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Oct. 20, 2025 - Dennis Prager Show
01:48:59
Timeless Wisdom - Reclaiming America: Dennis Prager with Hugh Hewitt
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Time Text
Prince Edward's Island Story 00:04:33
Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Here are thousands of hours of Dennis' lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.
So without further ado, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager.
Thank you.
Did they have enough coach, Prince?
This is wonderful.
Hey, Lou.
Thank you very much.
Even my wife stood.
Good evening, gentlemen.
That's big.
Well, first of all, I would just like to open the floor to some opening comments.
First, Dennis, anything you want to open the program with tonight?
Hi.
Moving on then.
Hugh, anything you'd like to say?
He's good.
He's good.
Hugh has the opening comment.
We rehearse this in advance.
We practiced last week in Minnesota together.
We do not ever practice.
As many of you know.
Wait, wait, wait.
Why do you have an iPad, whatever that's called in front of you now?
Are you going to read notes?
I'm going to take as we go forward.
Oh, you're going to take notes?
Dennis and I have lectured many places around the world, and it's always a unique and interesting experience to be anywhere with Dennis Prager.
I, for example, I have lectured at Prince Edwards Island.
Have you ever lectured on Prince Edwards Island?
That is very fair.
He got the name.
Did you ever be there?
Have you ever been there?
Have you ever lectured there?
No.
Now, I go places Dennis doesn't get to.
And as a result, I bring a little bit more worldly experience to these events than Dennis does.
I just want you to know.
I just brought up what you're talking about.
I just want you to know that one minute before walking in, he said, have you been to all of the Canadian provinces?
I said, yeah, everyone but one.
He said, which one?
I said, Prince Edward Island.
And now he does it.
That's how this came about.
But we're videotaping this, and I'll have it cut so that it shows that Dennis has not been somewhere.
I love going places with Dennis, but here's the secret to this.
You have to get Dennis onto track early.
Lou, give up trying to control him.
He is a monster truck.
Have you ever seen the monster trucks events that they go out and they climb over everything?
Sunday.
It does not matter what you ask.
It does not matter what you put in front of him, the impediment.
When he begins to orate, it is a force majeure, and there is nothing like it.
So I'm going to start early.
I'm going to give you a treat.
And Lou, relax because you're going to need five minutes.
When Dennis, who has been on broadcast in Los Angeles for 20 years.
28.
28 years.
Except for Prince Edward's Island or wherever he was.
Prince Edward.
Yeah.
We had a roast for him.
And we had a roast for him at the Nixon Library.
And it was one of the fun nights of my career.
I had so much fun at this thing.
But I heard a story that I've since put him on the spot once or twice.
It's a great way to start before we go to politics and heavy things.
And it's Dennis at Madison Square Garden.
And I would like, for the benefit of the YouTube video audience that we are recording tonight, if you would just please begin, Dennis, by telling people about the time you took to the court at Madison Square Garden.
All right, let me explain.
I very rarely tell the story.
I did not know that he would put me on the spot.
First of all, how many of you have heard it?
Okay, so only about a dozen.
So forgive me, you forgive me.
He likes embarrassing me, Hugh.
It's a joy in his life, and I love bringing joy to people's lives.
I'm the guy who does the happiness hours, so why would I not want Hugh to have happiness?
Happiness for Hugh is embarrassing me in front of as many people as possible.
If there are only a dozen people here, you wouldn't even have me do this.
But what I am about to tell you is the truth.
That's the point.
Vow of Authenticity 00:08:36
I want you to know, and I'll be serious for just one moment here.
I took a vow in the very beginning.
You'll find this interesting.
I took a vow when I began broadcasting because I realized when I first began broadcasting, it's very tempting to embellish stories.
Just to add a little here and subtract a little there.
It's essentially true, but not exactly true.
And I made a vow to myself, and if you will, to God, that to the best of my ability, I will never embellish a story.
Because your credibility is on the line because after a while people would know it's somewhat true, but Prager exaggerates.
So, what I'm about to tell you is entirely true to the best of my ability to recollect.
And since I began telling the story within a week of it happening, it is true.
In my sophomore year in high school, I was at a Jewish high school in Brooklyn, New York, a religious Jewish high school.
And there were so many of them in New York that they actually have their own basketball league.
Now, let me say, I don't think that this is exactly a bad thing to say about my fellow Jews.
In the area of excellence, sports is not the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Jews.
Wow, what bowlers.
You just, you know, Schwartz bowled a perfect game again.
You don't, you don't, right?
I mean, let's be honest.
It's even a joke in Jewish life.
What are some of the shortest books ever written?
Italian war heroes, Jewish sports figures, and so on.
So, okay.
So, you have to understand to excel in the yeshiva league is not to excel.
But we had a whole league of yeshivas.
These are religious Jewish schools.
Anyway, the guys, the seniors of the previous year, came in first or second, and the first two teams get a game before a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
It's a deal with the yeshiva league that your two best teams of the previous year play before a Knicks game.
Unfortunately, the entire starting team graduated.
So we were not only not good, we were the worst.
And playing in Madison Square Garden.
And I know we were the worst.
I don't know if you heard this, but did I tell you about the coach, what he said, how I made the team?
Let me tell you, I did not, I don't like basketball.
I don't like it.
But there were no other teams in a yeshiva.
What do you think?
I have a hockey team.
All right?
I mean, you know, there were 110 kids in my class.
Well, you know, lucky we could get, you know, a quorum for a prayer service.
So anyway, the only team we had in sports, there's no football to yeshiva football team.
Anyway, it's too dangerous.
The Jewish mothers wouldn't allow it.
So we had basketball.
And I hate basketball.
I just do.
I'm okay to watch it, but I don't like playing it.
But I had one great asset, unfortunately.
I was the tallest Jew in New York City.
Even in high school.
I was 6'4 in high school.
Jews, you know, Jewish basketball teams is like Japanese basketball teams.
It's just the way it is.
And so this is what happened at the last tryout.
I was praying I wouldn't make the team.
My father really wanted me to get on the team and so on.
And finally, the coach, who is a despicable human being when I think of it, announces the following.
Boys, we've really hit the bottom of the barrel.
This scrape the bottom of the barrel this year.
Prager has made the team.
I'll never forget that as long as I live.
That's harsh.
Now, it is harsh, but you know what?
I want to tell you, and my wife knows this is true.
You want to know my reaction?
My reaction was, this man is a true jackass.
And he's entirely right.
I mean it at the time, Hugh.
Even then, I thought the guy's right.
You did scrape the bottom of the barrel.
I'm only on the team because I'm not crippled and tall.
This was the criteria.
Okay.
So as a joke, I take number 13.
I know I'm not going to play in many games, but I'm on the team.
We're at Madison Square Garden.
The team is losing by so many points that I am certain I just won't be put in.
But unfortunately, it was so many points that with 58 seconds left, with there being no mathematical possibility we could come close to winning, I'm told to go in.
Now, you have to understand what I had been doing on the bench the whole game.
I wasn't watching much of the game.
I was announcing it for my friend Isaac Nakbar, known as Snack Bar.
So I'm announcing the game, and Snack Bar is laughing himself silly, and I'm laughing myself.
This is what I did to get while the time away.
Finally, to my horror, Prager, you're going in.
I get the tap on the shoulder, and I look at Snack Bar, and I go, Snack Bar, which way are we shooting?
Now, I want you to know, I do think there is ultimate justice, and SnackBar will go to hell.
No, I do.
I believe that.
I'm sorry.
I'm not happy about saying this.
I believe this, though.
Snackbar did not tell me.
So I remember everything from those were among the 58 worst seconds of my life.
They began bad.
I heard over the Madison Square Garden Intercom, now coming in for Flatbush number 13, Stanley Prager.
I go, who the hell is Stanley Prager?
What the hell is when did I get Stanley?
Everything went wrong.
So I go in as a jump ball.
And folks, I had to preface this because you'll think, I didn't make this up.
After the jump ball, I ran to the wrong side of the court.
And I remember the referee on that side looking at me and saying the following: Kid, are you some sort of schmuck?
Now.
Now, now, you've got to understand, because I am prepared to see myself from outside of myself, I actually remember saying to myself, not to him, yeah.
The truth is, I am some sort of schmuck.
What am I doing on the wrong side?
For the next 50 whatever seconds, I remember doing only one thing, and that is avoiding the ball.
And I give you my word, we should all be so well.
I remember thinking, look busy, but do not go near the ball.
So I was going like this.
Even if we were on offense, I was going like this.
It was a blur.
And so that is my story of my basketball.
You know, because sometimes, you know, when I was single and I would play in the garden.
Now I got to tell you why I set it up to have Dennis do that.
Yep, thank you.
Thank you.
Number one, right before we came out, we were talking about humor, and I'm not a slapstick guy.
I love a story.
I love a story that is well told and well developed.
And as a trial lawyer and as the lawyers out there, we'll all tell you, those who tell the stories win.
And Dennis tells that story better than any story I've had.
But number two, I knew you would be laughing.
I knew that you would have something to take away.
You will all go, you should have heard Prager tell the story about Madison Quick Garden.
But it also stands up to this.
In the time he has been president, has President Obama ever made you laugh?
Jack's Stance on Jobs 00:12:25
That's a good laugh.
That's a good one.
Has he ever made you laugh?
And the answer is: I don't think so.
I don't believe he has an ounce of humor ability in him.
And one of the reasons the country is turning against him is because he is genuinely a dark kind of cloud when it comes to the emotions of the country, as opposed to my friend Dennis, who can always be counted on to lift up.
