All Episodes
Previous Next
March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:14:36
Starving, Useless, and Lost
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Dennis Prager here.
Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast.
To hear the entire three hours of my radio show, commercial-free, every single day, become a member of PragerTopia.
You'll also get access to 15 years' worth of archives, as well as the daily show prep.
Subscribe at PragerTopia.com.
Hello, my friends.
I'm Dennis Prager.
In April of 2020, I tweeted and then wrote a column that the worldwide lockdowns outside of Sweden were the greatest mistake in world history.
And I made clear, I'm not comparing it to the greatest evils, the greatest mistake.
Turned out to have produced a lot of evil, but it was a mistake.
Maybe there was some evil intent on the part of some, but by and large it was a mistake.
And then it was an arrogant and destructive mistake.
And I was roundly ridiculed for it, the method of dealing with people who differ from the left.
There are two methods, ridicule and censorship.
That's what's called misinformation.
Misinformation is the term used, as the Soviets used it, for anything that the left differs with.
It's, by definition, misinformation, which is a form of gaslighting, meaning that the misinformation is overwhelmingly coming from the left.
So here is a piece.
And this is, what is the foreign desk, Alan?
It's a news aggregation site.
A top UN official said yesterday that a record 345 million people were now acutely hungry.
Yeah, they're blaming it on soaring fuel and food prices.
But it was the lockdown that caused all of this.
Just thought you ought to know.
And I don't think that there is a single person on the left who either knows about this or cares about it.
Two years and three months ago, I wrote about this.
The acute starvation that would take place.
And it wasn't because I had this great insight.
Although it is worthy of asking, why did I know?
How vile the lockdowns were, how unscientific, how crushing, how destructive.
And most people didn't.
I don't have any powers of prophecy.
And by the way, I'm not even sure I have an answer.
My answer for me, I ask myself that question.
I think one is I really am committed to truth.
I used to say I have sort of an erotic attraction to truth.
It turns me on truth.
And second, I'm not intimidated.
When I hear the word experts, I assume stupidity will follow.
I mean that literally.
Not with regard to their area of expertise.
If a molecular biologist tells me something about molecular biology, I assume that I will learn something about molecular biology.
But if the molecular biologist is asked what policy to pursue, I assume stupidity will follow.
Because by and large...
Our experts are fools in every area outside of their area of expertise.
And fools cause the most damage on earth.
Not sadists, not sociopaths, fools.
There are far more fools than sociopaths.
They congregate among the intelligentsia.
They have for a hundred years.
I don't remember the scholar who wrote, That it was not hardhats in the West who supported Stalin.
It was intellectuals.
That number, by the way, is up from 135 million.
Oh, yes, good point.
I read that, and I didn't note it.
The number of 345 million is up from, what was the original, 135 million?
Yeah, before the lockdowns.
Before the lockdowns.
But of course, as usual, it's blamed on Putin.
It's like the lying president that we have, who's incomparably more dishonest than Donald Trump.
Incomparably.
Tells us it's the Putin tax on all our goods, on what is at the gas pump.
It had already been very high, the gas prices, because he follows...
The crackpots of our age, the environmentalist greens, who are perfectly happy with the price of gas.
In the third hour, I will cover what you probably don't know anything about, and I don't blame you.
I don't think it's covered by any mainstream medium.
And that is what's happening in the Netherlands with the farmers, thanks to the greens.
So we're going to have a brilliant Dutch woman on.
She's been on before.
To explain what is happening there.
Crushing people's lives is fine.
What is our brilliant friend Epstein's first name?
The energy man.
Alex, yeah.
Alex Epstein was on the show and has written a book.
Which I can't thank him enough for, because when I hear a new idea that makes sense to me, it's like a particularly happy day, even if the idea is awfully awful.
There is on the left, in the environmentalist left, obviously, an anti-human...
A very large loathing of humanity, of the human creature.
And it's hard for us to believe, because what human would hate the human race?
But if you idolize nature, Mother Nature, Mother Earth, Gaia, the goddess of Earth...
Then you see the human as a bane on nature.
Again, the antithesis of the Judeo-Christian worldview.
The left is the living opposite of the Judeo-Christian worldview.
Literally the opposite.
In the beginning in Genesis, God instructs the human being.
To dominate nature.
Of the many, many lines that offend the left in the Bible, that's really one of the top five.
The top one is, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
That really pisses them off.
Can't get a more offensive line than that.
You mean nature didn't invent itself?
Our God nature to whom we bow?
Yeah.
But that one, and you shall rule over it?
Wow.
That really ticks them off and reinforces their hatred of Judeo-Christian values, which mostly manifests itself in hatred of Christianity.
The greatest hatred in the West today is hatred of Christianity, certainly in America.
Can you name a hatred that even competes with hatred of Christianity?
Call me up if you can.
And I'm a Jew telling you this, so I have, so to speak, no axe to grind here.
There's nothing comparable, and yet there's no name for it.
There's name for every single alleged and real hatred.
Right?
Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, I don't know if I said that already.
But there's no word for the hatred of Christians or Christianity.
