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June 20, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:19:42
Deep Blue Sea
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Dennis Prager here.
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Dennis Prager Show.
A frightening drama is taking place, human drama, in the North Atlantic Ocean, two and a half miles down.
I read to you from the BBC. A massive search and rescue operation is underway in the mid-Atlantic after a tourist submarine went missing during a dive to Titanic's wreck on Sunday.
Contact with the small sub was lost about an hour and 45 minutes into its dive.
Tour firm Ocean Gate said all options were being explored to rescue the five people on board.
Tickets cost a quarter of a million dollars for an eight-day trip, including dives to the wreck at a depth of 12,500 feet.
Titanic's wreck lies from 435 miles south of St. John's, Newfoundland.
Though the rescue mission is being run from Boston.
Well, this is what I recall I read a lot about this last night.
They only have oxygen to last until Thursday morning.
The trip, as it were, was supposed to be, I think, a number of hours.
And so there is also a risk of hypothermia as it is cold in there.
It is dark.
There is no place to sit as well.
So they have claustrophobia, hypothermia, loss of oxygen, and a fairly hopeless situation.
You know, there is so much tragedy on Earth, and I don't tend to report...
No, I dropped the word 10. I cannot report all of them, because it would entail 24-7 speaking.
And then you would not even cover a fraction, or any more than a small fraction.
Nevertheless, some things obviously grip you.
I obviously truly hope that they will be rescued.
I don't know how a rescue would look.
At that depth, divers cannot go out.
I assume the ocean pressure is way, way, way too much for a human being to be out there at that depth.
So what could go down to that depth?
I think it's two and a half miles.
What is 12,000?
What did I say to you in terms of feet?
What was that number?
No, no, no, no.
Yeah, you're very good, Sean.
Very close.
12,500.
But you did say 12,600 to me.
So I want the audience to know that.
That you were close, but as they say, no cigar.
No, it's really a tragedy.
I philosophize about these matters from many directions.
If indeed, God forbid, they are not rescued and they have this terrible death that slowly dawns upon them as the oxygen...
And cold take their lives.
One of them is the billionaire who made this possible.
He obviously believed in it.
The human desire for an exciting thing, for something exciting to take place is very, very keen.
I don't say this And anyway, to attack any of them for going.
I'm just trying to explain it.
And I ask myself, had I been offered a free ticket when I have gone?
And one answer is, look, if the billionaire who funds it is going, he must know how safe it is.
Which is a perfectly logical...
Assumption to make.
But did he know that if something went awry, the chances of being rescued are minimal?
People do things for excitement.
The human being wants to be excited.
That's why people climb Everest.
Well, they climb Everest for the excitement and they climb Everest for the ability to say, I did it.
Again, this is no critique.
This is the human condition that I'm describing, not a criticism of people.
But one, I think, should ask oneself when taking risks, what am I taking the risk for?
Is it excitement?
Is it to be able to say, I did it?
Or is it intrinsically worthwhile?
That last part is a very important part.
Now, I love excitement as much as anyone.
I'm very rational and I take risks that I think are worth it for, let's say, a cause.
I'm going to go ahead.
But to say that I did it, my own inclination would not be to go into the submarine, but if offered a free ticket and reassurance of how safe it is, I don't know what I would have responded.
People who risked their lives to fight communism or Nazism, for example, that's different.
They certainly were not pursuing excitement, and they certainly were not doing it so that they could say they did it.
So one has to ask, in every instance, What is the cost benefit in any given act?
I did not take the coronavirus vaccine.
I weighed the evidence and it argued to me against taking it.
I was assured by experts in whom I have no trust.
None.
Zero.
Why would I listen to experts about what I should do in something that had not been tested?
I listened to experts with regard to knowledge that I don't have.
But prescription and knowledge are not at all the same.
A lot of people were hurt by that vaccine, and I don't know how many were helped.
Countries that had no access to it seem to have done quite well.
Countries with massive vaccination, like ours, didn't do particularly well at all.
It is very necessary to use the gift that God gave us of reason.
If you don't believe in God, who gave us reason?
It's a pretty silly notion that reason came about on its own.
Everything came about on its own, and I'm supposed to believe, right?
Don't experts tell me that?
Oh, everything came about on its own.
Really?
Is that an arena where you think the experts know what the hell they're talking about?
They don't have a clue how life developed.
Not a clue.
They don't have a clue how consciousness developed.
Some meditations on an ongoing human tragedy.
One final word.
I'm tempted to say I'm praying for them.
And I certainly am.
I pray for them.
But reason tells me that there's a lot of prayer made to God that obviously does not go answered, or at least not answered in the way...
we are praying for.
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Hi there all, Dennis Prager here.
It's been riveting my attention.
And I'm not usually riveted by these matters, but for whatever reason, I am.
Daily Mail.
It's not looking good.
Titanic diver who's been to wreck fear's missing ocean gate sub imploded 10,000 feet underwater and that its five occupants are already long dead.
