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Nov. 16, 2023 - Dennis Prager Show
01:15:10
Moral Crisis
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Dennis Prager here.
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subscribe at prager topia.com Hi everybody I'm back from Florida Good to be with you, my friends.
I just want to announce that my little box that could change America campaign is taking off.
I've got so much mail from you.
I can't respond to everybody, but I responded to a few.
With people of non-Jews, especially Christians, who are putting a mezuzah on their doorpost.
Read my article.
It's at DennisPrager.com, right?
You just go to DennisPrager.com and you'll see it.
It's now on many websites, but that's the easiest for you to see.
Many people have gone to local synagogues, and that has been a transformative experience for the Jews.
Seeing Christians come in...
And wanting to do this to show solidarity with Jews at the worst time in Jewish history in the United States of America.
So this is a seminal moment.
And so I ask you to consider, of course you could just order it online, M-E-Z-U-Z-A-H, just exactly as you pronounce it.
So, here's an article that I read, a very long piece by David Brooks in The Atlantic.
And it's so interesting to read him because he cares about moral issues, which therefore immediately interests me.
He's a columnist for the New York Times.
He was, I think, the first...
So-called conservative, but there's a big though there, which I'm coming to, because it's really important.
Really important.
And he's worried about America and the moral state of the country, etc.
And what happens to him is all of a sudden, He goes into a diatribe about Donald Trump.
It's a non sequitur.
As if Donald Trump is the issue.
Not America.
Not the education.
Everything he writes is independent of Donald Trump.
Everything.
So here's an example.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.
By the way, let me just say, as a rule, I've tried to live by this.
If I make a statement that gigantic, I give examples.
All of my writing is generalization, example.
Generalization, example.
Here's a generalization.
And there's no example.
I don't know.
I literally don't know what he was referring to.
He believes that hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw the virus through the lens of a political struggle.
Do you know what he's talking about?
I absolutely don't.
But it's such a debate.
He is accusing political struggle of causing hundreds of thousands of people's deaths.
What is he talking about?
After decades without much in the way of moral formation, that's correct, that was a good part of his article.
It's a very long one in The Atlantic.
It took me an hour and a half to do this.
One article.
America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump's morality and saw presidential timber.
That's the next sentence after the hundreds of thousands died.
I have said this now on many occasions.
Not once during the four-year presidency of Donald Trump did I use the term Trump derangement syndrome.
But I now do because it's true.
that all of a sudden a rational piece of writing becomes irrational and now because there's no moral formation which is true in the United States people became peep 74 million people
Looked at Donald Trump's morality and saw presidential timber.
They didn't look at Donald Trump's morality and see presidential timber.
They saw Donald Trump railing against the immorality, not sexual immorality, but the wrongness, the bad things that were happening in the United States.
They saw presidential timber because he had courage and he knew what was ailing America.
Like a porous border.
Porous is an understatement.
Like a sick obsession with climate change which was crushing the economy and has further crushed it.
The reason for inflation is not the war in Ukraine.
The reason for inflation is overwhelmingly green, sick policies of hundreds of billions of dollars spent on nonsense.
Green nonsense.
A modern version of how to build character.
The old-fashioned models of character building were hopelessly gendered.
Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions.
Okay, so that's an old-fashioned model of character?
What is wrong with that?
That's what makes a man.
Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions.
That's exactly right.
That's why I'm a conservative.
I want to conserve values like that.
Amen.
I'd like you to learn how to master your unruly passions.
Talked about that in the male-female hour yesterday.
And women were supposed to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility.
In order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires.
These formulas are obsolete today.
Well, I don't understand why the first one is...
Does he mean they should be obsolete?
I assume it.
By the way, I'm just curious.
Do you agree with that assessment that prior to the 60s...
Quote, women were supposed to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires.
I mean, you had a mother who so doesn't fit this.
I had a mother who so doesn't fit this.
My mother, if she read this, She'd go, huh?
My mother was born in 1919. This view of the past.
What about the hundreds of thousands of suffragettes in the 1920s?
So women born in the 19th century, were they sequestered?
In a world of ladylike gentility?
What is he reading?
Pride and Prejudice?
Yes, yes.
You don't get out into the world.
Not working outside the house doesn't mean you don't get out into the world.
Raising a family is not sequestered.
I know a guy who's raising a family.
He's hardly sequestered.
He travels around the country.
It's so painful to read, but the Trump parts are just astonishing.
Here's another one.
This is really, Frank, this is amazing.
This is an article on the moral crisis in America.
An ancient brand of amoralism now haunts the world.
Authoritarian-style leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping embody a kind of amoral realism.
