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Sept. 26, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:24:03
End of Days
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Dennis Prager here.
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subscribe at prager topia.com hello there everybody Dennis Prager here.
Hey, who sat in for me yesterday?
Who should I thank?
Bob France.
I love the guy.
I love all the people who sat in for me.
That's really...
The reason I wasn't here was perfectly, thank God, fine.
I virtually never miss a show because of any type of illness.
But yesterday was the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and for the 17th year in a row except for one COVID year, I conducted services.
Fasted, that's no water, 24 hours.
And no water and no food, obviously.
I'm very lucky, I fast easily.
And to have one day, at least a year, the whole day, where you just talk about the holy.
One of my two big speeches, I speak the whole service, was about the holy.
Maybe I should do, say ultimate issues hour, Damian.
I think I'll do an hour on the holy.
Thank you, sir.
Well, it's really fresh in my mind.
and Secular society can have good people in it, obviously.
But the death of the holy ensures some bad stuff in society, as we have seen.
Here is a piece, I don't even think my producer saw this.
I'm telling you, this is something you would expect satire to have written.
You know, a satirical site like Babylon Bee.
Scientists reveal, this is from the Daily Mail, the Daily Mail.
Scientists reveal the date.
Earth will face a mass extinction that wipes out all humans.
You did see it?
Yeah.
You just thought it was not worth sending?
No.
Oh, I think it's...
Well, what are we going to do?
We have a different take on the importance of this.
Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen, for the date?
They know the date.
And that's even if we stop burning fossil fuels right now.
Which, by the way, proves maybe it's irrelevant.
What date do you think it is?
Sean, when do you think the Earth will face mass extinction?
Because, presumably, temperatures will be between 104 and 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
And how long?
And that will wipe out humanity.
2092?
Alright.
Here it goes.
In 250 million years.
Yeah.
Well, you both had different reactions.
Alan was, I'm worried about it.
Deeply worried.
And Sean's was, let's party.
Computer simulations suggest our planet will face a mass extinction that wipes out all mammals.
University of Bristol experts report.
Any life form still alive on Earth Day by this time would have to cope with temperatures of between 104 degrees and 158 degrees.
My sense is a...
It's a parody.
It's a joke.
It's a stupid joke.
250 million years from now, and I am going to worry about it today.
I am going to wreck the economies of the Western world.
I'm going to put Africans into poverty because in 250 million years, the temperature, according to models, will be between 104 and 150. Excuse me, 158. Oh, wait a minute.
Whoa, I didn't catch this part.
Their calculations don't account for greenhouse gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels and other human-caused sources, so the date of our demise will likely be even sooner than 250 million years.
Yeah, 2092, there you go.
You predicted it.
The new study was led by Dr. Alexander Farnsworth, who was extremely lucky to be employed.
I added that.
That is not in the article.
Senior Research Associate of the University of Bristol School of Geographical Sciences.
The outlook in the distant future appears very bleak.
He doesn't think that we will have been able to figure out how to cool the environment within 250 million years.
Carbon dioxide levels could be double current levels.
Humans, along with many other species, would expire due to their inability to shed this heat through sweat cooling their bodies.
Wow.
It is embarrassing.
Okay.
I just thought I'd share that with you folks.
So the question is, how many young people are not going to have children?
Because of what might happen, according to models, in 250 million years.
That is the question.
Oh, wow.
Alright.
Hey, folks.
For quite some time I've been telling you that Ibram X. Kendi is an intellectual fraud.
And I was right.
He is the...
Well, I would say, is he the dean?
Is he the most respected critical race theory?
America is systemically racist.
Race matters thinker.
Yeah, he's up there.
He's the guy.
He's the guy.
That's right.
Well, it turns out, doesn't it, that...
The center that he directs at Boston University has done nothing.
The money has been squandered.
Ibram X. Kendi has done as he promised in 2020, freshly anointed as the director of Boston University's new Center for Anti-Racist Research.
Kendi announced his intention.
Oh, may I offer a thought, having read that sentence, a tangential thought.
Yesterday, in speaking to the 300 or so people that were attending the service I conducted, I mentioned the evils that humans engage in, and I listed racism.
And I realized what the left had done to the word.
I hate racism, but they have so removed the viciousness of racism by calling everyone with whom they differ a racist that the term no longer has any sting.
I read audiences like I read books.
How could I not?
I've been doing it all of my adult life, speaking in front of audiences.
And first of all, I think they're probably surprised that I even lumped it in there with fascism, Nazism, communism, because it's so associated with the left.
Racist, racism, white supremacy.
These are terrible things, but the left has denuded them of their moral intensity.
That was a good sentence.
The left has denuded them of their moral intensity.
You know I am speaking with such flourish because I'm finishing Frederick Douglass.
A remarkable man.
Kendi announces intention to transform how racial research is done.
Previously, research had been understood to involve collecting data, analyzing trends, and gathering new insights through the careful application of sustained thought.
But these expectations were hallmarks of white supremacy.
This week, as allegations of wanton mismanagement emerge from Kendi's staff, it appears that what it means to do racial research It has indeed been transformed.
It now entails taking vast sums of other people's money, then using it to produce almost nothing.
And by the way, it was the Boston Globe that revealed this.
To its credit, the Boston Globe is a left-wing paper.
I love giving left-wing media a shout-out.
