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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:16:11
Did Your Parents Criticize You?
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Jingle bell, jingle bell rock.
Jingle bell time and jingle bell time.
Dancing and prancing in jingle bell square.
In the frosty...
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
It's the end of the year already.
And I like to...
What's the word?
Shake things up is not exactly the word because that sounds like it's going to be rough and tough and tumbly.
But I don't feel as bound to news items in December, certainly starting the second week as I do in much of the rest of the year.
So I'd like to raise an issue that is not...
About news, it is about you, and it is about life, and it is about raising children.
So I have mentioned to you on a number of occasions, and I might add one more preferatory word, and that is that I talk about just about everything on my show.
It is in that way, a different show from others.
Everyone has his own role to play in the areas that most concern him, and they all concern me.
So I have mentioned on a number of occasions that everybody, oh, many occasions, I mean, this is one of the themes of my life, that we all have to battle our natures to be a better person.
Better in every way.
A better human being in terms of character, a better human being in terms of professional, as a worker, as a wife, husband.
As a parent, as a friend, there is, in religious life, if you are in religious life, in every way we have to battle our nature.
So I had mentioned that my father, on many occasions, told me that I was lazy.
I never thought he was wrong.
I was annoyed that he would tell me, I admit it, but I never thought, what is he talking about?
That's absurd.
So, my question for this hour is, were you criticized by a parent and it turned out To, in fact, help you?
Or were you criticized and it was harmful?
1-8 Prager 776-877-243-7776 I might add, if you are raising children or raised children, did you criticize them?
As my father said, I was lazy.
Did you say anything like that to your child?
There are parents that go overboard in criticism, and they do some damage.
There's no question.
And they do damage in a large measure because what they say isn't so, isn't true.
You might say to a bright kid, you're not very bright.
But by the way, even if your kid isn't very bright, you shouldn't say to your kid, you're not very bright.
That's a bad one.
But within bounds of psychological normalcy and decency, did you get a criticism that in fact was legit?
Or were you criticized illegitimately?
And likewise with your own children.
1-8 Prager 776-877-243-7776 I know someone who was told by her father, indeed all the children were.
It was a family of daughters and a rather sick father.
He's a sick man, and he had his own issues from his mother.
It does seem, doesn't it, that these things go down through the generations.
It's hard to put a stop to them.
And he basically had the message to his daughters that they were not very bright, not very pretty, and they weren't really...
Worth the money he was spending on them?
I mean, this is obviously sick stuff.
But I do know of such a case.
It's a tightrope that a parent walks.
Right now, parents are preoccupied with praising their child.
So I guess there's a flip side.
To this question that I'm posing, and that is, did you get too much praise?
There's a question I've never explored.
Do you feel, does anybody feel, they got too much praise from their parent, and therefore it didn't spur you on to excellence?
It's very complex.
It's almost insoluble because different people have different reactions as well.
It depends who you're talking to.
Different children have different natures.
What could crush one child can spur another child on to excellence.
I wasn't crushed by this.
And it did make me look inside and say, you know, I have to battle my laziness.
I don't...
I want to do a lot of things that I might need to do.
I wanted to do what I wanted to do.
By the way, that's still true, except that I do a lot of things that are difficult.
What I adopted was, given the fact that that is my nature, I did something very practical.
I took on a lot of projects in my life.
So if you look at my life, you would hardly think, well, a lazy man lived in that body.
Because I have done a lot.
I've done a lot because I've taken on so many projects that I couldn't not do.
I was obligated to do them.
I am a night person, for example.
I don't like the mornings.
I like to sleep during mornings.
For me, that's the purpose of mornings, to sleep.
So when I had a choice about what time, many years ago, what time I would do my radio show, I could have done it, obviously, local time at 9 a.m.
or at noon.
And I took 9 a.m.
to force me to get up and not sleep away the morning and then broadcast from 12 to 3 and the day is over.
I get less sleep as a result of a morning show, at least local time.
For many of you, I'm on at noon.
And if you're in Europe, I'm on at night.
I do get less sleep, but at least I have preserved the day.
So, the subject is not really, what did you do about it?
That's a great subject.
What do you do about your own flaws?
That's a very important subject.
We should analyze that too, Alan.
What do you do?
Have you recognized a flaw in your nature?
And what did you do about it?
But that's not the subject today.
It's were your parental critiques accurate and did they help or hurt you?
And the, as I said, Other side of the coin, or flip side, did they praise you too much?
I never analyzed that either.
I think kids do get too much praise.
And as a result, they think that they can do nothing bad, that they are the apple of God's eye, to the extent that they believe in God.
I am stunned by the amount of praise kids get from parents today.
Because I would say in all of my youth, you could fit in what the average kid gets in a day.
Did your parents praise you?
You were the apple of their eye because you were such an easy child.
I wouldn't say they praised me.
I knew your parents, obviously.
It was clear that your dad loved you.
Now, of course your mother loved you, but your mother had issues because of your political stance.
My producer, the man whose idea it was for PragerU, had a very, very liberal mother.
It's a very interesting question.