Now, you didn't read this article because you have better things to do with your life.
But isn't that amazing?
That's amazing.
The man was president four years.
He ran as a dictator.
He's comparable to Putin and Xi?
We'll be back in a moment.
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So, it's actually the reactions to Donald Trump at the New York Times and the entire liberal and left world, because it's actually the reactions to Donald Trump at the New York Times and the entire liberal He's a liberal.
He might even say he's liberal conservative.
No, he wouldn't say that anymore?
Okay, fine.
Doesn't matter.
He's not a leftist.
That's what matters.
And yet he loses his mind to lump Trump?
It's so vile, the lumping of Trump with Xi and Putin, and it's vile for another reason.
This country was much, much, much freer under Trump than under Biden.
He did not arrest.
His enemies.
I'm not just talking about the arresting of Trump.
I'm talking about the arresting of people who speak wrong.
Like the guy given 10 years by the Department of Justice who simply put out a joke.
Send your vote for Hillary Clinton to this email address.
It was a joke.
It was a joke from 2015. Or 2016?
And now, all these years later, he's arrested and given 10 years in prison for conspiracy to undermine the elections or whatever the indictment was?
The people in prison who just walked into the Capitol on January 16th?
Insurrection?
This is one of the gigantic lies in the history of Western countries.
I said it that day.
I condemned entering the Capitol the moment I heard about it that day.
It's on tape.
It's on video.
And the next day I knew exactly what they were going to do with the word insurrection.
Suppress their enemies.
Take over control.
That, there is an analogy.
Biden is no Hitler.
I would never lump him in with any of these people.
But...
The analogy is the Reichstag fire, and I wrote it that week, when the Nazis used it to suppress liberty in Germany because the parliament was burned.
Our parliament was not burned, by the way.
I don't know what animates the...
I think I know.
I should take that back.
I think I know what animates...
The irrational hatred of Trump.
The preoccupation with destroying the man's name and lying about him.
He's not one of them.
That's a big factor.
He's not one of the coastal intellectuals.
And he has no regard for them.
These people live on being honored.
If you're at the New York Times, you deserve to be bowed down to.
And he has contempt properly for the New York Times.
That drives them crazy.
His demeanor drives them crazy.
So they feel morally superior to him.
And that's important.
And to the 74 million morons who voted for him.
So he voted for Biden.
Biden has wrecked this country.
And David Brooks is proud of his vote.
I'm only choosing David Brooks because he's not a leftist.
Consumed.
Consumed!
It is a derangement syndrome.
You can't have a rational discussion with these people.
How did he suppress liberty?
You want the examples of the Biden America suppressing liberty?
They are quite abundant.
Give me one example of suppressed liberty under Trump.
So he compares him to authoritarian-style leaders.
Why is he authoritarian?
They never give an example.
You and I read this stuff for a living.
We have never seen an example of a Trump hater giving an example of how he is an authoritarian.
They evince a mindset, who's they?
Trump, Putin, and she.
They evince a mindset that assumes that the world is a vicious dog-eat-dog sort of place.
This is just word salad.
That is what is wrong with Xi?
He thinks the world is a dog-eat-dog place?
It's a stupid line!
It's just a stupid line!
And he's not a stupid man!
Life is a competition to grab what you can.
Force is what matters.
Yes, force is what matters for Xi and Putin.
Why is he talking about Trump?
How is Trump...
Included here.
How?
Morality is a luxury we cannot afford, or merely a sham.
He just spent this gigantic article showing the destruction of moral education in America.
That is entirely the product of the left.
Entirely!
The whole long piece is about the left's destruction of moral education in America.
And he speaks about Trump.
It's astonishing.
It's astonishing.
I did this, had I not been on an airplane for five and a half hours, I wouldn't have read it.
Because there's no disturbance, there's nothing else to do, so to speak.
So I just read and read this very long piece in the Atlantic.
I wonder how many people read it.
I don't know how many people realize.
But most Atlantic readers are going, yeah, of course, that's so true.
That's Trump's view.
Morality is a luxury we cannot afford.
But the entire war on moral education came from the left.
He documents it.
He doesn't say the left.
That's also tragic.
But he documents it.
No, I'll give you examples, by the way.
Well, we'll be back.
The Dennis Prager Show.
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Very, very long piece of The Atlantic about the moral decline in America, and it's got some good stuff in it.
Which proves my point.
There really is.
People get deranged about Trump.
And it's very problematic.
It's because what they do is they create hysteria.
If Donald Trump is dominated and wins the next election, there will be riots around the country.
That will make the quote-unquote insurrection look like a tea party.
