one to tell, but corporations are involved in this.
Because they get not only a seat at the table, they get to set the agenda.
And most importantly, just from a bottom-line business perspective, they get to crush their competition.
And in the book, I use the example of the COVID lockdowns.
Small mom-and-pop retailers crushed.
Independent restaurant crushed.
The big corporate chains that go along with the woke agenda boosted to the point where it's the largest transfer of wealth upward from the poor and middle class.
To the elite class, the greatest creation of billionaires during the lockdown.
So that is why corporations come in.
And another example, they love crushing the small guy.
Think of the Netherlands right now.
You have this net zero attack on modern agriculture.
Who's it going to affect in the Netherlands?
It's not going to affect China.
Bill Gates, the largest farmland owner in the U.S. In the Netherlands, it's going to affect the smaller family-run farms that have been owned.
For generations by the families.
They're going to be replaced when they go under by the billionaire class, by the equity asset class, by foreign governments, by people willing to tow along with the woke climate agenda and the net zero agenda and the COVID agenda and the anti-meat agenda.
So corporations love this.
They've never had more power.
They've never had government at their side so much to crush their competitors.
And that's what we're seeing across the board, whether it's climate legislation.
The bigger you are, the better the lawyers you can hire, the better the lobbyists you can hire, the better the donations to politicians.
It's the small companies that got crushed.
Even during the lockdowns, smaller fracking firms went under, bought out by larger firms.
It's a consolidation of power in one direction, upward, to fewer and fewer people.
And that's why this has great appeal.
Why did GM announce it's only going to make electric cars?
Don't get me started on electric cars.
This is literally a way to, again, no one voted on this.
California's leading the way.
Governor Newsom does an executive order to stop the production sale of gas-powered cars by 2035 with an aggressive lead-in.
It doesn't just happen.
There's a whole bunch of steps along the way to add more and more restrictions.
17 states jump on board.
They have California trigger laws to follow it.
The World Bank has now stepped up and said, We don't want to finance.
The former president, Nicholas Stern, is saying we need a timetable to end gas-powered cars.
So the World Bank is going to stop funding at the automaker level.
A bank in Australia is saying they won't give out car loans to consumers who want to buy gas-powered cars.
So GM sees the handwriting on the wall.
GM is virtue signaling.
And this is what we're going to end up with.
Cuba has a bunch of 1950s America's Chevy Bel Airs driving around because they can't get new cars.
All this is doing is intentionally creating a car shortage because electric cars will never be able to ramp up the production to replace it.
And we're going to end up with what East Germany had.
You had the crappy East German Trabant as the only approved car by the government.
And now you have electric cars.
Please get the book, The Great Reset.
Mark Marano, back in a moment.
Hello, everybody.
Dennis Prager here.
There's good news, amazing, again from Sweden.
I've never been an admirer of Sweden.
It was neutral during World War II, and it was worse than neutral during the Cold War.
It was more pro-Soviet than pro-American.
It presented itself as a great new socialist utopia.
Boy, I read a book.
Oh, it must have come out 50 years ago.
40 years ago.
I'm going to look it up.
The New Totalitarians.
And it was about Sweden.
It's one of the first hard-covered books I ever bought.
And then lo and behold...
Never give up on a country, I guess.
Although I have given up on Germany.
Germany, as I've often said, is always wrong.
It's like the left ruins everything it touches.
There are certain rules of contemporary life.
I should make a list.
Germany is always wrong.
It is an astonishing thing.
A lot of sweet, nice, individual Germans.
And two of whom I adore are in my life.
But Germany is always wrong.
Angela Merkel embodied the wrongness, shutting down nuclear reactors and opening up Europe to millions of immigrants from the Middle East.
So, Sweden, however, It was the only country in the Western world, of which I am aware, and I'm pretty much aware of what went on during COVID, not to have locked down.
People went about their normal lives unmasked.
Schools were open the entire time, elementary schools and high schools, until the age of 16. Open the whole time.