It gives you an idea of the sea of lies in which we swim.
That there is no name for the greatest hatred in the West.
No name.
Doesn't exist!
When you have no name, you don't exist.
This is the stuff your kids are learning.
I got amazing news on that one, too.
on the latest proclamation of those who loathe children, the National Education Association and the teachers' unions.
The greatest single thing, anything that could happen, is a massive withdrawal from our schooling system.
We'll be right back.
The rate of inflation we're experiencing is staggering for some people, especially seniors on a fixed income.
It's actually scary.
The fear of outliving your money is probably causing a lot of sleepless nights.
But Andrew Del Rey and Todd Avakian at andrewandtodd.com may have the answer for you.
A reverse mortgage can be a lifesaver and provide peace of mind in your golden years.
It's not for everyone, but if you're a good fit, it's a life changer for the better.
To find out if a reverse mortgage is right for you, it's more important than ever to talk to someone you can trust who will give you honest answers.
I do trust Andrew and Todd.
They're experienced mortgage bankers with Sierra Pacific who can guide you through every step of the process.
Go to AndrewAndTodd.com.
That's AndrewAndTodd.com.
See if a reverse mortgage is something that will work for you.
It could be the exact solution you were hoping for.
Go to AndrewAndTodd.com.
That's AndrewAndTodd.com.
I'm Dennis Prager.
Hmm.
Interesting theory of Sharon in Los Angeles.
I'll take an interesting theory, Sharon.
Go ahead.
Hi, Dennis.
I've listened to you since the early 80s or mid-80s.
And I listened to you today.
I got an insight that perhaps another reason or a reason that the left hates the Jews or has such antipathy toward them, that they return to their homeland and they actually practice dominion over the earth.
They took a desert and made it into one of its lush now.
It has industry.
They are dominant in their area.
They took the sea and have desalinization.
And so they actually have practiced dominion over the Earth in a brilliant and very, shall we say, they expanded on it.
You know what?
That is such an intelligent...
Well, I listened to you, and it was obvious in your words.
Yes, well, I didn't say it.
You did.
I've got to give you credit.
I may have triggered it, and I'd be proud if I did.
Sean, I think she has earned a visit from you.
Sharon, I'm going to speak to Sean.
Yes, you've got time on Friday?
Friday...
On Thursdays, people normally say the word tomorrow.
They don't normally say the name of the day if it's the next day.
It's not like you did something bad.
It's just odd.
We say tomorrow when it's the next day.
Anyway, that was brilliant.
If it weren't for conquering nature, Israel would be non-existent.
So would we, for the record.
Nature is there for our use.
Not our misuse, but our use.
Because, are you ready, all of you on the left?
All of you who went to graduate school, which is almost synonymous?
We are more important than the rest of nature.
Do you realize that that is controversial?
What I just said is massively controversial.
Humans are more important.
Another insight I got from my religious upbringing, that human beings are created in God's image.
Neither dinosaurs nor dogs are.
Now, I am adamant, have always been, as is my religion, that mistreatment of animals...
is a major sin.
In my Bible commentary, The Rational Bible, third volume of which is coming out in October, I note how often the Torah, the first five books, the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, whatever you want to call it, have laws about the decent treatment of animals.
Almost no one Thinks about this, including people who know their Bible really, really well, that humane treatment of animals is in the Ten Commandments, the central moral law of civilization.
That's right.
Your animal is to rest one day a week, as you do.
got into the Ten Commandments.
But they are for us to use.
They are for us to use.
They're not our equal.
We are to humanely use them.
We are to humanely use all of nature and to conquer it.
Israel is a perfect example.
That's a really good one.
Yeah, they conquered the desert, but you know what?
The desert is as natural as nature.
Conquered it?
What, is it some sort of war?
To which the answer is yes, there is a war between humanity and nature.
That is correct.
That's why we try to stop the damage of hurricanes and tornadoes and tsunamis and floods.
And droughts, all of which are natural.
Now, if God would have consulted with me, if I could have consulted with God at creation, I would have made the argument, could you make the earth without the plates and They're crashing and creating earthquakes.
However, I was not consulted, and I do believe that God knows best.
certainly better than my professors at Columbia.
1-8 Prager 776. Yep, that was a real good one, Cheryl.
I thank you very much.
I have a story for you that I was debating what hour I should talk to you about it, but I can't resist.
Ah, but I want to take this call from Jackie in San Diego, California, because it's on topic.
Before I change topics.
Jackie, hello!
Dennis, hello to you.
God bless you and thank you for your...
I'm going to call it a ministry over 40 years.
Religion on the line and so on.
It is like a ministry, I agree.
It is.
Now, my daughter, in the 90s, in California schools...
She was a cute, blonde, perky thing, not college material.
So she had to take the general science classes.
And her environmental science textbook, one chapter, started like this.
And I remember it because I rewrote it and posted it in the newspaper.
All right, you'll have to tell it to me when we get back because I have no choice but to take a break.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Rising interest rates, stock volatility, out-of-control inflation.
People are concerned about what the future holds financially.
This is Dennis Prager for AmFed Coin and Bullion.
