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June 28, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:30:39
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Dennis Prager here.
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Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone, to The Dennis Prager Show.
It is Wednesday, June 28, 2023, and I am your guest host today.
My name is Julie Hartman.
I am the co-host of The Dennis and Julie Show, which is a show here on the Salem Radio Network, and also it is on the Salem Podcast Network.
And I am the host of my own three times weekly show, Timeless, with Julie Hartman.
You can also catch that here on the Salem Podcast Network.
And you can go to my YouTube page, which is the aptly named Julie Hartman YouTube page, and you can catch Dennis and Julie on Mondays and Timeless Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
We have a great show coming up today.
The first hour I'm going to dedicate to this situation in Russia.
As many of you probably know by now, there was an attempted coup against...
We're going to spend again this first hour discussing that.
Then we will move on to other news items, including this book ban hoax that has seemed to permeate America.
I'm referring to this idea that is peddled by Democrats that Republicans are supposedly banning books across the country.
LGBTQ books and books written by or about black Americans.
That will be one of the news items for hour two.
And then hour three, I'm going to be calling it Viktor Frankl hour.
I recently read Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning.
And I think that book is relevant for any age or any time, but it is especially relevant now.
People my age in particular have a crisis of meaning that I, as a host, would like to rectify or at least...
Try to rectify in some small way.
So we'll be talking about Man's Search for Meaning in the third hour.
Also, it is a great book to talk about on this program because this book was one of the most influential reads for our dear Dennis Prager who is in Texas today.
But first, let's focus on the situation in Russia, and I have an expert on the subject to join us immediately on this first hour.
His name is Dr. Matthew Schmidt.
He is a professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven.
He's an expert on foreign affairs with a focus on Russia and Ukraine.
He's actually lived in Russia and studied Vladimir Putin for many years.
He has also taught strategic and operational planning at the Dr. Schmidt, thank you so much for coming on to the program.
Welcome.
It's my pleasure, Julie.
To start with the obvious question, can you please provide us with a synopsis of what has gone on in the past week?
I don't think that's the obvious question.
We don't really know.
The first thing I'll say is there's very little data on this, and a lot of people in the media are drawing conclusions that I don't think are warranted.
I want to be careful to say that what I'm doing over the next hour is drawing some potential conclusions, some scenarios out there, but I'm always very careful to be open to the idea that there's going to be new information we're going to find out tomorrow or next hour that can change what we assume happened.
That said, what we understand to have happened is that this started several months ago when Evgeny Kogosin started complaining about the support.
That the Russian military was giving his troops, the Wagner Private Military Corporation.
Let's step back for a minute.
Wagner was created in and around 2014. It was essentially created when Putin encouraged serving uniformed Russian service members to resign and to go to work for Yevgeny Prigozhin's company.
And then what we saw is they sort of ended up in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine with their guns and uniforms with no patches.
And then they did stupid things, like post things on social media, which were geolocated.
And some really good folks in the intelligence community and in the open source community pinpointed them to their home units back in Russia.
And they came to be known in Ukraine as the Little Green Men.
They just sort of showed up and helped run this first invasion of Russia.
So Russia never claimed it invaded Ukraine.
It said that it was supporting a homegrown rebellion, and this is silly.
So this is the origins of Prigozhin's power.
A few months ago, he takes this group, which is a group that he's mostly recruited from prisons, a group of convicts, Prigozhin himself.
He was once a convict.
And they're brutal fighters.
In some ways, they're tactically effective, although I would argue they're not so operationally effective.
And he starts saying the Russian Ministry of Defense is not supporting them.
He gets more and more strident.
He's doing this in the media.
He's good in the media.
He's excited to be in the media.
But he never criticizes Putin, and this is essential.
Then he claims a few days ago, That the Russian military actually attacked, bombed his troops in their barracks.
And that this was supposedly the impetus for then taking what he had said were 25,000 troops, we now know we're closer to 5,000 or 8,000, and march in the direction of Moscow.
That's the synopsis.
And I guess I'll say what happened.
Well, we can talk about what happened at the end.
I think there's a larger discussion.
But that brings us up to the present day.
Yes, we will definitely get into what happened with the reversal of this coup.
Just to clarify for the audience, Pergozin is the head of the Wagner paramilitary group.
I'm not sure if Dr. Schmidt, excuse me, you said that, but I just wanted to clarify that's who he is.
No, he's been in the news.
We should all know his name by now.
What would be the advantage for Vladimir Putin and for Russia to engage in this strike against their own troops in Ukraine?
That's an interesting question.
There might be advantage to the Ministry of Defense, but not an advantage to Putin.
There might be an advantage to Putin.
What we can speculate is that Putin felt that Purgosian, whom he had been close to, He was getting too powerful, right?
His criticism was inching too close to the Kremlin directly, and he wanted to bring them back in line.
Prigozhin's troops had been fighting in Bakhmut.
And if the listeners remember, this is really the biggest battle that we've seen in the war so far.
And it was a meat grinder, right?
Tens of thousands of troops, casualties and dead on both sides.
But in the end...
And Purgosian's troops essentially sort of eked out a technical win.
At what cost?
I'm not sure it was a win, but they had done that.
And he stayed in place and he did that.
And that was really the only win that the Russians had.
And that gave him some power to be able to say that he was the best team on the field.
And when he felt like he was being mistreated then, this might have been an opportunity to put him back in his place.
It's amazing for us in the West to...
Think about the fact that a leader would do that to one of his own generals and one of his own people, but we're dealing with a totally different character here.
Yeah.
First of all, Purgotin is not a general.
He never was.
And so he is not seen that way.
And it is not seen as Putin is attacking one of his own servicemen.
He's seen as what he is, as a warlord, as a CEO. He is seen as highly effective at what he does, both in Ukraine and across Africa and in Syria, for instance, where the company was basically formed to do things that would give Putin plausible deniability that his own forces couldn't do.
So I just want to be clear that this is not seen as a direct attack on Russian forces by the Kremlin.
We, in the next segment, are going to talk about what happened with the reversal.
Dr. Schmidt, you said that Progozin and his troops marched into Moscow, and then it seems that it was called off within just a few hours.
Also, there appears to have been some negotiations between the Wagner Group and President Lukashenko of Belarus, which is a neighboring country next to Russia, former Soviet Socialist Republic.
Basically, it's a client state of Russia.
It appears now that Progozin is now in Belarus, as well as some of his troops are in Belarus.
So we are going to be talking about that again.
This is Dr. Matthew Schmidt.
He is a professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven.
We are talking about this coup that was going to happen in Russia and then seems to have been reversed.
He will be on for the entire hour.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This is The Dennis Prager Show.
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Julie Hartman here.
This is the Dennis Prager Show for Wednesday, June 28th.
I have Dr. Matthew Schmidt on.
He is a professor of political science at University of New Haven with a specialization or a focus on Russia.
We are talking about this attempted coup that happened this past weekend in Russia, and I am going to ask Dr. Schmidt what this means for Russia, what this means for the war in Ukraine, and of course, what this means for the United States.