Well done, Dennis.
Thank you very much.
Good man.
You know why I say on the radio, and I said it today: we have one really, we have two choices: to laugh or to cry.
I prefer to laugh.
And that's it.
I have a philosophical basis for this.
Thank you for that great story, Dennis.
And now, unfortunately, the first question that's set up is going right back to you.
So, Dennis, the first question is for you.
One of the biggest political storylines this year is the rise of, of course, the Tea Party movement.
Thank you to the Redlands Tea Party patriots for being part of this tonight.
And, Dennis, what, in your estimation, caused the rise of the Tea Party?
And will this be a long-term or short-term political movement?
I think, all right, part one, what caused it?
And I would love to hear Hughes' thoughts on this too.
What caused it, I actually wrote about this in my weekly column about a year ago.
I said there is a silver lining in what the president and the Democrats are doing.
And I mean it.
I meant that this was not, I was not facetious.
This was not tongue-in-cheek.
There really is a silver lining.
Finally, I lived to see clarity.
He provided clarity.
This is what the left stands for.
Are you Americans leftists?
No.
Okay.
Well, that was that.
Some are and many are not.
What happened was clarity.
Number two, what happened was that the Democrats decided to do something unprecedented.
Change the country with not a single vote of the opposition party.
They decided to impose, rather than simply pass legislation, they decided to impose their left-wing agenda on a non-left-wing country.
And so spontaneously, people said enough.
We have been, we Americans who are not on the left, and that's 80% of us.
80.
17%, 18% of Americans in the latest Gallup poll define themselves as liberal.
Forget left, liberal.
18%.
By the way, the question that arises, and this was the subject of a very recent column of mine, why do non-leftists vote Democrat?
Maybe we'll talk about that later.
I don't want to veer off on that, but it's a very important question for us to answer.
By the way, I can give you a one-sentence answer because the right has been demonized effectively.
That's the reason.
How can you vote right?
How could you vote for a Republican?
These people are six-herb, as you may know from my show.
Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and bigoted.
And that is so reinforced that the proof of my six-herb thesis is the Tea Party.
You can't find a more decent group of people.
Look at how clean they leave the places where they are.
Look at how you treat each other when you go to a mass meeting or demonstration.
Wonderful, decent people.
And yet, what did they do?
You're racist.
And why are you racist since you've never come out in the Tea Parties with a single thing that could even be remotely regarded as racist?
Because you're predominantly white.
But as I noted, so was the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
So was the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
Are they racist bodies?
See, all of a sudden, the argument is so preposterous.
So are the vast majority of the visitors to the LA Zoo.
I asked a docent at the L.A. Zoo when I visited many years ago.
I noticed, I couldn't believe it, we saw all sorts of ethnic groups, but no blacks.
And I went over to a docent.
I'm just curious.
I have no race bent here.
I'm a talk show host who observes society.
Is this an odd day, or is it typical that blacks are not here and everybody else?
She said, absolutely right.
You noticed a fact that we don't see them here.
And, you know, I don't know.
I still don't know why.
But in any event, the fact that something is predominantly white makes it's absurd to argue that it's race.
It's more than absurd.
It's obscene.
So anyway, that's the reason for people doing that.
So finally, that being demonizing and not wanting to vote, the demonization, not wanting to vote, even though they're not leftist, not wanting to vote Republican.
So you arose spontaneously, and this was also unexpected.
They have to say you're funded by wealthy people.
Tea parties are funded by the wealthy.
As if they all went, you all were approached by some wealthy foundation.
Listen, folks, we're going to fund you.
You go and march.
I mean, it is.
It's laughable.
It is utterly laughable because the joke is that's what they do.
The unions gather their people and they come.
It's all by group.
There's very little spontaneity.
The right has spontaneity.
The right has ground, has the grassroots.
So that's why it arose.
Well, the second part of the question is, will it stay on?
It will stay on so long as the Republican Party deviates from the conservative principles that it should stand for.
And when it doesn't, it will become unnecessary.
The Republican Party will be the Tea Party.
And at that point, it will not be necessary.
Hugh, you want to cover some of that or you want to move on to the next question?
Go ahead.
Move on.
California is ranked dead last in terms of business climate.
Apparently, politicians in California don't think business climate matters and don't understand how jobs are created.
I heard a site locator joke, I believe it was from CEO magazine, California.
Ah, yes, Detroit with sunshine.
A glaring example of how politicians think jobs are created was displayed in the debate recently between Connecticut Senate candidates Linda McMahon and Dick Blumenthal.
Rather simple question, but he had some trouble answering it.
Clip one.
Sort of a follow-up, Mr. Blunthal.
You've talked about you want to incentivize small businesses.
Tell me something.
How do you create a job?
How do you create a job?
Sort of a follow-up, Mr. Blunthal.
You've talked about you want to incentivize small businesses.
Tell me something.
How do you create a job?
A job is created, and it can be in a variety of ways, by a variety of people, but principally by people and businesses in response to demand for products and services.
And the main point about jobs in Connecticut is we can and we should create more of them by creative policies.
And that's the kind of approach that I want to bring to Washington.
I have stood up for jobs when they've been at stake.
I stood up for job at Alderman Motors when GIM wanted to shut down that automobile dealership.
I stood up for jobs at Patton Whitney when that company wanted to shift them out of state and overseas.
I stood up for jobs at Stanley Works when it was threatened with a hostile takeover.
I know about how government can help preserve jobs.
And I want programs that provide more capital for small businesses, better tax policies that will promote creation of jobs, stronger intervention by government to make sure that we use the made in America policies and by America policies to keep jobs here rather than buying products that are manufactured overseas as WWE has done.
Mr. McMahon.
Government, government, government.
Government does not create jobs.
It's very simple how you create jobs.
An entrepreneur takes a risk.
He or she believes that he creates a goods or service that is sold for more than it costs to make it.
if an entrepreneur thinks he can do that, he creates a job.
We debated over the length of that clip, but it sort of loses its punch if you don't see him kind of flopping all over the place before she gets right to the answer.
So, So, Hugh, how did the job environment get this bad in California and how do we fix it?
We've had probably 20 years of unbroken Democratic rule in Sacramento with a period of two years that was not when Kurt Pringle briefly held the spankership of the Assembly.
Other than that, it's been 20 years of legislative chaos, 20 years of job-killing mandates, 20 years of the kind of incoherence Dick Blumenthal just put on display.
An inability to articulate is not even the worst thing.
It's the inability to imagine.
If it was just tongue-tied, if he was just inarticulate because of the TV camera, that would be different.
But it's not.
He has no clue.
I talked today on the air, and Jack, where are you?
Where's Jack?
Jack's right here.
Jack is a flooring entrepreneur in Huntington Beach.
And we were talking during one of the breaks I was doing my show.
I said, Jack, come up here and talk to American Terry Fay, our great GM of these two stations.
Say hi to Terry back there, Wave.
That's our great boss of KTIE and KRLA.
And Terry was listening to this coming in and said it was absolutely magnificent radio because what Jack said was, I don't need any advice from the government.
I need customers.
And I need people to stay out of my way.
I need the government to stop telling me what to do.
And I need to be able to sell to people who want to buy my flooring so that we can make more jobs and produce more product.
He knows what he's talking about because he's run his business for how many years?
25 years.
Dick Blumenthal, like Jerry Brown, like Barbara Boxer, like, and I'll just run down all of them, Joe Sestak, like Kendrick Meeks, like Ted Strickland in Ohio, like, you name him for me, Alex Giannulius in Illinois.
These people, well, actually, he was in business with the mob.
If you run down Democratic candidate after Democratic candidate, they are thrown up out of the government.
That's what they know.
That's how they have always lived.
They have been part of an apparatus that has never had to do with the creation of job or wealth, never had to take a risk, never had to lose their money, never had to work those hours.
And as a result, I believe that California is where we are today because the people who have run this legislature come out of machine politics that genuinely do not know the first thing about production of tax.
Pete Wilson used to say, the state will be in a crisis when we have more takers than we have makers.
We crossed the taker and maker thing about four years ago, and it has been a crisis since.
And if we do not elect Mick Whitman, if we do not elect Meg Whitman on November the 2nd, this state will not be able to recover because too many of their makers, of our makers, will simply leave.
Political Elite in Academia 00:04:17
They will have had it.
They will be done.
They will go.
and you can't get them back once they're gone.
Dennis, this question kind of follows along that one as well.
Have we created, in your estimation, a political elite in this country that they think they know what's best for everyone, but much like our current president, they've never run much of anything, never met a payroll.
Is that political elite there, and is that a problem?
The political elite of the left, at any rate, comes from academia.
Now it's now one Harvard professor after another.
I frequently play on my show William Buckley, the late, great William Buckley, saying what I have quoted much of my life, so he must have said it many decades ago: I'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Cambridge phone book than by 100 Harvard professors.
And it has to be understood that that is literally accurate.
It is not a cute lying.
In academia, and I taught at college and I went to an Ivy League graduate school.
In academia, you live in a place that is insulated from reality.
That's the only explanation for my favorite example that they taught us regularly when I was at school that men and women are basically the same.
If you just give boys tea sets and dolls and you give girls trucks and toy soldiers, then they'll be all happy.
It's just sexist upbringing that produces feminine, what we call feminine or masculine traits.
You had to be an academic to believe that, or the product of academia.
If you actually raised children, you would know how silly it was.
And by the way, this was mentioned by Larry Summers.