Well, I must say this.
If rescue is impossible, I hope it did implode because that would be very, very close to immediate death.
And I don't want them to suffer.
It's the terror and the suffering that people fear in life more than death itself.
An experienced diver who has traveled far into the depths of the ocean to view the titanic wreckage fears the submersible that vanished on Sunday may have imploded thousands of feet under water.
G. Michael Harris, who said he possibly knows three of the five occupants on board the missing sub, Told Fox News' Jesse Waters, he is not optimistic, they will be rescued and believes there is nothing the U.S. Navy can do.
That's what I think.
What can they do with that depth?
Worst situation is something happened to the hull, and our fear is that it imploded at around 3,200 meters, 10,000 feet, Harris says.
At those depths, the weight of the water would exert extreme pressure on the missing submersible, around 6,000 pounds on each square inch of its hull.
Aha.
Yeah, that's the point at that depth.
All right, I will keep you abreast of it, should there be...
Anything else to report?
By the way, while I'm looking at the Daily Mail page, I see a news item here.
Let me pull that up for you if I can find it, because I just got out of that page.
We have an internet service at my home base that...
Reminds me of dial-up service that they used to have when modems were first made.
I don't know if many of you remember that.
It's really sad.
A lot of technical challenges here.
Yeah, I'm not getting a Daily Mail, Sean, if you want to tell anybody who would care.
We're having issues.
Anyway, the article that I saw was that, Senator Fetterman met the president wearing shorts and a hoodie.
Now, I don't think this has anything to do with something I've not commented on because it's a man's sad condition of intense depression.
But I don't know what depression has to do with a sense of respect for the office of president.
I think Joe Biden is a bad human being.
I've never said that about a president.
A truly bad person.
I think that his wreckage of this country is deliberate, and I loathe him.
However, he is the president of the United States, and you do not meet the president in shorts and a hoodie, whether you're a senator or not.
I have long, as many of you know, long noted that clothing is of immense significance to a society.
And the move away from formal clothing, including people going to church with an argument that many wonderful people, because bad ideas affect good people too.
And they think, God doesn't care what we wear.
I don't believe that, by the way.
I don't believe that for one second.
God doesn't care what you wear into a house of worship?
Really?
Where'd you get that idea?
Does he care about what your pastor or your priest wears?
When you dress up better for if you were, let's say, invited to the Academy Awards and you dressed up really, really nicely and then you wore shorts and a t-shirt to church, that's not a statement.
Of which you hold in higher esteem?
I don't care about your feelings.
This is back to the issue that's also infected many religious people.
Society affects everybody.
The notion that how you feel matters has truly affected a lot of religious people.
Well, only matters what I feel, not how I dress.
Yeah, right.
Behavior doesn't matter.
Only feelings do.
Fetterman, whom I can't say I respect either, though I pity, has just brought the country down just another notch with these shorts and hoodie look as a senator.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, anyway, as I was saying about the prayer issue, I think it's a beautiful thing for people to pray for other people.
Absolutely.
But I must admit that my expectations of prayers being answered are minimal because so many people who deserve to have prayers answered did not have them answered.
This is not...
Blasphemous.
This is not...
It's not anything except using my faculty of reason, which is my vehicle to God.
Not feelings.
That gift that He has given us of the mind.
Anyway, I do pray for them.
Because if they are rescued, I'd like them to know that they were prayed for.
All right, I have a great deal to bring to your attention when we return on The Dennis Prager Show.
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When I speak about Joe Biden...
As a bad human being, one of the many, many indications, including perhaps unparalleled amount of corruption, pure stealing, because he was capable of doing so as vice president, his position on fighting for children to be able to decide to change their sex, which you can't do.
It's not possible, ladies and gentlemen.
If you want to know why I have contempt for quote-unquote experts, it is because many experts say that sex slash gender is non-binary.
That is one of the most grotesque, cruel, idiotic lies in the history of the world.
And that is what you're told now in medical school, by the way, by the experts, the same experts who believed that two-year-olds should be masked.
There is no amount of damage that...
People in the sciences can do that will have people skeptical of their next panic-driven recommendation for people.
It is clear.
It doesn't matter.
People have been conditioned not to think.
As soon as they hear studies say, they stop thinking.
Thinking is difficult.
Lawyer for detransitioning woman 18. Do you realize, therefore, she transitioned with doctor's help earlier than 18?
Do you understand that?
I don't know how these doctors sleep well at night except to say to you that as I wrote in a column a few months ago, the conscience is the weakest organ of the body.
You have more strength in your pinky than the vast majority of consciences in the human species.
That's all I can tell you.
Every person who hurts others sleeps well.
Right?
Their conscience.
The only people whose conscience bothers them are good people.
The doctors who are involved, the psychologists, the psychiatrists who are involved in ruining these children's lives, They are at total peace with their conscience.
So are the scum at the ACLU. These people are as committed to civil liberties as you are to child abuse.
Believe me, ACLU lawyers sleep well at night.