I don't know why they stopped at 16, but at least it was open for young kids.
So Sweden was an outlier.
It proved that all the lockdowns were vile, were directed by spectacularly foolish medical professionals.
Medical school apparently gives you knowledge of medicine, but zero wisdom.
Knowledge without wisdom always leads to bad things.
Always.
Wisdom is the key to goodness, and there is precious little of that in modern secular society.
And now Sweden has shown again the way.
It is elected, and I read to you from the New York Times, which hates what happened in Sweden.
The anti-immigration, oh, anti-immigration, Angela Merkel, anti-immigration, yes.
You know why they're becoming anti-immigration?
Intolerant, open, social, no, they're not really socialists, but claim to be in some ways.
Sweden, because of all the violence that has accompanied a lot of these immigrants.
And the lack of assimilation.
Some do, but many don't want to become Swedish.
The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, that's the name of the group, Sweden Democrats, beat out more moderate right-wing...
By the way, it's written by a leftist there, Amanda Taub.
She has a big regular feature there.
Please understand, for the left, there's right and far right.
This is one of the rare times that I've ever seen a left-wing newspaper say, what is it?
I wanted to get that word.
Moderate right-wing.
For that alone, it is worth it.
Isn't that an oxymoron?
Moderate right-wing?
To these people.
But she's so angry that the Sweden Democrats won that the other conservatives are now moderates.
In a country famed for liberal governance, it is the latest example of the right's staying power across Europe.
Ah, to think that I look to Europe now.
For the salvation of Western civilization and not America?
Holy crow.
This is why I never make predictions.
Who would have predicted this?
The final results of Sweden's elections made history on Wednesday.
That's yesterday.
The Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigrant far-right party with recent history of overtly Nazi ideology.
There is no link to that.
If I accused a group of having overtly Nazi ideology, wouldn't I give some examples or at least a link, you know, a hyperlink?
There is none.
I would like to know what the overtly Nazi ideology of Sweden Democrats is.
Has won its best result ever.
With 20.6% of the vote, it is in second place in Sweden's multi-party system, beating out all of the more mainstream right-wing parties.
Whoa, what do you think of that?
Twenty years ago, about 10% of Sweden's population was foreign-born.
Now, that number is more like 20%.
Wow.
The percentage of Swedes not born in Sweden has gone from 10% to 20% in 20 years.
That's a lot.
One out of five people living in Sweden was not born in Sweden?
If that were true in the United States, that would mean that at this time, more than 60 million people would have not been born in the United States.
I'd like to know how many are foreign-born.
I'm going to look that up.
More recently, heavy media coverage of an increase in gang-related killings.
Notice?
Heavy media coverage.
It's not the gang killings.
Oh, God, I love analyzing this.
You see, I grew up reading Pravda in the Soviet communist newspaper.
I learned Russian to read Pravda.
So I am so used to the way the left manipulates language, and I crack up because I had all this training when I read Pravda.
Now I read the New York Times the same way.
It's heavy media coverage of an increase in gang-related killings.
Notice the choice of words.
It's not the gang-related killings, the number of them that is causing Swedes to recoil from accepting vast numbers of people from cultures that do not quite adore the civil life of the Swedes.
No.
It's not that.
It's heavy media coverage of it.
Most people reading this would not have picked that up.
I'm not complimenting myself.
I am simply noting the subtlety of the propaganda.
Many of which occurred within immigrant communities.
Many.
I see.
Gee, why would that be, Amanda Taub?
Do you not connect immigration with crime in Sweden?
A country that had virtually no violent crime and now has plenty of it?
What do you think the reason is?
Climate change?
Oh, to have Amanda Taub on my show, it's like a fantasy world for me.
That's what I would ask.
Do you think that the Swedes are wrong in connecting all this immigration with crime?
That's the implication of what you wrote?
Sweden is just the latest European democracy with a far right that is regularly able to command electoral support, joining a list that already included France, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Estonia, and others.