While he was president of Harvard, he mentioned that.
He said he bought this line and he actually gave his girl, his daughter, for some holiday or birthday, trucks.
And he noticed that day that she wasn't in the living room and everything was quiet.
And so he knocked on her door.
She was about seven years old.
And she opened the door and she said, Daddy, shh, the trucks are sleeping.
And obviously, if you gave a boy a tea set, they would all become Frisbees.
But you see, the reason you are laughing is because you have not been or been able to disinfect yourself from the nonsense that academia teaches.
Once the elite comes from the academic world, whether it would be Woodrow Wilson, who is president of Princeton, or up to today's president and all the people, nearly all those that he is appointing, they live in a world of theory.
And finally, their theory is that America should be as much like a welfare state in Western Europe as possible.
That is their dream.
I'll conclude this answer with something that is very important in my opinion.
And that is a realization I came to maybe only 10 years ago.
And I feel silly saying this, but I think that if I didn't come to this realization until late, a lot of Americans have not.
I used to believe that the left and right had basically similar visions for what they would like America to be.
They differed in the means, not in the ends.
Governor Palin's Vision 00:05:08
I was entirely, not partially, entirely wrong.
Left and right not only differ in means, they differ in ends.
The America that they wish to create is utterly different from the America we wish to create.
It doesn't make them bad.
It doesn't make them mean-spirited or anything like that.
However, it means that if you want an America whose central values are e pluribus unum liberty and in God we trust, what I call the American Trinity, all of them are opposed by the left, who want multiculturalism instead of e pluribus unum, who want a secular society instead of an in God we trust society, and who want equality over liberty.
We envision a different America.
We are in a nonviolent civil war, and it will be in part decided this November whether we lose.
Hear, hear.
Hugh, anybody who listens to your show knows you follow the numbers on the elections around the country as close as anybody's.
So this is a great question for you, which is, how big do you think the Republican wins and the Republican wave fueled by the Tea Party is going to be, and what key races should we be watching as early indicators of that?
The opportunity arose today to interview Carl Rove, which I always take up.
The architect deserves his name.
And so I asked Carl, and I'll use his number today.
He said he's been a 35 to 42 guy in the House, but he's now a 42 to 45 guy in the House.
That means a takeover.
I think that's low.
He said we could win 8 to 10 seats in the Senate, maybe 11.
I believe he's right on there.
I think it's going to be 9.
It's going to be a split Senate.
I can't see us getting all three.
We need the three West Coast seats, which are Joe Miller in Alaska, Dino Rossi in Washington State, and Carl A. Fee Arena in California.
We need all three.
I can see us getting two out of three.
But the odds are if you've got 350-50 races, you only get two of them.
And in the governorship, CCs is picking up seven to eight, and we'll have 30 to 31.
And we'll get the big ones.
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and California.
I believe we're going to win in California.
I really do.
And so it's going to be big.
It's going to be big.
But I want to encourage everyone, and I keep putting up new candidates who are spreading the map.
I remember walking into KCET in 1994, and it was an election that no one saw coming.
And Chris Cox, serving in the House at that time, came on, and I opened the show by saying if it was a fight, they would have stopped it.
And Chris said, anyone who told you that they saw this coming is lying.
And I believe that that kind of surprise can still happen.
I think the shift is so profound.
And Dennis and I have been out on the road a lot.
We were together with Governor Palin in Denver in May.
We were in Minnesota last week with Michelle Bachman.
We are not afraid of strong women, are we, Dennis?
We've been out with two of the strongest women in America, and we're both married to strong women.
But I will tell you the most unusual thing I have seen happen.
The most unusual, I tell stories about Dennis.
I hope you understand how much I love going on the road with Dennis.
And it's mutual.
But this Denver thing was pretty interesting.
I'm going to toss it to him in a second.
The show was supposed to run like this.
15 minutes Prager, 15 minutes Hewitt, 30 minutes Governor Palin, followed by an hour of questions.
But Dennis was in a great deal of pain.
He was, in fact, in a wheelchair.
Sue and I were wheeling him around, doing wheelies and dumping him out and stuff like that.
And so he was getting that energy that is Prager was bottled up and he couldn't move around and talk and walk and shake hands.
He was kind of bottled up.
And so when he walked like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in that famous scene out to the podium, he exploded and he spoke for 35 minutes and it was wonderful.
And I'm looking at my watch.
Okay, there goes my time and I'm done.
But then I got done.
We got back on schedule and then we sat down to do the questions.
And again, it had been building up because Governor Palin gave a great speech.
And then an interesting thing happened.
The first question was, what's the biggest danger to the country?
And Dennis gave an answer, which I'll have him recreate here because it's so important.
It explains the Tea Party.
It explains why we're going to have the wave.
It explains so much.
And it had absolutely nothing to do with the day's events, but it had everything to do with what's going on in the country.
And 2 million people have watched this answer on YouTube.
Two million people.
Now, he probably won't want to tell you, but I just, what he said that night, I've been thinking about a lot.
Governor Palin and I were sitting there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it explains a lot about what's happened.
Americans Struggle With Health Care Costs 00:03:48
Well, it was very touching, actually.
By the way, I'm fine now.
If you noticed when I walked in, I was not in a wheelchair.
Well, I walked in.
I obviously was not in a wheelchair.
But I want to tell you, though, my life is abnormal.
has always been even something as simple as a protruding disc onto your side.
Health insurance rates are surging in America, leaving millions without affordable options.
If you're sick of having paychecks eaten up by health care costs or dealing with mega-corporations, then listen to this.
Christians don't need to waste money on a broken system.
That's why I want to tell you about Christian health care ministries.
It's an alternative to traditional health insurance at half the cost.
With CHM, fellow believers contribute monthly to help pay each other's medical bills.
There's no enrollment period, so you can join any time.
And you aren't restricted to provider networks, so you choose the doctors and hospitals you want.
It's that simple.
CHM is not insurance.
It's a ministry that puts faith into action.
Feel the difference of financial support and biblical care from fellow believers.
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Americans have a big health care problem.
Over 100 million U.S. citizens carry medical debt.
But that's not the whole story.
With health insurance, your out-of-pocket and monthly costs are way too high.
You get surprise bills, denied claims, and poor customer service.
That's a serious burden.
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You can enroll at any time and join a proven faith-based solution that's both reliable and affordable.
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Families across the country count on CHM to step in during their hardest moments.
And it works.
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That's chministries.org slash wellness.
...nerve, which is simple to describe and awful to have.
I mean, the pain.
I actually did an hour on the subject of pain.
I have very interesting theories on it, but I have interesting theories on everything, I think.
But in any event, I get my surgery in, it was a June, right?
The first one was June.
And by golly, as soon as I open my eyes after the anesthetic, I say, you know, my right leg has some pain.
Doctor says, happens all the time.
Don't worry, man.
Gets worse, and I keep texting the doctor, is this normal?
I'm in terrible pain.
It turns out this man, and he's a terrific surgeon, I would recommend him to anybody, and he was great for me.
But this man said, he is the head of the Spinal Institute at USC.
He said, Dennis, in 12,000 such surgeries, I have never seen this.
The same disc exploded on the other side.
And he had never seen this.
So I went back three weeks later for the next surgery.
Sounds Unimpressive 00:15:36
And now I'm fine.
Then in July, in August, I had finger surgery because I had a staph infection in my finger.
I can't believe I had no surgery in September.
I felt bored, I must say.
I said, you know, Sue, there's got to be something I can have an operation on.
You have to understand, too, what my life is.
It's very funny to be in public life.
It has its funny moments regularly, actually.
There you are in these incredibly humiliating gowns that they put on so they can have complete access to your tukhas.
If you don't know what tufus is, it's Yiddish for buttocks.
And, you know, and here I am lying getting ready for surgery.
And Sue, Sue saw this.
My wife saw this.
Dennis Prager!
The last thing I'm thinking of is I'm a celebrity.
You know, the very last.
I'm thinking, no, I'm really a pathetic creature whose buttocks is hanging out.
And, oh, can I have your autograph?
Oh, I got it.
I can't wait to tell my boyfriend.
This is awesome.
As the needle is going into put me to sleep.
It's very fun.
And I have no problem with it.
I just want you to know it's just funny to live a life like that.
Why do I even mention this now that I think of it?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Why I was wheeled into Denver.
That's right.
So they asked, so it was Governor Bill Arm, Senator Bill Armstrong, former Senator Colorado, who's the MC.
So it was, I was sitting here, Sarah Palem here, and Hugh next on the other side of Sarah Palem.
So he began with me because I was closest to him.
Dennis, let me ask you, what's the biggest problem confronting of America?
There were 6,000 people there.
And so a number of them shout out, Obama.
And I took that as a perfect cue when I said, no, it is not Barack Obama.
It is not.
It is our inability to have transmitted American values to the next generation of Americans.
And then I explained what those values were, didn't even know it was videoed, and then learned Through the Internet, that all of a sudden, you know, within a few weeks, 800,000.
Now, those are separate views.
That's 2 million is separate computers on the assumption that most people have at least one person living with them.
That's 4 million people.
And this is not to brag, it's to tell you the thirst for that.
And they realize, yes, that's the point.
It's not Barack Obama.
It's not the Democrats.
It's that we have failed to transmit America's values.
The greatest generation failed in this.
They defended, but they didn't know to articulate what they were defending.
Superman knew.
What was it?
Truth, justice, and the American way.
He came pretty damn close.
By the way, in the Superman movie, you know, they dropped, what is it?