If your child succeeds massively, but in an arena you're not happy about, how do you feel?
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There must have been some magic in that old silk happy crown.
So I'm asking a micro question.
I'm as interested in micro as in macro issues.
Did your parents or a parent criticize you and was he or she right and make you a better person for it?
As hurt as you might have been.
Were you excessively criticized?
And here's my favorite.
I never met anybody who said this.
But it just occurred to me now, asking questions number one and two, to ask question number three.
Were you excessively praised?
In my view, for generations now, kids have been excessively praised.
See, if you don't earn the praise, what's the good of it?
All right, let's see what you say.
I'm very curious, to say the least.
And, oh boy.
David, Tujunga, California, hello.
Yes, hello, Dennis.
It's a pleasure to finally get to speak with you.
I was not only not acceptably praised, I was kind of ignored.
And as a result, when you're number two, you try harder.
I've always been self-motivated, and it has served me well.
I have been able to develop my skills.
So you were neither excessively praised nor excessively criticized?
No, I was excessively criticized.
Oh, because you said your father ignored you, or your parents ignored you.
Well, in one aspect, my father was a teacher, a music teacher, piano teacher.
As a matter of fact, you may know him.
He was the music director of Yeshiva Flatbush.
Huh.
And my sister, who's three years my senior, was a contemporary of yours.
Okay, that's not here or there.
So just explain to me, were you ignored or excessively criticized?
Because I got both from you.
We were both trained as concert pianists, but my father was very focused on her.
And I kept trying to get his attention.
So did you end up successful?
Yes, I did, and my sister consequently left music.
How ironic.
All right, okay.
There's a vote for at least, at the very least, not being hurt by the parent who was not particularly praising.
Columbia, West Columbia, South Carolina, and Florence.
Hello.
Hi, Dennis.
Love your show.
Good.
Thank you.
I was told by my mother many times she did not like obese people.
She thought that was totally their fault.
I'm sorry.
I didn't follow that.
She didn't like what people?
Obese people, I'm sorry.
Yeah.
And who was she referring to?
Anybody that was obese, but she had, you know, her girls in the family and her daughters, and she would say to them, you know, don't overeat and become obese.
And, you know, God gives you your faith.
But you make your body look like you want it to.
It's up to you.
So she pounded that into our heads for years and years.
And to this, I mean, she was very complimentary to us as well.
I mean, it wasn't just down, down, down.
But she made it a point.
It helped.
To this day, it helped.
Okay, that's my, okay.
So there's a vote, another vote.
To the extent that call number one could be a vote for this.
That's very interesting.
Because looks, especially in girls, is such a sensitive arena.
Alright, that helped.
And Detroit, Mike, hello.
Hello, Dennis.
Thanks for taking my call.
My parents used to lovingly criticize, and they were depression babies.
All my grandparents were first-generation Americans.
My grandparents all came from Ireland.
My dad had a saying that he used to use on me.
He said, Son, the sooner you realize that I'm right, the better off you'll be.
I love it.
I actually used that saying on my two sons.
Oh, you did?
Oh, I do.
Absolutely.
You do?
I do.
And I love that.
That cracks me up.
Wait, so how did your sons react?
You know what?
It's taken them until they've gotten into their 20s, later 20s, to realize that even I, like my father, for the most part, usually am right as well.
But I will tell you, my sons are much smarter than I was.
I was more of a hardline case compared to they are.
They must have taken that to their mother's side.
They got their mother's brains.
But one quick story, but I had jobs.
I had very long hair like you would know most of us did in the 70s, and I was trying to find a job to be gainfully employed to possibly have a career, and I would come home putting applications around and be kind of disappointed.
I'm not getting the phones not ringing back then, you know, help wanted in the newspaper, and nobody's calling.
And my dad simply said, well, my God, you got hair down past your shoulder.
You got a big Fu Manchu mustache.
Who wants to hire a guy that looks like you?
So I went to the barber.
I shaved my mustache up to a normal mustache, like, let's say, like a Tom Selleck mustache.
And I cut my hair to, like, collar length.
And by golly, didn't the phone start ringing?
There you go.
Wow.
I wonder if that's even doable today.
Wouldn't people think today, oh, looks shouldn't matter in hiring.
Back in a moment.
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Hi everybody.
The subject this hour is criticizing children.
Were you criticized?
Is it good or bad for you?
And praising children.
I added that.
I was only going to talk about the critique part.
I was criticized and it dawned on me at a very early age that the criticism was accurate.
I didn't like hearing it, but it was accurate and I spent my life fighting that accurate critique and it served me well.
Oh, actually, you know what?
I don't think I ever mentioned this.
I was praised.
I think on one occasion.
I'm not being cute.
I think on one occasion, we were sitting in synagogue, and there was an appeal for a man who had just had a horrible accident and was blinded.
And they were making an appeal.
And I told my father, raise your hand and tell them that I'm going to give, I don't remember what it was, a dollar, five dollars.
It wasn't more than five.
If it was five, it was a fortune.
And he said to me, you have a good heart.
Isn't it fascinating that I remember that?
