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March 14, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
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Dennis Prager here.
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Hi, everybody!
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
And just a word to my guys here.
The same issue.
Okay, now I hear me better.
We're doing good.
All right, nice.
Hi, I'm in Minnesota, everyone.
You know, a week without an airplane, I get sort of jittery.
So here I am.
They say they have two seasons in Minnesota.
I just learned this phrase today.
What is it?
Winter and construction.
That's very cute.
I learned that the hard way, I must say, coming here.
Victor Davis Hanson has a very powerful piece, unfortunately.
In American Greatness, it's called The Sovietization of American Life.
The amazing thing is, I would say at least half of America would not understand the title of his article, and certainly virtually no young person.
I wonder if you said to the average, I forget the word average, I wonder if you said to most juniors at Princeton University, what does the Sovietization of American life mean?
I think that most of them would not know.
The ignorance of history.
I lament all the time.
The Lack of the Teaching of Wisdom.
It's my column today.
I hope you'll see it.
It's at denisprager.com and it's at townhall.com later in the week.
It goes elsewhere as well.
Many other sites.
And I lament the lack of teaching of wisdom with the reliance on feelings.
I have good intentions is now the only thing that matters.
Wisdom, virtue, even knowledge doesn't matter.
So not only do we teach little in terms of wisdom, we teach little in terms of knowledge as well.
So I don't think they would understand the Sovietization of American life.
I never thought I would live to see the day where a person I respected Would write a column titled, The Sovietization of American Life.
One day historians will look back, Hansen writes, at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022, to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable.
And antithetical to its founding principles.
Sovietization is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology.
It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates.
Ultimately, such regimentation destroys a state.
Since dogma wars...
And defeats, wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom.
The law is no longer blind and distraught, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused.
Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles.
Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress.
And is hauled off in cuffs and leg irons.
James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress and were rewarded with television contracts.
Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home.
Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt.
A set-up, George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge.
So goes the new American Commissariat.
The one-party state is Sovietized.
It's talking about California here.
Public policy is no longer empirical, but subservient to green, diversity, equity, and inclusion dogmas, and detached from the reality of daily middle-class existence.
Decline is ensured once ideology governs problem-solving rather than time-tested and successful policymaking.
In a similar fashion, the common denominator in Joe Biden's two years of colossal failures is Soviet-like edicts of equity, climate change, and neo-socialist redistribution that have ensured for the non-elite in any event.
Soaring inflation, unaffordable energy, rampant crime, and catastrophic illegal immigration.
Playing the role of Pravda, that was the Soviet communist newspaper, which lied, but it was called truth.
That's what Pravda means.
Biden and his team simply denied things were bad.
Relabeled failure as success.
And attacked his predecessor and critics as various sorts of counter-revolutionaries.
Regarding the soaring crime, there was a case in Los Angeles of a boy, a 19-year-old boy, smashing his car into a woman who was walking while strolling her Baby.
Baby was in the stroller.
She was walking.
He hit them both and then drove away.
It's all on video.
You can see it.
Tucker Carlson showed it last night.
And the boy had already just been allowed out.
He had already committed a crime.
He was out because we don't...
George Gascon, the DA of Los Angeles, does not prosecute violent crime, generally speaking, and there's a reason.
I knew this reason when I was in high school.
The left does not hate evil.
The left hates the right.
It's an extremely important observation.
And I understood it because the left did not hate communism.
As I am biblically oriented, why wouldn't I be?
It's the wisest book ever written.
There is a line, which is my favorite line in the entire Bible.
Those of you who love God must hate evil.
It's a command.
Hebrew has a command form.
English does not.
So it's not always translated correctly, but it's the command form.
If you love God, you must hate evil.
If you don't hate evil, you don't love God.
I can't tell you how important, or I can tell you.
Maybe I can't properly tell you how important I find that verse.
People in general have not hated evil.
They have feared it.
But they have not hated it.
They have made peace with it.
Because to confront it is frightening for many people.
It's very easy to fight evangelical Christians because you know you won't get hurt.
But if you fight Black Lives Matter, Then you might get hurt.
I don't mean beaten up and killed.
I mean lose your job.
Nobody's lost a job because they took on evangelical Christians.
Is that fair to say?
There's not much of a censorship culture there.
Cancel culture.
So the boy who hit the...
Mother pushing her child in a stroller and then drove away, this 19-year-old monster, was given, I don't know, virtually no sentence by George Gascon.