They are perfectly at peace with their conscience.
Now, since I'm at peace with my conscience and they're at peace with their conscience, doesn't it show you that the conscience leads you to nothing definitive?
Absolutely nothing?
Zilch!
Feelings trump conscience in most people.
Pursuit of money and fame and excitement are far stronger than the conscience in most people.
Lawyer for detransitioning woman 18 who had surgery age 13?
I can't believe it.
Yeah, I read this headline three times and I missed that.
Maybe because it was so unbelievable.
She had surgery at 13?
Slams doctors at Kaiser Permanente.
There was a time when Kaiser had a good reputation where you assumed that Good people work there.
And there are good people who work there.
And there are bad people who work there.
It says kids should be informed they could outgrow their gender dysphoria.
That's correct.
That's a very, very good point.
The lawsuit was filed June 14th.
That's...
Let's see, five, six days ago.
In California, San Joaquin County Superior Court.
In it, Kayla Lovedal.
I can't tell you how I pity these kids.
When adults ruin child's lives, I have such a hatred for those adults.
Can't you leave them alone?
Says she underwent a single 75-minute evaluation at age 12.
That's what they all report.
That's what they all report.
It's a transgender transitioning mill, our children's hospitals.
There's nothing.
Read my column today.
It's one of the most important I've ever written.
It's at townhall.
It's at dennisprager.com.
Virtually every Tuesday, I have a column out.
I think I'll talk about it in the Ultimate Issues Hour.
Everything the left touches, it destroys.
And that includes children's hospitals.
There are parts of children's hospitals they haven't touched.
So he's suing these doctors.
This girl, I read to you...
Every week, I would say.
Another example, and these are just the ones that are reported, of kids whose lives were ruined by psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians, overwhelmingly female, because they have allowed emotions to overtake concern for children and science.
That's why.
Because we live in the age of stupidity, ushered in by, in the post-World War II era, one of the manifestations of the age of stupidity has, in fact, been that you have to teach boys to control their natures, but not girls.
We have truly lived in a feminized age, which has done no one any good.
No one, including women.
Yeah.
I knew when I was in graduate school in the 1970s that a gigantic lie had been told to me that men and women are basically the same.
I knew it.
I didn't believe it.
I didn't think it.
I didn't feel it.
I knew it.
I knew that my professors were lying to me, but they didn't know they were lying to me.
So are they lying?
That's a question I can't answer.
If you think you're telling the truth, are you lying?
So I would say this.
They told lies thinking they were truths, which is very common.
It's also the most dangerous.
When you believe your lies, there's no hope for you.
And there was no hope for the universities.
I knew it in the 1970s.
I left graduate school after two years to write a book.
That book is still in print.
Most widely read, I believe, Introduction to Judaism in the English Language.
Yep.
Rather than writing yet another thesis about communism in Eastern Europe, that was my field of study, I gave my thesis orally.
And you know who my instructor was at Columbia?
Some of you old enough to remember the name will recognize it.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mika Brzezinski's father, as it happens.
And he was the national security advisor to Jimmy Carter later.
Too bad I don't have pictures.
We didn't have cell phones then.
And even though I was into photography, I didn't think about taking pictures of the people in my life.
I regret that.
Nobody did.
I mean, had I brought a camera to class, it would have been regarded as odd.
Not that I cared if I was regarded as odd.
But if I had a picture of Brzezinski and me and the other six students and the entire thousands of students at Columbia whose field of study was communism or communist affairs, I think that's the way the title was, communist affairs.
I would treasure that picture.
The attorney for a young detransition woman suing several medical professionals over her transition is speaking out, accusing doctors of needlessly performing the altering surgeries on impressionable youngsters in an exclusive interview.
Speaking to DailyMail.com Sunday, Charles LeBandry L-I-M-A-N-D-R-I slammed the recent spate of gender assignment surgery seen since 2015 as, quote, an indoctrination, unquote.
One that caught up his 18-year-old client, Kayla Lovedahl, L-O-V-D-A-H-L, and several others before and since.
Lovedahl was 12. 12!
When she began to transition from female to male with the help of four Bay Area medical professionals, can you think of a worse combination than San Francisco and transitioning?
Can you think of a more harmful combination to children?
I can't.
A decision she quickly came to regret just a few years later.
Such occurrences, LeMandry said, have become increasingly commonplace in recent years, fueled by a recent wave of transgender activism.
The four doctors named in the suit all work for the same Oakland-based firm, Kaiser Permanente, whose two subsidiaries are also named as defendants.
The more these doctors and hospitals are sued, the less you will have it.
Money and ideology.
And doctors as sheep.
Doctors are no worse than other groups, they're just no better.
There are terrific, there are mediocrity, sorry, morally, and there are bad.
Just like every other group.
It's not anti-doctor.
Just don't worship them.
Because they've done a lot of harm in history, and they are now.
LaMantrie, a prominent San Diego lawyer.