By the way, in November I'm headed to Denmark.
I will be receiving a free speech award and speaking in the Danish parliament.
That will be an interesting little visit.
And, obviously, I will report to you some of the thoughts that I will have had visiting Denmark and asking people there what they're doing to their farmers, for example.
Well, that was Holland.
That's right.
Oh, I have another Denmark news.
Yep, indeed.
Yes, indeed, my dear friends.
So Sweden has elected an anti-immigration party.
That's an amazing thing.
Just amazing.
Sweden.
They used to have a saying about that.
The saying was, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.
That's not even true anymore.
There are people in New York City who know someone dear to them, a relative or friend, who was mugged.
And what is it, Chicago?
What is the response time to 9-1-1 in Chicago?
I heard it was two hours, I believe.
All simply because of the Democratic Party, and they will vote Democrat again.
The brainwash that the right is the danger to the country, reinforced by the liar-in-chief called Joe Biden, a despicable human being and a despicable man, a despicable president.
I never used these words in my life, 40 years of broadcasting.
He's a lowlife.
He's a thug in this country.
I hate saying this because it sort of doesn't even reflect well on me because I'm known for my moderate approach to life in terms of rhetoric.
But if I can't call the bad bad, then I'm worthless.
If Joe Biden isn't bad, bad doesn't exist.
This man is hurting this country every day that he is president, but it is irrelevant.
Any Democrat would.
He just happens to be the Democrat who is ruining the country because he's president.
Kamala Harris would be no better.
She's a thug, too.
She's a nothing.
What these people are doing to our society...
How did America produce so many awful human beings?
It's a puzzle to me.
Because I'm so...
I loved this country and adored it as being better, exceptional.
I bought it, and I still buy it.
But it's less exceptional today.
It's not exceptional.
Sweden's ahead of us.
By the way, this whole thing, like Mike Lindell having his phone taken away by the FBI when he's leaving a...
A Hardee's restaurant?
What is that about?
It is Joe Biden using the government to suppress dissent.
That's all it is.
For any Democrat not to see the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the putting in of these decent people who happened to have entered legally or illegally Mostly illegally.
I condemned it the day it happened.
It's not an insurrection.
You don't have an insurrection wearing antler ears, antler horns, at Nancy Pelosi's desk.
Give me a break.
Insurrection?
The only people killed that day were innocent people entering with no weapons.
I said it at the time.
It was our example of the Reichstag fire, using something to gain more and more and more power.
That's what the Democrats have used January 6th.
But I want to make something clear.
A person who believes that the last election was dishonest is not violating the law.
Unless you believe that thought and speech are now...
To be suppressed, which of course all leftists in all of history have believed.
I had a caller on last week.
It was absolutely precious.
I love when people who don't like me or disagree with me call.
It's a learning experience for the listener.
He said, I have one question for you, Dennis.
Do you think the last election, the presidential election, was honest?
Or dishonest, I don't know, whichever he said.
I said, I don't know.
And he said, ah, okay, that invalidates me.
What you think is now the issue.
You can't think that there was any corruption in the last election.
Gee, why would we think that with all these...
New rules of mail-in ballots in vast numbers of time and far longer than any time in the last 50 years to count ballots and not allowing others to see what the ballot counting is about.
Why would anybody think there was any dishonesty?
Because after all, the left is known for its integrity.
The left wouldn't cheat in an election.
Even if they think a fascist neo-Nazi racist was running for president, they would not cheat.
No, not for a minute.
They're so committed to honesty that they would allow a man they consider a Nazi to be president.
I'm supposed to buy that.
And there's no reason to think that there was any cheating.
It's the first time in history that an incumbent got more votes than he did the first time he was elected and lost.
Why would I ever think there's reason to believe that there was cheating?
You can't think that under the new rules of the left.
Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here.
One of my favorite thinkers is Vivek Ramaswamy.
Not a name that, if you know the name, it rolls off the tongue very rapidly.