That's who people elected, after all.
I would say they get what they deserve, but the problem is...
The people who suffer are not the ones who voted for him, generally speaking.
But there is a very interesting aspect to this story about the driver hitting the woman, putting her child in a stroller, that has not gone commented on.
A guy in an SUV, or a woman, I don't know, a man or a woman in an SUV, saw what happened.
Saw when this young monster drove away and smashed his car into the boy's car.
I want to know who that hero is.
We need models of goodness.
Back in a moment.
The left's radical gender ideology is seeped into children's classrooms, medical terminology.
And into our everyday life.
It's producing a generation of psychologically infantile and confused young people, and this radical ideology is trying to erase the people who brought us all into this world, women.
Now, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire is taking matters into his own hands.
He recently embarked on a journey around the world to ask one simple question, what is a woman?
And you'd be surprised not only how few are capable of answering, But also how many have a completely twisted idea of what a woman is.
Thankfully, he got his whole experience on film, the documentary they don't want you to see, What is a Woman?
You can check it out today at dailywire.com slash Prager.
Radical gender ideologies have a not-so-secret agenda, and this film exposes them all.
Watch What is a Woman at dailywire.com slash Prager.
Hi, everybody.
I want to remind you, Victor Davis Hanson, one of our major thinkers, is speaking about the Sovietization of American life.
And I am reading to you from this very sobering article about what is happening in America.
Our diversity statements required for hiring at many universities are becoming comparable.
To Soviet certifications of proper Marxist-Leninist fidelity.
Marxist-Leninist fidelity.
Like the children of Soviet party apparatchiks, privileged university students now openly attack faculty whose reading requirements or lectures supposedly exude sense of colonialism or imperialism or white supremacy.
He's so right.
That was my field of study, as many of you know, Soviet Union, Communism, Eastern Europe.
But I went there many times to these communist countries and the Soviet Union, and I'm very well acquainted with it.
This is exactly what happened.
Students were required to show their Marxist-Leninist fidelity.
So were teachers.
And faculty were attacked if they deviated from the party line.
Deviated from the party line.
You deviate from the Democratic Party line, you may lose your job.
I will have a professor on from Georgetown University who just left Georgetown because it's another cesspool, another Soviet cesspool.
It is not possible to overstate.
How bad our universities have become, followed by our high schools and elementary schools.
It is something that is so sad to report to you.
And if you have kids in school, my heart breaks for you.
Either a religious school or a charter school that is actually committed to education rather than Sovietized indoctrination.
Or homeschooling are the only alternatives.
The most precious thing you have in your life is your child.
So, why would you gamble?
Faculty increasingly fear offering merit evaluation in terror that diversity commissars might detect in their grading An absence of repertory race or gender appraisals.
The result is still more public cynicism about higher education because it is apparent that the goal is to graduate with a stamp from Yale or Stanford that ensures prestige, success, and ideological correctness on the supposition that few will ever worry exactly what or how one did while enrolled.
It's an interesting question I don't know the answer to.
Does a degree from one of these universities carry the same prestige as it did even ten years ago?
I have no different view of you if you graduated Stanford than if you graduated some state university that is not well known.
You were brainwashed in either case.
You probably went along like a sheep.
Just to get a grade.
You've been indoctrinated to hate the greatest country ever made.
You've been taught to be a moral idiot, thinking that George Washington was a bad man.
That's what I assume, whether you went to Stanford or Boise State.
As the Soviets and Maoists discovered, and as was true of the Jacobins, National Socialists, and Cultural Marxists, once radical ideology defines success, then life in general becomes anti-meritocratic.
The public privately equates awards and recognition with political fealty, not actual achievement.
Were recent Netflix productions reflections of merit, or of ideological criteria governing race and gender?
Do the Emmys, Tonys, or Oscars convey recognition of talent, or of adherence to progressive agendas of diversity, equity, and inclusion?
Does a Pulitzer Prize, a Ford Foundation grant, or a MacArthur Award denote talent and achievement?
Or more often promote diversity, equity, and inclusion narratives.
That's correct.
Where does woke Sovietization end once accountability vanishes and ideology masks incompetence and malfeasance?
We are starting to see the final denouement with missing baby formula.