Said the firm spent just 75 minutes, that's Kaiser Permanente, 75 minutes vetting his client before providing her with off-label puberty blockers and powerful male hormone drugs.
It's a picture of her.
I feel like I want to adopt her.
It's barbaric and cruel, Amanda told DailyMail.com, of the health professional's actions.
Which culminated...
Oh, no, I didn't read this part.
It's hard for me to read it to you.
In a double mastectomy being performed on his client.
Oh, my God.
Doctors removing healthy young girls' breasts.
And they're proud of themselves.
You know what they should put up at that hospital?
There is no conscience here.
No.
There is a malleable conscience at this hospital.
Sheep work here.
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Yep, what a story, hey?
This is fascinating.
Santa Clarita, California.
Dana, hello.
Hi, Dennis.
Hi.
I feel strongly that this young lady should not be allowed to sue the doctors.
There are two reasons.
The doctors could have been in big trouble with the courts had they refused to do her bidding, as could the parents.
If this young lady had gone to her school nurse, school principal, school counselor, And said, my parents are denying my gender transition.
The parents could have been in trouble.
So why is she allowed to now sue for people doing her bidding at the request of the courts?
Good question.
Somebody, so let them make that defense.
We thought it was morally wrong to do what we did, but we did it anyway because that is the way California law works.
Let them use that.
I would love them to say that.
We know we did evil, but we did evil because that was the legal demand in California.
That's what you're saying, correct?
That's exactly what I'm saying.
They were between a rock and a hard place.
All right, all right, fine.
That's why we had the Nuremberg Trials.
The Nuremberg Trials established that even if the law of your society is vicious and despicable and evil, you have to say no at some point.
Good.
Let the doctors say, I want them to say that.
That will be a victory.
We know we engaged in evil.
We did so because California is run by the scum known as the Democratic Party.
And scum forced us to do scummy things.
Good.
I want them to say that.
They'll have to say one or the other.
We know it was good and we did it.
It is right to take a teenager's breasts off because she says she's a boy.
Or we knew it was evil, but we did it because we live in the scummy state run by Gavin Newsom and the Democratic Party.
Either one is a victory for decency in this country at this time.
Fine.
That's why the lawsuit is important.
I want to hear what these doctors will say.
Anything they say is a victory for decency.
We knew it was evil, but we live in California.
Great!
Or we think it is a wonderful thing because we're doctors and we're gods.
So we take girls' breasts off if in 75 minutes they say they're a boy.
Either way is a victory.
For moral clarity.
The greatest thing you could have in any society.
Hi everybody, I'm Dennis Prager. I'm Dennis Prager.
Always painful when I know that some of you didn't hear the last hour because I ended with a very, very passionate and rational moral point about the doctors being sued at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland for mutilating a teenage girl.
And a caller noted that, well, in California, that's what they were supposed to do.
I said, well, that's great.
At trial, let them say, we know what we did was evil, but California made us do it.
That'll be great.
That's why the lawsuit is so important.
They can only say one of two things.
We know it was evil, but we did it because the state told us to, or we know it was a good thing to do because we're doctors and we are gods.
Those are the only two possible defenses.
There's a piece in today's Wall Street Journal.
I paid for free speech at Arizona State.
The university is firing me for organizing an event featuring Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager.
Ann Atkinson.
We'll have her on tomorrow.
I will read it to you.
As I say, it's in today's Wall Street Journal.
I thought that Arizona State University, my alma mater and employer, was different from other schools when it came to free speech.
In 2011, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression awarded ASU, Arizona State University, a Green Light rating for its written policies on freedom of expression.
Now, let's see.
The university happily complied...
When FIRE suggested it adopt the Chicago principles and protect the, quote, free, robust, and uninhibited sharing of ideas among all members of the university community, unquote.
The ASU Barrett Honors College.
It's part of ASU, the Barrett Honors College.
Has even been home to heterodox initiatives like the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, where I served as executive director for the last two years.
All right, so she was at the Lewis Center at the Barrett Honors College at ASU.
But beneath ASU's written commitment to intellectual diversity lies a deep hostility toward divergent views.
The latest trouble started in February.
When the Lewis Center hosted Robert Kiyosaki, what is that, rich dad, poor dad?
He's very, very well known, and for good reason.
He's a terrific man.
Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk for an event on health, wealth, and happiness.
This nonpartisan program was part of a popular speaker series focused on connecting students with professionals who can offer career and life advice.
At the names of Messieurs Prager and Kirk, the faculty of ASU's Honors College were outraged.
39 of its 47 faculty signed a letter to the dean condemning the event on grounds that the speakers are, quote, purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women.
People of color, the LGBT community, and institutions of our democracy.
Wow.
They all lied, and it doesn't matter.
Really?
Well, I take it back.
I take it back.
It's not a complete lie.
I have attacked women.
I can't speak for Charlie Kirk.
I will tell you, this Charlie Kirk...
You know what Charlie Kirk's talk was on that night?