They dropped the American Way, I think.
It was just truth and justice.
Isn't that interesting?
When they made the Superman movie, gives you an idea of the insidious effect of having the left dominate the culture.
The American Way, that's chauvinistic.
And that's what we have to do.
And what are those values?
I'm not going to give you the talk.
I'll just tell you what I said.
The American Trinity, and I learned it emptying my pockets 15 years ago.
I had the values of America in my pocket since I was a child on every coin.
E pluribus unum in God we trust liberty.
No other country in the world has those three as its central values.
And the left opposes all three.
And I never accuse them of bad intentions or anything.
They have a different value system.
There is a competition on this earth.
This is the subject of my next book, for the mind of humanity between American values, Islam, and leftism.
Those are the three competing ideologies.
But here's the problem: two of them proselytize, one doesn't.
Thank you.
One of the interesting things you mentioned Superman dropping the American Way.
Of course, they did the G.I. Joe movie, and he was working for the United Nations, not the U.S. Army.
Yes.
It's the G.I. Joe movie.
They were all working for the U.N., not the U.S. Army anymore.
I don't know how you call it G.I. Joe at that point, but apparently that cultural reference has been lost.
Hugh, one of the seminal moments of the Obama administration has been the passage of the health care bill.
Let's say clip two.
But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.
That was a great moment.
And that was who, everybody?
Yeah, we didn't think we need to show the video on that one.
Now, clearly, in that clip, you can hear the smugness in her voice with which Nancy Pelosi acted in framing and passing, let me editorialize this monstrosity called Obamacare.
This was hence infuriating the masses.
How do we get the politicians in Washington and here in California in Sacramento to listen to the people again and do what their will is?
On Obamacare, it's very clear.
How many of you want it simply to be repealed immediately upon the passage of it?
I have always believed that repeal was possible.
I thought it would take four or six years.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that it will become the defining election of the next Congress, and not piecemeal, but as a part of an overall resolution that simply says setback, because the first wave impacts of Obamacare have been devastating.
22,000 seniors of Harvard Pilgrim in New England, that's the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire plans, have lost their Medicare advantage.
22,000.
The principal group in Indiana announced that they were selling off 620,000 policies they were getting out of the health care insurance business.
3M announced that their seniors will no longer be covered by a 3M policy.
They're going into Medicare whether or not they want to go into Medicare.
These are, and McDonald's has begun the study about whether their mini-med plans will be continued.
McDonald's got a waiver.
Thousands of small businesses will not get that waiver.
The first order impacts of Obamacare have been devastating.
And each of those individuals who has had their insurance in any way changed or their doctor care in any way altered has had a personal promise from the president to them broken.
It is not one promise that he has broken.
He has broken, by my count, at least 644,000 promises to the principal and to the Harvard Pilgrim people because he said, and I play it every day, I guarantee you, here's a guarantee I will make.
If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.
If you like your doctor, you can keep him.
That's President Obama giving his personal guarantee, and it was a lie.
He knew at the time he could not make that guarantee, and the American people do not like what's happened.
Now, I talked to a couple of doctors in the front row here.
A couple of docs here.
Any other docs here tonight?
They are changing the way that American medicine is being delivered because they cannot practice medicine under these conditions.
They will drop out.
They will drop their patients.
And most importantly, young people will not go into the profession.
And when young people stop going into the profession, we will not have the kind of quality health care that we want.
I'll close by saying this.
We're going to hold the feet of the Republicans to the fire on this.
They have got to vote to appeal Obamacare.
It is not an option.
There are two things which are not options.
One is not to go along to get along on Obamacare and Trim, and the other is not to spend.
And we'll come back and we'll talk about appropriations here.
But I believe that as this rolls out, the demand to change this fact is so intense that we're going to see that kind of, that in the reality, it's going to actually happen much more quickly because people engaged and outraged and active really will scare politicians.
And you have, and you will continue to do so.
Thank you.
The next question actually was, and you jumped right to it, was for Dennis, is that the number of companies and the exemptions coming out, do you still want to answer?
What effect do you think this is going to have politically on the chance of repeal?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, it obviously, unless I misunderstand your question, the chance for repeal is dependent upon what happens this November.
I mean, that's one of the many reasons that this November, in my opinion, and I never said this before, so it's not like I say this every election.
I don't.
It's the most important election, not just my lifetime, I believe, since the Civil War.
This is a referendum.
I see it actually as a plebiscite on America.
And I have announced, I admit it, while there are unbelievably impressive candidates running on the Republican pod.
This guy in Miller in Alaska, I mean, his curriculum vitae, his resume, reads like something you would make it central casting for an American leader.
And the Dr. Steele, who was running against the guy in Detroit, what's his name?
The Dingle.
Dingle, yeah.
I mean, I had him on the show, this doctor, he's eloquent, bright, humble, accomplished.
On the other hand, some are less impressive.
And I, frankly, I would vote for Howdy Doody if he ran on the Republican ticket.
I admit it.
I do.
I'm sorry.
I know this sounds unimpressive to independents.
Well, we look at the candidate.
I frankly look at the party.
The Democratic Party, it doesn't matter who they run, because whoever they run will obey the Democratic Party's leadership and shift this country irreversibly, in their opinion, to the left.
Big government means little liberty.
That's what it means.
The bigger the government, the less the liberty.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.
That's my motto.
We sell that bumper sticker.
You become less of a person as the government gets bigger.
America was founded to make the individual a giant, not the government.
And it's one or the other.
You cannot have both.
Do you know that most people in the world today cannot name a European?
And believe me, 100 years ago, you could have named any number of Europeans, any number, central to almost every area of life.
Today, it is like one big blob, which is what is created largely in the socialist paradises of Europe.
Because nobody wants to excel.
There's no reason to excel.
Do you know that in Germany, if you own a store, own a store, you have to close it at 5 p.m.?
Because if you keep it open until 6, you have, quote, an unfair advantage over the guy who closes it at 5.
So why work to excel?
I mean, to an American, this sounds unbelievable.
I believe truly if the Democratic Party had its way within 10 years, we would have a rule like that.
Because listen, and this is key.
Remember I said our goals are different?
Our goal is to create economically.
We have many goals, social, cultural, moral.
But economically, our goal is to create wealth.
The leftist goal is to redistribute wealth.
We have an entirely different view of it.
That's the reason that they could tell you you can't stay open longer.
You'll make more money.
That is inequality.
You can't do it.
And that is why this November matters, and then we can repeal it.
I've said from the beginning it had to be repealed.
We can't tell, well, there were nice parts of it.
If there were nice parts of it, we start anew, and we pass nice parts of it.
The nicest thing that we could do, by the way, and a lot of Americans won't like this.
Maybe some of you won't.
We have to start having us pay part of our health care costs.
Anything, anything, let me tell you something.
Whatever people do not pay for, they abuse.
They don't appreciate, and they abuse.
I am included.
It is true for it is a universal.
Let me give you one example, and I learned this.
I learned this very early in my life.
When I came to California at the age of 27, it was to direct the Jewish Educational Institute, and I had just published my first book, which was on Judaism.
And believe it or not, a lot of people don't know this.
Authors get six free books.
The rest they have to buy like everybody else.
But everybody, you know this.
You know, your seventh cousin wants a free copy.
Hugh, come on, Hugh.
You want to send me a copy?
Like, you don't, you like you get up, you know, you call up your publisher, can you send me another 200?
All my relatives want one.
So anyway, I bought a box of my own books, hardcover.
And I remember at this institute, which had a summer camp, I spoke one the first day of camp or the week before camp to the counselors.
And I said, I want you to know I'm going to give all of you a copy of my book.
And by the tenth person receiving it, I realized what a stupid thing I had done.
If they had to pay $1, they might have read it.
Getting it for free, it was worthless.
And that is true.
That's human nature.
And so we will have to make serious changes in health care in the opposite direction of this.
I want to be master of my own life.
This is the American way.
You fail and you succeed.
Freedom to fail is not in the vocabulary of the left.
But if you can't fail, there can't be success.
So that's why we need to repeal this for social reasons aside from economic ones.
Thank you.
Final question on health care, a political one for you, Hugh.
Is the passage of Obamacare, do you believe Deaths will go down as one of the biggest political overreaches of all time?
It's a great question.
The answer is yes, but the left didn't know it at the time.
I'm going to defer to Dennis on a lot of this on the left, and I take the political questions because I try not to think like the left.
I think it could hurt me.
And Dennis spends a lot of time trying to think like the left.
And it's actually a very different approach to doing this because I try and be aware of their arguments and understand it, but I don't read too deeply in the left.
I prefer to stick with history and things like that because I do think their prism through which they understand things is so bizarre.
You can end up losing your way by reading too much in it.
But I will say this.
They really thought that's what America wanted.
Americans Hate Lines 00:15:51
And to me, they don't understand the genetic makeup of Americans.
It's so deeply ingrained not to want to be a leftist in America.
And it goes back to Detcville and the people that I read.
We love freedom.
We love being left alone.
We do not want to be part of long lines.
Americans hate lines.
They hate lines.
Exactly.
Russians have grown up standing in lines to get nothing for hours, right?
That's what they did.
And so we can't, people go into a bank, or how many of you get mad if someone's got five items and the five, you know, five items too many in the checkout line.
They shouldn't be in that line.
I want to be out of here in a hurry.
We don't like anyone telling us to get in line or do anything we want.
But the left really didn't know.
They really didn't understand us.
And it's as though they do not understand the genetic makeup of America.