There's no better time than the present to move a portion of your IRA into precious metals.
Gold and silver IRAs are more popular than ever, and dealers are advertising heavily for your business.
You should know there's a right and a wrong way to set up your precious metals IRA.
Mistakes could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in IRS fines.
Nick Grovich, man I completely trust, owner of AmFed Coin and Bullion, has agreed to send you a concise report about how to set up your IRA and how to get the best bang for your buck.
Nick and his team will be happy to help you set up your precious metals IRA or review your current account.
Call AmFed Coin and Bullion 800-221-7694 for your free IRA report and all your precious metals needs.
American Federal.
Hi, my friends.
Dennis Prager here, speaking with a caller in San Diego.
I'm reviewing for you the extremely significant war taking place between environmentalists and Judeo-Christian values.
Everything on the left is the opposite of biblical values.
That's why they have such contempt for the Bible and for the people who take it seriously.
If you take Al Gore seriously, you're considered an intellect.
But if you take the Bible seriously, you're considered an idiot.
Those are the people who believe men menstruate.
Those are the people who believe that America is a systemically racist country.
I should have the list of absurdities in front of me.
I wrote a column on it recently.
Anyway, the issue about conquering nature, which is a biblical value, is huge.
You can't advance in civilization.
It's either nature conquers you or you conquer nature.
And Jackie, back to you.
So your daughter in the 90s took a class in high school.
Correct?
And she was told what?
Well, I took the textbook.
I always checked school curriculum.
It was sort of my passion.
And I had her textbook and read.
The overview of one chapter started like this.
For millions and millions of years, since man climbed up out of the primordial goo, And then down out of trees, he's been building roads and damming up the waters.
And in other words, in building our world, as we're called to do, we're in the way.
We're ruining this land.
Yes, that's right.
Dan is a fascinating nugget that same time period.
Ask Marilyn was in the parade magazine of the newspaper and Marilyn Bon Savant.
And the question was, are we overpopulating the earth?
And you know her answer was this, and I love that I remember it.
At that time, the Earth's population was approximately 5 billion people.
She said if we gathered everyone together...
And gave them about 18 square inches, and we stood all together.
We would fill, and she named the county in Florida.
Yeah, that's important insight.
Thank you.
It was called humanism, the ideological replacement for theism.
It's called humanism.
Theism is Theo, God-based.
Humanism is human-based.
The irony, and there are many ironies, is that humanism degrades the worth of the human totally.
If you want the human to be worth anything, you have to be a theist.
Why do you think I've been asking all of my life?
And I mean all of my life since I began speaking in my early 20s.
Asking students of all ages, would you save your dog or a stranger first if both were drowning?
I knew at 22 years of age that the secular world was confused, to say the least.
How many people are taught at school?
That all the genocides of the 20th century, except the Turks against the Armenians, 99% literally, 99 out of the 100 billion, were caused by secular regimes.
Do you think that there are 100 college graduates of last year who know that?
I don't.
I don't even think religious schools teach it.
I don't know what the hell religious schools teach.
In so many cases, they're so out of it.
They either have bought into the dominant leftism, or they have retreated into a cocoon of religiosity that doesn't take on the intellectual challenges of the left.
That should be posters.
Maybe PragerU should put up posters.
All the genocides were committed by secular governments.
All the genocides of the 20th century.
Towels just don't seem to dry you anymore.
They feel soft and lotion-y in the store, but you get them home, and they don't absorb.
Well, Mike Lindell at MyPillow found that out around 2006, and towels changed forever.
He found the best towel company right here in the USA. They have proprietary technology to create towels that feel soft, but actually work.
And that happens to be true.
I use them.
They are all made with USA cotton, and they come with the MyPillow 60-day money-back guarantee.
Six-piece set, two baths, two hand towels, two washcloths.
Regularly $109.99, now $39.99.
Just go to MyPillow.com and click on the new radio listener specials and get deep discounts on all MyPillow products, including the towels, by entering the promo code PRAGER or call 800-761-6302 for these great radio specials.
MyPillow.com promo code PRAGER. Hi everybody, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
If you want to read about hatred of America, all you need to do is read the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times.
I read to you some of the columns that they published on July 4th to crap on this country.
Well, not literally, but figuratively.
Today's example in the New York Times, a guest essay, they call it, by Tim Kreider.
I'm unfamiliar with, which is not relevant, but just letting you know I have nothing to tell you about him.
So here's a sample line from his guest essay in the New York Times.
To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams.
And hard work seems less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan.
As inane as just say no.
Hard work is inane.
Just say no is inane.
Everything productive is inane.
The country, it's not a country, it's an inescapable web of scams.
Amazing how many people want to move to this inescapable web of scams.
I'd like to know what college and probably graduate school Mr. Kreider is a product of.
The pandemic was the bomb cyclone of our discontents.
It not only gave us all non-essential workers an experience of mandatory sloth, Which for many turned out not to be altogether unpleasant, but also dredged up a lakeful of long-submerged truths.