Look like a...
Backyard grill.
Look like a sweet 16 party.
Okay, I'm getting carried away.
And it's because of people like David Brooks who've lost their minds with regard to Trump.
Do you know, it's so powerful, Trump derangement syndrome, that I know people, and it's a very painful subject personally, and I don't easily get pained.
Because these people have done a lot of good.
They so hated Trump that they lost their minds in this matter.
And many of them hurt their own lives.
They became, from relevant conservatives, they became irrelevant.
I don't know what's.
Irrelevant.
To go from relevant to irrelevant is a very difficult thing for most people.
They did it because they sincerely hate Donald Trump.
This is not play acting.
They're crazed by the man.
Because they ask not, did he do a good or bad job as president?
They only ask, do I hate his guts?
That's all they ask.
They don't think, when it comes to Donald Trump, they actually have abandoned moral thought.
They don't ask, did he do good or bad for the country, which is the only thing that matters.
I don't like his personality either, to be honest.
And you know what?
It doesn't matter.
The country is infinitely more important than his personality.
He says and does obnoxious things on a personal level.
That's correct.
He was a great president, however.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry it's mind boggling Thank you.
The older I get, the more I realize the battle of reason versus feelings is almost always lost to feelings.
Almost always.
I really try to have reason overcome feelings.
It's something I'm aware of all the time.
The things that he writes here.
Let's see what else.
Morality is a luxury we cannot afford.
He's talking about Xi and Putin and Trump.
Their attitudes on life.
Or merely a sham that elites use to mask their own lust for power.
See, this is all generalizations that amount to word salad.
It's fine to elect people who lie.
Well, we have with Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is much bigger a liar than Donald Trump.
There's no comparison.
All these Donald Trump lies, what are the thousands documented the Washington Post?
99% of them are not significant, or many of them are not even lies.
Many of them are just hyperbole on trivial matters.
Who are corrupt.
As long as they are ruthless bastards for our side, it's fine to elect them.
Wow.
Ruthless bastards.
Putin, Xi, and Trump.
This is David Brooks of the New York Times.
He ends this diatribe with, The ends justify the means.
By the way, that happens to be true in much of life.
That is what war is about.
They don't always justify the means.
The ends justified the atom bomb.
The atom bomb ended the war and saved countless American and Japanese lives as a result.
I never use the phrase, the end justifies the means, because sometimes it does, of course.
Oh, I have more.
Believe me, I have more.
not just on Trump, coming up.
I'm Dennis. - Okay.
What was that old line?
You're not.
What was that from?
I think that's from an airplane.
Is that?
No, I don't think it's airplane.
I think it's vacation.
Chevy Chase.
Chevy Chase, yeah.
Oh, that's from Saturday Night Live.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not a movie.
It's from Saturday Night Live?
I'm Chevy Chase, you're not?
Yeah.
I think Chevy Chase is a rarer name than Dennis Prager, though Dennis Prager is a very rare name.
I met one in my life, and my heart went out to the guy.
Imagine having the name...
You see, if there's a famous person named Bill Smith, it doesn't matter if you're Bill Smith.
But if the name is Dennis Prager, which is close to unique, not Dennis and not Prager, but the two together, and then you have that name, and imagine you're not on my side of the political spectrum.
Oh, my God.
It would be as if there'd be a woman named Nancy Pelosi and she was conservative.
I'm sure it would be a burden.
Very long piece of Donald Trump.
It's funny.
Of David Brooks of the New York Times in the Atlantic.
It's from last month.
As we enter...
No, no, no, no, no.
One second.
That's not correct.
I'm sorry.
This is from 2020. I went back to read older stuff.
It's very interesting to read stuff from a few years ago.
Listen to this from 2020, a month before the election.
As we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens towards its climax.
Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches.
But he doesn't give a single example.
My whole power in my discourse...
In my writings, is that I give example after example of what I say.
When I say the left ruins everything it touches, I have a column up with 22 examples.
22!
And explain how it happened.
I'd like to know, when he writes, he has shredded every norm of decent behavior.
Isn't that a little over-the-top, David Brooks?
Every norm of decent behavior?
Did he cheat in an election?
And wrecked every institution he touches?
What is he talking about?
What institution?
The Paris Climate Accords?
They should be wrecked.
They didn't help the climate.
They only hurt the countries who signed it.
China's producing more coal than ever.
Did it sign the Paris Peace Accords?
The Paris Climate Accords?
Take a look.
I'm not sure they did.
But it doesn't apply to them.
Yeah, but they don't do anything about it.
He undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud.
This is hysteria.
This is truly hysteria.