Epidemics of shootings and hate crimes, train robbings reminiscent of the Wild West in Los Angeles, Tombstone-esque shoot-up Saturday nights in Chicago, spiking electricity rates and brownouts, $7 a gallon diesel fuel, unaffordable and scarce meat, and entire industries from air travel to home construction that simply no longer work.
Everyone knows that the status of our homeless population in Los Angeles or San Francisco is medieval, dangerous, and unhealthy.
And everyone knows that any serious attempt to remedy the situation would cause one to be labeled an apostate, counter-revolutionary, and enemy of the people.
So, like good Eastern Europeans of the Warsaw Pact in the 1960s, we mutter one thing under our breath.
And nod another publicly.
Behind all our disasters, there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world, without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside, the nomenklatura, the nomenklatura with the bureaucrats of communism.
We'll be back.
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AmericanFederal.com Hi everybody, I'm Dennis Prager and I have the honor, I don't often say that, to have as my guest right now, Ilya Shapiro.
He just resigned from Georgetown Law School, Georgetown University Law School.
He was hired to head the Law School Center for the Constitution.
And he resigned this week in an act of great courage.
He was being hounded because of a tweet that he had sent out.
We'll review the tweet in a moment.
I told him off the air that he is heroic, and I don't expect him or even want him to react.
But I want every one of you to know that that is how I regard this man.
Courage is the rarest of all the good traits in the human species, and when I meet such a human being, it is encouraging, to say the least.
So, Professor Shapiro, let me begin with having people understand the context of your resignation.
It began with your being attacked for a tweet you had sent out.
And do you have the entire tweet in front of you or memorized?
I do.
I do.
Here's what I wrote.
Late at night, while doom-scrolling, bad practice.
Don't do that in a hotel room.
If I had been at home rather than on a business trip, this wouldn't have happened.
I'd be in bed with my wife.
But this was the day that news of Justice Breyer's retirement broke, and I was...
Doing media all day, putting out statements and whatnot, because I was at Cato almost 15 years and head of their con law shop, commenting on the Supreme Court, about which I've written a book.
You can see it behind my head, Supreme Disorder, Judicial Nominations, and the Politics of America's Highest Court, coming out in paperback July 5th, updated for the last two years.
And so I was getting more and more upset about President Biden's decision to limit his pool of potential Candidates, nominees for the Supreme Court by race and gender.
So I tweeted, objectively, best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog and V smart.
You have to shorten things on Twitter.
There's a character limit, which contributed to what I admitted was poor phrasing overall.
So I said, solid progressive, very smart.
Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian or ends Indian American.
He's an Indian immigrant, as it happens.
The chief judge of the D.C. Circuit.
But alas, doesn't fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy.
So we'll get lesser black woman.
And it's those three words that got me into trouble.
They were maliciously misinterpreted as suggesting that no black woman could ever be qualified for the Supreme Court or that all black women were lesser as humans, I guess, than all other people.
And as I've written before, as I've explained, you have to be acting in extreme bad faith wanting to get me fired and otherwise to interpret that in something other than the standard critique that 76% of Americans agree that Biden should have considered all possible candidates, not just restricting them by race and sex.
But anyway, I tweeted that.
I went to bed January 26th.
I woke up and a firestorm had erupted online very soon, moving.
Offline to Georgetown, those were a few days of hell.
And then the dean announced that I would be onboarded, this was a few days before I was due to start at Georgetown, I would be onboarded and immediately put on paid administrative leave pending investigation into whether that tweet, there were another couple of tweets, the focus was just on that one and those three words, lesser black woman.
Whether that violated the university's anti-harassment and discrimination policy.
So I went from four days of hell to what turned out to be four days of purgatory.
And, you know, just a bizarre process which culminated last Thursday with a decision to reinstate me because it turns out it took them four months to figure out that I was not an employee when I tweeted.
So these policies weren't applicable to me.
That was the resolution.
I took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to celebrate that technical victory.
But then I realized in the ensuing few days, as I delved into the report by the diversity officials, the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Affirmative Action Office, that they were setting me up for a fall and that this was a slow motion firing.
This was no protection of speech whatsoever.
Clearly, I would not be able to fulfill the duties of the job for which I was hired.
All right, Professor Shapiro.
All right, hold on.
Forgive me, because we have to take a break.
It's extremely important that we continue.
Ilya Shapiro, a courageous professor, which is an oxymoron in America today.
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I am speaking with Professor Ilya Shapiro until yesterday or the day before at Georgetown Law School.