Maybe because it was not common.
But anyway, I don't want to misrepresent my upbringing.
Okay, Logan, Columbus, Ohio.
Hello.
Good afternoon, Dennis.
Hi.
In answer to your questions, I was vociferously criticized as a child.
My father was, I don't know, your typical...
Archie Bunker type character.
And in his eyes, I was worthless, I was stupid, and I would never amount to anything.
Wow.
Did he actually use those words?
Oh, yes.
Almost every time he spoke to me.
He would say you're stupid?
Pretty much, yes.
There was nothing that I could do that would impress him or in any way.
Did you have siblings?
I had a younger sister at the time, yes.
And did he speak to her similarly?
Yes.
Wow.
Did your mother speak to you similarly?
Not so much.
She usually was just trying to cover for my father's bad behavior.
By doing what?
Oh, don't listen to him.
So was it don't listen to him, you're actually a good kid, a smart kid?
Or just don't listen to him?
Just don't listen to him.
I see.
You're okay.
You're doing fine.
How would you rate their marriage?
Rocky at best.
He was an abusive alcoholic.
Okay.
Well, that explains everything, doesn't it?
Mm-hmm.
How did your sister turn out?
She turned out rather well.
It's a very long story.
Sherry, the producer, but she only lived with us for the first seven years of her life, so fortunately, she doesn't remember a lot of the bad things.
What happened after she was seven?
Well, she was 12 years younger than I was, so at that time, I was 19, had graduated high school, joined the military.
During basic training, my parents were killed in a traffic accident.
I had three days to rush home and find some place to put her.
She had a half-sibling in Canada, so I brought her up there and her mother adopted her.
Did you maintain contact with your sister?
Oh, absolutely.
To this day?
Not anymore.
She passed with COVID in 2020, but no, we were always very, very tight.
Fascinating.
So how did all this criticism affect you in 20 seconds?
It made me resilient, and I ended up joining the Army, doing a couple tours in Iraq, got my master's degree, and became a member of Mensa.
Some reflections from me upon return.
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Well, hello, y'all.
Great to be with you.
Dennis Prager here.
If you're listening to me in Georgia, and I do have a lot of listeners in Georgia, you have to vote today, and you have to get everybody you know to vote.
I know that a lot of people are dispirited.
It doesn't matter.
You can't act on being dispirited.
Can do good.
If the Democrats have a 51-49 majority, then it doesn't matter if there's one dissenting Democrat in any Senate vote.
Like Joe Manchin, it doesn't matter.
Or Kyrsten Sinema, right?
So it's an extremely important vote.
That the Republicans did not take the Senate is a calamity, given the damage that the Democrats are doing to the country.
But I just have to repeat, there's another reason.
Committee assignments are 50-50 now.
Because the Vice President only matters in voting, but not in committee assignments.
51-49 is hugely different from 50-50.
I don't know what else to tell you in Georgia.
God, do I remember two years ago, I begged people.
They'd say, oh, why bother voting?
They'll cheat anyway.
Okay, so they win then.
All right.
Just had to say that because it's really important.
I have an article here.
My reaction was, professors have too much time on their hands.
Let meat eaters drown, Oxford philosopher argues.
The College Fix, one of my favorite websites.
Yes.
It is plausible that there is a moral case for letting meat eaters drown, according to an Oxford University professor.
Michael Plant...
Tell me that is not ironic.
Michael Plant.
I love it.
He actually...
I looked it up.
His original name was Brisket.
And he changed it to Plant.
Argued in the Journal of Controversial Ideas that in a hypothetical situation it could be justified to let people who eat meat drown since they cause suffering to animals.
He is a research fellow at Oxford University's Well-Being Research Center.
Okay.
There you go, Sean.
Are you a meat-eater?
Yeah, when you said brisket, I started to salivate.
Yeah, oh, you salivated when I said brisket.
In his paper, Plant wrote that many people accept a duty to save strangers' lives, such as a child drowning in a pond.
While also accepting that it is wrong to cause the suffering of animals in factory farms.
According to Plant, this creates a major problem for those who accept and practice the vegan lifestyle.
This is because both of these moral principles are actually in conflict with one another.
if the person in danger is a meat-eater and the cause of continued animal suffering.
I am actually sensitive to the issue quite seriously about animal suffering.
That's why I believe that ideally an animal is stunned, which is very common at this time, so I don't know how much animal suffering is involved.
This is my theory, and the part one everybody shares, but part two most people had not thought of.
Part one is, those who torture animals will end up torturing people.
That is generally the case.
If you like to see animals suffer and cause it, you will probably do it to people.
However, the reverse is not true.
If you are kind to animals, you will not necessarily be kind to people.
Very few people know this.
There's actually a book on it which I found compelling reading many years ago.
The Nazis were very, very pro-animal.
There are cartoons from the Nazi era in Germany of animals going Heil Hitler, thanking the Nazis for the way that they would be treated.
They did not allow experimenting on animals.
And yet they experimented on human beings.
Horrific, grotesque, excruciating experiments on human beings in the concentration camps.