It turns out that millions of people never actually needed to waste days of their lives sitting in traffic or pantomime work, which is, in quotes, under managerial scrutiny eight hours a day.
We learned that nurses, cashiers, truckers, and delivery people actually ran the world, and the rest of us were mostly useless supernumeraries.
The brutal hierarchies of work shifted for the first time in recent memory in favor of labor.
That's true.
A lot of the stuff that people do, especially, but he doesn't note this, The biggest waste is government workers.
When I think about the damage the Department of Education has done to America, it is almost immeasurable.
When I think of the overreach of the Environmental Protection Agency, until last week when the Supreme Court ruled Congress has to make these laws, the EPA can't.
Of course, everyone is still busy, worse than busy, exhausted, too wiped out at the end of the day to do more than stress, eat, binge watch, and doom scroll.
What's doom scroll, you know?
You're just looking at one horrible story after another.
Uh-huh.
I doom scroll.
I look at one horrible story after another.
By the way, let's say people stress, eat, and binge watch.
Why is that the society's fault?
Notice this is classic leftism.
You do something self-destructive and it's society's fault.
Get it?
He doesn't even realize that's what he's saying.
Well, he might.
He might.
I'm not certain about that.
Whether he realizes it or not, that is essential.
I'm okay.
You're okay.
America stinks.
That is the credo of the left.
We're great.
An endless frantic hamster wheel for survival.
You've seen all the headlines about the great resignation.
Gen Z and millennials would rather be unemployed than unhappy in a job.
Yeah, the Business Insider reported nervously.
Hmm.
On YouTube, the faux guru self-help singe, exhorts, do nothing.
Millions are now pursuing what a punk guitarist I know called the C-minus lifestyle.
And it's no longer just...
Maybe the sense that life is useless and work is useless is another product of the secularization of our culture?
This is what...
This is basically what the death of a salesman was.
Who was the author of that again?
Arthur Miller.
So Arthur Miller was a liberal, not a leftist.
But that was a big part of his message.
Life is meaningless for these people who just get up, put on a suit and tie, then...
Go and become a salesman.
There's an inner death involved in that.
It's fascinating that when people lose meaning, everything loses meaning.
When you truly embrace The godless, religionless world that the left promotes, very little work can fill the meaning hole that that has produced.
See, if you have a traditional middle-class religious home, you go to work and Whatever job it is, it may not be all that fulfilling.
But what is fulfilling is that you have been able to support your family, teach your kids good values, pass on these values to the next generation.
A weekend, so you only work five days a week to begin with.
You have a weekend for any other pursuit you want.
In the case of religious Christians, you have your church on Sunday, and hopefully more than church.
In the case of religious Jews, you have your Sabbath.
And you don't rely on work to give you meaning.
This guy, who I am as certain as I can be, is secular.
This guy is lamenting the lack of purpose in work.
but it's really the lack of purpose in life that has been given to this poor soul who writes this piece for the New York Times.
More young people are opting out, are opting not to have kids.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah, that's right.
Not only because they can't afford them, but also because they assume they'll have only a scorched or sodden wasteland to grow up in.
That's another gift of the left.
See?
Oh, why would I have kids?
They'll just...
They will boil to death.
This guy is perfect for the New York Times.
It's sick, and he's sick.
By the way, I hope that he doesn't have kids.
There is a certain justice in fools not having children.
They don't reproduce.
Unfortunately, though, they teach your children.
An increasingly popular retirement plan is figuring civilization will collapse before you have to worry about it.
This is all the residue of the left.
He says it's the residue of capitalism.
I'm not sure anyone's composed a more eloquent epitaph for the planet than the stand-up comedian Kath Barbadoro, who tweeted, It's pretty funny that the world is ending, and we all just have to keep going to our little jobs, LOL. Is that perfect?
Everything about that is leftism.
Yeah, why would I work?
The world is ending.
He finds that funny, the writer for the New York Times.
It's hilarious.
Mid-century science fiction writers assumed that the increased productivity brought on by mechanization would give workers an impressive amount of leisure time, that our greatest threats would be boredom and ennui.
But these authors' prodigious imaginations were hobbled by their humanity and rationality.
I'll read more when we continue.
Portions of the Dennis Prager Show are brought to you by Sierra Pacific Oregon.
I've got to read to you one of the responses to this.
Work and children are for idiots.
We live in a cesspool called America.
And we realize how everything we've been told is largely meaningless.
That's the dystopian essay in today's New York Times.
So listen to Lisa T. Olive Bridge, New York.
Her comment, one of the most popular.
I go to the comments at the New York Times.
Reader's picks.
So she's like the fifth most popular comment.
Listen to this.
After many years as a high achiever, so busy, working, working, working to make the world a better place, In parentheses, as an environmental activist, LOL. I agree with the LOL. I had the opportunity to drop out for seven years, working with the land and working with the land.
Get that?
Not on the land, not working the land, with the land.
The land and I work together.
And living very simply and with quiet deliberation at a secluded retreat center.
I have since left and have continued to create a simple, uncomplicated life.
Now middle-aged, single and child-free, I marvel at how slow I get to be.