A highly esteemed professor there.
Constitutional law.
What is the name of your book so I can promote it?
Supreme disorder, judicial nominations, and the politics of America's highest court.
And sorry I ran long there, the previous segment.
I almost got to the end of the whole story, which is that after reviewing the documents I got from the diversity administrators, it became clear that it would be untenable for me to remain because what they had set up was a situation where If in future anything I said someone found offensive or made them uncomfortable, that would constitute a hostile educational environment and I would be subject to discipline.
And so in my resignation letter and Wall Street Journal op-ed from yesterday, from Monday, I speculated on some very realistic-seeming hypotheticals about what could happen and how that could get me in trouble, commenting on Supreme Court opinions on abortion or guns or the argument this fall on affirmative commenting on Supreme Court opinions on abortion or guns or the All of those obviously things that are part of my job description but which would immediately get me into hot water.
So rather than play that kind of game or try to walk on eggshells, I said this is untenable and I resigned.
For good reason.
The examples you gave were...
In fact, as I read your piece in the Wall Street Journal, I was thinking, wait, did he actually say this, or is he offering possible things that he could say?
That's how realistic your examples were of what could get you in trouble at Georgetown.
So whenever I speak to a professor in your position, and it is not often because most professors are sheep, I ask them, Did you get any support from any of your colleagues?
Well, there's Randy Barnett, who's the faculty director of the center.
Of all of the about 150 faculty members at Georgetown, I think three and a half are not on the left.
So, yeah, they supported me in various respects.
The three and a half?
You mean the three and a half?
Yes.
So...
There was, you know, David Cole, who's on the faculty, who's the ACLU's legal director, wrote an op-ed saying, of course, what I did was terrible, but it shouldn't be a fireable offense because, after all, it was free speech.
So that's, you know, that's something.
But that's about it.
Well, it is something because the ACLU does not protect free speech anymore.
So the ACLU has become another left-wing organization suppressing free speech.
So...
Forgive me, and you don't have to answer anything I ask, obviously.
But I'm curious.
How shall I phrase this?
Are you disappointed?
or in you you're not even shocked at the reactions of your colleagues um I'm not surprised yet Yeah.
I mean, initially, when the scandal first broke at the end of January, I saw some of the commentary on the faculty listserv.
But the thing is, that's not necessarily representative.
You said most professors are sheep, and most professors are sheep.
They're not, even at a place like Georgetown, woke radicals.
There's a critical mass of that.
There's a critical mass of almost anything other than conservatives, because it's a large faculty.
But most faculty were silent.
That doesn't surprise me any more than the fact that a vocal radical minority were out for my head.
I'm saddened by the whole situation, by the whole process.
I left Cato after 15 years because I thought I could accomplish something and I could have a different sort of impact and have a new challenge and teach students, which I enjoy.
And I'm saddened that that became impossible.
But I'm not – once the scandal broke, I'm not necessarily surprised by anything that happened after that.
When I said most faculty...
Most professors are sheep.
I chose my words very carefully.
I didn't say most of them are woke.
What you described is exactly what I have perceived.
The sheep-like behavior of the majority and the handful of the woke mob calling the shots at any given school.
What about students?
Did students generally join the mob?
Or stay quiet or what?
Well, you wouldn't have learned this from reading most media, but there was a quite significant...
Counterletter.
There was the famous letter that was signed by something like 18 or 20 different identity groups led by the Black Lost Students Association and ultimately had something like 1,000 signatures on it.
Many of these people who were pressured to sign because silence is violence, as they say.
But there was a counterletter that was organized by an organization at Georgetown called the Conservative and Libertarian Students Association, or CALSA. Both the students and alumni as well.
I orchestrated pressure in my support, and certainly students did drop me lines saying that they hope that I survive this and they'd love to take a class from me, and how they sympathize because they themselves cannot feel like they cannot speak out or speak their minds, whether it's in class or social situations at the law school.
What was your situation at Georgetown prior to your tweet?
I had just been hired.
I signed my offer letter early, mid-January.
The hiring was announced January 21st to a lot of fanfare.
The dean, I think, genuinely was happy to hire me.
Now there would be four and a half non-progressives, I guess, on faculty.
It was a university-wide announcement of my hiring.
And that was January 21st.
And five days later, there was a university-wide condemnation of me by the dean for my appalling tweet that suggested that no black woman could ever serve on the Supreme Court in his mischaracterization.