But at least for now, we're trying to understand, with the limited information that we have, of course, what happened.
So in the last segment, Dr. Schmidt was telling us that Progozin, who is a...
I was going to say general, but Dr. Schmidt told me he is not a general.
One of the leaders of the Wagner paramilitary group led his troops into Moscow.
This is after President Vladimir Putin allegedly sent a strike, if you will, into Ukraine, a deadly military strike, which killed several Russian troops.
So we are now on Saturday, if I have the timeline correct.
What happens now, Dr. Schmidt?
So, first of all, I'll say I don't believe it was a coup.
And most people, you know, experts in my field don't believe it's a coup either.
They take Prigozian's word for it, which is it was a mutiny.
And the end goal of that mutiny is still a little, you know, opaque.
But what happens is he marches into two cities in the south and he gets to within 250 miles.
of Moscow and then engages in a series of negotiations with the president of Belarus, like you said, with Lukashenko, and then suddenly stops and says that he's come to an agreement.
He'll go to Belarus and the troops in the Wagner company will be folded into the regular units of the Russian military.
And the question is, of course, what was the negotiation about?
We don't really know, but the British have put out what I think is compelling evidence that essentially what happened is Russia took people hostage, right?
The Kremlin, Putin, said, we know where your family is, and more than that, we know where the family members are of your commanders in Wagner.
And, well, now what are you going to do?
And so this was a mafia-style, you know, thug.
Kind of moment.
And Purgosian backed down instantly.
This whole thing lasted like one day and said, okay, I'll go to Belarus and we'll fold the troops in.
Don't kill anybody.
And so far as we know, that's what happened.
And he, of course, never went into Moscow.
And it's the belief that, you know, this guy's not stupid.
He knew he didn't have the troops to go into Moscow.
And again, this is critical to understand because the narrative out there is that he was critiquing Putin and he was not.
He was very careful enough to do that.
And in response, Putin never by name critiqued Purgosyan.
And that was leaving open this area for negotiation.
Purgosyan was critiquing General Garazimov and the Minister of Defense Shoigu and saying that they, you know, may have been doing something that Putin didn't want them to do, right?
They had attacked his troops.
They were not supporting his troops and appealing above them to Putin to right the situation.
This, among many other reasons, is why it's so great to have you on, because I've been reading a lot about this subject.
First of all, the Western media is calling us a coup.
And second of all, the Western media is saying that this was the biggest challenge to Vladimir Putin's power in his 24 years in office, if you can even call it that, in office.
Really, he's been an authoritarian.
He has not been holding office.
He has had a stranglehold on power.
Was it the biggest threat to Vladimir Putin's presidency?
Or was it not as big of a deal?
Forgive me for labeling it that way.
You know, I hate to say that because obviously any resistance in Russia is a big deal because it happens so seldom.
Was this as big of a deal as the Western media is making it out to be?
Look, Pregosian fired and downed several Russian Federation military aircraft and vehicles.
And he marched within 250 miles of the capital of the largest nuclear power on planet Earth.
That's a big deal.
It is a huge challenge to Putin.
I think it has been his biggest challenge.
But I'm not convinced that he's come out of here weaker in the short term anyway.
Look, I think Putin's weak in the long term.
But in the short term, I think what he's shown is, I defeated this thing.
In 24 hours, I have proven to anyone else in my country that is considering, any of these other oligarchs, that is considering supporting anybody else out there, that their families are at risk and that I will do that.
And that I'm capable of doing that because I still have the loyalty of the security services.
And then the truth is, there's not a second progosian out there.
There's no one else who realistically could threaten the Kremlin the way he did.
So I think for the time being, Putin is actually in a very strong position.
If it had all worked out for Pergosian, what would have happened?
What would have been his ideal scenario?
I don't think he ever wanted to be president.
I don't think he ever considered that realistic.
I think what he wanted to do was force the president to make the decisions he wanted him to make, which is to get rid of the defense minister and get rid of the head general and put in place a second general that was close to Pergosian himself.
And the thing to understand is that...
Purgosian is brutal.
He's an evil man.
But he has in that way, think of this like the mafia again, right?
A sense of honor.
And I think really what he wanted to do was to say, these guys who are prosecuting this war are not doing it right.
And as a result, my men are getting killed.
And as a result, the war is being lost.
And I'm taking this extreme move in order to fix that situation.
And I think that's really what he wanted to have happen.
This is very enlightening.
We will probably have to continue this question that I'm about to ask you into the next segment because you'll probably have a lot to say about it.
But what meaningful effects has this march – I'm not going to call it a coup now, thanks to you – has this march had?
And also, why are they in Belarus now?
Will they ever be allowed to come back to Russia?
Okay, so first of all, I'm glad you used that term.
Rogozhin's term for what he did was called the March for Justice, which plays into what I was saying, right, that he's trying to create this just outcome for his men and for Russia.
What is done in the battlefield in Ukraine is completely unclear right now.
Let me use a metaphor of football.
If your enemy team fumbles the ball but recovers it on the spot, it hasn't necessarily changed the strategic situation on the field.
If they fumble the ball and you recover it on the spot, it hasn't necessarily changed the strategic situation on the field.
I mean, you're closer to the goal in theory, right?
But you may not convert.
If they fumble the ball and you pick it up and you run it for a touchdown, now you've done something.
There's no touchdown in Ukraine yet.
There's no sense that the Ukrainian forces were able to convert yet.
They could still do that.
The jury is out.
We're not clear about what's been going on with the Russian military in the last few days, but we haven't seen it yet.
So far, this is a fumble that's been recovered on this spot and hasn't changed the game.
More with Dr. Schmidt in the next segment.
I'm Julie Hartman.
Julie Hartman here.
I'm pleased to have Dr. Matthew Schmidt on the show.
He is a professor at the University of New Haven, and he specializes in Russia and Ukraine.
Of course, he is the perfect person to talk to about this march by Prigozhin, who is the head of the Wagner military group, into Moscow, which occurred this past Saturday.
It was suddenly called off, and then now Prigozhin and many of his soldiers We ended the previous segment, Dr. Schmidt, where you were telling this great football analogy.
I was asking you how this affects the war in Ukraine.
I'd like you, if you don't mind, to continue with that because I think it is important.
War is a political military phenomenon.
Karl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian German military theorist, says famously that war is a continuation of politics by other means.
Politics is very simply deciding, right?
The society decides who gets to decide how to spend scarce resources.
And so war is fundamentally about changing those decisions.
And by the time you get to war, it's usually about changing the person who's making those decisions in order to change those decisions.
Think of World War II. We decided we don't like Nazi Germany's decision-making, and we decide that the only way to change that decision-making is total surrender.
That's kind of unusual.
Usually, war doesn't end in total surrender.
But we decide that this has to become much more heavily weighted on the military side of the political-military equation.
In order to achieve what we want in changing the decision-making of the enemy state.
What that means, though, is that in order for you to win the war, ultimately, you have to find a way to take lethal military force and get it to connect with the change in political decision-making in the enemy state.