My morning coffee on the deck, Listening to birds or spending an hour watching the sunset light change without feeling like I should, capitalized, should, be more productive.
This is true freedom to me.
Thanks for the essay.
Wow.
This is your New York Times reader.
Par excellence.
Leftism is a desire not to confront the fact that life is complicated.
And if you marry and have children, it's even more complicated.
And if you have a job, it's even more complicated.
So this woman embodies the left-wing ideal.
Do nothing!
Watch sunsets while you drink your coffee.
I have described leftism as nihilism.
In nothing.
The belief in nothing.
She's one of the most popular comments.
She wrote one of the most popular comments on this essay in the New York Times.
Yes.
No children, no husband, no work.
It's an interesting thing that she spends an hour watching the sunset light change. .
Reminds me of the scene.
There is a great movie that nobody knows about.
What was the one where is it?
The Seven Wishes with the Devil?
Bedazzled.
Yeah, Bedazzled.
It's a great movie.
It's been made twice.
Once, I think, in the 70s and one about 15, 20 years ago.
And if you see the one, the more recent one, he makes a deal with the devil because he wants to win over this woman who doesn't pay him any attention.
And the devil gets him invisibly into her, Bedroom to check her diary when she's gone.
And it writes that somehow she wrote there something to the effect she wants a sensitive man.
So one of his wishes is, make me the most sensitive man in the world.
And they're on the beach.
The devil gives him what he asks for.
And he's on the beach with this woman whom he wants.
To woo.
And he starts crying at the beauty of the sunset.
And a bunch of guys walk over, kick sand in his face.
At this nerd.
And she walks away with the guys who kicked sand in the guy's face.
It's a very powerful film, actually.
Because it's real.
Women don't want men who are sitting, not working, not being strong, and crying at sunsets.
To be perfectly honest.
I have an idea.
I would like to improvise a sonnet about your hair.
How wonderful, my fair one's face.
He was just kicking the face.
Excuse me, fellas.
Might I ask you to take the horseplay down to another part of the beach?
No?
Yep.
Yep.
Somebody else commented on Lisa T's comment at the New York Times.
Maya Sara in Brooklyn.
The child-free life is heaven, the key to uncomplicated.
Wish more people would consider it, for the environment alone.
Leftism, among its other pathologies, is a desire to have an uncomplicated life.
And to remain as young a child as possible, where everything that you want was taken care of, first by your parent or parents, and now by the state.
As the guy wrote in his original essay, the happier life of people in Denmark, where they take care of everything for you.
That's right.
You know, in the Ten Commandments it says, you shall work six days, and on the seventh day it is a Sabbath, and to the Lord do no work.
Another aspect of the Ten Commandments, that specifically, that commandment, the fourth, is that it is understood that you should work for six days.
Work is a good thing.
But not to these.
Children is not a good thing.
Family is not.
Marriage is not.
Work is not.
I just want to exist.
Meditate on the changing colors of sunset while the government provides me with all I need.
And I don't need anything like free speech, let alone a family.
Families are complicated, which indeed they are.
It is not possible to overstate the damage that this thinking is doing to these people, who I frankly, believe it or not, and very little scares me.
I find these people scary.
We shall return.
Hi, everybody.
A favorite guest is Carol Roth.
Who presents this week's PragerU video.
And it is The War on Small Business.
That's the book.
What's the name of the video?
Yeah, Small Businesses America.
So they're obviously deeply related.
I'm happy I mentioned the book's title.
Here's the beginning of her PragerU video.
One day I want to own my own business.
Be my own boss.
Probably nothing embodies the essence of the American dream more than that thought.
And what American hasn't had it?
Henry Ford had it.
Oprah Winfrey had it.
Steve Jobs had it.
So did the owner of your favorite food truck.
So have countless others.
Many of those people came to the U.S. because they believed their best chance to achieve it was here in America.
Many have been rewarded for their boldness.
Many have not.
Starting a business, as everyone knows, is fraught with obstacles.
But still, countless Americans risk it, risking everything to make it happen.
Why?
Of course, we already know the answer.
Because owning your own business represents freedom.
You may miss some of your kids' soccer games, need to take out a second mortgage, and work 100-hour weeks, but ultimately, you are in charge of your own destiny.
Yeah, all right.
We'll now go to the live Carol Roth.
By the way, you can watch us.
Where's Sean?
Where do I send people?
Right.
Believe it or not, those are the words I formed.
Salem News Channel.
You can see the whole show video, but it's more interesting when I have a guest on like Carol Roth, who is wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey, and I still kept her on despite the rivalry that the Los Angeles Kings and Blackhawks had in their better days, I might add.
Did I surprise you with my hockey knowledge?
I love your hockey.
I like the fact that we both are commiserating now that our teams aren't so great, but we are still loyal to them.
That's such a sweet way of saying awful.
I'm very diplomatic.
Not so great.
Kind of a mess.
Yes.
It's all right.
It's all right.
Carol, the more I live, the more I love small business and realize that it is...
An essence, if not the essence, an essence of America.
There is something so, as you say, so identified with freedom.