On why he, as a Christian, has come to keep the Sabbath from Friday night to Saturday night.
He doesn't use his cell phone, for example.
Now, if that's not hate, I don't know what hate is.
Isn't that amazing?
That was his talk.
It brought me personal joy because I have touched his life with that issue.
And to have touched this wonderful man's life is an important thing to me.
But that's what he talked about.
Now let's see.
Have I attacked women?
Yes, I have.
Absolutely.
Are you not allowed to attack women?
You're only allowed to attack men?
That's what they would believe at ASU, by the way.
I have attacked women who play a disproportionate role.
I'm sure they don't even know this.
I don't know what they were referring to.
But I will acknowledge the disproportionate role women are playing in ruining children's lives in America today is a fact.
It's not an opinion.
It's not misogyny.
It's a fact.
The overwhelming majority of teachers of kids in elementary school and the younger the kid, the more likely it is a female teacher.
They are the ones leading the sexualization of children at a young age.
It is not men who are in the vanguard of the drag queen story hours, for example.
It is women psychologists, women psychiatrists, and women physicians who are leading the mutilation of children charge happening in the United States, as I reported another case.
A girl having a mastectomy under the age of 18. So what else was I, or at least the two of us, accused of?
Purveyors of hate.
I hate evil.
Because I'm bitten to by the Bible.
Those who love God must hate evil.
My favorite verse in the Bible.
A lot of people don't hate evil.
A lot.
That was the reason I was not a leftist in high school.
Because the left didn't hate communism.
They claim to hate Nazism.
But if you only hate Nazism and you don't hate communism, then you don't hate evil.
People of color.
See, have I ever attacked people of color?
Hmm.
Well, if you attack Barack Obama, is that hate-filled attack on people of color?
I don't know what they're referring to.
The LGBT community.
No, never did that.
I have attacked the LGBT activists who are...
Among the greatest purveyors of hate in the society, like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, honored by the Los Angeles Dodgers, another team composed of cowards in its leadership.
Because cowardice is the human norm, courage is very rare.
Texas Rangers are the only team, I announced this yesterday, that has not had a pride night.
Reason for you to be a Texas Ranger fan.
Because they said people should come to a baseball game to watch baseball.
Not to be indoctrinated with the cause du jour.
Who else are we accused of purveying hate?
Institutions of our democracy.
I guess if you feel that...
I have no idea what they're referring to in any of these charges, the faculty at Arizona State.
This is again in today's Wall Street Journal.
I guess if you attack the leadership of all of the intelligence agencies for lying about the Hunter Biden laptop in order to help Joe Biden win the election in 2020, You're attacking institutions of our democracy.
The signers decried ASU, that is the professors, platforming and legitimating their views, describing Messieurs Prager and Kirk as, quote, white nationalist provocateurs.
Wow, I didn't realize.
Either I forgot about that or I didn't realize it.
We are...
Charlie Kirk and I are white nationalist provocateurs.
Well, that's how you do misters.
You don't do misters in plural.
He's asking, what does it do with the messieurs?
She's correct about that.
I don't get it, though, about being a white nationalist provocateur.
I don't even know.
What does white nationalist mean?
Do you realize that it doesn't mean anything?
If you're a nationalist, then you're pro-America.
If you're an American, so on.
So Russia is composed of whites.
So if you're against the Russian invasion...
Done by whites.
Okay.
So the woman is describing the letter that 37 members of the faculty of this branch of ASU sent out, including calling Charlie Kirk and me white nationalist provocateurs.
Of course, they never substantiate.
What does that even mean to be a white nationalist?
I don't even know what that means.
By the way, the motto of my life, as I have been saying for 40 years of broadcasting, is there are only two races, the decent and the indecent.
The idea that I celebrate whiteness is beyond a lie.
It's actually a lie that is absurd.
It runs counter to everything I believe.
I believe race is insignificant.
The left believes race is significant.
The faculty protests extended beyond the letter.
Professors spent precious class time denouncing the program.
On Twitter, they lamented the university's willingness to allow donor input on campus events.
Mr. Prager received a death threat.
I didn't know that.
I just read about it in the Wall Street Journal.
I think they mean Sean, who has frequently threatened me with death.
I think they're referring to that, but I know he's kidding.
So I don't know what else to say.
The event's topic made no difference to the faculty protesting it.
The political views of Messieurs Prager and Kirk rendered both men persona non grata on any issue.
The message to students was clear.
Nuance is impossible in the presence of wrong think.
The offender must either comply or face sweeping castigation.
The university administration's position on the event was no secret.
All advertising about health, wealth, and happiness.
By the way, isn't that a riot?
That was the hate theme of the evening.
Health, wealth, and happiness.
Was scrubbed from campus walls and digital flyers.
Behind closed doors, deans pressured me.
This is the woman who was the head of this college at ASU.
Or this program.
Deans pressured me to postpone the event indefinitely.
I was warned that if the speakers made any political statements, it wouldn't be in the Lewis Center's best interests, which I interpreted as a threat.