As we've seen in the US, in 20 plus years of fighting the war on terrorism in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, it's quite possible that you can win nearly every tactical engagement you engage in on the ground and still fail to create the political outcome that those tactical engagements are in theory designed to create.
You win over and over again in Afghanistan tactically across Right?
Three presidential administrations.
Right?
And still end up with the Taliban back in control.
Right?
So that's what Ukraine has to do.
Ukraine has to win on the battlefield.
And I believe they will.
It won't be fast.
Right?
It'll be plotting and it'll hurt.
It'll hurt a lot for Ukraine.
There will be a lot of injuries, a lot of death.
A huge impact on Ukrainian society for decades to come.
But I think that they will win because they want it more than the Russians.
And the Ukrainians know why they're fighting.
One of the things that Dennis talked about is this importance of belief, right?
This importance of knowing why you're doing something.
And that's ultimately what the Ukrainians have on their side.
They're smart.
They're super technically capable.
Here's an aside.
Ukraine was the center of the Soviet...
Missile and rocket design industry.
So there are a lot of Ukrainians running around who used to build Soviet missiles, who have that capability.
Ukrainians sink the Moscow command ship with a missile they designed themselves.
I've been to part of their design bureau for drones.
They're building drones themselves.
They don't have the manufacturing capability, but they're designing these things.
So they have all of these technical capabilities and married together with that is an understanding of why they're fighting.
And that's why they're going to win, tactically, on the ground.
But what they have to do is convert those wins into political influence in Russia.
And that's where I think it's going to be very, very difficult because Russia is hard to affect because the Kremlin has learned to rule by creating a huge sense of political apathy.
This is not about support for the Kremlin or opposition to the Kremlin.
It's about getting apathetic Russian citizens to care enough to then oppose the Kremlin.
But if you can't get them out of their apathy, then that military force is not going to produce the political outcome you meet.
Back in a moment.
With Dr. Schmidt, I'm Julie Hartman.
This is The Dennis Prager Show.
We're talking about the march into Moscow this past weekend.
We are back with Dr. Matthew Schmidt.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This interview has been enlightening, to say the least.
I have learned that this was not a coup that happened this past weekend.
It was a march by the Wagner military group into Russia.
Russia.
That doesn't mean that it wasn't significant, but it wasn't a coup, as the Western media is calling it.
We have also learned, among other things, that Prigozhin is not a general.
And as Dr. Schmidt was saying in the last segment, that Ukraine is favored to win the war, at least in his calculation.
Of course, they want it more and want it.
I think I kind of stumbled on I want to make sure the audience didn't hear me say win it.
They want it more.
More advanced weaponry than Russia.
I was reading recently that Russia is actually using some Soviet-era weaponry in this war against Ukraine.
That's certainly an encouraging thought that Ukraine may prevail if it is indeed the case.
Dr. Schmidt, you were saying in the last segment that though Ukraine will probably, hopefully, prevail on the ground, they still need to be able to enact Political reforms in Russia.
What did you mean by that?
Can you say more about that?
So the loss in Ukraine, which I do believe will happen, the military loss on the ground when Ukrainian troops, best Russian troops, will cause a crisis of leadership in Russia.
And it is in that crisis of leadership that Russia may decide to pull its troops back, right, and give all the territory back to Ukraine.
I don't think that's likely.
But that's the idea.
And the way I put it is this.
Sooner or later, Putin's going to go, right?
He set up his constitution so that he can be in office, in theory, until 2036. Think about that.
If he lives that long, right?
But in any case, the guy after Putin is either going to be worse than Putin or only slightly better.
He's not going to be some kind of Democrat that's going to come in small d, right?
That's going to come in and decide to reform the regime.
It's the guy after the guy that I think has the first real chance to bring Russia into the fold and make it look like a proper Republican, small r, structured government.
But that's 20 years away, in theory.
The guy after the guy.
So in that interim space, I think you're going to see Ukraine win on the battleground.
There will be a period of time where there may be standoffs, which will look like 2014, look like World War I again.
That's what, you know, we have two lines staring at each other, but not a lot of active offensive combat.
And the political stuff will happen in Russia slowly over time until somebody decides, okay, we're going to pull back.
This isn't in our interest anymore.
And the U.S. and NATO will have a massive presence in Ukraine because Ukraine will become the leading edge of Western policy towards all of Eurasia, basically to China.
We have several calls where people are asking what this challenge to Russia means for the United States.
That's a big question.
It's the United States.
Following both the neoliberal and the neoconservative policy, which is really the same policy, but sort of justified in one in a conservative theory and the other in a liberal theory.
But it's basically the same.
It says, more democracies in the world make the U.S. safer.
And so we have an obligation at a certain point to defend those democracies, up to and including what we're doing in Ukraine or even engaging in force, like in Iraq.
You can critique what happens all you want, but that's sort of the theory, right?
And so the theory in Ukraine is we are spending pennies on the dollar to defend ourselves, our values, European values, right, than we would if we let Russia run Russia out over Ukraine.
So that's why it's important.
And it does in the end, right?
I think Putin is temporarily stronger than he was, you know, than last Thursday.
But in the end, he's going to be weaker.
In the end, he's going to be much weaker militarily.
He's going to be much weaker economically, which is even more important.
And that's going to be to the benefit of American and Western policy in general.
Also, another thing that we don't focus on is that Russia is going to be weakened demographically in the near future.
They're supposed to lose 15 million people by 2045. And actually, by 2045, Russia is also apparently supposed to be 50% Muslim.
So that just is another...
Point to support your hypothesis that in the long term, Russia will be weakened.
Of course, I'm referring to the loss in population, not necessarily the religious change, though certainly that will have a great effect on the country.
I am fascinated by what this means for China.
I talk a lot on this program and also in my own show, Timeless, about the global reach of China.
They seem to be going into almost every country in the world trying to economically develop those countries, become friends, in blinking quotation marks, with the leaders so as to buy off, essentially, the leaders.
And Russia, although perhaps it is a bridge too far to say that China is buying off Russia – China is certainly trying to go into Russia, give them weapons and infrastructure to help in the war with Ukraine.
Certainly President Xi Jinping of China is close with President Putin in Russia.
So what does a potentially long-term weakened Russia mean for China's global power?
First of all, I totally agree with you that China is slowly sort of snugging Russia up into its orbit, you know, closer and closer.
However, China's been very careful not to go all in.
They can provide a lot more military aid to Moscow, and they're not.
They're giving just enough, but they're very wary of upsetting the West too much.
And, you know, Xi Jinping, when he went to Moscow, he didn't go there as a firebrand.
Saying that he was all for Moscow in the war.
He went there to say, I want to create peace on Moscow's terms, but I still want to create peace.
I think that's important to recognize.
In the larger realm, China, the U.S., everybody is watching this war and they're learning from it, essentially with an eye towards Taiwan.
What happens when you have a technically sophisticated ally next to a larger, potentially less sophisticated aggressor state?
And how would you fight this war?
And so this is having a huge effect on that.
And I guess the last thing I would say is China has a chance to expand its power given, you know, I think a Russian vacuum of power that's occurring, but it's in the wrong direction.