This is why it is valid to speak of Trump derangement syndrome.
You may have a relative or friend who has it, and I feel for you, because it is a realm of hysteria.
It is factless.
Literally factless.
And feckless.
Yes, I read that.
Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation.
But he was just president for four years when he wrote this.
Did he do any of that?
Trump is the final instrument of this moral crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.
That's true.
Oh boy.
So that's an example of Trump derangement syndrome.
So what brought us to our moral crisis?
This is from a 2023 article.
This is from two months, three months ago.
So there were things in here that were worth reading.
That's what it makes it to Trump derangement syndrome.
He's not a leftist.
So he talks about the crisis, as I have often, a record high 25% of 40-year-old Americans have never been married.
One out of every four Americans at age 40 has never been married.
That has never been the case in the history of our country.
I'm not sure it was ever the case in the history of Western civilization.
More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well.
He didn't give a citation for that.
I really would have liked to have seen it.
Do you believe that?
More than half of Americans say that no one knows them well.
It's possible.
I need to do a happiness hour on that.
Or any hour.
Do you know millions of people know me well?
Isn't that ironic?
Not just the public person.
You know me.
It's truly worthy of its own hour.
We return in a moment.
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Hello, everybody.
The Gladiator theme says, take it away, Dennis.
What year did we inaugurate the Gladiator theme?
That's from the movie Gladiator, Hans Zimmer's music.
2001?
Oh, yeah, right, right after 9-11.
Right.
22 years.
Hello, my friends.
The first hour I was...
Reading to you from a very, very long piece in The Atlantic by David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who is not a leftist.
But he does have the Trump derangement syndrome, which I can define.
It's when you lapse into irrationality with regard to this individual named Donald Trump.
And every charge you make is over the top, is hysteria.
And you don't back it up.
And that's exactly what we saw here.
The larger article is about the decline of moral seriousness in America, and it's important in some ways.
He never notes that it's the left that created every single reason for the decline, but nevertheless, that's the truth.
He implies it, but he never says it.
It would be too difficult for, I think, a New York Times columnist to note that the reason for the decline of America in every area of life is the left.
So, let's see.
Two-thirds of American households gave to charity in 2000. Notice, not a lot, but something.
And in 2018, fewer than half did.
Right.
Next.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions.
Its founding fathers had a low view of human nature and designed the Constitution to mitigate it.
Yes, once again, I am vindicated.
I am obsessed with the question of why people have chosen to be stupid and think that human nature is basically good.
There are few positions that so bother me as when an adult says people are basically good.
Children can live in a make-believe world, though they shouldn't.
I didn't.
I was taught that we're not basically good when I studied Bible in third grade, because that's what it says.
Very few religious Christians or Jews believe that people are basically good.
It's a stupid belief.
One of the many stupid beliefs that undergird leftism.
Because if people are basically good, why do they do bad?
Ah, we have the answer.
Capitalism, inequality, racism, you name it.
We don't blame the person.
Oh, he's basically good.
Isn't that something?
America...
For a large part of its history was awash in morally formative institutions.
Its founding fathers had a low view of human nature and designed the Constitution to mitigate it.
That's right.
And that's why we believe in limited government because we don't want people who don't have good natures to have power.
End of issue.
If people were angels, Well, Madison said, if people were angels, we wouldn't need government.
But if people were angels, who cares?
We would only have benevolent government.
The bigger it got, the more good it would do.
Overwhelmingly, two types of people enter government.
Those who want power and those who want security.
End of issue.
And the latter are as dangerous as the former.
Yeah, they're known as...
The Russians had a term for it, apparatchik, a member of the apparatus, the bureaucrat, as we put it, the bureaucrat.
For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education.
See when he doesn't talk about Trump?
He's serious?
It's a phenomenon.
It's a psychological phenomenon.
Americans were obsessed with moral education until the damn left ruined everything.
The progressive philosopher, that's ironic.
John Dewey is a part of the reason that education began to be awful.
Yet even John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality, quote, every moment of the day, five days a week.
I'm not sure he was for it, but he was right.
My parents were in American public schools.
My grandparents were Orthodox Jews who trusted the American public school to in no way...
Deviate from their moral code, even though, obviously, they weren't Jewish schools.
It never occurred to them that sending their child to school would make the child an idiot and a worse person, which is what most schools do today, from elementary school through graduate school.
If you're a conscientious parent, you're at war with your school in most cases in this country.
As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers' unions, stated that, quote, Continues to be a top priority for education.
1951, ladies and gentlemen, when the NEA was not a radical, leftist, nihilist, child-destroying organization that it is.