So that's how it happened.
All right.
We'll be back in a moment.
Ilya Shapiro is my guest, formerly of Georgetown Law School.
How could I possibly have needed so much more?
So the question that I'm posing is not, are people basically good?
That's like asking, is water wet?
We all know the answer to the question, is water wet?
We all know that people are not innately good.
So the question that plagues me is, why do people believe it?
I'll tell you one reason, and then I'm going to go into what I just received from Dr. Stephen Marmer, the psychiatrist.
Because we discussed this just a few days ago at our synagogue in light of my upcoming debate tomorrow night with a, unfortunately, it turns out to be a rabbi who believes that people are basically good.
So, again, PragerDebate.com if you're in the Southern California area.
So one of my...
The speculations as to why people believe something that is obviously not so, like believing that people are innately good, is that they live in America.
And there's so many decent people around them that they get naive.
I think that's a very big factor.
I think if you asked the average individual In a country where the people were not as decent as in this one, they would laugh at you for even asking the question.
So I'm going to read to you from the psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Marmer.
The initial reason for wanting to believe everyone is basically good comes from the very beginning of life.
A newborn will not survive without those in his world being good.
The psychological survival, as well as the physical survival, depends on having a good mother and, if possible, a whole good family.
When things are consistent, the baby can be in a calm state.
If things are inconsistent, if mother is not dependable, or if she has her own psychiatric illness, or is an addict, or anything else that takes away from her consistent good treatment of the baby, The child will be in a state of anxiety or depression which will lead to physical and emotional dysregulation.
Furthermore, in this childhood period of development, the baby needs to do nothing in particular to earn the goodness around him.
Only later in development does the child learn that he has to take initiative and he has to exhibit goodness to induce others to be good to him.
So the first reason is, one, I also believe, or the second reason I gave the first reason about Americans being mostly decent, is it is a desire to remain a child.
Children need to believe that the world is good.
And when you grow up, you realize that's just not the case.
There are good people, of course.
But you have to work on being good.
There are good pianists, but you have to work on being a pianist.
Nobody is naturally a pianist.
Even if they have a natural gift, they have to study it.
They have to be taught it.
So I agree.
I have long believed it is a desire to remain in a childlike state.
Oh, people are sweet and good and kind, and I feel better about life.
Number two, the second reason for wanting to believe everyone is basically good comes from not wanting to look into our own dark side.
Once we recognize that people can be both good and bad, we have to acknowledge that we too can be and are both good and bad.
Many people, especially narcissistic and immature people, refuse to acknowledge that they have a dark side within them.
You can exempt yourself from examining your own cruel, sadistic, angry, selfish side by convincing yourself that people, including yourself, are essentially good.
No question that is a reason.
The third from Dr. Marmer.
You said...
That it is not rational, you, Dennis, said that it is not rational to ignore all the evil and badness history reveals to be intrinsic to the human condition.
That is true, but some people would rather live in the illusion, and when confronted by various instances of badness, blame not the person, but some other outside agency, economic, society, discrimination, or some such.
That way, no individual needs to take personal responsibility for their bad actions.
It's a sort of variation on, the devil made me do it.
And finally, reason four, yes, economic society and even acts of nature put stresses on us and evoke and draw out the worst side of people, often affecting people who are striving to be good and be at their best.
The acknowledgement that we have the most leverage not on society or economics or climate, but on ourselves, is chronically avoided by many.
At the end of the day, as Shakespeare put it, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
But they don't teach Shakespeare anymore because he's a white male.
Of course.
Why would we want to study a white male named Shakespeare?
Yes, they took down the Department of English at that silly institution called the University of Pennsylvania.
They took down the mural of Shakespeare because he was a white male.
And they put up...
A non-white gay female whom nobody heard of.
Because you're not judged by your wisdom.
You're judged by your sexual proclivities, gender, and race.
What's our story, Sean?
We shall return in a moment.
1-8 Prager, 7-7-6.
Why do people believe nonsense?
Specifically this one.
Hey everybody, I'm Dennis Prager.
This is the Ultimate Issues Hour.
I'm preparing intellectually for my debate tomorrow night, though I talked about this all of my life.
And the debate about is man innately good, which the person I'm debating believes, and of course, to me it's not an issue of belief.
So my question to you today is not are people basically good.
I don't think that the case needs to be made any longer, that we're not.