I ignored their threats, and the event was a resounding success.
1,500 people attended in person.
Another 24,000 joined us online.
There were no protests, no disturbances, and no traumatized students.
But the faculty's illiberal tantrum was devastatingly effective on two fronts.
First, the scare tactics worked on undergraduates.
Many students told me they were intimidated by professors into not attending.
Some would attend only if we promised that cameras wouldn't face the audience.
You understand the police state that the left wishes to create here.
These people are morally Worse than the people who went along with communism in Russia and in the Soviet Union.
Because there, there were real severe penalties if you didn't go along with the communists.
Here, there were no penalties for these professors.
And they are acting exactly as communists did in the Soviet Union.
Communism is in the human bloodstream.
Unfortunately.
Students worried that expressing interest in the event would hurt them academically.
You hear that?
Arizona State.
You give money to Arizona State, you might as well just join the left.
You have.
And by the way, if you say, well, I'm only giving it to the business school or to a science program, please.
Money is fungible.
Don't fool yourself.
Did the school that you would like to donate to at ASU protest what these faculty did?
The success of Professor's fear-mongering was reflected in the audience where older attendees outnumbered the students.
Second, the event cost its organizers dearly.
Shortly after Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Lynn Blake, the events operations manager at ASU Gamage Theater, was fired by ASU Gamage.
Before her firing, Ms. Blake told me she was, quote, berated by ASU Gamage leadership for coordinating an event that did not align with the values of ASU Gamage.
Align with the values.
That's their Orwellian speech for suppressing dissent.
And as of June 30th, ASU will dismantle the Lewis Center.
It's over.
The whole center has been closed down because Charlie Kirk and I showed up.
And terminate my position as its executive director.
She lost her job.
Barrett Honors College leadership told me this is purely a business decision despite my raising more than a half million dollars in the last year.
Yeah, right.
Wall Street Journal notes in parentheses, ASU Gamage executives did not respond to a request for comment about Ms. Blake's termination.
The biggest losers here are unquestionably ASU students.
who have now been taught that success requires conformity rather than free thought.
Additionally, the campus will no longer be able to benefit from the Lewis Center, which has helped countless students prepare for job interviews, build professional networks, manage their finances, and master important life skills.
ASU claims to value freedom of expression, but in the end...
The faculty mob always wins against institutional protections for free speech.
If a culture that promotes the free exchange of ideas isn't adequately fostered, at green light rated ASU, is any school really safe?
Hello everybody, Dennis Prager of the Ultimate Issues Hour every Tuesday, the third hour of my program.
I can argue that any given hour is the most important hour, and I can make that argument for the Ultimate Issues Hour, because it is about the great issues of life, not about solely the news of the day, which preoccupies vast numbers of people, and vast numbers don't even have any interest in the news of the day.
They just tune out of everything.
But if you don't get the ultimate questions correct, then you won't understand life, and how will you have a position on the politics of the day if you don't have an overriding outlook, or Weltanschauung, as the Germans say, worldview?
Anyway, that's the justification, though it doesn't need one, but that is justification for the Ultimate Issues Hour.
So...
I have raised this issue since I returned from Romania last week.
And now I have written it up.
I'd like to tell you, by the way, about writing.
I have mentioned this, but not in a long time, my theory about the three mirrors of your life.
The mirror of your body, the mirror of your mind, and the mirror of your character.
How do you see what your body and face look like?
Physical mirror.
How do you see what's in your mind?
Write.
When you write, you see what's in your mind.
And if you don't write clearly, it is because you don't think clearly.
This is certainly not an attack or a criticism, but it is a fact.
Unclear writing is a result of unclear thinking.
So you look at what you write or wrote, and you know what is in your mind.
So I did an interesting...
I lived...
If you will, an interesting experiment about this, so I have lived it all of my life.
I came up with an answer to an extremely important question after my speech.
What night was it?
Last Monday night.
Wow, that's amazing.
Just eight days ago, I was speaking in Romania.
That's the way life works.
And I... I discussed it on the air, and then I wrote my column about it today.
Tuesdays is the Ultimate Issues Hour and my column day.
You can see it at dennisprager.com, townhall.com.
And then in the next few days, it'll go to the Daily Wire, American Greatness, and many other, the Jewish press, many other wonderful places.
Jewish World Review.
It's very important to me to write.
Because then I clarify what I thought.
This was a perfect little process for me.
Came up with the idea last week, discussed it on the radio, and then wrote about it yesterday for publication today.
So it's clearer than ever to me, thanks to the writing.
You should write if you want to know how to think clearly.
And do you think clearly?
And third, what is the mirror of your character?
The people you attract into your life.
If your track record in attracting good people into your life is a good one, the odds are you're a good, decent person.
If you keep...
If you find you keep attracting bad people into your life, that should trouble you.
Not just because they'll hurt you, but because it may say something about you.
Okay, the three mirrors.
So what was the question?