The NEA is despicable.
And in 1951, it celebrated an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values as a top priority for education.
The great books programs that popped up at places like Columbia and the University of Chicago, they were based on the conviction that reading the major works of world literature, do you hear this?
It's like another world.
Reading the major works of world literature and thinking about them deeply would provide the keys to living a richer life.
Not now.
Shakespeare's taken down from the University of Pennsylvania English Department.
His picture has been removed because he was white, European, and male.
See?
Because really loathsome people have taken over departments of English almost everywhere.
Fools.
Meanwhile, discipline in the small proprieties of daily existence.
I want you to hear the first example he gives.
Dressing formally, even just to go shopping or to a ball game.
How often have I talked to you about that as symbolic of the decline of the society?
To the extent that even conservatives, Christians, call my show and say, God doesn't care what you wear to church.
I don't know where they got that idea.
I really don't.
Was considered evidence of uprightness.
That's right.
Proof that you were a person who could be counted on when the large challenges came.
A woman walked over to me at the airport in Tampa yesterday who didn't speak English, or barely spoke English to be precise, and asked me, you know, how to get to a gate.
And I told her in Spanish.
And I thought, why did she approach me?
Like, 50 people just got off the train that I got off in the Tampa airport from the rental car center to the terminal.
And I thought, well, it could be any number of reasons, but I had no doubt that the fact that I walk around with a shirt and tie like I'm wearing now, as you can check out at Salem News Channel.
I think that that...
How could it not?
Totally.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
People trust you.
it's part of the stupidity of the age that they drop dress codes This was a liberal, not just leftist thing.
Oh, what difference does it make?
What difference does it make what the teacher wears?
Clueling is very important.
That's what I mean by foolishness.
So the decline is delineated here by a man who works for the newspaper that helps the decline, the New York Times.
I'm reading to you about the reasons, or not the reasons, the reason is the left.
Well, how did the left develop?
So he gives some of those.
He never says the left, though.
Doesn't matter.
I just want you to understand that American education was obsessed until the 1950s with moral education.
That's what mattered.
America's National Institute for Moral Instruction was founded in 1911 and published the Children's Morality Code with 10 Rules for Right Living.
Can you imagine that today?
You know how the left would laugh that out of existence?
They'd call it white supremacy.
That's what they would call it.
The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste.
An objective moral order exists, and human beings are creatures who habitually sin against that order.
Can you imagine that?
Those of us who look back at the United States with nostalgia, do you understand why we have every right to?
It was a better country.
Yeah, it was a better country.
Oh, but what about Jim Crow?
That was worse.
That is correct.
Oh, what about Jim Crow doesn't negate that it was a better country.
It was a bad...
Aspect of a good country and one getting better.
So what you do is you get rid of Jim Crow and you keep all the good.
That is not exactly profound.
Moral formation doesn't succeed in making people angels.
It tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.
Jim Crow was a product of the Democratic Party, 100%.
As was the Ku Klux Klan and as was pro-slavery.
That's correct.
How many kids learned that when they learned the racist past of America?
They learned it at PragerU.
They learned it at PragerU.
It's true.
The crucial pivot happened just after World War II as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century.
Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority.
The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, and here's where we begin with our fools, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life.
We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended.
People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.
Told you, the root of it?
The root of becoming a fool is to believe people are basically good.
That is the root.
That and that you don't need the Bible.
Those are the two roots.
of the foolishness of our age.
There is not a single wise secular institution.
Name one.
I provided my own clock and buzzer.
Buzzer.
Yeah, Sean was right on top of it this time.
He heard me do it, and then did it.
There are no wise secular institutions.
It doesn't exist.
Missed it by that much.
A cluster of phenomenally successful books appeared in the decade after World War II, making the case that, as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman wrote in Peace of Mind, 1946, quote, Thou shalt not be afraid...
That's stupid.
People can trust the goodness inside.
His book topped the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks.
If this rabbi was orthodox, I will eat cauliflower the rest of the day.
I've got to look him up.
I mean, it's possible.
But I tend to doubt it.
Let's find out here.
You are living the example.
Let's see.
He was an American reform rabbi.
Why do I know my people?
Because certain doctrines lead to certain beliefs and certain doctrines lead to other beliefs.
That's what doctrine is about.
Orthodox Jews know that people are not basically good, except for the rabbi that I debated.
It's on YouTube.
You should watch it.
Dennis Prager debate.
Are people basically good?
That's why I debated him.
It was so sad to me that there would be an Orthodox rabbi who said people were basically good.
There's no basis in reality and no basis in Judaism.
Sweet man.