Forgive me, Dr. Schmidt.
We'll continue with this discussion of what it means for China in the next segment.
We'll be back.
We're back in the final segment with Dr. Matthew Schmidt.
Dr. Schmidt, it's been a pleasure to have you on.
This has been so informative.
We left off when you were talking about what this means, this meaning a long-term weakened Russia, what this means for China's global power.
Will you continue, please?
Yeah, just briefly.
China wants to move east, right, across the Pacific, and in that direction, that's where the money is.
So the fact that Russia is weakening and allowing China to expand its sphere of power to the West is not as good as they want.
Are there any final thoughts that you would like to tell us and the viewers about this situation, which, again, has been trumpeted by the Western media as a huge deal, huge challenge to Russia?
What are your final notes?
This is not about NATO. This is not about security promises.
This is about an ideology that has developed over the last two decades called Eurasianism, or Putin now calls it the Russian world kind of thesis.
And this is a belief that's driving Putin.
It's a belief that is believed in by many of the oligarchs, which is why they won't turn on him.
And ideologies are not deterrable.
You can't negotiate with them.
You can't ask for compromise on them.
They have to be defeated.
And that's what Ukraine is facing, and Ukrainians know that.
And that's what the West is facing, even if we don't yet understand that.
Dr. Schmidt, it's been a pleasure to have you on.
Thank you so much for your time.
Your expertise has been invaluable.
I'd like to encourage all who are listening to check out his podcast.
It's called Impolitique.
He's the co-host of it.
It's a national security and international affairs show.
Thank you.
Thank you so much again.
Thank you so much, Julie.
It's been great.
And in the next hour, we are going to be talking about domestic news.
Of course, we have focused this first hour on international news, though, of course.
International news is really relevant for our domestic state.
Of course, Russia is one of our most formidable and prominent adversaries.
China, who has, as Dr. Schmidt was just saying, a close tie with Russia, is also one of our most formidable opponents.
But indeed, in the next hour, we will be talking about the book ban hoax.
Many on the left are accusing conservatives of banning books across the country.
Is it true?
I'll give you a hint.
It's actually not.
We will also be talking about a really alarming loss of faith in the United States banking system that we have seen in this past economic quarter with people withdrawing deposits, uninsured deposits from major banks.
And also we will discuss these terrible, gruesome murders that occurred this past weekend in Newton, Massachusetts.
A couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary were stabbed to death in their apartment.
We are going to be discussing the media's coverage of this event because the perpetrator was black.
More in the next hour.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This is The Dennis Prager Show.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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Welcome, everyone, to the Dennis Prager Show.
My name is Julie Hartman.
I am your guest host for today.
I've guest hosted the show many times, and it is always really fun and informative.
I am the co-host of the Dennis and Julie podcast.
That's right.
I have a podcast with Dennis Prager.
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It premieres every Monday on the Salem Podcast Network.
You can also watch it every Monday on my YouTube channel, which is the aptly named Julie Hartman YouTube channel.
And I am also the host of my own three times weekly show called Timeless with Julie Hartman.
I segment that show into two episodes.
One is called Julie Noted, where in about 15 to 20 minutes, I give you a rundown of the most important news stories of the day.
And then the second segment is the timeless segment, where I don't talk about politics, don't talk about news.
I talk about what I call timeless, eternal subjects.
One of the things that I lament nowadays is that everything seems to have become political.
I was actually recently in New York City visiting some friends and family and I live in Los Angeles, so this is not exactly a place without pride flags, but I was stunned to see how decked out New York City was in pride regalia.
Everywhere you went, and I mean everywhere, you would see a pride flag.
It was displayed at hotels.
I walked by the Palace, New York Palace Hotel on 52nd and Madison, and they had an American flag and then right next to it, a pride flag displayed at the front of their hotel.
Starbucks had a pride flag in its window.
There was a liquor store selling wine and guess what?
You couldn't see the label of the wine that was being displayed in the window.
It was wrapped in rainbow colors.
I went to Rockefeller Center and there were over 50 pride flags encompassing the perimeter of that famous ice skating rink.
I passed by an art gallery and in the window there was a painting of a pride flag.
It was really just everywhere.
So this is just to illustrate to you that it seems that modern-day America bombards us constantly with the political.
Whether we walk down the street and see it, whether we turn on our favorite TV show and we are accosted with some kind of woke political line, whether we go to school or send our children to school and they learn about radical racial and gender theory, it seems to be everywhere.
I hope that my show, Timeless, is a bit of a break from that.
I talk about nonpolitical subjects among them, including Machiavelli.
Does Machiavelli deserve to be called Machiavellian or ruthless?
I have an episode on that.
We talk about Islam.
A quarter of the world is Muslim.
We should know about the tenets of the religion and understand it.
I did a show on owls.
I did a show on helicopter parenting, the origin and development of language.
I also had a great artist on the show, Robert Florzak, and we talked about the five most important paintings that everyone should know.
So I just wanted to give that brief shout out to my show, Timeless.
Again, you can see it on the Julie Hartman YouTube page.
And you can also follow me at Julie R. Hartman on Instagram and Twitter, as I say in my Boston accent.
Speaking of the fact that America has become intensely, overwhelmingly political, there has been a narrative that has taken hold among Democrats.
And indeed, this narrative was said in President Biden's announcement for his rerun in 2024 that Republicans and conservatives are banning books across the country.
Sean, do we have the clip from his announcement, his 2024 presidential announcement, where he talks about banning books?
We got it?
We're going to play it briefly.
That's been the work of my first term.
To fight for our democracy.
This shouldn't be a retribution.
To protect our rights.
To make sure that everyone in this country is treated equally.
And that everyone is given a fair shot at making it.
But you know, around the country, migrant extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms.
Cutting Social Security that you've paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy.
Dictating what health care decisions women can make.
banning books and telling people who they can love, all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.
You know, I really could spend the entire hour just going through the lies that were espoused in that, what, 30-second, 45-second video?
You know, President Biden should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for how many lies can be stated in under a minute.
You know, I'm laughing, but I'm laughing because otherwise I would cry.
The destruction that this one singular person has done to America is staggering.
But let's focus on this one particular lie, that conservatives are banning books.
Again, this clip that I just played for you was his 2024 re-election announcement.
So this is a key narrative undertaken by the left.
So as with all things, I like to really understand where this is coming from.
And in fact, I like to understand, of course, whether or not it is true.
Even if President Biden is saying it, I am...
Certainly inclined to not believe what this individual says because he has lied and lied and lied about so many things.
But I decided to go on a research expedition to figure out, is it true?
Is it true that conservatives and Republicans are banning books?
So I'd like to tell you what I have found.
But first, before we get to that, just to illustrate even more how much this narrative has taken hold, I'd like to read to you some quotes by some prominent Americans.
Our Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona.
Recently said, quote, a lot of the banned books include stories of change, progress, and stories about communities of color.
These books hold a lot of history.
You can't erase history, and I will challenge anyone who tries to.
Again, that's our education secretary.