I do not know how they could be that blind.
So I'm going to tell you, how could they have been that blind?
I would change one verb.
You said, I don't remember exactly, but you said something to the effect in the beginning that they don't know what Americans want, I think you said.
I would change the word no to care.
See, and I mean this.
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Americans have a big health care problem.
Over 100 million citizens carry medical debt while paying for overpriced and complicated health insurance.
As Christians, we don't have to pay for a broken system.
Christian Healthcare Ministries is an alternative to health insurance at half the cost.
Plus, you can enroll at any time.
Stand up to health insurance with a biblical solution.
Join CHM today by visiting chministries.org slash wellness.
That's chministries.org slash wellness.
I never say things to insult.
That's gratuitous.
I literally mean what I said.
They know better than Hugh and me and you how this country should be governed.
You, if you differ with them, you are six-herb.
Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, or bigoted, or all of the above.
And that's all they need to know.
That's why we always beat them in debates.
I mean always.
Always.
100%.
Not because we're better debaters, not because we're necessarily smarter, but because they've never argued their position.
They live in insular worlds like academia or New York City or San Francisco, and they only talk to one another.
They only read one another.
I read, you're right, by the way, it is a very funny, if that's the word, an odd characteristic that's built into me.
Do you know what I did as a hobby at 14?
I listened at night to Radio Moscow.
Oh, gosh.
Yes, you're right.
Well, I was just talking to my wife about this.
I finally have come to conclude I am a freak.
I am.
I am.
By the way, it made raising my kids difficult because everybody who raises kids thinks of their own childhood as a good, as a sort of way of understanding.
I was so abnormal.
I was.
There was nothing normal about me.
I was smoking a pipe at 15, reading symphonic scores on my own, which I would take out of the New York Philharmonic Library, and listening to Radio Moscow and learning Russian from a Berlitz Russian book.
Now, I don't think there was another 14-year-old in America doing that.
And so there's nothing to be learned from me.
And of course, I graduated in the top 80% of my high school class because I did no high school work.
This was what I was doing.
My parents thought I would end up in jail.
They really did.
It was very funny.
But in any event, I always cared what the others thought.
That's why I learned Russian and Arabic.
I wanted so deeply to know how those others think.
So, yes, I've immersed my life in their thinking.
I went to communist countries.
I studied totalitarianism.
They know better.
They are better people.
They're not six-herb.
They are not sexist, intolerant, racist, bigoted, etc.
They're not.
They're the opposite.
They're open-minded and kind and compassionate, unlike us who are mean-spirited and selfish.
That's their worldview.
So therefore, they can't impose on you.
Therefore, the answer is not they don't know what the American people want.
It's irrelevant.
What is it?
Is it what was Rahm Emmanuel's motto?
We use a crisis.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Never let a crisis go to waste.
That's exactly it.
We don't have to persuade the American people.
And to the extent that they tried to persuade, they lied.
It's permitted to lie.
There were liars who were conservative.
There were liars who were liberal.
There were honest people who were conservative and honest people who were liberal.
But as an ideology, truth is not on the hierarchy of left-wing values because it can come in the way of the greater good of social justice.
That's much more important than truth.
And if you have to lie and say things, the president, I play this all the time.
The president said, not that I believe in big government.
You know, I don't believe in big government.
I mean, my God, for the president to say he doesn't believe in big government?
I mean, I don't know what it's wanting to say.
What is big government then?
And so that's the point.
If they can do it, they will do it.
What is the name of your great book that I cite all the time?
If it's not close, they can't cheat.
Hugh, you started that one.
So this next question actually starts with Dennis.
In the wake of what we called climate gate at the time, do we need a wholesale review of all the policies we've passed to combat what now appears to have been a myth, the thing called global warming.
Propped up by bad science and in some cases flat-out fabricated science.
Do we need a total re-examination of this and what effect do you think it would have on our national economy if we did?
All right.
Look, I don't want to be too long here.
This is another thing that I've tried to figure out.
A few years ago, even maybe four years ago, I wrote a column and I asked the question, which is one leftists should ask, not just people on the right.
Why?
Americans have a big health care problem.
Over 100 million U.S. citizens carry medical debt.
But that's not the whole story.
With health insurance, your out-of-pocket and monthly costs are way too high.
You get surprise bills, denied claims, and poor customer service.
That's a serious burden.
As Christians, we don't have to pay for a broken system.
Christian Healthcare Ministries is an alternative to health insurance at half the cost.
You can enroll at any time and join a proven faith-based solution that's both reliable and affordable.
CHM isn't just help.
It's financial and spiritual support when you need it most.
Families across the country count on CHM to step in during their hardest moments.
And it works.
Stand up to health insurance with a low-cost, biblical solution.
Join CHM today by visiting chministries.org slash wellness.
That's chministries.org slash wellness.
Americans have a big health care problem.
Over 100 million citizens carry medical debt while paying for overpriced and complicated health insurance.
As Christians, we don't have to pay for a broken system.
Christian Healthcare Ministries is an alternative to health insurance at half the cost.
Plus, you can enroll at any time.
Stand up to health insurance with a biblical solution.
Join CHM today by visiting chministries.org slash wellness.
That's chministries.org slash wellness.
Overwhelmingly, was it liberals who believed that man-made carbon dioxide emission will lead to such heat as to destroy a good part of the planet?
And why did the vast majority of conservatives not believe it?
I don't want to drown.
Right?
Conservatives dislike drowning just as much as liberals.
Is that fair to say?
Now take a vote.
If you don't want to drown, would you raise your hand, please?
I just want to get a show of hands.
Fine.
No, no, it's a very important thing.
Think about it for a moment.
Why would we be less scared than they?
We have no desire to see any of the ends promised us by the global warming theorists.
We're as affected as anybody else.
Just as many conservatives lived in coastal areas as liberals.
Just as many conservatives will have the terrible heat or whatever, or the droughts.
So why were you?
You are, the vast majority of you in this room are not in the oil business, are not executives of energy companies, and are middle class, truly middle class.
Why aren't you afraid of it?
You should be the people who fear it.
And by the way, it's not a simple answer.
It's a very important question, but not a simple answer.
And so I had to, I have to, I've been thinking about this, as you pointed out.
I've been thinking and thinking, why do they believe this?
And then I realized it's part and parcel of something the left does regularly.
There's always a world crisis on the left.
When I was young, it was the population of the earth will eat up its resources.
Remember that?
And so people believed in ZPG.
And Europe decided to go ZPG, zero population growth, and as a result, Europe is fading.
What it had to do was bring in tens of tens of millions of people, largely Muslim, to work because they had no younger generation to support the older generation in a welfare state.
So they sowed the seeds of their destruction believing this myth.
I have come to see it over and over.
Silicone breast implants.
I'm sorry if there are any who still believe that that caused terrible disease.
It was finally debunked as false science.
The heterosexual AIDS in America, Time and Newsweek, had pictures of white heterosexual women on the cover, middle-class white women.
In other words, she's as likely to get AIDS as an IV drug user's partner and as a gay male.
This notion, and why did they do it?
Again, because truth is not important.
They did it in part because they get hysterical very easily.
And secondly, because they have a larger urge, the larger urge there was to de-demonize AIDS.
And the only way to do it is to say, it's not a gay male disease.
By the way, it's not a gay female.
The last person likely to get AIDS is a lesbian.
So it can't be anti-gay unless you're only anti-male homosexuals.
So it had nothing to do with anti-it had to do with truth-telling.
I was almost fired from KABC.
That was my first station.
And I remember it was the only time that I was ever called, well, I was called in one other time.
Twice in 18 years at KABC, I was called in.
And once was Dennis, we're getting letters from doctors to remove you from the air because you're denying heterosexual AIDS.
And the reason I did was Michael Fermento's article in Commentary Magazine, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.
And I learned how AIDS is transmitted.
He explained it perfectly well.
I won't go into the details of anal cavities with you, but he explained it perfectly well.
Every scare.
There are scares, by the way, that turned out to be hysteria that both left and right believed.
For example, the molestation of children at daycare centers.
That transcended left and right.
Overwhelmingly, it is part of the left, whatever it is.
They get their, I don't know why, this I have not answered.
I don't know why they get scared more easily.
They do.
I don't know exactly why.
But I do know that they use these scares to implement what they want.
And in this case, it was to get off fossil fuel because carbon dioxide creates heat.
I just want you to know that the leading person in the Obama administration on this issue wants this to be renamed, not even climate change.
That was the first rename.
What is the latest rename?
Global climate disruption.
Global climate disruption.
But wait, do you realize what they're saying?
If either carbon dioxide emission traps heat or it doesn't, if it's only climate disruption and we're no longer talking about global warming, then it's an acknowledgement it was at best erroneous and at worst a lie the whole time.
This is a very big issue.
One final word.
Wherever there is a scare, getting the government to get more expansive is really at the heart of the scare.
And this was a perfect example.
We will tell you what light bulbs to use.
And by the way, that light bulb, okay, you know about it, right?
I mean, you know, if it breaks, you have to leave the house.
Did you know that?
I'm serious.
Read about it.
It's got mercury in it.
You must take yourself and your pets out.
If it's two degrees out, you have to.
If it's minutes so cold, as you put it, you have to do it.
So that's longer than I wanted to be on that, on the global warming issue.
Let me pick up a little bit on that, though, Lou, because Prop 23 is on our ballot.
That was the next question.
No, hurry.