That's irrelevant.
That's fascinating.
1907 to 1948, he died young, an American reform rabbi and best-selling author.
Best known for the book Peace of Mind, which spent more than a year at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Interesting, isn't it?
I think I should read it. - Good.
Anyway, that was a very interesting insight.
People can trust the goodness inside, as book topped the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks.
Dr. Spock's first child-rearing manual was published the same year, 1946. I told you, post-World War II, it all went downhill.
That was followed by books like The Power of Positive Thinking.
According to this ethos, morality is not something that we develop in communities.
It's nurtured by connecting with our authentic self and finding our true inner voice.
God, is that awesome?
That's how you find morality.
Connect with your inner voice.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. - Okay.
Greg Jarrett is undoubtedly known to many of you.
He is the legal analyst for Fox News.
And it's impressive...
That he has written this book.
It's impressive because it's an important and deep book.
It's impressive that Fox News has people who write serious books.
And what was the most recent example?
With Brian Kilmeade and the book on Booker T. Washington, yeah.
And Teddy Roosevelt.
And now I have Greg Jarrett here on the most important documents of American history, speeches, and other patriotic documents.
It just came out two days ago.
The Constitution of the United States and other patriotic documents.
It is so coincidental but so fitting that I'm having him on after the last two hours of my show on the decline in moral education in our schools because so many of these documents would have been known by students 100 years ago and 200 years ago.
Providing the document was in existence 200 years ago, obviously.
And now we have this with his insightful commentary.
It's an important work.
The Constitution of the United States and other patriotic documents.
Well...
First of all, welcome to the show, Greg.
It's great to have you.
Well, Dennis, thank you so much for having me with you.
It's a pleasure.
Although, I was listening to you a moment ago, and I'm not quite sure I exist, but I loved your response to the professor when he posed the question.
You think well on your feet.
Yeah, that's a gift.
I know it's true, and to be honest, I take no credit for it.
It's sort of like the pianist who has perfect pitch.
You're just born with it.
But yeah, it's so vivid, that memory, because it was such nonsense.
Do we exist?
Anyway, that took me one day to realize I wouldn't be a philosophy major.
Let's put it that way.
I'm glad you heard that, Greg.
In a sense, it is so great that you wrote this book.
Is it fair to say it's also a little sad that you had to?
Yes.
It became a labor of love because I labored over it for the better part of two years, spending a lot of time in libraries and archives.
And so there was such rich material, Dennis, that the challenge...
Was cutting it down to 65 historic patriotic documents.
And this really is a tribute to the many American patriots who made our country great.
We are a luminous beacon.
Of hope for liberty, prosperity, and justice throughout the world.
Millions want to come here.
Just look at our southern border, of course.
And yet, to your point, it was a little bit sad and depressing that I felt the need.
Because I think our education system in America has failed young people.
And I have seen it firsthand.
They simply are not being taught basic, fundamental American civics, government, and American history.
There seems to be a movement afoot to teach critical race theory, the most extreme version of which tells children that view everything through the lens of race and racism.
And your worth is dictated by the color of your skin.
If it's light-colored, you're an oppressor and a victimizer.
And if you are dark-skinned, you are oppressed and you are a victim.
My goodness.
Has it really come to that?
I mean, turning on its head the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, who wished it was his dream.
That we'd be judged based on our character and not the color of our skin.
Well, it shows you the transformation of liberalism into leftism because the liberal ideal was to be race-blind, color-blind.
And now if you say you're color-blind, the University of California declares that comment to be a microaggression of racism.
Triggered.
Triggered, yes.
So you picked out these.
I already bought it on Kindle, incidentally.
And I'll probably have it on every...
By the way, just out of curiosity, did somebody record this for an Audible?
Yes.
My last book, Trial of the Century, I did myself.
This is more than 500 pages.
And I believe it was recorded by a professional.
And I am decidedly unprofessional.
Well, it's hard to read a book.
I have not read my books for Audible, as it happens.
I hope to one day, but it's a project, and the pros do a good job.
Anyway, so you finally picked the documents, and let me go to the beginning here and give people an idea of what you did pick.
So let's see.
I'm not going to go through every one, but as an example, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Homestead Act, Patrick Henry's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death speech, Thomas Paine's Common Sense pamphlet, an excerpt, John Adams' thoughts on government.
You know what comes through, among other things?
That America is an idea, not an ethnicity.
Right.
You know, you identified some of our founders.
What I discovered is not just their brilliance, their eloquence, but they were prescient.
I mean, it's as if they could see into the future.
And I'll give you a couple of examples.