But if you don't know Vivek Ramaswamy, you should...
He's a best-selling author.
He is a thinker.
He loves this country's ideals.
And I have invited him to do a PragerU video, which he has, How Big Business or Big Corporations Went Woke.
It's really an important video.
And his book just came out two days ago, his latest book, Nation of Victims, Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.
We've gone from a country, he says, that has adored and honored heroism to one that honors victimhood.
Is that a fair summary, Vivek?
That's exactly it.
You understood it right away.
The core case I make in the book is that hardship is not the same thing as victimhood.
Hardship is part of what defines who we are, both as individuals and as a people.
And I will tell you, Dennis, you and I spoke about my last book, Woke Ink.
This is a sort of sequel to Woke Ink, where in Woke Ink, I explored the question of why corporations and corporate America was getting into the problem of selling this victimhood narrative.
Well, it takes two to tango.
And part of the problem is the general population is buying it up.
They're eating it up.
And the question I ask in this book is, what is wrong with our national psyche?
What is wrong with the psyche of an entire generation of millennials and Gen Z and other Americans that's causing us to buy up these victimhood narratives?
That's what I explore in this book, both through looking at current events, as well as through a longer tour through both American history and even the history of other great civilizations like Rome, and hopefully end with a note of hope.
We'll get to the hope in a moment.
You'll enjoy this in a dark way, obviously.
But I remember speaking at a university prior to the lockdowns.
I never say prior to COVID. What mattered was the lockdowns.
Anyway, prior to the lockdowns, I was at a university, and I say, come to the microphone if you don't agree with me, because I want them to speak up.
So, a girl, a young woman gets up and she says, are you telling me that women in America are not persecuted?
And I said, yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
And I felt that I was the first adult in her life to tell her she's not a victim.
Is that paradigmatic of what you're talking about?
It is.
It's the good side of what I'm talking about because most of what those younger people hear is that they are a victim.
And guess what?
The more you describe someone as a victim, the more they think of themselves as a victim as well.
And that's actually the greatest form of systemic racism or misogyny or bigotry of all.
But I think that we need to be able to see that with clear eyes.
If you describe someone as a victim, they see themselves as a victim.
And we're living a moment in history where we've already reached incumbency status as a country.
Millennials and Gen Z Americans, they're on the receiving end of the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.
Well, guess what?
That causes you to think of yourself as an incumbent, to experience the sense of entitlement.
But you have to justify this idea that you're receiving these rewards so you spit up these narratives of how you're actually still a victim of some invisible grand form of oppression to be able to justify the great life that you actually already enjoy.
I see it, Dennis, even in the Asian-American community.
I'm an Indian-American.
My parents came to this country as immigrants.
I'm a first-generation American, grew up in an immigrant household.
But I will tell you, kids in my kids' generation, and even kids who are second or third-generation Asian-Americans, Are now starting to describe themselves as persons of color or victims of a different kind, even though it was their parents and their grandparents who are actually the ones that went through the real hardship who never saw themselves as victims.
It's a really funny trend we're seeing.
Well, I want to tell you, and I may have said this to you in person or something related, it is as big a puzzle to people who think about this, why Asian Americans, or specifically Indian Americans, such as yourself, would think of themselves as victims as it is when American Jews think that they are.
It's a puzzle.
Two groups that have been blessed by this country, who should be waving the American flag in front of every one of their homes, and yet so many of them are leaders.
On the left, like so many Indian Americans, I am stunned when I see all these Indian names and see these faces as people of the left.
Do you have interaction with any of them?
Of course.
Many of them are part of even extended family.
Some of them are part of family friendships that we've formed in the Midwest.
I'll tell you, we have a proud American flag.
Proudly flying in front of our home where I'm talking to you from right now.
But part of this answer to this puzzle, because it is a puzzle, Dennis, both in the Jewish community and in the Indian American community, is that we've also set up an incentive structure for victimhood in this country, right?
So take my alma mater, Harvard.