And I have not seen any correlation between kindness to animals and kindness to people.
But there is a correlation between cruelty to animals and cruelty to people.
Alright, so much for that.
Oh yes, I talked to you yesterday about Tulane Medical School, right?
Yes, that was done then.
What did I, oh yes, oh yeah, yes, today's headline in the Los Angeles Times, LA Teachers Union rallies for 20% raise and smaller classes.
So let me say for the record, I have such contempt for the teachers union and most of its members.
I hope they go on strike and I hope people decide, finally, teachers are not, in general, their children's friends.
If that was not proven to you over the last two years, the odds are you will never conclude this.
The amount of damage done to your child by teachers in the last two years clamoring to keep schools shut.
Remember the Chicago Teachers Union?
Remember that?
How they refused to go into class?
These hypochondriac weaklings, cowards, ignoramuses.
Ignoramuses because they obviously didn't know that in Sweden teachers taught kids and nothing happened.
They never miss the day of school for kids under 17 in Sweden.
Yes, that's right.
Oh, UTLA also seeks less standardized testing.
Oh, what do you think of that?
Less standardized testing.
Where was the article I just saw against grammar, that English grammar is a white supremacist?
You didn't see that article, did you?
I have to take it.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joel sent it to me.
I'll have to read that to you.
Yeah, that's what the teachers are thinking.
Not all, but many.
I don't know what it would take.
Maybe there is no red line.
That may well be.
Maybe there is nothing damaging teachers could do, including taking your six-year-old to a drag queen story hour that would finally have you realize teachers are damaging your child.
Not all, but enough that it becomes irrelevant whether it's all or many or most.
L.A. Teachers Union rallies for 20% raise.
Yes, because they're working too hard, especially the last two years when they didn't show up at class.
So be it indeed.
Charlie Kirk went to the University of New Mexico and they were riot police.
So remember a very important rule that I developed in the recent past.
When young people ask me, how can I know who's telling the truth, the right or the left, I have a really, really helpful answer.
Whoever is trying to suppress the other's speech is lying.
There you go.
That's the general rule.
There are exceptions, but that's the general rule.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA. So when was this?
It says Wednesday night.
So that was last Wednesday night.
I'll have him on the show.
I'm very curious to know.
They enlisted the help of New Mexico State Police in riot gear.
What else do you need to know about the left to finally decide what a threat it is to this country? .
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New York Times, which has no problem lying, it has a problem lying when the article is about something non-political.
An earthquake in Colombia, for example.
But otherwise, its silence and its claims are often false.
Listen to this from Breitbart.
The New York Times falsely claimed Sunday that Hunter Biden's laptop was stolen.
I so found it odd, and actually, even given my contempt for the New York Times, I found it hard to believe.
Let's put it that way.
And then I read the piece in the New York Times and that's exactly what they said.
New York Times falsely claimed Sunday that Hunter Biden's laptop was stolen when in fact it was abandoned at the computer repair shop to which he had taken it and which had tried to contact him.
As Breitbart News and others have reported for years, citing repair store owner John Paul MacIsaac, quote, Hunter Biden dropped the computer off at his shop on April 12, 2019, to conduct a data recovery.
He says he called Biden the next day to inform him the recovery was completed, but Hunter never picked it up.
The laptop.
It was never stolen.
It was abandoned, and the store took legal possession of it in accordance with documents that Hunter Biden signed himself when dropping off the laptop for repairs.
He never reported it stolen or missing.
However, the Times' Michael Grinbaum, reporting on last Friday's report by Matt Taibbi about the internal deliberations at Twitter, That led to news about the laptop being censored in October 2020. Get that?
Twitter...
Remember October 2020 was a month before the national election?
And Twitter suppressed reports about the laptop.
They might have swayed a lot of votes.
So the Times writer writes, "Mr. Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship and pernicious influence by liberals.
Many others, even some ardent Twitter critics, were less impressed, The exchanges merely showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen laptop.
See that?
That's false reporting.
According to the New York Times, there was no censorship at Twitter.
No, no, no, no.
They were honorable executives debating on what to do about it.
Intense flu, CBC in Canada reports.
Intense flu hitting early and hard, landing kids in hospital across Canada.
Children's hospitals are being forced to take drastic measures to cope with an intense respiratory virus season, including one pediatric hospice that discharged its respite patients.
Experts are calling for concrete solutions immediately.
When I see expert, I know something stupid is to follow.
Something controlling of your life.
Flu infections are raging among children and hospitalizing them across Canada, say pediatricians who are calling for urgent and longer-term solutions.
Well...
The definition of a fool is the person who doesn't ask what is the price of a position that I hold.
Taking a position that I hold.
On the weekend, hospitals across the country were forced to scale back regular service to deal with the surge in influenza illnesses.
So, here's a question.
Why do you think, if this is true, There are so many more kids with flu in Canada.
Ah, this is not a difficult question, my friends.
Maybe it's because they were masked and locked down for most of two years.
Maybe they didn't build their antibodies.
Maybe it hurt them, the lockdown.
Much more than it helped them since children were extremely unlikely to die of COVID. Just maybe.