Can you imagine the...
Any of these papers, however, saying, you know, PragerU has done some terrific things.
It'd be impossible.
They could not acknowledge it.
His center amassed $43 million in funding, including a $10 million donation from then-CEO of then-Twitter, Jack Dorsey.
Natural disasters?
Airline cancellations and runway near misses, supply chain issues, inflation, rising interest rates, and sky-high government debt.
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Americanfederal.com.
AmericanFederal.com I have Dinesh D'Souza, the author, the podcaster, the filmmaker.
after.
I'm on video and audio with me right now.
He has a new movie coming out in late October, and it's Police State.
The website is policestatefilm.net.
I saw the trailer.
I saw the trailer, and it is classic Dinesh D'Souza excellence.
So, Dinesh, welcome to the show, and tell us the reason you made the film.
Well, Dennis, there's so much that is troubling that's going on in our society around us, and I try to think to myself, what really has changed?
What really has changed is that I came to an America...
This is a generation ago as a teenager.
And it was an America in which we had basic liberties that could be taken for granted.
Now, a lot of them, although not all of them, are spelled out in the Bill of Rights.
The right to free speech, the right to conscience, religious freedom, the right to assemble, to petition the government for grievances, the right to equal treatment under the law, equal justice under the law.
And these rights are not...
Supposed to be open to political negotiation.
Majorities are not allowed to override these rights.
And that was the America I came to.
Fast forward to now and I suddenly realized every single one of those rights is in serious, and I mean serious, jeopardy.
And so...
A lot of the rhetoric that formed my early career, we are the free world, I'm here for the American dream, suddenly I'm looking at a different America and a startling question pops into my mind, are we becoming a police state?
Are we becoming the same as the unfree societies that we have long deplored?
And that's the central question driving this film.
Is the United States moving steadily, perhaps inexorably, toward a police state?
I wrote a piece during the lockdowns.
It was titled, Dress Rehearsal for a Police State.
Do you think that that was overstated?
No, although I think that the lockdowns, January 6th, these are the, let's call them the Reichstag fire pretexts for creating police state rules that you then kind of refuse to undo.
It's almost like you're establishing wartime measures that even after the war is over, you keep in place.
And this is what's going on.
And what's really scary about it is it's not just happening...
From the state, it's also happening in the private sector.
And what I mean by this is that traditionally police states are run in a centralized fashion with a dictator at the helm, a propaganda ministry that tells the media what to do, censorship that's established by a Goebbels or by a Stalinist minister.
But here we have a different situation.
A lot of the police state is in the private sphere, the media, the educational institutions which have become engines of indoctrination, digital platforms that are...
We're actively colluding with the government to enforce censorship.
So we're dealing with a more widespread and in some respects scarier phenomenon.
That's a very important point, the collusion of the private sector along with the public sector.
Do you see any signs?
I'm asked this all the time and I never fully know what to say.
Maybe it's not knowable.
Are there signs of a pushback?
I'll even be more specific.
What percentage of America fears a movement to a police state, in your opinion?
Now, fortunately, I can answer that question, and it's because just about a week ago, I went to the guys at the Rasmussen survey, and I told them I'm making this film, Police State.
They had done a poll last year on 2,000 mules.
And so I told them, when you do your national surveys, do you mind asking a couple of questions of people?
Ask them if they fear that America is becoming a police state, and ask them if they think that the FBI is the guardian of or a threat to our basic liberty.
And so they did.
And those results are out.
And amazingly, 72% of people say that they are, quote, very concerned or somewhat concerned that we are moving toward a police state.
And only about 25% say, no, that's not something that they're worried about.
And I kind of laugh when I see that number because I say to myself, those are the people that are helping to build the police state.
That's exactly right.
All right, people should go to policestatefilm.net.
Another critical film from Dinesh D'Souza.
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The Nesha D'Souza has a film coming out at the end of October.
Police State.
And the website is policestatefilm.net.
He is obviously as shocked as I am that such a film would even need to be made.
You're reciting the Rasmussen poll.
So I want to understand.
This brand new poll says 70% plus of Americans are worried that what?
That America is moving toward a police state.
And they define what a police state is.
They talk about mass surveillance, censorship, political targeting, the existence of political prisoners.
I mean, the things that we would identify as a police state if we were describing another society.
And so Rasmussen puts those forward and says, are those things happening here?
Are we heading in that direction?
And really, three out of four Americans say, yep, we are.
So, let me understand then.
That means that a serious percentage of Democrats think that we're moving toward a police state in order to get to that number, correct?
Correct.
It's got to be probably...
Okay, so...
Sorry, go on.
No, I was saying that just by the math, the number of Democrats has got to be around 20 to 25 percent.
This is assuming that virtually all Republicans...
Yeah, exactly.
So, it's probably, you know, 30 percent.
So...
How do you understand that about a third, if the poll is accurate, about one-third of the people who vote for the party instituting the police state will continue to vote for it?
Where do they think the police state is coming from?
Republicans?
This is a key point, Dennis, and this is a little bit of a surprise because we hear this, but we don't take it seriously, and that is that the left is telling its own constituency.
That we are building the police state.
This is really why whenever they use the word Trump, they always use the word authoritarian or fascist.
The idea here is that Trump poses a singular menace, but more than that, they define freedom in a somewhat different way.
To them, freedom is the freedom of...