We've got to vote for this because California, which is already struggling under a deadening and stultifying, bewildering array of regulations, is unilaterally disarming in the economic competitiveness nature by imposing Hollywood's agenda on the state via the AB 32.
23 is the reverse of 32, and we've got to do it.
But I have a proposition on global warming.
Ten Commandments Test 00:10:02
And I believe you can always go back to some things.
Again, I'm going to credit Dennis partially on this.
How many of you attended parochial school?
Those of you who attended parochial school, how many of you know at least some of the Ten Commandments anymore?
I believe that you can successfully predict whether someone's going to be a conservative based upon whether or not they can remember some or all of the Ten Commandments.
And I really do believe if you go down, you find someone, you don't ask them anything about you, just meet a stranger and say, do you know any of the Ten Commandments?
I'm the Lord thy God.
Thou shalt not have strange gods before me.
And you just run down the ten or however they might be, and there are different variations depending.
That if they know all are part of the ten, they're going to be a conservative because they would have been brought up in a natural law proposition.
But one of those commandments, the one I mentioned, I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me, was taught to me to be skeptical of anything that claims priority on God and natural law.
And that that was drilled in.
I went 12 years of Catholic education, and so it's drilled in that idols are bad.
Idols are very bad.
And the left loves its idols.
It sets them up all the time.
It's sort of a variation on what Dennis was saying.
But I always understood communism to be the idol of Marxist thought.
I have always thought that Hitler was his own idol.
I think global warming is an ideology of science.
I think evolution is its own ideology, and I'm not disputing its truth here.
I'm just talking about how the left must have an idol because they knock down God.
And when you take God out of that, you're looking for something, and they're ready to fall for anything as a result of that.
And the climate people are just the hippies who don't want to get down and roll around in the mud anymore.
They need something to believe in.
and when we've got something to believe in, we're just not that easily taken in, Dennis.
I wonder if you...
Oh, that's brilliant and true I never thought of the Ten Commandments one.
But that's right.
I'm very tempted to recite them for you, but I won't.
I really am.
In order.
In order.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
I am the Lord your God.
I took you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of slavery.
You shall not have any other gods before me.
Do not create any graven image.
Do not take the name of the Lord in vain.
Honor your father and mother.
Keep the Sabbath day holy.
Honor your father and mother.
Do not murder.
Do not commit adultery.
Do not steal.
Do not bear false witness.
And do not covet thy neighbors anything.
The conservative thing.
By the way, he's right, by the way.
It's a very powerful thing.
Everybody should know them by heart.
And I want you to know they govern my life.
They do.
I'll tell you a story I've never told publicly, only because it never arose.
It's a very Middle East moving to me.
When my older son had his bar mitzvah, in Jewish life, every Sabbath, a portion of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, are read until you complete it till the end of Deuteronomy, and then you start over again after Rosh Hashanah, the new year.
And it turned out, by sheer coincidence, that his portion was the portion called Jethro, Exodus 20, which has the Ten Commandments.
And I was called to bless the Torah when he read the Ten Commandments from the Torah.
My son, his bar mitzvah, reading the Ten Commandments in the original Hebrew, and I called for blessing, I was mush.
I cried through the entire blessing.
It was pathetic.
You know, my son is looking at me, Dad, come on, Dad, come on.
Anyway, it's a very powerful thing to remember those commandments.
There was another point I want to make, maybe I shouldn't.
What were you just saying beyond the Ten Commandments?
Oh, about the idols.
He's exactly right.
No, no.
G.K. Chesterton.
G.K. Chesterton said in the 1890s, when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.
They believe in anything.
The death of God in Europe gave us communism and Nazism.
Those were secular ideologies.
It's why it's very hard to get me angry on the air, as you well know.
Callers can say all sorts of nonsense.
I really have to control it when they give me the mantra they picked up in college, more people have been killed in the name of God and religion than anything else.
Nothing compares to the number of people slaughtered in one century by secular ideologies, Nazism and communism.
All the religions in the world combined are Boy Scouts compared to what Nazism and Communism did.
The death of God is the death of morality.
It doesn't mean every atheist is immoral and every religious person is moral.
Of course not.
There are despicable religious people and there are wonderful atheists.
But in the course of a society, that's exactly what happens.
And Europe is fading as a moral force because it is so secular.
You know what they believe most in Europe?
Vacation time.
That is their - I mean it with all sincerity.
They don't demonstrate over Biafra or Cambodia or North Korea or Congo or Darfur.
They demonstrate over vacation time and what age they will retire.
What age is pension time.
That is what animates the socialist universe.
It is a morally dead world.
They can't fight evil.
They couldn't even take care of the Balkans.
We had to rescue them in the Balkans.
Forget all the other wars we had to rescue them.
We are the force for good because we are still by far the most religious industrialized democracy.
And as this Judeo-Christian value system and belief fades, so will the desire to fight evil.
As I have said, I want my grandchildren to know that their grandfather fought evil, others' grandfathers fought carbon dioxide emissions.
Lou, one second.
Hey, noble fight.
After the elections are over, Dennis and I are going to do a few gigs together, and I'm calling it Ask a Jew.
And I'm because I'm fascinated.
If you've spent any time as I have with Dennis, he really does know his Torah, right down to the fact we were playing hearts on Sabbath on his back porch one day, and I said, Dennis, what does the Torah say about gambling?
And the answer is nothing.
Nothing.
Very good to know.
So my question is.
And he said, go ahead.
I was losing.
So he said, get going.
Could have said anything.
And Dennis is rigorously fair.
We were out on the road once in Philadelphia, and John Kerry, I thought it misquoted, and said in the Old Testament something that was in the New Testament.
And Dennis said, I don't know.
It's right in the middle of Leviticus and quoted it for me.
But the thing you've really got to note, and I think this is the division in the world right now, is something that he and Dershowitz got into an argument about at the, is it the New York City wine?
Where were you from?
Yeah, 92nd Street Wall.
Tell these people.
This is important.
This is the difference.
What are you referring to?
Tell me.
I don't even remember.
Everybody believes in God.
You and Dershowitz agreed.
And then you said to him, but I believe he wrote it down in a book and he intends you to follow it.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
I wrote this for the L.A. Times a few years ago.
This was a big, quote-unquote, revelation in my life.
The big difference in America is not those who believe in God and those who don't.
There are enormous numbers of people on the left who believe in God.
That's not the division.
The division is those who believe in a divine scripture and those who don't.
That's the difference.
I have essentially identical values to Hugh and to religious Christians.
We both believe in the divinity of, for example, the Torah.
In fact, I tell Jewish audiences to whom I speak half the time, I'm very delighted that I do, very, very delighted.
And I say, you know, the day that as many Jews believe in the Torah as Christians do, the Messiah will come.
I mean, my wife has heard me tell, except I say Mashiach, because Jews know it as Mashiach, and that's, and, you know, they squirm in their seats.
Well, it's, you know, the Christians believe in the Torah.
That's a problem.
That's a problem.
We don't.
They do.
All right, last question from...
You got to come out to the Ask a Jew show.
It's going to be a good show.
All right, one more of our scripted questions, and then we're going to questions from the audience, which we've been collecting and I've been culling through as the night has gone on.
The President, Dennis, has sounded a very uncertain trumpet when it comes to our war policy, especially our policy in Afghanistan.
The policy seems to be surge and withdraw.
So, what long-term implications will this be?
That is erotic.
That is downright erotic.
Surge and withdraw.
Issue Not Left or Right 00:07:18
Surge and withdraw.
You never know.
I tell you, these talk show hosts on Salem.
Well, I just lost my job.
I honestly did not think about it that way.
what long-term implications ask a jew i'm sorry i was asking a question Oh, boy.
The president has sounded a very uncertain trumpet when it comes to our policy in Afghanistan.
What long-term implications will this have for our prospects for success in Afghanistan and the war on terror in general?
This is an example of where you don't.
To me, the issue is not left or right.
It's common sense or no common sense.
If you announce you will leave a war, why would the other side fight until you leave?
It's frightening to me that that is not self-evident.
If we had announced that in 1943, we are leaving Europe in 1944, no matter what.
What would Hitler have done?
He would have gone to Bertha's garden, planted some flowers, waited till 1944, and then taken over the rest of Europe.
One marvels at this.
If you have a five-year-old child or grandchild, they would understand this.
So I have nothing more intelligent to say.
That's the obvious message that is being sent.
But I do want to say this.
I read poll after poll that a majority of Americans are, I don't know, uncomfortable or want to leave Afghanistan and don't want a, what is the word, interminable stay, or indeterminate stay.
I'm sorry, folks.
It's not a television sitcom.
It's not a television series.
It is not a movie.
If we have to be there to prevent that evil that took place on 9-11 and the continuing evil of women being stoned to death for showing an ankle or learning.
Do you know they were killed?
Girls were killed for studying?
Well, then we do.
And of course, I get this all the time.
It's a perfectly legitimate answer.
What is it?
Dennis, who appointed us the world's policeman?
And the answer really is we did.
And the world did.
Because every good person on earth knows that if they're in trouble and coming up the hill are American soldiers, they will be very, very thankful to whatever they believe in.
And that is the case.
And by the way, this is where I differ entirely with the Libertarian Party.
The Libertarian Party, who is superb on domestic issues, I can never join, never, because of their views on international affairs.
Unless we are invaded, we don't fight anywhere.
Well, maybe because largely libertarians are secular.
So maybe they don't feel a divine compulsion to fight evil the way in which a religious Jew and a religious Christian might.
The Libertarian Party is not known for its religiosity.