In fact, also, the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights issued a legal challenge to the state of Georgia, specifically to one school district in that state, for allegedly, quote, creating a hostile environment by removing sexually explicit creating a hostile environment by removing sexually explicit materials from its shelves.
And Oprah, recently during a commencement address, said, quote, books are being banned.
History is being rewritten.
So this is something that has really taken hold.
Well, folks, I know this may come as a shock to you, a great big shock, but it isn't true.
In the vast majority of cases, believe it or not, conservatives are not banning books.
I'm going to provide specifics.
For the rest of this segment and probably into the next one, 1-8 Prager-776.
1-8 Prager-776.
I encourage you to call in, especially if you disagree with me and challenge me.
I will take your call first.
There is an organization, a non-profit called PEN America.
It's an acronym, P-E-N America.
I'm not sure if they call it PEN or P-E-N. I'm going to call it PEN right now for the sake of brevity.
PEN America bills itself as, quote, So they are an organization that surveils this so-called book ban and tries to track how much it is happening.
Pan America reported that in the 2021-2022 school year, 2,532 books were banned by conservatives across the country, including 1,648 different titles.
So this is what this organization is saying.
You will get a kick out of this story, how they try to say that conservatives are banning books.
One of the most prominent examples...
of this so-called book banning happened in the state of Florida earlier this year.
It was reported that in a particular Florida school district, a poem read at As I
will tell you in the next segment, This was not true.
This was a total lie that Amanda Gorman's poem was banned.
It was moved from the elementary school section of a library to the adjacent middle school section of the library because of the themes and vocabulary that is used.
We'll be back in a moment.
The Dennis Prager Show.
1-8 Prager 776. 1-877-243-777-777.
We're talking about the book ban hoax.
That is being peddled by, among other people, our own President Joe Biden, as well as our Education Secretary, and even Oprah Winfrey, who I used to really admire, but she seems to be succumbing to these lies that Republicans and conservatives are en masse banning books across the country,
specifically books pertaining to Now, shockingly, this is not true.
I have done a lot of research on this subject to try to uncover whether or not these claims have any validity.
And in the vast, vast, vast majority of cases, I mean like 99% of cases, They do not have any validity.
Please call in, again, 1-8-Prager-776, especially if you disagree with me on this subject.
I ended the last segment by telling you that one of the most prominent stories that was reported about this so-called book banning was the alleged ban of Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem, The Hill We Climb.
Amanda Gorman, at the time of reading this poem, At the inauguration of President Joe Biden in 2021, was a 22-year-old young black female, recent graduate of Harvard, who was the youngest person to read at an inauguration.
So, of course, what the left is saying is that, oh, conservatives are banning this poem because she's black, because she's a female, because it was President Biden's inauguration.
But the fact is, it just wasn't true.
Vox published this headline saying, Conservatives ban Amanda Gorman's poem at a Florida school.
A similarly deceitfully worded headline was also published by The Guardian and The Washington Post for that matter.
It was heavily reported by the mainstream media.
So according to my research, And also, according to the research of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy, this poem was not in fact banned at the Florida School District.
It was merely moved from the elementary school section of the library to the middle school section of the library.
Now, these are not two different buildings.
This is a matter of five to six feet.
Any of us who have been to school know that there are different sections of libraries, and libraries are closed places, so it's really not that hard to walk just a few feet in order to access a piece of work that is housed in a different section.
I wonder if there would be similar outrage if Amanda Gorman's Poem was wrongfully listed in the fiction section of the library, and then it was moved to the historical or nonfiction section of the library.
It's honestly a stupid question because, of course, there would probably still be outrage.
Of course, the media would probably try to spin that.
But think about it.
It was a move from one section to another.
The Florida School Materials Review Committee examined the book and decided that it was more suited to a middle school reading level than to an elementary school reading level, so they just moved it to the other section of the library.
According to Heritage, there is no evidence that this move made it harder for children who are interested in reading it to get it.
In fact, this committee that I just mentioned to you wrote this statement saying that they, quote, affirm that Amanda Gorman's poem has great historical significance because it was the first inaugural poem read by someone that young at a presidential inauguration ceremony.
But again, they decided it would be more suited to a higher reading level than to an elementary reading level.
So this PEN organization, the acronym is P-E-N, it is a non-profit which tracks these school bannings, these alleged school bannings of books, came out with a statement about this Amanda Gorman bombshell report, as they called it, even though, of course, it wasn't.
And they said, get a load of this, quote, Do you know how Orwellian that statement is?
You know, a lot of people talk about the Orwellian nature of the United States of America.
One of the examples is that gender-affirming care, that's what they call the removal of breasts or genitalia of a person who seeks to change their gender.
They call that gender-affirming care.
Gender-affirming care is actually gender-denying care, as our dear host of the show who is in Texas today, Dennis Prager, says.
There are so many Orwellian instances.
In our country.
But really, actually, I think George Orwell couldn't have predicted the extent that this has gone in the United States.
What's interesting about the quote that I just read to you, when you restrict or diminish access to a book that's a ban, is that that statement actually contradicts itself because it's using separate verbs.
They are saying that this is a restriction and a diminishment.
But then they're saying that it's a ban.
So they actually, to an informed reader, by informed I mean someone who sees it for what it really is, this statement is actually contradicting itself.
A restriction is different from a diminishment, which is different from a ban.
But according to this nonprofit, a restriction is a diminishment, which is a ban, which is a diminishment, which is a restriction, which is a ban.
Which one is it?
Basically, what this organization is saying is that whatever they deem a ban is a ban.
It doesn't matter if it fits into the definition of a ban.
If they want to call it a ban, it's a ban.
So Amanda Gorman's poem being moved six feet from the elementary school section to the middle school section in this library is a ban because it serves this organization's political purposes of alleging that conservatives, pro-free speech conservatives, are suppressing books en masse because the books or the poems are written by or in their substance talk about minority groups.
It is a lie.
And this organization admitted without even probably knowing that it admitted that it's a lie.
The truth matters.
The way that we speak, the verbs that we use matters.
I'm going to provide more instances of this in the next segment of how in our everyday lives this assault on truth is chipped and chipped away at, especially in our language.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This is The Dennis Prager Show.
Back in a moment.
1-8-Prager-776.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Welcome everyone to Hour 3 at the Dennis Prager Show.
I'm Julie Hartman, your guest host for today.
Dennis is in Texas.
And a few weeks ago, as in probably a week and a half ago, he was in Serbia and Romania and Phoenix.
He travels all of the time.
He has an amazing energy source from God knows where, truly God knows where.
I think it's a divine gift.
But nevertheless, that's the explanation for my guest hosting.
I'm honored to do so.
I am the co-host of the Dennis and Julie show, which you can see on my YouTube channel, the Julie Hartman YouTube channel.
And I'm also the host of my three times weekly show, Timeless with Julie Hartman.
Now, whenever I guest host for Dennis, and I have done it several, several times, I usually do the third hour as a history hour, or most recently I've actually done a literature hour.
I even did a Nietzsche hour, an hour on the 19th century German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, who has had such an outsized impact on our culture.