Controlling your own body, namely abortion rights, the freedom of someone to transition from one gender to another.
And so their argument is that Republicans throughout the country, DeSantis in Florida, for example, are threatening these types of freedom.
So they're making the argument that the police state is coming from the right.
And so it may be that there are some Democrats who go, oh, yeah, there's there is a police state.
And of course, that's why we have to make sure that Trump is not on the ballot next year.
So, does that poll, in light of that, give one reason to think that the legitimate fear, which I have and you have, of a police state is more than half of this country?
If 30% of Democrats think the police state is coming from the right, and every single conservative and Republican thinks it's coming from the left, what is the gain?
Well, I think this is how I look at it.
You know, I started in this film to ask the question, are we becoming a police state?
And then it occurred to me that this is a question on which a lot of liberals and conservatives agree, except they point the fingers at each other.
And so the way I frame the film is, all right, so who's right?
Well, we can only answer who's right by answering a couple of other questions.
Number one, what is a police state?
Number two, how does it operate?
Number three, who's organizing it?
And number four, who's in charge?
If you answer those questions, then you know whether the police state is being run by the right or by the left.
And so that's really what the movie does.
It takes you into the bowels of the police state.
It has a lot of...
Informants, whistleblowers, people with inside knowledge.
And then I also feature a lot of ordinary people in the movie who have found themselves at the receiving end of the police state.
And I think that's important, Dennis, because there are going to be people who say, well, listen, you know, I'm not Trump.
And I didn't go inside the Capitol on January 6th.
And I pay my taxes.
So I'm never going to have the FBI come smashing down my door.
And that person could not be more wrong.
And this movie is intended to show them that.
How do you think the average FBI agent will react to your film?
God.
I think the problem, and this is a problem of bureaucracy, and it's a problem that we see in all police states.
Police states rely on recruiting Good people to do very bad things.
And they do it by framing the very bad things in very bureaucratic, mundane ways, and then setting up very complex bureaucratic measurements of advancement and career success that are tied to achieving these goals.
And the goals are always framed benignly, fighting disinformation, upholding the law.
That's why we're going after Trump, Dinesh, because no one is above the law.
Or upholding democracy.
We got to do this stuff.
It may be distasteful, but we got to save democracy by going after these white supremacists.
And so what you have is an ideological camouflage.
The police state is marching behind the benign banners of law and freedom and democracy.
That's exactly right.
I'm hesitating because it's the most painful part of all of this.
Like you, I believe we have political prisoners for the first time in American history, certainly modern American history.
What does your film do to address that?
The film has a, out of 90 minutes, there's about 25 minutes that focuses on January 6th, but in a kind of a fresh way, because...
We have to understand January 6th a little differently than simply the rhetoric that comes out of both sides.
Because on the one hand, you've got the rhetoric of insurrection.
On the other hand, you've got a bunch of guys who are just upset about the election.
And the problem with these two points of view is that neither can make sense of the other.
So there needs to be a sort of enlarged viewpoint, if you will, that makes sense of the way both sides think about this.
And in any event, we really focus in on January 6th because I agree with you.
Apart from wartime, we have not had political prisoners in this way, in this country's history.
And look, when people talk about the police state...
All right, hold that point, Dinesh.
Hold on one sec.
Hold that point.
I want to get everybody to your website.
Policestatefilm.net.
We return.
Dinesh D'Souza is coming out with a new film in theaters at the end of October.
Police State.
That's the title.
You could cry, you could weep, that it is an accurate depiction of what is happening because of the left.
And the left Owning the media, as they do, and the educational apparatus, have been able to say the threat to your liberty comes from the right, which I said the next day it happened when they called January 6th an insurrection.
I said they would use it like the Rostock fire was used by the Nazis to suppress liberty.
I was not comparing them to Nazis.
I was comparing the use of an event to suppress rights.
I have been proven right, tragically.
There are now political prisoners.
I have talked to one in prison.
I have mentioned another who is now in solitary confinement because he gave an interview to Newsmax while in prison.
There is video of him in prison.
John Strand is the man.
This video of him in prison, not in prison, excuse me, in the Capitol, and he did nothing wrong.
Nothing.
But he would not take a plea agreement because he's a religious Christian and won't lie.
And he knew that if he pled guilty, that would be lying.
So the D'Souza film could not come out at a more appropriate time, unfortunately.
So you were talking to me about January 6th, the use of the insurrection term, etc.
I wanted to make the point, and we make a number of points, but I'll focus on one of them here.
And that is the bitter irony that right after 9-11, the Bush administration...
Ask the American people, give us all these new police powers.
It's not enough for us to go after the bad guys who did this.
In fact, hey, they're all dead.
Let's go after the next guy who's going to do this.
And so to do that, we need massive surveillance.
We need to be able to get into people's bank accounts and their phones.
We need to be able to infiltrate their organizations and perhaps even help them along so that right before they can carry out the plot, our inside people will bust it.
So the FBI and all the other police agencies of government, let's remember Department of Homeland Security, they're 10 times bigger than the FBI. They're actively involved in all this.
So the FBI and the police agencies kind of perfected this routine of how do we go after suspected Islamic terrorists?
So that set it up.
All right.
Listen, we've got to do more of this.
I want everybody in America to see your film.
Go to policestatefilm.net.