They're known for terrific, terrific things on domestic issues.
They're brilliant.
I have them on my show constantly for their insight into the economy and government.
But when it comes to this issue, whether it's Rand Paul or whomever, well, if we're not attacked, it's not our business.
Well, it is our business.
We are the most blessed country in the history of the world.
We are not blessed just to enjoy our own blessings.
If we are the strongest country in the world and there is terrible evil taking place and we can do something about it, we can't always do something about it.
So the argument, well, are you going to send troops everywhere?
No.
Obviously, you have to pick and choose.
But if you not only are spectacularly evil, but also have done something to slaughter many of our people, well, then yes, we will stay there until we have to.
We have troops in Korea since 1955.
Why are Americans at peace with that?
And by the way, I will tell you, I made this offer many years ago.
Whenever I see these despicable demonstrations in Korea against our troops, I wish we would have announced, and I meant this, I would have announced if I were president.
Ladies and gentlemen of South Korea, every year we see these parties that whole parties in Korea run against American America and run against having our troops there.
We will now, we ask you to have a plebiscite of the Korean people, of the South Korean people.
And if you do not vote at least 60-40 to keep our troops there, we will leave.
And then, so it's put up or shut up.
You really want us gone?
We'll leave.
And if the sickos, the psychopaths of North Korea overrun you, you will recall that you voted to remove that protection.
That's what I would have done.
Lou, I got it.
We always do this earlier and neglected to do so.
Any active duty military with us tonight?
If you'd stand up, if anyone here?
I didn't see anyone come in.
And how about parents of active duty military?
Any parents here tonight?
Back here?
Thank you so much for the service of your children.
As the war goes on, and this the the the the Woodward book, which I will not buy, I don't trust Woodward, I don't believe him, but I do know that a lot of people have been corroborating certain parts of his account on the chaos inside the Obama administration when it comes to military policy.
We have to keep reminding ourselves that Americans of extraordinary quality keep stepping up and volunteering to serve in the armed services to go and do this work because they realize and they hear a bell, they hear a call, they have a vocation that is a very high calling, and they know that's their job.
It's sort of like law enforcement people that go out every day knowing that it's a dangerous job that they do.
There's a movie out there called Restrepo.
I don't know if any of you have seen it yet, National Geographic documentary by the man who made The Perfect Storm, Junger, I believe his name is.
And he took his cameras out to a forward operating base in Afghanistan with these young American heroes who are out there at the far edge of the tip of the sword, the spear, protecting us.
And as Dennis just mentioned, it's not our choice.
It's their choice to defend us, but it's not our choice to fight this war.
Drunk And The Enthusiasm Gap 00:09:20
This war is going to go on, and it's going to go on for as long as you and I are alive, and there is no way to stop it because radical Islam is so deeply embedded and it's going to continue to try and do what it tried to do last month for as long as we are here.
The only question is whether or not America is going to be cognizant of it and attempt to do the best that it can, relying upon its very best people to prevent that, to provide that defense way forward for us, because it's not, we don't have a choice.
It's not something that's going to go away.
They are not going anywhere.
And if there's one thing that you can take away from all of the books and interviews that Dennis and I share over, whether it's Lawrence Wright, whether it's any of the number of people who have been writing for a decade now about this threat, it's not going away.
Well, on that happy note, some questions from the audience.
First of all, and either one of you can take it, decide between the two of you.
First question from a member of the Redlands Tea Party Patriots: Are the media intentionally underplaying the significance of the enthusiasm gap?
And I want to answer that, and the answer is yes.
And here's why.
Dennis and I know what it's like to go into work every day when the news is 100 percent against the people you want to win.
It's hard.
2008 and 2006, but especially 2008 and the last month of the campaign, I get up in the morning, and I will never lie, like Dennis.
I will never lie.
I will not, I said like Dennis, not unlike Dennis.
Like Dennis, I will not make up stories.
I will not misrepresent the facts.
I will avoid things I don't want to talk about if I have to.
And so I would look for a story, one story.
Find me one race where a Republican is doing well.
Find me one poll that I can talk about.
Give me one glimmer of hope because it's hard to get people to care or to motivate or to donate or to work or to make a phone call if they think they're doomed.
And therefore, it's part of the balancing of democracy that you encourage your side even as you attempt to demoralize the other side.
And this is just politics 101.
Right now, the other side is deeply demoralized, not just because they're going to get whacked, but because they know they deserve it.
They realize that their policies have been fully implemented and they have fully failed.
And so there is an enormous enthusiasm gap, numbers that we have never seen before in Gallup history since they began doing it in the post-war era.
In terms of likely voter, heavy turnout, and likely voter, low turnout scenarios, it's between 11 and 18 percent, a Republican preference.
The kind of numbers that, and a lot of the Democratic preferences, because of geographical issues, heavily focused in some areas, they could get slaughtered.
They could get absolutely slaughtered.
And so what are we talking about?
We're talking about foreign influence.
That's why David Axelrod went on face the nation this weekend to bring up and cook up an entirely new attack.
It's why President Obama and Joe Biden are out there cooking up these wild stories about Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie because they've got to do something, anything, to try and charge up their base to at least turn out because they don't want to get out of bed.
They are depressed.
And we want them to be depressed.
And our friends in the old media will do whatever.
It's their last, it's almost a charade of what they used to be, how they're attempting to manipulate the news.
But there are two things that are going on.
They are not covering the big story, which is the enthusiasm gap, and they are covering sideshow stories unless they don't like them.
Last point on this.
Gloria Alred shows up with a nightmare story.
I had her on my show.
How many of you heard Gloria on my show?
She hung up on me.
It's one of three people who have hung up on me: Helen Thomas, Ed Henry, and Gloria Allred.
And I'm very glad to have had her hung up on me.
She could not stand, she couldn't answer a single question about it.
Nonsense story.
Front page of the L.A. Times.
I'm not bringing it up to talk about Gloria.
Front page of the L.A. Times.
All over the nightly news.
Flash forward a week.
A tape of Jerry Brown is released in which either Jerry Brown or a senior aide is heard referring to Med Wickman as a whore.
This is a real story.
This is a little bit of a window, not a complete picture by any means into how Jerry talks to his aides about his opponent, deeply offensive to many people.
It's not what we expect out of our elected officials.
On the day after the story appears, it is not on the front page of the Los Angeles Times.
It is in the second section.
On the Sunday, it is on the second section on the jump from the second section page.
It is so deeply buried.
Why is that?
That is the last gasp of the old media attempting to again manipulate stories so that you don't see what will outrage you and you do see which will hurt the Republican.
But it doesn't work.
It doesn't work because everybody knows everything because of the new media.
We are all informed about the whore comment.
We all know that Alred was talking out of her back pocket and had no idea what she was talking about and couldn't answer the questions.
And we all know the enthusiasm gap exists, so it really doesn't matter, but it is being underplayed.
The enthusiasm gap has a large effect on turnout, obviously, and that's important.
And we have a proposition that would legalize marijuana basically here in the state of California on the ballot.
And I actually have a proposition to really help Republicans in California, maybe put Meg and some others over the top, which would be we implement that 24 hours before the election and make the marijuana free.
And that would really depress left turnout.
That's a great idea.
They'll all be high.
And then we can just repeal it again.
Lou?
Yeah.
This is from my Ask a Jew comment.
Won't be any Doritos left.
What does the Torah say about dope?
I'm serious.
I'm just curious.
You're a dope if you take it.
Is it?
Is it really?
No, no, that's very interesting.
The Torah specifically would not have a reference to it.
However, probably because it was not known to them at the time.
But there is a, from the first stories in the Torah, you have a real skepticism and worry about getting drunk.
So it's obviously easily usable because you get, in a way, drunk when you get high.
You lose your full cognizant cognitive abilities.
And that first story is Noah.
Noah comes out of the ark and gets drunk, and clearly something sexual takes place within his family.
And it happens on a number of occasions.
However, interestingly, in case you're interested, I have no idea if you're at all interested in this.
Judaism, neither the Torah nor later Jewish law ever banned drinking.
In fact, it is a mitzvah, which means commandment in Judaism, to drink on the Sabbath and holy days.
And what it did was it rendered drinking sacred.
And one of my first books is my first two books are on Judaism, and they're co-authored with my dear friend now Rabbi Joseph Talushkin.
And we wrote in there: when Jews stopped saying the benediction over wine, they started getting drunk.
It taught Jews how to drink, because drunk Jews was very rare.
Jews in certain other types of problematic behavior was not rare.
But they were Jews in organized crime.
I mean, the usual stuff, white-collar type crimes, but not drunk.
It's very rare.
Police chiefs would tell me that.
Well, because the reason I bring this up, I think Prop 19 is a moral issue.
It is.
I think it's very important.
It hadn't gotten much attention.
And people always bring up alcohol.
But there's very different.
I don't think you can regulate the impact of dope in the way that you can regulate the impact on alcohol.
I think you just alluded to this: that it is possible to drink responsibly.
It is not possible to be stoned responsibly.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Well, for people who call me up, I've had this exact question: oh, come on, Dennis, what's the difference between alcohol and marijuana?
Give me a break.
I said, all right, so I'll ask you something.
Would you like, would you prefer that the captain of your next flight come on stoned or having had a martini?
I mean, there's no comparison.
Again, it's all common sense.
Of course, you can drink responsibly.
It's a great line.
I will quote you.
You can't get stoned responsibly.
I'd rather he had a light beer.
No, no, I agree.