Maybe listening to these experts ruined the lives of vast numbers of people throughout the world except Sweden.
Just maybe.
Thought you'd want to know about that, my friends.
Yes, but by the way, needless to say, the CBC article doesn't even hint that that might be a reason why kids are hospitalized with the flu in unprecedented numbers in Canada this year.
Correct?
Yes, correct.
Terrific article in the Washington Examiner by Dan Hannon and...
It is coming to terms the COVID lockdowns were all for naught.
I am proud to tell you that in April 2020, I called the lockdowns the greatest international mistake in history.
You can look it up.
And he asks a very interesting question.
Why do we cheer the protesters against lockdown in China?
What did we do to protesters against lockdowns in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America?
Buddy?
Hello.
Ah, you signaled me before you turned on the mic.
A rare moment.
I'm Dennis Prager.
I don't have...
often...
In fact, very rarely do I have people on or running for office because there are so many people running for office in any given year, obviously, that it would have to be primarily a political show, which my show is not.
And it's even rarer that I have people on after an election.
However, I think very highly of Carrie Lake, who ran...
In Arizona for governor.
And I have her on right now.
Carrie Lake, it is really a statement of my feelings toward you that I'm having you on after the election.
Thank you, Dennis.
That means a lot to me because you know that I've been a fan of yours, a listener for many years, and I always pinch myself.
I go, I've arrived.
I'm on Dennis Prager's show.
I've arrived.
So thank you.
I wish I thought that way.
I've arrived.
I'm on Dennis Prager's show.
It doesn't occur to me.
So a few facts and then your take.
How much did...
Do they report you lost by?
Half a percentage point.
17,000 votes, something along those lines.
And your assessment of the honesty of the election is what?
I have zero percent faith in the election.
That was run in Maricopa County, and that's why we're planning to file a lawsuit next Monday to challenge the election.
62% of our state lives in Maricopa County.
The elections were run by two people who are actually Republicans, but they're Republicans who started a PAC with the sole purpose to make sure I didn't win the election.
And they're running the elections.
I'm on the ballot.
The people who are running the elections, everybody knew that our supporters were showing up on Election Day.
And like clockwork, as soon as the polls opened, the entire Election Day operations pretty much fell to pieces.
More than 60% of our Election Day polling places were inoperational or partially inoperational.
The tabulating machines broke down right at the beginning of the day, and many of them were broken down for almost all day.
The printing machines...
That print out the ballots didn't work, didn't have printer toner in them.
And people were waiting in line for anywhere from an hour to five hours to vote.
Many of them walked away or saw the long lines and just took off.
Not only that, when they got up to vote and they handed their ballot over, the machines wouldn't accept the ballot.
They were told to put it into a drawer number three.
And don't worry, we'll take it back and count it later for you.
People in Arizona have zero faith in the way these elections are run.
It's been going on for far too long.
We know that we led a movement here in Arizona.
My opponent pulled a page from Joe Biden's playbook, which was hide in the basement, don't campaign, act like there's no election going on, never debate.
And she actually oversaw the election as Secretary of State and just yesterday certified this sham election.
How many people were affected by what you just described?
We believe that we're going to be able to prove that there's systemic illegal voting in the hundreds of thousands.
When it comes to ballots here in Arizona.
And not only did it affect the people, it really was discriminatory toward people who chose to vote on Election Day.
It affects the rest of the state as well.
We have 15 counties here.
As I told you, Maricopa County is considered a mega county because more than half of our state, 62%, lives here.
But it affects the other 14 counties.
When they run things well and Maricopa makes a mockery of our sacred vote, it affects and disenfranchises.
So when you say hundreds of thousands, you mean people whose votes did not get counted or people whose votes were counted but were not legitimate?
Both.
Both.
We have ballots that go out.
27 days before the election to everybody in town, practically.
And, you know, the Democrats do really good work at trying to wrangle up each and every one of those ballots and count them.
But then we had problems on Election Day where people weren't able to vote, didn't have faith that their vote was counted, did show up to vote.
And when they went to check if their vote was counted, it said no, it wasn't counted.
There's a million different ways that they use to disenfranchise the voter.
And we intend in our lawsuit next Monday to...
Has it ever happened that a certified election was overturned?
I think there have been, actually.
And you just stumped me on that.
I believe there have been a couple of cases back east where a county has been tossed out or there's been a redo.
I know my attorneys have talked about that, but I have so much incoming with...
Every day we have more people reaching out saying, you're not going to believe what happened.
Take a look at this.
All right, hold it there, Carrie.
I've got to take a break.
I want to continue with you, Carrie Lake.
Okay.
Just ran for governor of Arizona and is an impressive woman.
Isn't God supposed to be good?
Isn't he supposed to love us?
Does God want us to suffer?
Ten years, you're not finished yet?
Marty!
Why did you do this?
Who are you?
Bruce?
I'm God.
Bingo!
Yahtzee!
Is that your final answer?
Our service is God.
Well, it was nice to meet you, God.
Thank you for the Grand Canyon, and good luck with the apocalypse.