Thank you, Dinesh D'Souza.
We'll do a part two, obviously.
I look forward to it.
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Hello everybody, Dennis Prager here. - Sure.
The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports that California County calls off, quote, American Christian Heritage Month, unquote, after fierce backlash.
Two months after proclaiming that July would henceforth be known locally as American Christian Heritage Month, the Board of Supervisors in El Dorado County, California has reversed course.
Where's El Dorado County?
I assume central conservative area of California.
The county's elected governing body unanimously Unanimously, huh?
Rescinded the proclamation Tuesday, following backlash from local Jews, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others who said it inappropriately advanced the idea that the United States is a Christian nation.
Well, as a Jew, let me say how embarrassed I am that there would be local Jews who came out against this, aside from...
Being, in my opinion, foolish because it does not state that America is a Christian nation any more than LGBT month affirms that America is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender nation.
To honor something doesn't mean everybody in it is that.
And there are more Christians I strongly suspect in El Dorado County, California, then there are LGBTQ people.
So why can't that be honored?
Has Christianity not played a fundamentally positive role in creating America?
Was it not Christians in Britain who abolished the slave trade, the first people on earth to do so?
Is that not worth noting?
Left-wing Jews are of no help to the Jewish people aside from all the other awful things that they stand for.
But it's true about left-wing everybody.
Left-wing Christians, left-wing whites, left-wing liberals, left-wing blacks, left-wing Hispanics.
left wing is damaging.
But it was a painful thing to read.
Hmm.
Thank you.
Marla Saunders, a massage therapist in South Lake Tahoe, said she was verklempt after the decision using the Yiddish term meaning overcome by emotion.
Saunders, who was Jewish, had started an online petition calling on the board to rescind the proclamation.
The petition had 1,000 signatures as of September 19th.
I am teary with joy, she said.
It's a rural area with 200,000 residents south of Lake Tahoe.
They voted on July 18th to mark every July's American Christian Heritage Month.
The vote passed 4 to 1, though one supervisor maintained she actually abstained, but was recorded as an I.
The language of the proclamation is taken from the platform of the Constitution Party, a conservative political party formed in the 1990s, that advocates for hands-off governance and Christian values.
Coming at a time of rising Christian nationalist sentiment.
Hmm.
What does that mean?
Whenever I read Christian Nationalists anything, they never explain it.
Do you know what it means?
I assume it means that there are people who believe that America should be a Christian nation.
What does that mean?
Does it mean that all non-Christians would be exterminated?
What does it mean?
In these people's anguished reaction to the term I want to know what they fear.
Now, I would prefer the reality is a Judeo-Christian nation, because that's what it was founded as, Christians rooted in the Old Testament.
Even Jefferson and Franklin, who were not theologically Christian, Wanted the Great Seal of the United States to depict the Jews, the Israelites, leaving Egypt.
American founders regarded America as a second Israel, the first Israel with the Jewish people.
I wonder if these people, if they had said, I am curious, there's no way to know.
although i'll tell you there's a rabbi quoted here of temple b'atyam in south lake tahoe i applaud them for rescinding it let's invite him on the show all right i'd like to know what he feared I'd like to have somebody who was for this petition.
I'd like to know what they wanted.
The overwhelming...
Majority of Americans throughout our history have been Christian.
I don't know why it is exactly controversial to have a month honoring Christian heritage.
You don't want to bother with it, don't bother with it.
Does Black History Month mean that people want to make America black?
Does LGBT Month mean that Pride Month?
They want to make all Americans LGBTQ? They wouldn't mind, but that's not what the purpose of the month is.
So why is Christian Heritage Month?
month, let's make all Americans Christian.
So, anyway...
This great nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians.
Not on religions, but on a foundation of Christian principles and values.
This was John Hedal, the supervisor, who said before the vote, The proclamation is clearly stating, don't forget our history.
So he even said, not on religions, but on a foundation of Christian principles and values.
So, it's the values of Christianity that they were...
They were celebrating when they passed this.
The proclamation's critics said it violated the principle of the separation of church and state and promoted one religion over others.
So, why does an LGBT Pride Month promote LGBT as a sexual expression over others?
This would be the only type of celebratory month that would be celebrating the superiority of something over others, in theory.
The ACLU of Northern California said the proclamation, quote, conveys that the county supports, promotes, and endorses specific religious beliefs, and as such, violates the California Constitution.
Wow.
So, this is what's going on in America today.
Christopher Ruffo, who really, his book was fantastic.
What is the name of his book?
I read it and I don't even remember the name because I read a lot of books.
It's a powerful book.
See if they have it here on the website of his article.
Yeah, America's Cultural Revolution.
Yes, it was a very important book.
There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside down.
Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics.
Speech is declared violence.
This is all true, by the way.
College students say that.
Speech is violence.
If they don't agree with your speech, it's violence.
Talking about speech, Charlie Kirk and I are speaking tomorrow night at Arizona State University.
If you have a fourth cousin whose kid is attending, tell them to come to the speeches.
They need to hear another voice to the dominant dishonesty that they are subjected to.
And I can't wait to speak there and respond to some of the truly vile professors, the intellectual lightweights at Barrett College, Honors College, no less, of ASU. Reading Christopher
Rufo's piece in City Journal, There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside down.
Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics.
Speech is declared violence.
Violence is excused as speech.