The question was, Mr. Prager, young Romanian, what is leftism?
Since I spoke about the left's...
Actually, interestingly, my topic was, what is conservatism?
I should release that speech.
It was a very important speech.
Got to make that available to you.
And he said, this young man, so what's leftism?
And I realized, I don't think I ever defined it for an audience.
I always...
And this is what everybody does, or just about everybody.
They give you left-wing positions, but they don't define it.
It is very hard to define leftism.
If I asked you, explain to me, or define for me Christianity, it would not be difficult.
This is what Christianity stands for.
You want to read further, read the Bible, and obviously...
Including the New Testament.
Okay?
Then I know.
And if there are any number of books, this is Christian doctrine, this is what Christianity...
Same with Judaism.
What is Judaism?
Here.
Here are three books.
Read the Torah.
In particular, the rest of the Bible, of course.
The Talmud.
Nobody could read all of that in any event.
Very few people in one lifetime.
But even a synopsis of the Talmud would be fine.
Anyway, read the following books on Judaism.
But what if I said, what is leftism?
What would you tell, if you're a leftist, what would you tell people to read?
Karl Marx?
Karl Marx is unreadable.
This capital is dense and largely foolish.
So what would you tell people to read?
Lenin?
I doubt it.
Mao?
I doubt it.
What would you have people read?
And what would your definition be?
Okay.
So, it's a very real question.
What is leftism?
And I came up with a response that, number one, it is opposition to conservatism.
Which sounds simplistic, not just simple, but if you know what conservatism is, conservatism wishes to conserve the best of the past.
That's why it's called conservative.
But the left wishes to destroy the past.
And everywhere it has gained power, that is what it did.
The good and what it deems not good.
So I'm going to read to you the column, because it is so important to understand what leftism is, and obviously I will interject points as I read it to you.
After a speech in Romania last week, I was asked a question by a young member of the audience that, remarkably, I don't remember ever having been asked, what is leftism?
The question seems so simple and so basic to understand in contemporary life that you would think it would be posed frequently and if it weren't, the reason would be that almost anyone who cares about society would already know how to answer it.
But the question is rarely posed and few know how to answer it.
What is leftism is not at all the same as what is liberalism.
Leftism and liberalism share almost no values.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest tragedy of America today is that liberals do not vote their values.
Leftists vote their values, conservatives vote their values, but liberals vote for left-wing values, almost none of which they hold.
To cite but two examples, liberals do not believe in racial segregation, whereas the left does.
All black dorms...
All black graduation exercises, different standards for blacks, etc.
And liberals do not believe that males who say they are females should be allowed to compete in women's sports.
Only leftists do.
If you ask people what is leftism, most will respond by listing left-wing positions, not by defining it.
People confuse identifying left-wing positions with knowing what leftism is.
But naming left-wing positions is not the same as defining leftism.
Okay, so that's what we'll get into when we return.
It will explain almost everything that is happening in America today.
The second half of this column.
What is leftism?
is the subject of the Ultimate Issues Hour, Third Hour Tuesdays.
What is leftism?
Leftism is the attempt to destroy the past.
Every value and every institution, the good, as well as what it regards as the bad.
That is why leftists, by definition, hate conservatism.
Conservatism seeks to conserve the best from the past.
The left seeks to destroy the past, including the best.
The first of the modern left-wing revolutions, the French Revolution, Quite consciously sought to destroy every major institution and value of French society.
Not just the monarchy, but God, religion, the legal system, traditional notions of good and evil, the calendar, the old way of telling time, the old weights and measures, and even the names of the days of the week.
But you folks didn't know that.
Most of you, anyway.
Everything.
Changed everything, even the days of the week.
In other words, the past.
Just like the left in contemporary America, the leftists of the French Revolution toppled statues.
In their case, the statues of every king of France.
The next major left-wing revolution, the Russian, did the same.
As the Soviet dissident joke went, in the Soviet Union, the future is known It's the past which is always changing.
Now you can begin to understand leftism.
In a very real sense, today's leftism began in the 1960s with the infamous clarion call, never trust anyone over 30. That phrase meant nothing less than value nothing from the past.
Precisely what all leftism has been about?
From France under its revolutionaries, to Russia under the Bolsheviks, to China under Mao, to America under the left.
Value nothing from the past.
That is why, as I have said almost every day on my radio show for years, the left destroys everything it touches.
Whatever its noble-sounding rhetoric, the left stands for nothing, and therefore builds nothing, other than state power.
Aside from state power, it only destroys.
Leftism in music, art, sculpture, and architecture destroyed everything beautiful and noble that had been created over all the preceding centuries.
It is destroying the universities, the high schools and the elementary schools.
It is destroying science.
More and more medical schools, for example, no longer speak of pregnant women, but of birthing persons.
The American Medical Association has come out in opposition to listing the sex of newborns on their birth certificates.
Children, the AMA holds, will eventually decide whether they are male or female, neither or both.
Like the French revolutionaries, it has defined moral categories.