Well, Harvard years ago, decades ago, had to describe that it had what they called, it's their words, not mine, a Jewish problem.
Now they effectively describe themselves as having an Asian problem.
What does that mean?
If they only used meritocracy as a method for admitting students, they would have disproportionately high numbers of Jews or Asians.
So in some sense, what are the applicants doing?
They realize, oh, they have an incentive now to say that, okay, I have to describe myself as a victim in order to get allocated rewards.
So some of this puzzle is solved.
We're just looking at people responding to incentives for how they're rewarded, what kind of economic success they get.
That's a big part of what we're seeing.
So the way I joke about it, you know, coming from a business background, et cetera, myself is, Victimhood is like a currency.
It's a currency that's trading at a bubble.
What happens when a currency is trading at a bubble?
People cash in before the bubble bursts.
That's exactly what they're doing, is they're cashing in their chips on the victimhood currency bubble before it bursts.
And so that's why everyone in this country, Jews and Indian Americans included, want to be victims.
It's so funny.
Why do your family members say to you, how did you go wrong?
What's happened to you, Vivek?
You know, I get it from a lot of even friends who I grew up with, etc.
It's almost, you get the words almost exactly right.
What's happened to you?
I'm so disappointed.
I had such high expectations for you.
I looked up to you.
And so, you know, look, these are people I love in my life, right?
People who have worked for me, people I've worked with, you know, former teachers, former extended family members, etc.
But at the end of the day, what we have to be able to find in common American life today is a shared identity.
That runs across our, not only partisan disagreements, but even our divisions of identity politics.
And one of those common threads to me is the unapologetic pursuit of excellence.
It is why most immigrants, or at least the immigrants who come legally, it is why most legal immigrants come to this country.
It is to live in a meritocratic society that doesn't care what the color of your skin is or what accent you speak with.
You can, with your own hard work and commitment and dedication, achieve pretty much anything you ever want.
That is the American dream.
That is the American identity.
And so we've forgotten that, embraced this new culture of victimhood instead.
But you know what?
I've got to say that my tour through Roman history, that's a big part of the middle of this book, is it goes through a lot of Roman history, is it traces not the rise and fall of Rome.
That's one of the myths that we tell ourselves, that there was a rise and fall of Rome, and America is declining now, like the fall of the Roman Empire.
If you actually study the history, one of the things you learn is that there was no one rise or fall of Rome.
And there, I hope, is no one rise and fall of the American experiment as well.
There are many rises and many falls.
Yes, we are at a nadir.
We are at a low point.
But I think if we're able to see these problems with clarity, we can go back to reviving a national identity based on the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, a cultural identity based on excellence, rather than one that's based on victimhood, which is why I wrote this book.
You can't emphasize excellence if your endgame is equity.
They're mutually exclusive.
Excellence and equity cannot coexist.
Excellence and equality of opportunity, those go hand in hand.
One fits the other like a glove.
But the other one, the equity agenda, let's talk about that for a second.
What presupposes is that any inequality of result means that the system of meritocracy itself must have been biased.
It must have been systemically racist or rigged.
And what I say is, you know what, one of the things that I ought to do better, what a lot of us ought to do better on the right, is talk about restoring equality of opportunities and the way in which actually a lot of liberal policies have contributed to inequality of opportunity.
But let's restore actually equality of opportunity.
Let's get everyone to the same starting line.
But you know what?
If some people finish in a different place than someone else, that's the beauty of excellence.
Whether it's on the basketball court or whether it's in free market capitalism, if we don't end up with the same number of green pieces of paper as one another, that's okay, as long as we all start in the same place and see one another as co-equal citizens.
That's the call to action in the book.
The book is Nation of Victims, Identity, Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence.
Obviously, we'll get to the Path Back to Excellence.
That's key.
This is a serious man.
Serious thinker.
Vivek Rawaswamy.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com.
Nation of Victims.
It's an antidote.
It's a vaccination against victimhood.
The Dennis Prager Show.