Masculinity is condemned as toxic, while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square.
That's a great sentence.
Just a great sentence.
The upside-down world of the sick, pathologic left.
Masculinity is condemned as toxic, while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square.
It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown, and he believes we are.
He said there are three clusters of personality disorders, A, B, and C. And he explains them.
Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a sense of entitlement, obsession with one's own importance, and deep feelings of resentment, often expressed through moral self-righteousness.
Borderline personality disorder is marked by an unstable sense of identity Black and white thinking, feelings of emptiness, and recurring self-harm and suicide attempts.
Histrionic personality disorder, the third cluster, exhibits excessive emotionality, sexual provocation, and attention-seeking, often to serve a pathological need for sympathy.
Anti-social personality disorder is typified by impulsivity, manipulation, disregard for others, and a penchant for violence and aggression that violates social norms.
This cluster of psychopathologies is no longer an individual matter, however, to be dealt with in the privacy of the analyst's office.
On the contrary, Cluster B, that was the cluster I just read to you about, Cluster B psychological traits have begun to shape the patterns and structures of our culture.
The scenes of American public life increasingly resemble a cluster B psychodrama.
Victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit.
He's exceptional.
I would put him up there among the leading thinkers that we now have.
And knowledgeable.
So listen to this.
This is very important.
Victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit.
That's right.
The question that is asked by the left is not, what have you accomplished?
But how much of a victim are you?
Yesterday I led Yom Kippur services, the holiest day of the year.
You could watch them and you would love it.
Whether you're an atheist or a Christian or a secular Jew, anyone.
You would love the service.
And by the way, it's at pragerhighholidays.net.
You can now get it.
It was incredibly professionally filmed.
By the great Robert Antal.
And I noted to the 300 or so people who were there, what you are engaging in on this day is the opposite of what society is having people engage in.
The whole point of Yom Kippur Kippur, or Yom Kippur, is to see where I, the individual, am wrong.
What did I do wrong in the past year?
And it's a very long list of specific things.
I mean, it's not just generalized.
I sinned.
That doesn't do much.
There's a whole list, 42 of them, It forces you to think, and that's the whole purpose of it.
How was I this past year, and in what way can I be a better person next year?
In America today, and this has been true for a while, but it is worse today than ever, I am not the problem.
America is the problem.
That's the difference.
So often I've told you I was raised with the notion that the biggest problem in Dennis Prager's life is Dennis Prager.
Not America.
Nope.
Society was far from perfect.
How could it not be far from perfect since it's composed of humans who are far from perfect?
But...
It was as good as it gets.
So we, who are religious, focus on our own imperfection.
Or should.
So that's a great line.
Victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit.
Accusation replaces disagreement as the means of settling disputes.
This paragraph should be enshrined on billboards.
That's right.
As I say, the left never argues.
They smear.
False compassion becomes the primary method of manipulating citizens into compliance.
Yeah.
False compassion.
Let's have pity on the eight-year-old who says she's a boy and thereby ruin her and her future.
With hormone blockers.
Or puberty blocker hormones, I should say.
Which reminds me, I need to remember every day, you must not buy a brawn shaver.
An ad celebrating a double mastectomy is sick.
Christopher Ruffo is describing what I have been saying, and I love when people put in excellent and I love when people put in excellent words their own way of describing it.
I said, the left is sick.
It is truly pathologic.
That is right.
So he's talking about the various disorders that characterize the left.
Not liberals, the left.
And he writes, while these strategies are contemptible, they are also extraordinarily effective in controlling what we think, what we say, and how we act.
They have slowly transformed our institutions into what psychologist Andrei Wobachevsky calls a pathocracy, or rule by psychological dysfunction.
Allow me to applaud.
Rule.
That's right.
This has become our new social order.
Once a thoughtful observer internalizes this phenomenon, he will start to see it everywhere.
The cluster B traits have been formalized and entrenched in our human resource departments, government policies, cultural institutions, and civil rights laws.
Examples abound.
A recent CIA recruitment video valorized the cluster B traits of narcissistic identity obsession, self-righteousness, and craving for affirmation.
I saw it, but I never played it on the air.
Would you give it to Sean?
I think people should hear it.
A CIA ad.
Which, as he puts it, valorizes pathology.
It glorifies it.
You will make a great CIA agent if you are pathologic, if you are psychopathological.
Quote, I am a woman of color.
I am a mom.
I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
Unquote.
Intones the featured CIA analyst as the camera pans over her diversity awards.
I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36 I refused to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.
How do you like that?
That's who you want in your CIA, don't you?
Well, it's good for the CIA. The more pathologic their members, the more they control them, can control them.
The CIA is corrupt.
The FBI is corrupt.
I've never said anything like this.
I never thought this.
This is how bad it's become.
Because the left destroys everything it touches.
If you don't know that, you do not understand history since 1917. Indeed, one can argue you don't understand history since 1789 and the French Revolution.
The left destroys everything it touches.
The CIA, the FBI are two of the examples.
Your kid's school is another in all probability.
Sean, did Alan send you this video from the CIA? I'll play it for you next segment.
This is a recruitment, not we want the best.
They don't want the healthiest.
They want people who acknowledge that they are psychologically deeply impaired.
And this woman's solution to her psychological impairment...
Is that she no longer has internalized misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.