Hi, everybody.
I'm Dennis Prigger.
This is the Ultimate Issues Hour, the third hour every Tuesday.
It is very rare that I have a guest on the Ultimate Issues Hour.
It is also very rare that I discuss contemporary issues on the Ultimate Issues Hour because it's about ultimate issues as opposed to the quotidian, the daily issues that are discussed in so many other hours of my show and nearly every other talk show.
So, on two accounts, this is a rare Ultimate Issues Hour, but...
Among the handful of people I truly respect who was commenting on the situation in the world today, and in America specifically, is Victor Davis Hanson, who is a major writer and major thinker, a kindred spirit, and I welcome you, Victor Davis Hanson, back to my show.
Thank you for having me, Dennis.
I would say it's a joy, but I'm torn.
It is a joy to be with you, but it is not a joy to talk about what we generally talk about.
In light of our equally dire assessments of the current situation, I want to ask you a personal question first, because I am asked this all the time.
Among other things, I do a happiness hour every week, and I do have a happy disposition.
So I'm asked all the time, how does this affect me personally?
This meaning the situation in America, the suppression of free speech as an example, the corruption of the media, which we're going to get to in a moment.
I am curious, how do you personally deal with it?
Well, I kind of ignore it, and then I bump into it.
I'm at Stanford University, which I mention that only because it's so far left, and I've been brought up by the Faculty Senate for columns I write, or I get professors that call Hoover and complain.
So I'm used to that, and I think all of us just sort of go ahead and feel that this is sort of the dark ages as far as...
Free expression.
That the left that used to brag about anything goes in free speech areas is now...
It's Orwellian.
It's totalitarian.
It doesn't believe in free speech.
That's a big change.
I think the biggest thing that I look at is as a kid that went to school here in California in college, the 60s people, 70 peoples I looked at, they were on the street, Dennis.
They were marching against the Pentagon.
They were barging in.
They were uncouth into the president's office.
They were throwing eggs at the corporate logo.
They were picketing the draft centers.
But now they're inside.
They run it.
They're the dean.
They're the secretary of defense.
They're the head of the Joint Chiefs.
They're Disney CEOs.
And that's the biggest shock, I think, is how easily they adapted themselves.
The techniques that they use on the street in the 60s, they've adapted to use when they have power and money and influence as the establishment.
You mentioned you're being at Stanford, and you're at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Right.
So do you get to teach at Stanford to Stanford students, or are you at what I think of as a think tank?
Well, we're a little different because a senior fellow is tenured, and that tenure is not given by Hoover, it's given by Stanford.
So you have to go through the tenure process through the department in which you would be a member if you were at the university itself.
So I was tenured by the classics department, but I have no desire to teach there, and I don't think they have any desire to welcome me.
So what I got around that is that I have in my contract when I came to Hoover 21 years ago that I can take a month in September and go to Hillsdale College and teach an intensive course there.
And I've done that for 21 years.
Talking about the classics.
Forgive me, I just want to ask you about, I want to get your reaction to something.
I say, talking about the classics, comma, I just read to my listeners, maybe my producer will remember, where is it that you can now get a degree in classics but never...
Princeton.
Oh, Princeton.
Okay, yeah, the Joshua Katz article, that's right.
Yes.
Yes.
So I'd like you to discuss the state of classics education in the universities of America.
Well, I would say that starting 30 years ago in round one of the culture wars, it was Michel Foucault and Lacan and Derrida that had displaced philology and rigorous training.
So if you were a student...
When I went to Stanford's PhD program, you had to know Latin and Greek, and you were tested in a three-hour exam in the PhD level.
You had to be able to write in Latin and Greek, and that would be tested.
You had a three-hour exam in Greek history, Roman history, Roman lit, Greek lit, and then you had to defend your thesis, and then you had to be responsible for three other topics, and then you had to have a reading knowledge of German and French, as well as Latin and Greek.
That I don't think exists anymore.
I don't think they require a composition requirement.
It's watered down and it's theory.
And then you had to take 12 seminars, very rigorous seminars in philology, manuscripts, archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy.
So what I'm getting at is that all of that has been considered exclusionary.
And like everything else...
What does that mean, exclusionary?
That means that...
Quote, unquote, marginalized people feel that those are arbitrary standards that reinforce privilege.
And therefore, who is to say that you need to know Greek to be an undergraduate classics major at Princeton?
Or when you're writing a thesis, maybe you want to write it on the marginalization of slaves or the denigration of women, but it's going to be a contemporary woke issue that will be channeled to the ancient world.
And so that's the difference.
Before I retired, I was a Greek professor for 21 years at the Cal State System.
And even when I retired in 2004 or five, it was generally known that if you ask a professor to come for a job interview, you just didn't think that they could read Latin at sight like they used to.
I couldn't give them a page of Caesar or Cicero or a page of Euripides or Elysius and say, "Could you please read that to see if you're qualified?" Or if you ask them basic knowledge- - And that's 20 years ago.
20 years ago.
And today it's worse.
So what Jonathan Katz was fighting at Princeton was the complete destruction of standards.