It's important to fight, my friends.
The cliche is accurate.
Only evil wins when good people do nothing.
Rockthewoke.com.
Back to Vivek Rawaswamy and his very, very important book just out two days ago, Nation of Victims.
Vivek, I like to explore every aspect of these issues.
So you obviously don't have a victim mentality, as I don't.
In fact...
Even if I were a victim, I would hate to think of myself as a victim because it would make me unhappy.
I've written a book on happiness.
There's a whole chapter on not thinking of yourself as a victim, and I wrote that 23 years ago, well before this woke stuff.
If you think you're a victim, you can't be happy.
It is not possible.
Why do people bathe in misery?
It's a tough question.
I'm just curious because I admire your mind.
Go ahead.
I mean, thank you, Dennis, for posing it because that is the heart of why it takes a whole book to explain.
And I think that there's something about one's status of not facing hardship that actually makes you hunger for the hardship that you didn't encounter.
So I think in a lot of cases, people who encounter real hardship...
In many cases, aren't the people who see themselves as victims in the first place.
It's the folks who lived an entire generation without encountering hardship that then have to spin up the narratives to justify and apologize for what they feel like is their unearned success.
And I think there's one thing to experience success.
It's another thing to engage in effort.
But I think if ultimate satisfaction truly comes from earned success, as I and others have argued, okay?
Then at the end of the day, the opposite of that, if you feel like you have material success but it was unearned, one way to feel like you earned it is to create a psychological illusion that you actually encountered or are encountering some kind of hardship that justifies it.
So that's what's going on, I think, in much of the millennial generation.
That's what's going on amongst a lot of younger Americans who actually are growing up at a time where we haven't been in a war, where we haven't had major economic hardship.
If anything, we've had 15 years of easy money in this country, printed on high, mana from heaven, dollars fall from the Federal Reserve, more pandemic aid when you encounter a government policy that pays people to stay home.
That breeds a culture of laziness, but no one wants to admit that they're lazy.
They want to recreate.
So if you actually look at the leaders of the anti-work movement amongst many millennials, what they say is the reason they want to stay home isn't just because they're lazy or because they have the vice of sloth.
But it's because it's part of a grand fight against the oppression of capitalism, dismantling the colonialism of capitalism.
And when you wrap it with the veneer of victimhood, what it turns out is victimhood fits laziness like a glove.
That's one of the things I say in the book.
And it's about that psychological need that once you understand that, the solution, I hope, is filling that psychological need with something more rich.
And meaningful.
And I think excellence can actually even be more powerful than those victimhood narratives if we're able to get people to see it.
The problem with excellence is somebody will be more excellent than you.
And if you fear that, then you will retreat again into victimhood.
Is that fair to say?
I think that's right.
I think that's right.
Now, one of the things I point out in the book is that there's actually many ways to be excellent, right?
Too often we fetishize just one path, right?
The path to excellence in business, accumulating green pieces of paper.
Well, great.
I mean, that's a path that I chose.
It's a path that other people choose to succeed in business.
But there are many ways to excel, and part of excellence is just self-actualization, becoming the best version of yourself to make the contributions in the way that you know how.
And that doesn't mean that just because somebody else was excellent in a different sphere, be it on the basketball court or in the classroom.
Or as a musician, or in business, that there's one unidimensional hierarchy of excellence that has to otherwise breed envy.
But you're right, that's what people experience.
I hope people can see that there's many ways to be excellent, but see yourself as pursuing that.
That's what it means to be American, not to see yourself as a victim of someone else's success.
You explained the victimhood appeal among the successful, but the tragedy is it goes across the board.
People who have not succeeded use victimhood to explain their failure.
That's right.
Yes, so that is the other half of this.
And so it has a trickle-down effect where the people who are in charge that are apologizing for their own success in part make up for it by describing those at the bottom as victims.
You see a lot of this in the black victimhood culture that I talk about in the book.
By the way, a lot of people told me you can't talk about black victimhood culture.