And there is nothing like the sense I built something as opposed to I work for.
I was reading a piece to my listeners right before you came on in Pravda, I mean the New York Times.
That was a Freudian slip.
And it is just contempt for the idea that people would work so hard.
And is this dream of owning your own business sort of dying?
For a lot of people, I don't think it is.
The reality is that it does create freedom.
And I think there are people come from all over the world who want to participate in that freedom creation.
And so now we have more than 32 million individuals who are out there living the American dream, taking responsibility.
Unfortunately, that same idea does not permeate everybody.
Not everybody has the same tolerance, but there's still, as you can hang your hat on the fact that there still are a good number of people who want to have that sense of purpose, who want to have that mission, who want to create economic freedom, and who want to create wealth.
We're starting to break up, guys, with the Skype here, which is unfortunately not uncommon.
Shall we go to phone, or should I continue with Skype?
You're okay?
You think we can?
Good, I hope so.
Do you think that the average college graduate has a dream of starting his or her own business?
So I don't think the average college graduate does, but I think there are a whole slew of young people in Gen Z who are very interested in business and entrepreneurship.
And there tends to be a huge difference on college campuses in the program, the temperament of the young individuals who are attracted to the business schools and the entrepreneurship schools versus the underwater basket weaving and gender studies.
Unfortunately, the latter outnumbers the former, but we still are attracting the people who want to have that kind of background.
Okay, well, I'll be back with you in a moment.
It's sad that the latter outnumber the former.
Hey everybody, Dennis Prager here.
Last hour, among other things, I read to you from a column in today's New York Times about a guy writing about how all of this work people do is absurd.
Capitalism is a scam.
The title of the piece in the dystopian New York Times is It's Time to Stop Living the American Scam.
And I'm not sure what the...
I guess the answer is that the government will just take care of us more and more and leave us time, as one commenter wrote, to meditate on sunsets.
That's the Marxian ideal, right?
The Marxian ideal, that's exactly right.
We'll have time to write our poetry.
One guy, it's too bad, one guy wrote a, I'm going to try to find that for you.
That was priceless.
One guy wrote a comment about how his life has, he's a musician.
And he has resented his whole life that the government doesn't support the arts more.
That he didn't have a chance just to make a living from his musicianship.
That's the attitude.
I play the guitar.
I should be paid to do that.
The government should support the arts.
The government does support the arts, by the way.
Plenty of support.
But there are more guitarists or musicians.
I don't know if he's a guitarist.
There are more musicians than there are funds to support musicians.
And guess what?
Do you know why there are orchestras closing down now?
Because we don't teach music and art.
We teach binary gender identity.
How many graduates of high school can spell Beethoven?
What do you think the percentage of high school graduates who can spell the greatest, one of the two, three greatest composers to have ever lived?
And that's universally acknowledged.
The average Korean knows far more Beethoven than the average American.
For those of you who think this is a white male issue, Koreans and Chinese don't think that way.
You should watch, as I did, the Van Clyburn, or is it every four years?
I don't remember how many years.
The greatest piano competition, aside from the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, is the Van Clyburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas.
And I would say half of the finalists were probably Asian.
How come all of these cities could support orchestras when America was not as wealthy as it has been?
Thank you.
What year was the Chicago Symphony founded, or the L.A. Philharmonic, or the New York Philharmonic?
It was the late 1800s.
How did they have the money then?
It wasn't government support.
People supported it.
Because they loved music.
When I was a kid, believe it or not, this must be astonishing to young people to hear.
They had classical music on American national television.
It was assumed that the average Joe, as they used to say, while not at all a connoisseur of great music, liked it, respected it.
Yep.
Take care of me, baby.
Take care of me.
That's the lament.
I shouldn't have to work hard.
The comments of New York Times subscribers, I hope that they were as illuminating to you as they were to me.
Well, they weren't illuminating in the sense I expected them as revealing, I should say, not illuminating.
Life is complicated if you have children.
I want an uncomplicated life.
I mean, the openness about their narcissism is what is so remarkable.
Leftism and narcissism are virtually synonymous.
I know the...
The self-definition of the leftist is, I care about the environment and about the poor and about racism.
I know.
The self-definition is, I am wonderful.
But the fact is, it's extraordinarily narcissistic.
Because when it comes to the real altruism of life, get married and make a family, count me out.
I'm too busy saving.
Species.
But not the human species.
So they all write capitalism, capitalism, capitalism, capitalism, and I would much sooner note secularism, secularism, secularism, secularism.
These people acknowledge their life is devoid of meaning, but they blame capitalism.
Exactly how has capitalism robbed their life of meaning?
Because it told them to work hard for a living.
That's what they would answer.
But somehow religious people who work hard for a living don't find that their lives are empty.
Going to a job...
Even a job you don't particularly like.
And coming home to a family.
And being committed to God and a religion and a religious community.
Are pretty fulfilling.
But they don't have that.
And they don't even realize it.
They have been robbed of the best thing they could have.
Well, among the best things.
Well, yeah, family and God, that's a lot to be robbed of.
Instead, they blame capitalism.