Do you know PragerU has been attacked now by every major medium in the country?
Many times, twice.
Because Oklahoma and Florida have announced that they will allow teachers to use our videos in classrooms.
And do you know one of the examples they give of how awful PragerU is?
That we have a video on femininity, which includes the line, something to the effect, It is a beautiful thing when a woman smiles.
Disgusting, isn't that, that we would say that?
And red clouds, or white walls, or blue skies, we're gonna fly, feel all right, somebody help me feel all right.
Music. .
Bye.
Hello everybody, it's the Ultimate Issues Hour on the Dennis Prager Show.
The great issues of life.
Perfect timing actually, because yesterday, all day long, and from the previous evening, I was leading religious services.
You can see it, by the way.
They were professionally, magnificently videoed with the music as well as all of my explaining life and prayer, closeness to God, etc., all in my rational way.
It's at pragerhighholidays.net.
It's an investment.
It is not time-bound.
You can watch it five years from now.
I purposely make it timeless.
And I spoke yesterday about many things, but my actual sermon was on the holy, on holiness.
Which, if you are secular, you are probably very tempted to right now observe.
Spiders weaving webs.
Because the term holy connotes for most people in our anti-religious age voodoo, silliness, irrelevance.
Yeah, I guess irrelevance more than anything.
That's not exactly right, however.
So I'll tell you what holy means so that you will get...
To begin an understanding of it.
It means God-centered.
That's what holy means.
In a secular society, nothing is God-centered, so nothing is holy.
Name something that is holy in our secular society.
You can't.
Remember the term Holy Bible or the Holy Scriptures?
What did it mean?
God-centered.
That's what holy means.
It's very helpful to understand what it means, certainly from a biblical perspective, since that's where the term is used.
It starts basically in Leviticus, chapter 19, and the Lord spoke to, let's see, Moses saying, I guess, I'll check that sentence, I know the next one.
You shall be holy.
For I, the Lord your God, am holy.
God is the essence of holiness because God is God-centered.
Should go without saying.
So the question is, what is the use of the holy?
And that's what I should like to address in this Ultimate Issues Hour.
Why is it important?
So I'll give you a biblical example.
The Ten Commandments were carried in ancient Israel in the Holy Ark.
And kept in the Holy of Holies.
Or kept in the Holy Temple.
And what you have here is symbolic.
The Holy...
Protects the ethical.
The Ten Commandments are overwhelmingly about ethical issues, how we treat our fellow human being.
And the Holy Ark is about holiness.
The Ark protects the Ten Commandments.
When you get rid of the holy in society, you will start your way down the ethical path to oblivion.
And I have seen that in the United States.
Because in secular society, there's no such thing as the holy, so it becomes, as I said, irrelevant.
The whole concept.
I pointed this out, and I was mocked by the usual mockers, who should know that their mockery reinforces My understanding of the validity of what I said.
The left plays an important role in my life.
In fact, I wrote years ago, maybe decades ago, how the left keeps me religious.
The most anti-religious group are the most vile, the most pathetic in terms of intellectual understanding of life.
And so I realize, wow.
If the people who have the most contempt for Judeo-Christian values are the stupidest and the meanest, then there must be something great about the Judeo-Christian value system.
I do.
It has that effect.
So I was mocked when I pointed out that there was a vote in San Francisco.
The city council voted, and I think the vote went 9-7.
I may be mistaken by one vote, but basically...
Nine to seven.
I believe it was two votes that kept laws against public nudity in place.
And the only reason the people voted on the city council in San Francisco to keep the laws in place, the only reason they gave was health, that hygiene.
That somebody naked sitting on a bus bench, for example, it could spread some sort of germs and disease.
That was it.
But of course there would be a very simple solution to that.
If you are walking around naked and sit on a public bench, you have to have a towel to sit on.
So if you're sitting on a park bench naked, then you could be sighted like jaywalking.
We had in America when I grew up the concept of public decency.
Public decency is a secular way of saying holy.
There is no such thing as public decency with the radical secular known as the left.
Taking over.
They don't have the concept.
That's why the examples that I give of the breakdown of the holy are public cursing.
Everybody understood that people do it periodically in private.
That is, use expletives.
Everybody understood that comedians might use these words for comic effect.
But the widespread use of expletives is new.
It's just new.
By the way, I wrote years before Donald Trump ran.
I said I could not vote for him because he did use expletives publicly.
I don't like when our side does it.
As it turns out, despite that, he became a great president.
The country was thriving while he was president.
And that is the only way I measure a president.
Not on likability, not on holiness, but on was the country thriving or was it in decline as it is now?
I have no other metric to judge a president by.
Public cursing was the beginning.
of the anti-holy onslaught in society as it rejected the Judeo-Christian value system.
Nudity is another example.
There is no secular argument.
There's no secular argument against public cursing.
There's no secular argument against public nudity.
Give me one secular argument.
Against people going around naked.
I don't mean in nudist colonies.
I mean in society.
There is none.
There is only the religious argument that we are not animals.
Animals' genitalia are on display.
Human genitalia are not on display.
That's it.
There is no other argument against public nudity.
Especially in a temperate climate.
1-8 Prager 776-877-243-7776 There are consequences to the death of the Judeo-Christian system.
This is one of them.
This is the Ultimate Issues Hour.
I'm talking to you about a subject I have a suspicion that it has not been discussed on regular radio in decades, if ever.