John Adams, he warned that powerful men, if left unchecked, Would become, in his words, ravenous beasts of prey that would destroy our nascent government.
And of course we've seen that happen recently.
Unelected government bureaucrats at the Department of Justice, the FBI, intelligence agencies trying to drive an elected president from office because they loathed his policies, they despised the man.
It was the Russia hoax.
The title of my first book.
And then George Washington, a great leader, and in his farewell address, he issued a stern warning.
Do not go further with this newly created political party system.
It will spell the demise of democracy, and parties will be controlled by unscrupulous, unprincipled men.
His warning, his clarion call, sadly, was ignored, and we've certainly seen the results with the fractious, divisive party system in America.
So you started the book, I'm curious, did you have many of these in mind, or reading, you said, oh, here's one I didn't realize I want to include.
You know, I've read so many biographies, you know, about Washington and Lincoln.
I had recently read David McCullough's wonderful book, Pulitzer Prize-winning book on John Adams.
And I began, you know, this began to germinate.
And so I started to look around.
Is there a collection, a single book?
That has what I want.
Not made in China, not filled with Hillary Clinton speeches, not a deconstructive quibbling of American history deep with criticism that were terrible people.
And I couldn't find what I wanted, so I decided to write it myself.
And I thought it would be valuable for parents who care about their children's education and for educators themselves, because as I said earlier, kids are, you know, the subject of failure.
So that's how it all came about.
And, you know, it was just a couple of nights ago on Fox News that we did a Man on the Street segment interviewing various individuals about basic civics.
I'm afraid.
What was the revolutionary war about?
Wait, you're serious?
What was the revolutionary war about?
Everybody flunked!
It's like what was the color of Washington's white horse?
Who's buried in Grant's tomb?
All right, we're going to continue in a moment, Greg.
Got to take a quick break.
The book is up at DennisPrager.com.
All right, my friends.
Greg Jarrett, legal analyst.
Fox News has compiled some of the most important documents of American history.
And it is worth having in one volume and going over this with friends.
Just do a document at a time.
Like, how did you pick which Federalist paper to do?
I mean, that had to be an issue.
It was difficult.
You know, there's more than 70 of them.
And so I picked three that I felt were the most important to really get to the heart of the meaning of our Constitution, our civil liberties, our rights.
But you're right.
You know, I almost need volume two, Dennis.
There were so many people I really wanted to put in and that I didn't.
For example, Abigail Adams.
You know, I've read so many of her brilliant letters.
She was not formally educated, as her husband, John Adams, who had graduated from Harvard, was a fine trial lawyer.
And the letters between the two of them and her letters to others told us so much about the genesis of America, the power of noble ideas.
Galvanizing words.
I'm reminded of what Victoria Woodhull said, that women are the equal of men.
Well, in Abigail Adams' case, the superior of men, including her husband.
And I think were he alive, he would readily agree.
So you didn't get, but you didn't get a chance to put her letters in.
No.
That was an example.
I had to cut a lot of people out.
I'm very proud of the 65 documents that are in it.
Among the people that meant so much to me, Frederick Douglass, of course, had been a slave, became an abolitionist icon, a confidant of Abraham Lincoln, who famously said in his lament, Over slavery, we the people does not mean we the white people.
And he talks so powerfully about the cruelty and deprivation of human bondage that it really shifted public influence.
You know, he walked into the White House one day.
He was really the first African American who was allowed in.
Abraham Lincoln saw to it.
And Lincoln turned to him in a room full of people.
That it suddenly turned silent when they saw Douglas walk through the doors.
And Lincoln said, there is the man whose judgment I trust more than anybody else.
After Lincoln was assassinated, Douglas wrote a moving tribute.
He called Lincoln the noblest and wisest man he'd ever known.
And the left is busy telling us that Lincoln is a racist.
That's their synopsis of the man.
In this regard, your colleague was, I had on last week for his fine book on, what was it, on Teddy Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.
He had a very, Brian Kilmeade, he had a very interesting little throwaway line that the worst figure in American history was John Wilkes Booth.
And it struck me.
He may be right.
Oh, I think he is right.
I wonder what might have been in America.
The opportunities, the equality that might have been achieved much sooner.
And, you know, sadly, after Lincoln's assassination, he'd just been re-elected to a second term.
His successor was Andrew Johnson, who would not lift a finger to undertake Lincoln's commitment to Reconstruction.
And it was a huge setback for America.
Ulysses Grant, who eventually succeeded Andrew Johnson, did his level best, sent federal troops to the South to enforce the laws.
You know, it was a huge setback for America.
America lost, I think, its greatest voice.
Yep, well, that was his theory.