We're not basically evil either, in my opinion, but we're not basically good.
It's why do people believe it?
And I've given you a number of reasons.
All right, let's see what you folks have to say here.
Nova Scotia, Canada.
Alex, hello.
Alex.
Hi.
Shalom.
Hi.
Hi.
Thank you.
Dennis, you're going to have a debate with the rabbi.
He should know that the Jewish scriptures support your position.
And I'm sure you would agree with Job in Job 14 and 1, that man that is born of a woman is a few days and full of trouble.
And in the Psalms, it says that, "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me." Oh, listen, my friend, I thank you for the call.
The number of scriptures that back up my position.
I mean, how about this?
Don't follow your heart after which you prostitute yourself.
Or the heart is deceptive.
If we're basically good, shouldn't we follow our heart?
Can you think of a worse idea in life than follow your heart?
I can't.
No, really, come up with a worse idea other than go to college.
Give me a worse idea.
I can't think of one.
All right.
I thank you.
Very good.
Holtzville, New York.
And Nick, hello.
Hello, Dennis.
I love your show, and I'd never miss a fireside chat.
Oh, wonderful.
Thank you.
Sure.
One thing you used to say when I first heard you years ago was making people think a second time.
That's right, yes.
So, along with that, I think you should ask the question a little bit differently.
Are people naturally good rather than are people basically good?
I think it would make people think before they answer.
Precisely for the reason that your psychologist friend just stated, if people haven't, if they live in a bubble, like liberals and leftists often do, and they haven't encountered anyone evil lately, they'll say, yeah, everybody's really nice.
You know, they just won't think about it.
Yeah, you're right.
Basically is not a good idea.
You're right.
Because you're sort of asking at the present time, are they basically good?
You're right.
But the debate title is not basically.
It's innately.
So it meets your objection.
I just want you to know.
It's an excellent point.
I should not use basically.
That's true.
Anyway, that's very good.
I appreciate that.
It was a good insight.
All right, let's see here.
Remember, I'm really interested.
A lot of you have fine points here, but I'm really asking, why do people believe what is so obviously nonsense, that people are innately good, born good, if you will?
I love the one about, well, babies are born good.
Really?
Babies do good?
That's as stupid as babies are evil.
Babies are neither.
They have no free will.
You can't even attribute good and evil to a baby.
Babies are good?
Babies are preoccupied.
With one thing.
Me.
Or as I used to put it, I want mommy, I want milk, I want nipple.
And if you do not give me all of these things immediately, I will ruin your life.
Why is that good?
That's good?
Yeah.
You have no idea how much charity my baby gives.
I have a very charitable baby.
That's remarkable.
No kidding.
Yeah, hi everybody.
So I'm thinking about my debate tomorrow night.
Are people innately good?
If you're in Southern California, I'd love to see you there because it's important.
You know, let me just philosophize for a moment about the debate itself and people going...
We need to resurrect the joy of live intellectual debate.
It was such a big part of American history, and now it doesn't even occur.
I mean, it's so rare, actually.
For that alone, you should go if you can.
I mean, I got people here.
I'm in Minnesota now.
I know one person who was flying.
To L.A. to go to the debate.
Me.
Yeah.
There you go.
That's pretty dramatic, eh?
Oh, boy.
be.
Anyway, let's go to PragerDebate.com and bring kids.
So my question is not, are people innately good?
The answer is so obvious to me that I don't think it's...
Well, it will be debated, but I don't think it's debatable.
What is interesting is why do people believe that?
That's the question.
It's like, why do people believe that you can print trillions of dollars of currency and not have inflation?
How do you believe that?
Right?
It's like saying, there's no gravity.
It's the absurdity of it.
It's so self-evidently wrong.
And yet, do you know that, what was it, 20, 21, 17?
Between 17 and 21, one of those numbers.
Of Nobel Prize winning economists said last year, or earlier this year, that printing trillions of dollars will have no inflationary effect.
Nobel Prize winners in economics.
As soon as I hear the word expert, I assume what I will hear is stupid.
And that's not always true, but I assume it.
Ah, Pittsburgh, Dave, the famous Dave of Pittsburgh.
Hello.
Hi, Dennis.
How are you?
Thanks for taking my call.
Yes, sir.
I look at it more from, I guess, a macro view in that, you know, there's, what, 7.5 billion people in the world?