I'm not talking about religious broadcasting, but in general broadcasting.
The Holy.
The general contempt in which anything religious is held has made the holy an inoperable word.
We are living in the age of nothing is holy.
And we are suffering tremendously.
The holy means...
The elevation of the human from the animal to the divine.
That's another way of looking at it.
Holy means God-centered.
The clothing issue was the perfect example.
Why do we wear clothing even if we don't need to be warmed by clothing?
Why don't people walk around naked?
Seriously, think about that question.
I'd like you to ask your college-aged son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, nephew, niece, Neighbors, kid, I'd like you to ask anybody at college, do you think people should be allowed to walk around naked?
I try to get the air of Rasmussen to ask that question.
I'd love to get the percentage.
I believe at least half.
Of the students at Yale would say yes.
People should be allowed to walk around naked.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were 75%.
And overwhelmingly the only dissenters would be religious kids.
Christian, Jewish, Muslim.
Or Hindu.
I can't imagine any Normative religion whose adherents would say it's fine if people show their genitalia publicly.
I don't know of such a religion.
So that's a really good question to pose.
We used to have laws against public cursing.
When America was a religious, much more religious society, it was deemed really wrong, like public nudity, public cursing, which today means nothing.
It means absolutely nothing.
Left-wing kids will scream the F word every sentence at a speaker they don't agree with.
This is new in America.
This is another product of secularization.
Secular conservatives don't understand the threat that secularism poses, but they're good people.
But their grandchildren, if they have any, will probably not be conservative.
Some will.
There are always exceptions.
There is no secular argument against public nudity.
We used to have another holy thing.
Holy things are not just speech, not just behavior.
But time.
There was holy time in America.
The Sabbath.
Sundays.
What does holy mean?
God-centered.
There was a God-centered day in much of American life.
It was Sunday.
You felt it.
It was different.
Not anymore.
In secular society, Sunday is indistinguishable.
From other days of the week, except for the fact that people are not going to work.
They're going to shop, they're going to visit, and they're going to some sporting event, perhaps.
The death of the Sabbath in American life is a catastrophe.
I have it, because I have decided to affirm it, in fact.
I'm at synagogue virtually every Saturday, certainly every one that I'm in Los Angeles.
Three of us founded a synagogue, and about 150 or so people come each week, and many others around the world watch it on Zoom.
It's something that gives me tremendous peace.
God and human-centered day each week.
Not work-related.
It's powerful.
It's a very powerful force.
1-8 Prager-776-877-243-776 What do you think a college kid in your life would answer should public nudity be allowed?
New rule of the completely destructive force known as the Democratic Party, the new rule in the United States Senate is there is no dress code.
So this pathologic, and I don't mean because he's depressed, just pathologic, because he has allowed his pathologies to govern his sentiments.
Fetterman, a senator from Pennsylvania, shows up in shorts and t-shirts and hoodies at the U.S. Senate.
Clothing is a very important, very important issue.
I have argued this, Christians, to my shock.
I really, it's the only time I think I've ever been surprised in 40 years of radio.
Many of my listeners are Christian.
I have a deep affection for them, needless to say.
And yet many of them have called to tell me, God doesn't care what you wear to church.
Hmm.
It shows you the effect of secularism even on religious life.
1-8 Prager 776. Dennis Prager here, Ultimate Issues Hour, about a subject almost nobody talks about, but is as important as virtually anything else.
holy and the death of the holy.
So the people forget how big it is.
Nudity is a great example because there are no secular arguments against public nudity.
The only argument is we're not animals.
We don't show our genitalia.
That's a religious argument.
Public cursing, same thing.
The only argument is ultimately a religious argument.
It's wrong.
It violates some sanctity.
That's implicit in a good society.
The death of the Sabbath is another example.
There was a day ostensibly devoted, as holy means, to God-centered things.
This is the first time in American history fewer than 50% of Americans attend church each week.
It's a calamity, as you can see in the society.
Okie dokie.
Let's go to West Los Angeles and Eric.
Hello, Eric.
How are you doing?
Really well.
Thank you.
That is wonderful.
So I am just a long-time listener.
I would be considered a sort of secular liberal, but I'm a big fan of what you have to say, and I think there's a lot of wisdom in what you're saying.
Well, by the way, so let me just make the point that you are a living illustration of the difference between liberal and left.
Yeah, and by the way, I share 100% your belief that a big moral failure of liberals, and with that I include 98% of my own social circle, is living in sort of complete denial about the left.
There's sort of this belief that, oh, this is just a fiction of Fox News, this is just a...
Right, well, so I'm curious, and I'm certainly not going to take time from what you want to raise with me.
Do you generally feel sort of alone in life?
Yes.
In that regard, very much so, yeah.
Because I think most of my friends are either Trumpers on one end, which I don't agree with, or on the other side, insane.
I shouldn't say insane.
I would say people are living in denial.
Pardon?
No, insane is not wrong.
There is a pathology on the left.
If you think that men can compete with women in sports and scream at people who don't think so, there is something wrong with you.
It's not just the wrong political view.
I would actually characterize mainstream liberals as the following.
They would say, and this goes for most of my friends, they would say, oh, these are crazy ideas.
That's right.
That's what they say.
That's right.
All right, so now raise the challenge that you called in with.