I actually had Spencer Clavin on my show Timeless to discuss Nietzsche with me.
But today I am focusing on a different thinker, equally as influential, though sadly not known to many Americans today.
That is Viktor Frankl.
He is a, or was, a Holocaust survivor and he wrote the book...
Man's Search for Meaning, which I have right here.
I read it recently in order to be an informed citizen and talk show host, and it changed my life.
I really believe it changed my view on things.
And I thought it was an especially good choice for The Dennis Prager Show, given that Man's Search for Meaning was one of the most influential books.
For our dear host, Dennis Prager, he often talks about Viktor Frankl on the program.
So I thought I'm going to dedicate an hour to this book, the wisdom that can be gleaned from it, and how especially relevant it is for our time now.
The great thing about an author like Viktor Frankl is that he is, for lack of a better term, or maybe this is the exact term I want to use, he is a timeless thinker.
He is someone who is relevant at any age and stage of life.
But I believe that his work is especially relevant now.
Spencer Clavin, who again I interviewed on my show about Nietzsche, though we are going to do a once-a-month Thinker of the Month segment on my show, Timeless, he wrote in his recent book, How to Save the West, that America is encountering a crisis of meaning.
This is so well argued in Spencer Clavin's recent book that many Americans, especially young Americans, don't have a sense of meaning in their lives to propel them forward, to give them hope for the future, to give a sense of importance to their existence.
I have seen this from many people in my age group who lack meaning and are cast adrift, and they seek meaning.
In ways that I argue they shouldn't seek meaning.
They seek meaning in politics, in protest.
If they don't have religion or deep familial ties or hobbies in their own lives, well, they can go march on Ventura Boulevard or Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles or Fifth Avenue in New York as happened this past weekend during the Pride Parade.
They can march.
Against injustice and bigotry and racism and transphobia and homophobia because that gives them what all humans need, a sense of a purpose beyond themselves.
This is what Viktor Frankl so eloquently identified in his book Man's Search for Meaning.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian.
He was born in 1905. He died in 1997, so he lived a long life despite being interned, imprisoned at Auschwitz during World War II. He was a psychiatrist prior to World War II. He actually ran a hospital in Vienna caring for patients who were suicidal.
He actually had correspondences with Freud, of all people.
I always find that as a history nerd to be so interesting when great prominent historical figures have ties or correspondences with other great historical figures.
I think about George Washington's great-granddaughter was married to, of all people, Robert E. Lee.
Talk about a connection there.
So Viktor Frankl had correspondences with Freud.
He actually developed a transcript on logotherapy, which is his really primal work, where he posits that the main...
The impetus that drives human beings is this quest for meaning, for purpose.
This is called logotherapy.
He had a transcript on logotherapy, which he actually took to Auschwitz when he was imprisoned in that camp.
And of course, they confiscated that transcript from him and destroyed it.
He had an opportunity.
To not be interred in a concentration camp in World War II. This is what, among other things, makes him such an amazing figure.
He was offered a visa by the United States to continue his work on logotherapy in the States.
But he actually elected to stay behind in Vienna and face his fate.
And one of the things he writes in his book about why he decided to reject the visa and stay in Austria, even though he knew that the Nazis were probably going to arrest, torture, and imprison him, he says that he stayed behind for his parents.
There's this amazing passage in Man's Search for Meaning where he says he goes to his parents' house and he sees this marble.
And he asked his father, well, why do you have this marble in your house?
Where is it from?
And apparently it was from a synagogue that was destroyed by the Nazis in Vienna in the early years of the 1940s, in the early months, I should say, of the 1940s.
And apparently that marble in the synagogue was specifically from a tablet, the Ten Commandments.
And not only was it specifically from the Ten Commandments, it was specifically from the commandment which says, honor your father and mother.
That was the one little piece of marble that his father, Viktor Frankl's father, took from the destroyed synagogue.
And seeing that marble, honor your father and mother, that his father kept, made him...
Stay in Austria to face his fate, to face the situation that he and his parents were going to have to endure, and all Jewish people in Austria and beyond had to endure, that is, the imprisonment by the Nazis.
He elected not to go to the United States to stay with his parents.
Need I say more about what an upstanding individual this person is?
Well, actually, I will say more because the whole hour, as I said, is dedicated to Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl's book about his experience in Auschwitz and other concentration camps during World War II and what he learned from it.
As I said, it is especially prescient for our time amid this crisis of meaning in the United States.
As Dennis and I comment on in our show, Dennis and Julie, so many of the problems that we face in the United States are contrived.
Racism, homophobia, transphobia, even the existential threat of climate change.
All of those issues are contrived.
Of course, are there individual racists, transphobes, homophobes?
Of course.
Is climate change real?
Of course.
But are these things that I just said really that grave of threats that the left is making them out to be?
Of course not.
These situations are drummed up, are exploited at every opportunity in order to gain political favor.
What the left says is, oh, there's racism rampant around every corner.
Microaggressions constantly.
Systemic racism constantly.
But we are your saviors.
If you vote for us, we're going to change it all.
It is a despicable, despicable political ploy in order to gain power.
There are enough problems in life, legitimate, terrible problems across the world and even in the United States.
And yet so many of our issues are contrived.
I posit, as Viktor Frankl posited, that this comes from a crisis of meaning.
When you are not centered on what really matters in life, of course you are going to drum up these absurdities.
That is the American situation today.
The whole hour on Viktor Frankl.
Back in a moment.
I'm Julie Hartman.
Welcome back to the Dennis Frager Show.
I'm Julie Hartman.
This is what I call Viktor Frankl hour.
On this show, I've done a Ron hour.
Ukraine Hour, India Hour, or no, I haven't done Machiavelli Hour.
I want to in the future, and I will.
Nietzsche Hour, Literature Hour.
I mean, many, many hours dedicated to important historical and literary topics.
Today, we are talking about Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, a book that I recently read.
A book that had a huge impact on Dennis.
It's in his top 10 most influential books of his lifetime.
He read it when he was my age.
And it's a book I really regret to say.
That most people my age don't know about.
I'm only listing this anecdote because the people who I've asked are Jewish.
I'm not saying that this is representative of all young people who are Jewish.
I'm merely telling you my anecdotal experience.
I'm acknowledging that it is an anecdotal experience.
But nevertheless, it was something that happened.
I asked five of my friends from college who are Jewish, do you know who Viktor Frankl is?
All five said no.
All five.
Again, I'm not claiming this is representative.
I'm just telling you this fact.
I blame the American education system.
They are not teaching what should be taught, as Dennis says in his aptly worded promo for PragerU.
PragerU changed my life.
It alerted me to conservatism.
To goodness.
To Judeo-Christian values.
He's right in saying that PragerU teaches what should be taught.
And I'm sure PragerU, actually I know PragerU with Michael Knowles has a book club episode with Dennis on Man's Search for Meaning.
It's just amazing how many young people don't understand and aren't even aware of some of these most important books.
I view it as my vocation.
As a talk show host on my show, Timeless with Julie Hartman, to alert people to the things that we haven't been exposed to.
Of course, this book is one of them.
I encourage you to call in on this subject.