What the hell does capitalism have to do with it?
I'll tell you what it has to do with.
It means that the government is not the most important thing in your life.
It should have supported me.
I'm a musician.
Daycare.
America was a healthier place when the government didn't pay for daycare.
It's like inflation is caused by Putin and not by the environmentalist policies, the green policies followed by this horrible administration.
The number of New York Times writers or readers who know that is so small.
If leftists knew what we knew, we who were not leftists, many of them would leave the left.
But they don't know a lot about what is happening.
Do they know what I read to you the first hour?
National Education Association?
Proposes changing the word mother to birthing parent.
You want this to be the policy in all schools?
Birthing parent?
One of you has a very, very good call.
I wonder if it's still up.
Yeah.
Richard, in Stanton, California, we should change father to sperm donor.
Is that good?
That's a good one, no?
If it's birthing parent, then it should be sperm donor.
Because after all, a woman could donate sperm.
If a man can give birth, a woman can donate sperm.
Absolutely correct.
I'm not being cute.
By the way, they're not even saying breastfeeding anymore at these places.
You know that?
Chestfeeding.
That's right.
And the women's groups are going along with this.
Anyway, thank you, Richard.
That was a very intelligent point, and I will use it, and I thank you for it.
Jeffersonville, Indiana.
Chris, hello.
Yes, hi, Dennis.
It's such a pleasure to get to talk with you today.
Thank you.
I'm calling in response to your thoughts about where does the left find meaning?
In particular in a life, in a world where there is no God.
Oh, there is an answer.
It's all around you.
Anti-racism.
Environmentalism.
Saving the planet from extinction.
Saving endangered species.
The LGBTQIA+. These are all substitute religions.
Secularism produces far more religion than religious life.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hi everybody, Dennis Prager here.
And I welcome a young woman from Holland, or the Netherlands.
She is now living in Florida.
And I've had her on before when she was battling, almost alone in the Netherlands, the terrible lockdown laws in that country.
She's a brave, brilliant young lawyer, and we're very lucky that she's spending time in the United States right now.
But there's more incredible news out of the Netherlands that I suspect most of you are not familiar with.
Decided that we'll have her explain it.
I don't even know what it's all about.
I know a fair amount, but I know she knows more.
That's why she's on.
Her name is Ava Vlendingerbroek.
Did I pronounce your last name correctly?
Uh-oh, I'm not hearing Ava, guys.
I'm not hearing her at all.
Here we go.
So we're moving to the phone.
My friends?
I have to deal with this.
All right, Ava, did you happen to hear anything I said?
No, I didn't.
Okay, she didn't.
All right, fair enough.
I was just introducing you, and I wanted to know if I got your last name right, so I'll do it again.
Fladingenbruch.
Stardingerbruch.
Bruch.
Ah, Bruch.
Okay, so I'm getting there.
This is a lifelong project for an American to get Dutch names correctly.
Yeah, especially mine, I can imagine.
Especially yours, yes.
By the way, should the blessed event happen one day and you get married, will you take on your husband's family name?
Yes, I want to take it on legally, but I want to keep annoying you Americans with my Dutch maiden name.
So I'm going to keep that for all the public.
Okay.
I suggest one with one syllable.
Just a friendly recommendation.
Yeah, well, the first name is short and easy.
Ava, yes, does work.
Ava, so it is really sad that I keep having you on the show with regard to bad things happening in the Netherlands.
But life is what it is.
So what is the latest issue with the farmers of the Netherlands?
They're still out protesting.
And for your listeners, they're protesting because our government is trying to take their land away.
They're actually now enforcing new regulations that are not even based in an actual law that will expropriate our farmers of their property.
So their land by 2030 for about 30%, meaning that most of them will go completely out of business.
And, well, the Dutch farming industry is a very lucrative industry.
We're the second largest exporter in the world after America.
And we're only a very tiny country.
So imagine, this is their livelihood.
These farmers have...
We have family businesses that have existed for centuries and they're now being robbed of it by our government and they have nothing to say against it.
So they're protesting this and they're doing that, I would say, very courageously and very strongly by blocking distribution centers, by blocking roads, by going to government buildings and protesting there.
And they have, thankfully, a lot of support from the Dutch people.
So it's not just bad news, even though what is happening to them is obviously criminal and a disgrace.
All right, I think we need to explain what is the justification for expropriating farmers' lands?
Well, they have a new crisis that they are using for taking away our rice.
We've seen that for the past two years, haven't we?
And this one is a so-called nitrogen crisis.
And ammonia.
So they're saying that the farmers produce too much nitrogen and ammonia and that it's dangerous to the climate.
So that's why now they're forced to give up their land and give it to the state.
Okay, I don't see how A leads to B. Even on the assumption that they're producing too much ammonia and nitrogen, why will giving the land to the state stop that?
Right.
You're asking the right question.
It would, in a sense, that they have to kill off their livestock.
So they will go out of business, and the state will take this land, and the real reason that they're doing this is what actually is also shown now out of state documents, is that they need this land to house new immigrants.