If you took a Princeton PhD today and you took him...
And he was in a job interview and you ask him the following questions.
How far is Sparta from Athens?
Why did the Mycenaean world fall apart?
Who built the Parthenon?
They wouldn't know any of that.
None.
They would try to steer the conversation to, I'm interested in the marginalization of the helots or I want to know what race and...
And I'm working on transgenderism and occult, that kind of stuff.
And so they don't know Greek and Latin, and they're proud of not knowing it because they feel that it represents a white, privileged tradition in Western Civ.
Do they consider the Greeks and Latin white?
Well, that was a big fight, you know, in the 80s, where this Afrocentrism...
Lionel Jeffries and Martin Bernal and tried to claim that Egypt, the Egyptians were African and many of the Greeks were like Socrates and there was no evidence for that.
I mean, the Ptolemies in Egypt were Macedonian-Greek, but that kind of faded out.
But that was the first round.
That was the World War I fight.
The peace between the World Wars, and now we're into a much more serious World War II, I think, across the humanities.
Well, I remember, and I was broadcasting at the time, and I said, this is a sea change.
When Jesse Jackson led a march at Stanford, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.
That was it for me.
That was the obituary for Western Civ.
Yeah.
That was when they went after Bill Bennett.
They went after Alan Bloom.
We went after Saul Bellow.
But I think...
Alright, hold on, hold on.
Remember that.
Saul Bellow was the last thing you mentioned.
I'm devoting this Ultimate Issues Hour to one of the most important thinkers today, Victor Davis Hanson.
So when it brought me to my knees, well, I had everything.
So tell me, would you please, how could I possibly have needed so much more?
We'll return to Victor Davis Hanson in a moment.
Truly, truly significant, deep thinker of our time.
I have so many questions to pose about our time.
I want to remind you that it's Christmas season and I'm doing an appeal for the Angel Tree campaign.
It's a beautiful campaign.
Apparently, it's hard to believe, and it's depressing, 1.7 million kids have a parent in prison, and the Angel Tree campaign gives them a gift, hopefully a note from the parent, and introduces them to a religious outlook on life, which they deeply need.
So I'd like you to contribute.
It's $25 serves one kid.
Obviously, multiply it, 10 kids, $250.
Remind these children that they're not forgotten.
That's the appeal, whatever religion you are.
And the way to do it is go to the banner for the Angel Tree Campaign on my website.
Please do donate.
Or call 888-206-2801, 888-206-2801.
And it's at DennisPrager.com, the Angel Tree Campaign banner.
Victor Davis Hanson is my guest and talking about the decline, well, the decline, I assume, He agrees with me, is in every arena of life.
We're talking about his field because it's so interesting to me reading what happened at Princeton wherein you no longer need to know Latin or Greek to get a degree in the classics.
As I've noted, at UCLA you don't need to read a single Shakespeare play to get a degree in English.
This has been true for quite some time.
So, the last thing you mentioned when we had to go to break, Victor, was you were mentioning Saul Bellow and Alan Bloom and so on.
So, do you want to continue from there or should I pose another question?
Ten seconds.
That was the first round.
They went after traditional education, but it was played between the sidelines.
They all agreed that there was such a thing called the humanities.
They just wanted to change it.
This new group, this next generation, this second war, they don't believe in the genre of classics or humanities.
They want to destroy them.
I think Professor Daniel Peralta, for instance, says, I want to destroy classics.
And he's a classics professor.
So this is a nihilist.
This is sort of the Jacobin round of the French Revolution.
That's right.
Well, my area is music, not literature.
And what is happening to orchestras around the country is analogous, not to mention music, which started with a tonality in the beginning of the 20th century.
Here's the $64,000 question.
Well, for you, I would put it differently.
What was the unit of money in ancient Greece?
The drachma.
Oh, still?
Really?
They still use that?
Yes.
Okay.
So here's the 64,000 drachma question for you.
Yeah.
And I have been preoccupied with this ever since.
I was at an Ivy League school for my graduate work.
What animates the desire to destroy?
Because that's all it is.
They build nothing.
So do you have a theory as to the origins of nihilism?
Well, it's usually a very educated, elite.
Pampered class that feels that their rhetorical skills or their glibness or their savvy, savviness, whatever, however, their cunning, that's not properly rewarded by society.
And so they despise the 7-Eleven owner or they despise the car, anybody who has more things and is more successful materially.
And so then they...
Condemn the entire system that hasn't appreciated their genius.
And they adopt this creed, which is wokeness is just simply another face of radical government or state mandated equality of result, where any inequity, any unequalness, if I could use that word, has to be attributed to an oppressor.
Or a victimizer or somebody has to be culpable.
If you're too short or you're too long, you've got bad health, good health, good inheritance, bad inheritance, natural skill that make us not equal, they have the power, they feel, this elite to determine, to put some people back and to put some people forward and even it out on the back end.
And the weird thing about it is that that process is never...
Extends to themselves.
They're exempt from the ramifications of their own psychology.