You can't have a chapter on that because you're not black.
I said, you know what?
I don't believe in people being constrained by their race in terms of what they can and can't say.
If you want to solve a problem, you're going to have to talk about this openly.
And so I do have a tab chapter where I explore the black victimhood shackles.
I think it's a psychological shackle, sort of like a shackles holding black Americans back today across the country.
In many cases, are these victimhood narratives.
They're spun up by others who actually make themselves feel better, but then pass them on.
And it's very hard for the person who's handed a victimhood narrative to resist.
To resist the appeal of accepting it.
So one of the things I explore in the book is actually one of the things we can do in this country is, even through the educational system, highlight the self-made narrative that created the American dream in the first place and democratize that to Americans of every stripe, including black Americans, including even those who come from poorer places in the cities of this country.
If I could have everybody read your book with a magic wand.
I would definitely use the magic wand.
Nation of Victims by this good man, bright man.
Vivek, it's a joy always to be with you.
Thank you, Dennis.
Good to see you.
Thank you.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com, everybody.
You know, it's so interesting when I think about the human condition, which I do on a daily basis.
Think of Charles Krauthammer.
Charles Krauthammer, many of you, of course, hopefully will remember.
He only died a few years ago.
Charles Krauthammer was probably the leading conservative pundit on television and a Washington Post column.
They wouldn't have hired him under the Jeff Bezos governance.
But they did hire him years earlier, and they weren't going to fire him.
He was widely read, widely watched.
He got paralyzed at medical school in his early 20s, almost entirely from the neck down.
Didn't see himself as a victim from day one.
Graduated with his medical school class on time.
And became a highly successful thinker.
Because he didn't think of himself as a victim.
Should, there you go.
One of my three favorite words.
Earn, like, and should.
You should think about what your favorite words are.
I'll bet a lot of Americans if asked, what are your favorite words?
One of them would be love.
Mine is like.
It's more important to like people than to love people.
A lot of people love their kids, but they don't like them.
You like your kid, you're in good shape.
Yes, I did an hour on that.
That's why people subscribe to the show and have all these hours at their disposal at any time and with no commercials.
PragerTopia.com Listen to this.
*clap* Whoa!
Who did that?
God.
What I have to put up with here, folks.
The Michigan Department of Education.
It already starts off bad.
It's from City Journal.
One of the two greatest publications.
The other is the Claremont Review of Books.
And there are many, many great ones, let me just say, but those two are really terrific.
Anyway, this is Christopher Rufo, does great work.
The moment I hear Department of Education, I know it's going to be bad.
There should never have been a Department of Education in the United States, and there shouldn't be one in your state, but certainly not in the United States.
I would say that the educator class, not educated, educator, has done more harm than almost any that I can think of.
Listen, what I'm going to read to you now, five years ago, ten years ago, it would have been unintelligible.
The Department of Education in Michigan has adopted a gender theory program that promotes gender fluidity Beginning in elementary school and encourages teachers to facilitate the sexual transition of minors without parental consent.
Every cult, every totalitarian regime, every tyranny undermines parental authority.
That's a hint as to how evil the left is.
Not liberals.
Liberals are weak.
They go along with the left, but they're not leftists.
I have obtained, that is Christopher Ruffo, videos and internal documentation from the state's training program, which first took place in 2020, repackaged for public school employees for the 2021-2022 school year.
The training program mimics the basic narrative of academic queer theory.
The presenters claim that the West has created a false notion that gender is binary.
Get that?
Kids are taught that it is a false notion that there are two genders, male and female.
Ladies and gentlemen is an oppressive term.
Boys and girls is an oppressive term.
The false notion that gender is binary in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities.
What does that have to do with racial?
Sexual minorities are oppressed.
I see.
If you divide the human species into male and female, you're oppressing whom?
Are you oppressing gays?
Gays deny that there's male and female?
Not that I know of.
You're oppressing bisexuals?
Not that I know of.
Lesbians?