Yeah, I think your point about holiness is really wise, and it's really food for thought, particularly for a guy like me, who's a secular liberal.
But the respectful challenge I would present is, how do you square in earlier age in America, i.e.
the 1950s, where people didn't curse in public, wore jackets and ties to events?
We've respected the sanctity of public places.
All the things that even I, as a secular liberal, think we've lost, and I think that's dangerous, and I agree with you.
I think your message is important.
How do you square the fact that we had all that, I would say, traditional good stuff, but we also had segregation?
We also had a public acceptability of segregation.
I wasn't around.
I was born in 1968, but I'm going to assume that this was an age in which people...
Respected decorum, respected, you know, all the stuff that's gone out the window now we had, but we also had clear social acceptability of inequality, and segregation is clearly the most, the clearest example.
How do you square those two things?
Well, it's funny.
You called in to say how you're a secular liberal and yet you so often agree with me, and here I am, a religious conservative, agreeing with you.
You know what?
I don't know how they squared it.
I just finished Frederick Douglass' magnificent autobiography.
I think he wrote two, by the way.
I'm sorry?
I think he wrote two autobiographies.
I could be wrong.
Did he write two?
I think there was a biography and an autobiography.
Okay, I'm wrong then.
You're right.
So anyway, he...
He raises that question constantly.
How did slave owners go to church on Sunday and beat a slave on Monday?
And even though I fully support the notion that you judge people in their age, it's still baffling.
I have no better answer.
Well, I may have a slightly better answer.
People, human nature is so unimpressive.
It takes a lot to make good people.
And religion doesn't always work.
I'll say more about that.
Talking to you about the death of the holy and the consequences to the society.
I've been devastating.
So I gave the example of public cursing.
The end of the Sabbath day each week.
The concept of dress not meaning anything what you wear.
In fact, you can wear nothing.
These are all examples.
I'll give more, but I want to answer this call if he's still on.
Is he still on?
No, but it doesn't matter.
He raised a great question.
He was a good man, a secular liberal who hears my points.
So we had all these things, no public cursing, proper dress, church attendance, and a lot of Americans believed in racial segregation, indeed racial inferiority.
My friends, I wrote my first book, let's see, 50 years ago.
It's hard to believe.
My early 20s.
It's still in print.
I think it's the most widely read English introduction to Judaism.
It's called The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism.
And one of the nine is if religion is supposed to make people better, how do you account for unethical religious people?
Religion doesn't make you better unless you want it to make you better.
Many people are religious because it's comfortable, not because it's morally demanding.
My sermon on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, a week ago at the service I lead.
You can watch my service at pragerhighholidays.net.
Promise you'll be very moved.
PragerHighHolidays.net My sermon was on this subject that God wants us to be good more than anything else.
If you don't believe that, then in fact you can go to church on Sunday and beat a slave on Monday.
I don't know.
I really wish I could go back in the time machine.
I've said this a few times.
I don't know how people who are religious, that is, Jewish or Christian, could defend slavery.
The Bible specifically prohibits kidnapping people and selling them.
It's a 3,000-year prohibition.
There's a prohibition in the Torah, the first five books where all the laws are, against returning a slave to its master.
The masters were punished if they seriously wounded a slave.
And And presumably put to death if they murdered a slave.
And I don't know how people did.
And then when it was ended, how did people treat the blacks so poorly?
When the whole biblical foundation is every human being is created in God's image.
God doesn't give a damn about color.
Only racists did then and the left today.
Isn't that interesting?
The only two groups in the post-slave world to say that race matters have been The racists and the Ku Klux Klaners of the past and the left of the present.
Another example of how vile the left is.
How morally sick.
Race tells you nothing about a human being.
Nothing!
Is that clear?
Religion doesn't make you better.
Unless you want it to make you better.
Shakespeare doesn't make you wiser unless you want to become wiser.
You have to believe in its values in religion.
You have to believe in that.
You can't use it for comfort.
You should walk through life asking, what does God want from me, not what do I want from God?
In that light, I want to start a campaign on billboards around the country.
God not only loves you, He judges you.
Have a nice day.
I would love to see the reaction to that.
Okay, let's go to Brent in Los Angeles.
Hello.
Shana Tova, Dennis.
Thank you.
Yeah, I was just curious, in your liturgy on Yom Kippur, do you include the traditional Torah reading of Leviticus condemning incest and bestiality and male homosexuality?
Well, it's interesting, and I knew your question, and I love challenging questions.
The prayer book that we use, everything in it is from the traditional Orthodox prayer book of hundreds, sometimes 2,000 years.
But those whose book we use, they took that out and they put in a lovely part of Deuteronomy instead.
I believe in using the tradition, and even when it's difficult, That people have to confront its difficulty.
So, you'll find this of interest.
I'm very close to a few gay couples.
And one that I'm really close to, in fact, my wife and I are the godparents of their children.
Because they're very close to us, obviously.
Okay, and they mentioned to me that...
For a whole host of practical reasons, they're going to get married.
They have not been married.
They have obviously two kids.
Otherwise, we couldn't be God's parents.
And they said to me, and I'm going to keep you on, by the way.
We're taking a break.
Stay on.
They said, we would love you to officiate at our wedding, but we know you're opposed to same-sex marriage.
I'll continue with the story in a moment with your call.
Dennis Prager here.
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