Whether you're, you know, John Kerry on a private jet lecturing about carbon emissions worldwide, or the Davos set, or you're talking about...
Or Gavin Newsom eating at a restaurant without a mask.
I thought that was perfect.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Or, you know, you feel that...
Nancy Pelosi has to go to her hairdresser.
Elizabeth Warren, the Marxist, semi-Marxist, Elizabeth Warren writes a book on flipping houses and how to profit.
So I'm not saying they're not serious and they're not ideologues, but I think the motivation that makes them want...
To adopt this nihilist radical equality that they'd rather have everybody equal and poorer than everybody better off but some more equal than others is some kind of personal anger or that they feel that it has something to do with our modern education or they do get these degrees and they are a member of the upper classes and they feel that They did not get their proper deserved rewards.
Yeah, I can't agree with you more, and I always forget to note this.
I'm glad you did.
They don't think they get the proper respect.
I know all this, and a third baseman makes 50 times more than I do.
Is that a fair summary?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Or even...
It doesn't even have to be that much.
They feel that...
I've had people say to them, what does a 7-Eleven person know?
And I would say they know on the tip of their fingers security, inventory, profit margin, quality of product.
It's a very tough job that no academic could do.
They hate the guy with the Winnebago or the boat or the jet skis.
And it's very strange that...
This left-wing romance with egalitarianism for everybody, but this really weird desire, obsession with nice things and status and titles.
And I know at Stanford I see all these BMWs that come in in 2020-21 with BLM stickers on them, you know.
And kids 21 walking out with cut-offs and flip-flops out of a BMW convertible with a BLM. Right.
All right, back in a moment with Victor Davis Hanson.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hi, everybody.
One of my favorite thinkers living today, Victor Davis Hanson, the entire hour of the Ultimate Issues Hour, talking about the state of life at this time.
So I would like to bounce a theory of mine off you.
I shouldn't feel it necessary to say, but I tell every guest this.
I feel totally free to say I completely disagree.
That's fine with me.
But I would like to bounce it off you because I've studied the left.
You've studied classics your whole life.
I've studied the left my whole life.
I don't know if you know.
I was at the Russian Institute at Columbia University.
Where I did my graduate work in what was called Communist Affairs, I studied under Zbigniew Brzezinski.
There were seven of us at Columbia.
It was a very rare major.
I'm glad I did, unfortunately, because it turned out to be very relevant, my study of communism and the left.
So it's been a very tough question for me.
What animates people, for example, to say men give birth?
That you now have to say that at Stanford, where you are.
So I have a theory, and again, just react as you will.
I believe that ultimately we have a religious crisis.
An atheist can agree with this.
Douglas Murray is not a believer.
I don't know if he's an atheist or an agnostic.
But he signs on to the...
The religious nature of the issue.
And in a nutshell, in my understanding, and my listeners are familiar with this, so in the Genesis account of creation, what God does for six days is not create.
He creates very rarely.
The term is only used three times in all of those days.
What God does is make order out of chaos.
That's why I consider the second verse, the second most important verse after the first, and everything was chaos.
Tohu vavohu really means chaos.
I believe the left, in the post-Judeo-Christian, post-Bible, post-Genesis age in which we live, in the final analysis yearns for chaos.
Men give birth is the quintessence.
Well, I think that I agree with it in this sense that their agenda does not appeal to human nature.
So most people do not want to buy into socialism or communism.
So they look for chaotic moments to push through things that are otherwise unpalatable.
So whether it's a 2008 meltdown.
Or whether it's COVID or whether it's January 6th, it's that Rahm Emanuel has never let a crisis go their way.
So they feel that chaos for a moment, a brief moment, destroys rationality and it destroys the historicity and shame and normality and protocols and rules.
And within that window, they can squeeze through and establish a whole set of new realities.
Once they do that, they don't want chaos.
Once they have a Soviet system or a socialist system or they take over a department or they take over a foundation.
But to get in, yeah, they want chaos and they want people to have no reference and be confused and they can step in and otherwise introduce ideas that otherwise are repellent.
Most people don't want their ideas.
But they're afraid, and they don't want to...
10% want their ideas, and the other 90% feel that they'll suffer if they object, because they feel they're in control.
They squeezed through the window and took over the apparatus, like some virus.
So what is the end?
The end is that you have to have a number of people, voices, who say, I don't care what they do to me.
Oh, no, no, I'm sorry, I wasn't clear.
What is the left's end?
What do they, if they're not aiming for chaos, they use chaos, which I can accept that.
What is, is it power?
Is it utopia?
Yes, power and privilege.
Because they are not religious and they don't believe in transcendence, they want to feel that in this brief time on earth, their power, their genius has reordered society as if they're some kind of god.
They have made people equal.
They have solved the problems of climate change.
They have, you know, they're not interested in...
Individual people, you know, solving cancer or helping poverty.
They want these cosmic reorderings of society.
And that's their legacy that makes them famous and immortal.
And they have to have certain means to be able to get those in.
That is very insightful.
We'll return in a moment.
That's a big deal.
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
And what I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.
Dennis Prager here.
Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast.
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