But they have a new, you know, they tell the people that it's because of the nitrogen.
OMG. I did not know that.
All right, I'm going to come back to you in a moment, Eva.
So, it sounds to me like another spectacular form of destruction as a result of the Greens, the environmentalist movement, the most destructive, well, one of the most destructive movements of the modern period.
Hi, everybody!
I don't know if you get more woke than the Netherlands.
Although, there's a lot of competition for that title, and I have a Dutch lawyer on the line, and she has been on the show a number of times.
She's a fighter.
Yes, I have to read it.
I really should master it, because I adore her.
Vlandingerbroek.
Broek is correct.
It ends with broek.
Oh, I'm not hearing her, guys.
Maybe I should, maybe I can help that.
All right, sorry, Ava, yeah.
Yeah, can you hear me?
Yeah.
Great.
So it ends in brook?
Brook, yes.
It's not that hard.
I'm not being cute.
Ava, so we're talking about what's happening in the Netherlands.
So nitrogen and ammonia...
Are produced by the farm animals and by the fertilizer.
And they are problems according, I mean serious problems according to the Netherlands government because they contribute to carbon pollution.
Is that correct?
It contributes to what they say.
Climate issues.
Yeah, climate change, right.
Okay, fine.
So, I want people to understand what we're talking about.
How many people live in the Netherlands?
19 million.
So, ladies and gentlemen, please understand how perverse this is.
Although, it's not as perverse as the, or not more perverse than the National Education Association's bill.
To stop calling mothers mothers in American schools, but rather, what is the term?
Nursing persons or birthing persons.
So 19 million people live in the Netherlands.
There are 7 billion people on Earth.
If the Netherlands fell into the sea tomorrow, it would have zero impact, as close to zero as Yes,
you are.
It would have zero effect on climate change, quote-unquote.
But what it would have a serious effect on is the food supply.
Like I said, the Netherlands, although we are such a tiny country, are the second largest exporter of agricultural products.
So ordinary civilians will notice this if this goes through in their supermarkets.
And that's exactly what the farmers have been trying to show with their protests when they blocked the distribution centers because immediately you could see that the shelves in Dutch supermarkets were empty.
So that's what they're trying to say to the people.
Don't let this happen because without farmers, you have no food.
And the fact that they're doing this shows that it's part of another agenda.
Obviously, this needs to happen by 2030, which rings a bell.
The 2030 climate agenda, the 2030 UN agenda, the Great Reset.
They want to get rid of these farmers because they take up too much land.
They're God-fearing, hardworking, honest people who are self-sufficient.
And if you have a state that wants to have control over citizens, what better way than to get rid of these people that send it away and also to be able to control the food supply?
So people are completely dependent on you.
That's what is really happening here.
And they're covering it up with nice terms about climate change, but that's not the real issue at hand here.
And if you think that that is a disgrace, then you should see how the Dutch police have responded to the farmers protesting.
Go ahead.
How have they?
Two days ago, they actually shot at one of the protesters, peaceful protesters, who turned out to be only a 16-year-old farmer's boy.
He was driving away from the scene, and they shot at him.
And if you know anything about the Netherlands, you will know that this is extremely rare for us to happen.
First of all, we don't carry guns, which is, I would say, partly the problem here.
It's partly one of the reasons why we are in this mess right now and why we are not able to defend ourselves.
But also the police usually refrain from using violence unless there is an immediate threat to the police officer's life.
Well, that was clearly not the case here.
And what did they do?
They tried to frame it and say that the boy was trying to drive his tractor into a crowd of people.
It's been shown now that that's all been a lie.
They dropped the charges against him.
But yet, this is how they've responded, and this is how they continue to respond, with brute force.
So we're seeing a state that is not just expropriating people, taking away their livelihood, but they're also meeting them with force when they try to prevent it from happening.
I'd say this doesn't get any worse.
It's communism to the T. So it seems to me, looking at the big picture, that there's a competition between Canada and the Netherlands.
For the country that most wants to emulate the Soviet Union.
Is that an unfair characterization?
No, I don't think so.
It's a competition, but it's a partnership, you could say.
Because the leader of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and our Prime Minister, Mark Zeta, are good friends.
And they are both apprentices of Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum.
That explains a lot.
Yeah, no, they're rolling out his agenda.
This is all in line with the globalist narrative, with the environmental rules that are being implemented to take control over ordinary civilians.
That's it.
This has nothing to do with good intent.
Is there anybody, do you have anything analogous to Fox News or talk radio or big internet sites, PragerU, Daily Wire?
That are saying what you're saying?
No, and that's the problem.
The entire mainstream media in the Netherlands, it would make you believe that nobody supports the farmers, even though the majority of the Dutch people, in fact, support the farmers.
It's absolutely how, hand-in-hand, the state authoritarianism goes with the way that our reporters are talking.
That's correct.
All right, stay on with me if you would, Ava.
Canada and the Netherlands.
Dennis Prager here.
Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast.
To hear the entire three hours of my radio show, commercial-free, every single day.
You'll also get access to 15 years' worth of archives, as well as the daily show prep.
▲
Export Selection