Whether or not you have read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, this hour is for you.
It is actually even more for the people who haven't read this book than for the people who have.
Because again, I want to just shout from the rooftops with a bullhorn or with a microphone to millions of people through the radio airwaves that this is one of the great works of Western civilization.
There are three main takeaways, I would say.
I mean, it's very difficult to even identify three in this book.
But I would say that there are three main takeaways from Man's Search for Meaning that I would like to alert you to that Dennis, indeed, talks about.
The first is that Viktor Frankl has the, I would argue, revolutionary line in his book when he is asked, how do you feel about the German race, which is the way that people ask questions in those days.
How do you feel about the German race?
Viktor Frankl's response was, I only divide the world in two categories, the decent and the indecent.
That is so huge.
You know, Dennis and I are conservatives, but there are many Republicans who are holding office, and indeed just everyday Republicans in the United States, who don't share our values.
There are people...
Just in general, of the same religion that you belong to, of the same school that you go to, of your family, whatever tie that holds you, whether it's conservatism or, again, school, religion, family, there are people that you would think would share your values, would be a part of your cohort, that really aren't.
I think we see that all as Americans in our everyday lives.
That's why Viktor Frankl's message is so revolutionary.
There are only two races, the decent and the indecent.
That transcends political, religious affiliation.
It really goes down to the bare-bones values that individuals That is how Dennis says that he strives to see the world, and that is how I strive to see the world, a division between good and evil, decency and indecency.
That is the first main point of Viktor Frankl.
The second in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, is that you don't have much other freedom in the world.
Especially if you live outside the United States.
In the United States, you have many freedoms.
Unfortunately, that privilege is dwindling.
It has been dwindling for a few years now.
Our freedoms are under assault.
But in the vast majority of the world, you have next to no freedoms.
But Viktor Frankl says the one freedom that every human being possesses, whatever regime they're under, whatever country they live in, is the freedom How they react to situations.
This is so important.
The way that he talks about the concentration camps in his book.
In World War II, again, people don't even know.
I could even dedicate an hour to this subject alone.
People don't even know the specifics of what happened less than 100 years ago.
Less than 80 years ago.
World War II was less than 80 years ago.
People don't know about the daily atrocities that individuals in Auschwitz and the other concentration camps had to endure.
Their names were taken away from them.
They were reduced to just numbers.
Their families, their possessions, their clothes, they were literally stripped down to...
And animal status.
They were treated like animals.
They were herded in lines, in labor, like they were animals.
And so what was left?
This is what Viktor Frankl talks about.
What is left when literally everything that you have, even the fat on your body, because they did not feed them.
They gave them the bare minimum, just broth, once a day.
Your fat on your skin was stripped away.
These individuals were just skeletons.
No name, no possessions, no family, no fat on their skin, no clothes.
Just, well, the clothes that the concentration camps gave them.
No clothes.
They're just skeletons.
What freedom do they have?
Viktor Frankl answers this.
The freedom to react to their circumstances.
He said that what kept people from succumbing to the degradation and the brutality of the camp, what kept people from becoming like and feeling like they were animals, was maintaining their integrity.
That is, all these individuals had in the camp was maintaining their integrity.
Viktor Frankl talks about that he would be disciplined to not steal a ration of bread from the fellow inmate.
To not become so upset and lash out against the individuals who were in his bunk with him.
He says as hard as it was when every force was pushing him to an animalistic status, the one thing that allowed him and others to maintain their sense of humanhood, their sense of humanity, was maintaining their integrity.
We are not living during a time of the Holocaust.
Thank God for that.
But we are living in a time when there is an assault on our humanity.
We must maintain our integrity.
More on Viktor Frankl back in a moment.
The Dennis Prager Show.
This is the Viktor Frankl Hour.
I'm talking about his book, Man's Search for Meaning.
I'm Julie Hartman, your guest host for today.
I am the co-host of the Dennis and Julie podcast and the host of my own three times weekly show, Timeless with Julie Hartman, where I talk about timeless, eternal works, messages that have been lost nowadays.
Foremost among them, Viktor Frankl's work, Man's Search for Meaning.
A quick aside.
Do you know what joy I get from loving my heritage?
From loving the works of Western civilization?
Of course, Viktor Frankl was an Austrian.
He wasn't an American.
But even just loving things in general, that is something that is lost.
A secular leftist doesn't engage in the joy of loving.
Great pieces of literature, music, art, architecture that I feel.
As Dennis talks about often, love is not a pie.
It's really, I believe, a divine gift.
Think about it.
What other emotion can you disperse and feel in such a quantity without diminishment?
There's a limit to your sadness.
You will feel so sad you just can't bear it anymore.
There's a limit to your anger.
But there's not a limit to your love.
I can love my parents, love my friends, love the Statue of Liberty, which I saw last week and teared up when I saw it when I was in New York City.
I can love...
Bach and Beethoven and Viktor Frankl and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charlotte Bronte.
And you know what?
It doesn't diminish from any of them.
And I can keep adding and adding and adding to the things that I love and revere.
That is, again, it is a divine gift that God gave us.
And it shows, as corny, again, corny alert as it sounds, our real existence.
In addition to meaning, which Viktor Frankl posits, is love and reverence.
That is what makes us more human.
Viktor Frankl's main contribution is this very point.
Freud posited the human beings are psychological creatures, motivated by psychological forces that they may not even be aware of, forces of their childhood.
The way that they were potty trained, for instance, that is Freud's supposition.
Marx's supposition is that the human is an economic creature motivated by money.
Viktor Frankl says no to all of that.
The human being is motivated by meaning.
They must find purpose in life to transcend themselves from animalism, to be a human.
When he was in the concentration camp, everything was stripped away from him.
He was no different from an animal.
He was treated like an animal.
He had to work like an animal.
In many cases, many prisoners looked like animals.
They were so emaciated, so deprived of their clothes, their possessions.
They probably, in many ways, as he says, resembled animals.
The one thing that kept them human was their moral compass and their integrity.
That is the essence of a human being.
That is indeed what transcends us from animals.
That is an insight that we cannot forget.
As I ended the last segment, of course, we are not living during the time of the Holocaust.
Thank God we are not.
But we are living during a time where there is an assault on the value of the individual, the value of the human being.
These secular leftist forces that have invaded academia, journalism, media, etc., government, almost every institution in our society, say that, well, a man, a human, is a mere product of materialism.
It's a product of Darwinianism.
Evolution, we have just evolved, and our impulses, our feelings, our expressions of our, again, material animalistic instincts.
There are few institutions that trumpet the transcendent value of a person.
That we are beyond our instincts, our evolution, our materialism.
That we possess a soul.
We possess free will.
We possess certain qualities which make us distinct, which make our existence, even if we are just one individual among billions, significant.
The caller board is lighting up.
We're going to go to many calls in the next segment.
1-8 Prager 776. Welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show.
I'm Julie Hartman.
We're having so much fun, at least I am, on the Viktor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning Hour.
There is a crisis of meaning in the United States.
I have to tell you, I... I can't say I pinch myself because that would hurt, but to use the expression, I pinch myself.