That is, the left.
It has substituted class and racial categories for moral ones.
Good and evil have been replaced by black and white, male and female, rich and poor.
It is destroying the ideal of the nuclear family, a married man and woman with children.
The left has made war on heteronormativity and has redefined marriage.
And most telling, even the French Revolution did not conceive of the break with the past.
The left is working to destroy the distinction between man and woman.
Days before the 2008 presidential election, then-candidate Barack Obama said to a wildly cheering crowd, we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
That's all the left does.
Fundamentally transform.
Destroying everything it touches.
It's not a byproduct of leftism.
It is its aim.
1-8 Prager 776. That's the key.
That is key to understanding leftism.
Tell me what good from the past the left seeks to preserve.
I can't think of a single thing.
So then there's a question, maybe I'll devote a part two to this question.
Why do people want to destroy the good of the past?
That's a really tough one.
Because first of all, it's extremely difficult to know motives.
It's hard to know your own motives, let alone the motives of others.
I'm not sure that they know their motives.
I have to believe though that part of it is that tearing things down gives one a sense of purpose.
Just as building gives you a sense of purpose, so does tearing.
People are fascinated by buildings that are blown up, right?
Everyone is.
It's probably more fascinating to watch a building blown up than a building built.
Right, Scott?
Man, well, it's certainly faster.
Man, it's certainly easier.
That is what the left does.
It blows things up.
Tell me what it has built other than state power.
There must be something in the human That wants to destroy rather than build.
And I don't know what that is.
I guess it's sort of like those of us who like 99% of us or I don't know what percent.
I'm sure it's in the high 90s who cannot relate to child abuse but there are people who Live to abuse children.
I don't think those of us who don't want that, who don't even think about it, can understand those who do.
In that sense, the left is inscrutable.
You really don't want to teach Shakespeare because he's white?
You at the University of Pennsylvania English Department?
You really want to tear down Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington?
Why?
They made the freest country in human history.
It's tough to know the answer to that.
Take your calls, 1-8 Prager-776.
This is the third hour, and it's a Tuesday.
Here we go.
It is the Ultimate Issues Hour.
And it is, what is leftism?
I have said, oh, as long as I can remember, the left destroys everything it touches.
And now I've put two and two together.
That is not a byproduct of leftism.
That is its aim.
French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and the leftist revolution in America today, Maoist Revolution, it all involved destroying everything from the past, whether it was good or bad, it didn't matter.
So it's not just a matter of dismantling, let us say, Jim Crow laws, which all decent people favored.
It is dismantling the United States as we have known it.
It is dismantling the founders.
I'll give you a musical example.
The left in music, because I know music best among the arts.
In the beginning of the 20th century, they got rid of tonality in music.
For example, anything you know, from a symphony that you might know, to a song you know, to happy birthday, it has a key.
C major, D major, E minor.
And it follows, there are rules that musicians had, composers had.
Every so often there would be a dissonance.
Where the notes that were played together were not tonally related, but it was to have an effect at that moment.
Once you drop tonality, you ended up with sounds, but not music as it was ever understood by the greatest composers.
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Haydn, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, it didn't matter.
They all followed rules.
Same with classical art, the great artists.
We have a fantastic video at PragerU on what makes art great, on classical art by Robert Florzak.
And so they dropped all of those rules, the whole past.
They're not better than anything else.
We had, in the moral sphere, we had a, in some sense, there was always a biblically-based concept of right and wrong.
As I mentioned yesterday, the justices of the Supreme Court face a sculpture of Moses holding the Ten Commandments.
It was recognized in the American past that that's where we got our judicial notions from.
And our moral notions from.
Now we get them from anybody or anybody on the left.
The breakdown is total.
The most obvious example being you can become the other sex.
You can't.
You cannot.
You cannot become, if you're a man, you can't become a woman any more than you could become a squirrel.
You can feel like a woman.
No one denies that.
You can dress like one.
You can take on a name.
You can do surgical procedures.
But you don't become a woman.
You don't become a man if you're a woman.
But if nothing exists, if there is nothing objectively true from the past, you can make up anything.
And you do.
And they do.
Alright, let's see what you have to say here.
Let's go to...
They're all good.
What can I do here?
Mountain Home, Arkansas and Sam.
Hello, Sam.
Hello, Dennis.
What I wanted to say is the left not only changes the history, as you've said, but they destroy it and then they rewrite it to support their present narratives.
And we see this and I see this in debating young people about leftism.
And when I hear them speak, they will say something and take it absolutely as fact.
You know, this whole like 1619 project nonsense idea.
And so they...
Not too long ago, a young lady said, well, you know, slaves built this country.
I said, where did you hear?
What are you talking about?
And none of them can give a single example.
So what they do, they destroy the past, they break it down, they rewrite it, and then the youth of today take it as fact, and then they go forward with absolute nonsense.
That's right.
Well, your points are really, really well taken.
I'll comment on that when we return.
Dennis Prager here.
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