And if people weren't, you know, basically good, and I want to get into that in a second here, I mean, civilization would fall apart.
And as far as the police, if you think about it, police protect us from the absolute minute minority of really bad, evil people.
And I'll use the Wild Wild West as an example.
So you didn't have a cop on every corner, but every guy had a gun in his holster.
So I guess I'm looking at it more from a circumstantial perspective.
And by the way, I've...
Right, so let me...
All right, so even though it's not...
I took your call knowing it wasn't exactly answering my question, why do people believe it?
But since you believe it, it's good that I took your call.
So just in a nutshell, civilization regularly does collapse.
Your question, why doesn't civilization collapse?
Ask a Jew in Germany or Poland or Hungary or Romania.
Whether civilization collapsed in the 1930s and 40s.
Ask a Chinese if civilization collapsed in the 1960s and 50s in China.
Ask North Koreans if civilization has collapsed since the establishment of North Korea.
Civilization collapses a lot.
In Rwanda, a million people were killed by machete in the 1990s.
Not guns.
Not gas.
Machetes.
Civilization collapsed.
Civilization collapses a lot.
But, Dennis, I'm looking at the numbers.
I agree with you.
But numbers-wise, it's a small percentage.
And those things are caused by the few very evil, evil people that made those things collapse.
Okay, so that's a good question, too.
So if people are innately good, how do you explain these very evil people?
I just think that there's evil in the world, and I'm not saying that people are all saints.
No, no, no.
You know I'm not giving you a hard time.
If you say you don't even know, that's okay with me.
But how do you, to yourself, explain the existence of these evil people if we're innately good?
I just think that some people are innately evil.
There's evil in the world, and some people just go off on the deep end and continue going and going and going, whether it's selfishness.
Wait, wait, wait.
So do we have free will?
So it's just the innately good versus the innately evil?
I just think that generally, I mean, you walk into a bank, you walk into a grocery store, you go to another country.
I mean, the majority of people aren't killing each other or stealing or doing any of those things.
Oh, I think the majority of people would steal if they could get away with it.
I don't agree with you on that.
You're right about murder under most circumstances.
I think that's true.
Stealing?
Is cheating on a test stealing?
I think it is.
My high school class, it was a small school relatively, 120 kids in my grade.
Three of us didn't cheat.
Three.
Because I know I led an anti-cheating campaign in high school.
If people knew that they could get away with forging a name, not get caught, there's no chance on earth, God himself promised them they wouldn't get caught, you think that most people would resist the urge to get a million dollars by cheating?
Or a hundred dollars?
I don't.
Back in a moment.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Hey everybody.
Final segment of the Ultimate Issues Hour.
Third hour every Tuesday.
Coming to you from Minnesota.
The land of nice people who vote into office.
Not nice people.
Minnesota shook me up.
I'm not kidding.
There's big, big realizations of life that you could be nice and stupid.
That should be the license plate here and in Massachusetts.
Nice and stupid.
Anyway, but listen, it's not...
In New York, it's just stupid, because there it's not nice.
See, there's a difference.
California's a mixture.
Oh, boy.
So my subject is, why do people believe the foolish notion that people are innately good?
Because I'm debating the subject tomorrow night.
Again, PragerDebate.com.
You should bring your kids.
It's a very important thing to have an intellectual life and be entertained.
I mean, it is.
In the best sense, it's entertaining.
It's in Beverly Hills, California.
By the way, tomorrow night.
I fly home late, late, late tonight, broadcast tomorrow, and then do the debate.
Busy day.
I like being busy.
My friends, how many times did you say to your child, say thank you?
10,000?
I would say probably about 10,000 times.
If we're born good, wouldn't once suffice?
Oh, of course, Mom.
I'm a good soul, so I want to express gratitude.
If your kid said that, I would rush them to a psychiatrist.
Can you imagine a kid saying that?
Actually, it would actually somewhat scare me.
If my kid had said, you know, he should say, thank you.
Dad, you are so right.
I can't believe I didn't express my gratitude that I feel so deeply.
I would have thought, oh my God.
This is a scary, scary moment.
Right?
All right.
Hey, listen.
Steve, Calvin, Dean, Thomas, Peter, Chad, John.
Not one woman.
That's interesting.
I don't know why.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow night.
PragerDebate.com.
Back in L.A. tomorrow.
Thanks for listening.
Dennis Prager here.
Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast.
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