I think about how lucky I am to be in Dennis' orbit, to have a show with him.
And one of the things that he has provided for me is the necessary oxygen into the spiritual suffice.
Suffocation of my generation.
So many of us are spiritually, emotionally, intellectually suffocated.
We don't read great, timeless, eternal books like Man's Search for Meaning.
We don't even know their names.
I didn't even know Viktor Frankl's name.
I was a graduate of Harvard.
I didn't know Viktor Frankl's name until I encountered Dennis, who told me about this book.
And now I've read it.
We need the spiritual part of our lives.
Indeed, it is what makes us human.
It's what makes life worth living.
Dennis tries to provide it to you, and I certainly try to as well.
We have a lot of calls on the subject.
Let's go to William from Rye, New York.
Hi, William.
Thank you for your call.
Hi.
Hello, Julie.
Hi.
Hi.
I sent you an email earlier today because I want to marry together two topics that you're talking about.
The Viktor Frankl subject and what you were talking about earlier about the alleged censorship in schools.
I'm the guy who sends you emails.
I always sign them, Long Live the Republic.
So that may ring a bell for you.
I'm not sure.
I get a lot of emails, my dear, but thank you.
Oh, I know you do.
But that's why I have an unusual closing, because I figure it allows people to remember me.
So I've been a schoolteacher, middle and high school, English and history and math, for nearly 30 years.
And I can tell you that there is virtually no one among my colleagues.
Many of whom are Jewish, who have any clue about Viktor Frankl.
And when I've tried to get them to teach this to upper-level students, they just refuse.
They don't want to know about it.
There's this disdain for the old, as Dennis often talks about.
And this is where I'm marrying together two topics.
The insistence among some to include new classics, so-called new classics, in the curricula, to the exclusion of, ironically enough, or not ironically enough, books like To Kill a Mockingbird or of Mice and books like To Kill a Mockingbird or of Mice and Men, who were written by white, heterosexual, Christian people.
Simply because they're white, heterosexual, male, Christian, whatever, and replace them with things that we've never heard of.
Right.
And the thing is...
We've taught Amanda Gorman.
We made a big stink about her inaugural address.
If there's any censorship that's going on, it's two kinds.
It's censorship from the left, but it's also a self-censorship that English teachers are engaging in.
It's true.
No, it's totally right.
I mean, I've even seen this in my own education system.
You know, the problem is, William, I've talked about this on my own show, Timeless.
That a lot of educators now reduce great works of literature to social commentaries.
And I even saw this in my own education experience in high school.
I now have The Scarlet Letter, my favorite book of all time on my set.
The Scarlet Letter I learned when I read it in 8th grade or 9th grade at my high school.
I learned that it was a social commentary.
On the misogyny of 17th century Puritan America.
That is actually such an insult to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Scarlet Letter.
John Agrester writes this in his amazing book, The Death of Learning.
When you reduce these great works of literature to their time and place that they were written, it makes those works alien to the reader.
You have to make it relevant to the reader.
And potentially to the leader.
Hopefully a reader is a leader.
The Scarlet Letter is fundamentally about how you deal with problems that afflict you that are unjust.
Hester Prynne was branded as an adulteress.
The male counterpart of her adultery was not labeled.
She was labeled as an adulteress.
By the end of the book, spoiler alert, the A that she was branded with...
People didn't even remember stood for adulteress.
They thought it stood for Abel because she was so competent.
She didn't whine, complain, even though she had a reason to do so.
She didn't whine and complain.
She had an amazing seamstress business.
She raised her daughter well.
She was a great citizen, an individual in society, and people respected her so much that they forgot the supposed sin that she had.
That is the timeless, eternal message of the book that is lost in American education, as you pointed out, William.
And that's why we need to really dissect these books and point out the timeless, eternal meaning of their worth.
Let's go to Maria in Granada Hills, California.
Hi, Maria.
Hey, Julie.
What you're saying today is absolutely riveting to me.
Thank you.
I'm just listening because you know what?
The conversation you're having with all of us goes on on a daily basis.
My poor husband.
He listens to this every single day.
The meaning of life and how do we talk to our nephews and nieces and other family members who have completely lost the critical thinking skills, meaning in their lives.
And are just lost, really, as humans.
And the one thing that distinguishes between animals is our intellect.
We have the freedom to determine our future in history, and we're not applying it right now.
The press, all the institutions, have really devolved.
We've devolved into kind of an animalistic behavior.
Tribes, you know.
Your meaning-based now revolves around your sexuality, really.
Kids at the age of five are sexual beings all of a sudden.
The difference between the races now, whites are the evil race and the ones that suppress.
Forgive me, Maria.
I'm so sorry.
I hate doing this to callers.
We're about to end this segment.
We'll pick you up in the next one.
See you in a moment.
We're back.
With Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl Hour, I'm Julie Hartman.
Let's pick up quickly with Maria from Granada Hills, California.
Hi again, Maria.
Sorry I had to cut you off.
No problem.
Quick wrap-up.
If we, parents, schools, universities, don't have the courage like Viktor Frankl did, if we don't take a practical look and develop some critical thinking skills and look at this with courage, We're going to be sliding.
We're down the slippery slope of the playbook of dictators.
We've got to rise up against it.
We've got to learn from each other.
And we cannot be afraid, like so many parents are terrified, of talking to their kids, unlike my parents, who escaped from Nazi Germany and communist Russia.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your call, Maria, and well said.
You know, for all that the left obsesses about the past, about slavery and misogyny and racism, we now live in a time where it is so easy compared to other times and places on earth to stand up to evil.
Think about people who live in Iran.
I focus a lot on the misogyny of the Ayatollahs in Iran.
You know, the age of criminal responsibility for men in Iran is 15. For women, it's 9. If a woman is raped in Iran, she needs four male witnesses to corroborate her story.
Otherwise, it won't even be considered in court.
A woman needs many permissions from either her husband and her father.
And brothers in order to obtain certain educational degrees or even professions in Iran.
You know, think about those women there, how hard it is to stand up to the bigotry and misogyny of their government.
Masa Amini, a young 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was in Tehran.
Her hijab was a bit loose and some of her hair was peeking through her hijab.
She was arrested by Iran's morality police, and she was beaten in the van and died a few days later.
Again, solely because a few strands of hair were peeking through her hijab.
People in Iran and many, many other places on Earth, not just in the Middle East, all around the world, will literally die for standing up to evil.
In the United States, maybe we're entering into a regime where it is more difficult to stand up to evil, but it is really easy compared to other times and places on Earth.
If we cannot stand up to evil now when it is so easy to do so, would we really have stood up to evil then?
That is a question I wish that I could ask so many leftists in America today.
Thank you all so much for tuning in.
It has been such a pleasure to be with you.
As a reminder, I am the host of Timeless with Julie Hartman, the co-host of Dennis and Julie.
You can follow me at JulieRHartman on Instagram and Twitter.
You can also email me at Julie at Julie-Hartman.com.
Dennis will be back tomorrow.
Thanks again.
Dennis Prager here.
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