So, I didn't get to notice this.
Do you put in documents that are significant but not necessarily noble, like the reason for the Confederate state seceding or something like that?
Would that be in there?
Well, I suppose the closest that comes is the Articles of Confederation, which...
Of the Confederation.
Articles of Confederation that allowed our government to continue after the Revolutionary War, but it was terribly hobbled.
Unicameral legislature, there was no strong executive.
Decisions about basic government operations.
America spiraled into debt and was on the verge of collapse when suddenly they convened a constitutional convention and crafted our most esteemed document, the Constitution of the United States, which was not a perfect document, and they knew it immediately, which is why...
They quickly created the Bill of Rights to gain passage among the states of the Constitution, and that succeeded.
And in large part, thanks to Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and James Madison, who penned the Federalist Papers that turned the tide.
America was not going to approve this Constitution until the Federalist essays were read by nearly everyone.
So in going through all these so many documents, Did anybody stand out who did not stand out prior to your writing the book?
Yeah, there were a lot of people.
I would say my opinion of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass were elevated.
I felt the suffragette movement was so important, and so Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Victoria Woodhull, I mentioned Susan B. Anthony.
I read and re-read many of their speeches and picked out the most important ones.
And yeah, that really elevated my opinion of them.
I will tell you in my lifetime...
Don't forget, I will tell you in my lifetime, make a mental note.
I want people to know what the book is.
It's up at DennisPrager.com and it is the great documents, the Constitution of the United States.
Greg Jarrett, legal analyst for Fox News, and an important book, American Constitution, and other documents, other patriotic documents, collected and explained by Greg Jarrett.
So what were you going to say?
Did you make the mental note I asked you to make?
Do you remember?
And, you know, Dennis, People ask, well, who's the greatest patriot?
Who said and wrote the most inspiring words?
And it's unfair for me to answer with somebody who was speaking those words or writing them when I wasn't alive.
And so my answer would be Ronald Reagan in my lifetime.
You know, Reagan burst onto the scene with his Time to Choose speech in 1964, and he almost single-handedly elevated conservatism in America as an important set of principles.
And so the time for choosing is in the book, and then his first inaugural, in which he carried through, and he said that memorable line.
You know, the problem...
Is our government.
Government isn't the solution to our problem.
The problem is our government.
That was the line.
Government is the problem, not the solution, or some variation on it.
That was the line that made me a Republican.
Yeah.
I mean, and he was so right.
And, you know, Bill Clinton tried to borrow it at one point in time, to no avail.
And then, of course, the Challenger disaster.
This was a man who gave the most moving, comforting speech for a grieving nation that was so shocked by that event.
And his words there are reprinted in my book in full.
And then, you know, finally, he appears at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and he challenges Gorbachev to tear down this wall.
Two years later, the wall came crumbling down, and with it, the Communist Soviet Empire.
So when you talk about meaningful words that had an effect on American history, Ronald Reagan is very close to the top of my list.
Wow.
So I haven't gotten through it all, obviously.
It just came out two days ago.
There is a speech that Donald Trump gave in Warsaw, which I think is one of the most important speeches a president has given.
Are you familiar with that one?
Oh, yes I am.
And that was, I was debating between that speech and his 75th anniversary D-Day speech.
I went back and forth.
I even consulted with one of his speech writers.
Nameless.
In the end, I chose the D-Day speech.
For the principal reason, both great speeches, this really put an exclamation point on my book.
So we start out with Patrick Henry's give me liberty or give me death, and we end with a moving tribute by Donald Trump, what it means to be an American, and our exceptionalism, our greatness.
That's great.
It's funny that you should have mentioned singling out Frederick Douglass, because I spent a fair amount of time earlier this year reading his entire autobiography.
One of the great autobiographies I have ever read of any human.
Do you know it's a banned book?
It triggers.
It triggers.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
I think it's down in Oklahoma.
I may be mistaken, but it's on a list of banned books because, you know, it'll trigger your emotions in somehow a negative way.
I mean, it's just stupidity and insanity.
But yeah, that's one of the questions that teachers had when Oklahoma passed a particular law down there imposing restrictions in education.
Well, can't we teach?
The autobiography of a seminal person in American history?
No, it might trigger kids.
Well, congratulations, Greg.
This is really an important work.
The Constitution of the United States and other patriotic documents, it's up at my website.
Greg, may you lead a long, productive life as you have till now, because you're a service to the country.
Well, and the same to you, Dennis.
God bless you, and thank you so much for your kind words about my new book, available in bookstores nationwide.
You can buy it online.
It means a lot coming from you.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
Dennis Prager here.
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