Not that I know of.
So whom are you oppressing?
The transgender?
The transgender don't deny that sex is binary.
They just don't think they're a member of the first sex, the one that they are biologically.
Who denies?
What sexual minority is oppressed by the binary nature of gender identity?
That's a real question.
It's not rhetorical.
In response, the department encourages teachers to adopt the principle of intersectionality, a key tenet of critical race theory, in order to, quote, dismantle systems of oppression, unquote.
Because of all the Americans who were oppressed.
Which are replicated through the culture and institutions of education.
The first step to dismantling these systems, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary.
Get that?
You have to disrupt that.
There aren't two sexes.
I will continue.
This is stuff from the Twilight Zone.
Why would you keep your kid in a Michigan public school?
Really, why?
I'm reading to you about the Michigan Department of Education, the gender theory program for its schools.
It's sick.
It's sick stuff.
That's all I can say.
The first step to dismantling these systems of oppression, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary.
That's the new term here, binary.
We're not just male and female.
In one presentation, trainer Amory Robinson, who describes herself as a black, masculine-identified, cisgendered, lesbian baby boomer.
One more time.
Black, masculine-identified, cisgendered, lesbian baby boomer.
This woman is what we call healthy.
And she is a trainer for teachers.
See my article two weeks ago, the disproportionate role of women in harming the society.
This is an example.
The wild imbalance of female to male in the education system, which is ruining kids.
She uses the African name, that's her statement, Kofi Adoma.
Says that, quote, we've been conditioned and we've been acculturated in this particular culture that gender is binary.
So it takes culture to tell you that gender is binary, not biology.
But teachers should know that, in fact, gender is a spectrum, including, are you ready?
This one, you're going to like this.
You're going to like this.
Ready?
Including identities such as gender non-binary, gender fluid, gender queer, gender non-conforming, and bigender.
Not done.
I am not done.
Sexual orientation can include an expanding range of categories student might identify as asexual, lesbian, straight, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, demisexual, demiromantic, aromantic, and scoliosexual.
I remember when I first met Sean, you mentioned that you were scolosexual.
He pioneered the category.
I salute you.
It's caught on.
It is caught on.
Look that up, will you?
S-K-O-L-I-O. I'm really on top of these things, and I don't know what scolosexual is.
This is what kids in Michigan are being taught now.
Or scheduled to be taught.
Because they're learning too much history and too much math and grammar and literature and music and art.
Yeah.
People who...
People who are attracted to transgender and non-binary.
A lot of them.
We know a lot of guys who want to date a woman who has a male organ.
It's a large group.
Yes.
Okay.
Very nice.
Thank you.
The normalization of everything.
That's why they adopted the word queer, because there is no such thing as queer.
This is the ultimate end of equity, of equality.
This is the egalitarian notion.
The idea that permeated Western history, that the ideal...
Is a man marrying a woman and making a family is loathed by the left.
It is loathed.
Virtually any ideal.
Because an ideal means that something might be better.
I'm very close to a number of gay couples and one of them said to me the other day, not the other, the other week.
He's married to a man.
They're both wonderful human beings.
And we're quite close.
And he said, look, I don't deny for a moment that the ideal is a man marrying a woman and making a family.
That's like when I was single.
I was the head of a Jewish institution, a big Jewish institution in California.
And I didn't marry until 32. And I said, I'll never forget in a speech, I said to them, you know, the Jewish ideal is that you marry.
I'm single.
But I fully acknowledge that the ideal is to get married.
I never thought that the world revolved around my state of being.
The narcissism involved here.
Is staggering.
I personally don't feel that I am female, though I am female.
Therefore, there is no binary.
I will destroy civilization so that I am not exceptional.
That's what it is about.
That's what it's about.
There is a lot more to this article.
Come back and take some calls.
Michigan State Department of Education.
And you're going to keep your kid in the public school there?
Or in many of the private schools?
Are you a gambler?
You must be.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Dennis Prager here.
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