I don't want him to have any of this.
But if I had to choose, they're not the same.
They are not the same.
How many of you are going to vote for 19?
Please be honest with me, because I am very troubled by this, because the polls say it could pass.
How many in this crowd are going to vote for Prop 19 to legalize?
How many are going to vote against it?
Supporting the Podcast 00:14:44
You see, it's going to be very.
How many want to beat up the two people who said that they wanted to vote?
It's a generational thing, but it's a bad thing for the state.
All right, final question from the audience, and then we're going to get to your closing comments, John.
Now, by the way, you are going to see on YouTube tomorrow, Prager tells 400 conservatives in California to beat up people who are voting for Prop 2.
Isn't that what you said?
Again, either one of you, how confident are you, and this is a very important question, whoever asks is right on point.
Patrick of Riverside, how confident are you that the Republican Party will stick to their principles after the election?
I'm curious to hear your answer.
I told Hugh, I'm curious to hear his answer.
I am not confident.
I have interviewed Leader Boehner.
I have interviewed Whip Cantor.
I have interviewed Paul Ryan.
I have interviewed Kevin McCarthy.
I have spent lots of time with David Dreyer.
And they are all serious conservatives.
They are all committed to doing the right thing.
Within the Republican caucus on the Hill, there are long-serving members who are not committed to the same politics that are driving the Tea Party.
Those long-serving members will have to be persuaded or pushed aside.
And they are not even necessarily rhinos.
They are, however, in love with the old way.
And the old way used to be this.
I was never a deficit hawk.
I've got to be honest with you.
If GDP, if deficits were below 3 percent in GDP, I did not care.
I didn't care about pork.
I've always assumed I was in the Reagan White House and we were running a GDP, a deficit up to 6 percent in the Reagan buildup in order to take on the Soviet Union.
I didn't care about it.
I have always believed that you can run a responsible 3 percent deficit and not even worry about it.
The times have changed, and the Republicans have to change with it.
Now, there will be a struggle immediately after, and that struggle will be dispositive if we win back the House.
And I was assured last week by some senior-ranking Republicans that the battle lines are already drawn and that the numbers will be there to demand rapid action.
However, if they do not deliver, and this is what keeps me awake a little bit at night, the people will desert the Republican Party.
They will not get a third chance.
This will be their second chance.
They will have been slapped around in 2006 and 2008 badly, part of it because of the war, part of it because of spending.
And if they do not get it right, if they think they have time, they will be punished and we will lose in 2012.
President Obama will be reelected if we do not deliver and if we do not join the fight and in a principled, constructive, persistent, consistent way, make the arguments about why we have to shut down the government, why we have to go hard on Obamacare.
They must fight that battle because we are not working this hard.
I am sure the people in this room have done Tea Party.
You did not stand in the heat.
You did not give up your money.
You did not give up your weekends so that the Republicans could go back and negotiate a 50 to 50 percent compromise with Nancy Pelosi.
You did not do that.
That was great.
That was great.
Closing comments, gentlemen.
Isn't he terrific?
I mean it.
He really is.
I'm going to give you a closing comment, not on America.
I want to give you a closing comment on talk radio.
Okay?
Seriously, because you can hear me talk about America on the radio, but this you're not going to hear me talk about on the radio.
First, you should know that we're very blessed.
We actually really, really enjoy and respect our colleagues.
Whether we go on these things, we have a particularly wonderful chemistry, but Michael Medved's terrific, and Bill Bennett's terrific, and we have a number of people, not just they, who are terrific.
And we are very proud of them.
And we are very proud of what talk radio has done because, as some Europeans have told me on the air, if we had talk radio in Europe, the world would be a different place.
They have no talk radio in Europe, none.
Radio is controlled by the state.
You get a journalist license or you don't do a damn thing, not in written form and not in radio form and not in TV form.
And so it doesn't matter if you're watching German TV, Italian TV, or French TV, you get the exact same take on the world.
A take that is so sick that Europeans in polls think that the United States is the most dangerous country in the world except for Israel.
Israel and the United States are the most dangerous countries.
North Korea is ranked below in terms of danger.
Even Iran is ranked below.
That is how sick and skewed the news is.
But that's how it would be in the United States without talk radio.
So I'm telling you this not to pat ourselves on the head.
It's actually patting America on the head.
That we have such freedom that anybody can own a radio station and do whatever he wants.
Most of it is junk.
But some of it is just so precious as this ability to have intelligent people giving you an alternate view to what you had in college, an alternate view to what's on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, and so on.
That's a very big deal, what has happened in the United States.
And to give you an idea, I don't know if you know this story.
You know most of my stories.
I thought very seriously of running against Barbara Boxer six years ago.
And I actually started a committee and so on.
And I met in L.A., this is very important, you understand, in L.A. at a very, very wealthy office building.
I met with a very leading California Republican.
The man did not know who I was.
Now, believe me, I have a very healthy ego.
I don't expect to be known by everybody, period, end of issue, even in L.A. But for one of the heads of the California Republican Party in living in L.A. not to know who I was, that is staggering.
That is how out of touch Republican leadership is with America and with their own people.
If there's anybody that the Republicans should know, it's talk radio.
Now they do, by the way.
That's why they're all coming on our show, and absolutely.
It's a different world now.
But it gives you an idea of what there was.
I'm telling you this so you will appreciate what goes on because it's very easy.
There's a saying in Oregon, you don't know how tall a tree is until it's felled.
I don't want people to appreciate talk radio once it's disappeared.
So I need to tell you, you need to support us.
And you support us in a very simple way.
You simply patronize our sponsors.
Okay?
You're going to have to get the ex-product somewhere.
You're going to have to have Y product somewhere.
Get them from our sponsors.
They keep us on the air.
And it's been a very hard time for radio, been a very hard time for newspapers, very hard time for TV because of the recession and because of the internet.
So it's just something you should be aware of.
And as I began, I said with the mutual appreciation, I'll just end with this.
There's never an issue.
We have been on panels all over America now for years.
And it's only fun for us.
It really is.
We enjoy each other immensely.
A, there's not a shred of competition, not one iota.
We're all in it for the ideals.
Secondly, we respect each other.
And third, we all have different strengths.
Utterly.
There are things you can talk about eloquently that I would stammer.
And it's the truth.
And I know that.
His encyclopedic take on American political life is awesome to me.
It's awesome.
I mean, he knows what ex-candidate in Idaho had for breakfast.
I mean, the guy's amazing.
I have other strengths, the large issues.
Why is this happening?
Explaining what the battles are about.
That's why people can listen, by the way, all day to us hosts.
If we all repeated each other, anybody would get bored.
Michael Medved brings his unique take onto these issues.
Bill Bennett brings his.
Gallagher brings his, and so on.
So it's a very blessed thing that we do.
And I do believe that every day we go to work thinking how blessed we are to have this job.
I can't think of anything more exciting, wonderful, and you hear my enthusiasm every day.
I mean, you also hear when I get down because of events in the world and events in America.
I'm real.
But every day I'm excited.
I never think, oh, no, another date abroad.
I never, ever think that.
It doesn't occur to me.
It's fun.
It's exciting.
It's interesting.
And that pulls you into.
And then in my own life with my unique stuff of a happiness hour, and you know the letters I get, I show my wife, I mean, people on the male-female hour, people say to me things they would not tell anyone in their lives.
They send me letters like that.
You know, let me tell you about my sex life with my wife.
I'm serious.
No, I'm dead serious.
Opening up in ways that sometimes make you want to cry.
And I appreciate that.
I am real.
When people open up like that to me, I'm very touched.
I wish I could respond to every letter, but I try to read every letter at least.
And this is a very powerful blessing, this talk radio thing.
And we're grateful to you because if you don't listen, well, then we do other things for a living.
He has an alternate.
I would conduct regional orchestras at $200 a gig.
Haydn doesn't pay as well as World Affairs.
But no, I mean, I would figure out something else.
But anyway, I just wanted you to know about us, about this work, and about the importance of your helping through the sponsors.
Thank you for being here tonight.
It's a blessing.
I am going to pick up on a couple things Dennis said in the back room afterwards.
These are our talk pack cards.
TalkPAC defends free speech by defending talk radio.
And there are 25 targeted districts in the United States.
There are 52 targeted districts, like Harry Reid's, The King of Diamonds, etc.
A donation of $25 or more goes to the PAC that defends the freedom of speech in America.
If you are at all interested, they're in the back on your way out.
Please also visit talkpack.com.
That defends not just the Salem hosts, but every talk radio host in America, because we know the left wants to shut us down.
And they will try any way they can, because we have been a devil in their side, a thorn in their side from the beginning of the Obama administration, because we speak the truth.
And we do so without fear, and we do so without favor.
And I want to pick up on just two things that Dennis said.
One, the left does not honestly engage in argument anymore.
It's very rare to find a liberal who will come on the air.
And you may have to pick up on me after this.
They won't come on with us.
It's not because we're that much smarter, although in some instances we are.
And it's not usually because we're better read, because in many instances they wrote the book that we have only casually read, but it's because their arguments don't hold up.
They really cannot respond to basic factual assertions about the way that the world works.
As Dennis pointed out earlier, in the 20th century, the toll in humankind from secular atheist constructs was so vastly greater than all of recorded human history, that's a hard thing to refute because it just happens to be true.
So they're not arguing with us anymore.
They won't even come on the programs to talk to us.
And when they do, they do not do well, which tells us why we've got to stay doing this and why I thank you for supporting KTIE, KRLA, and our sponsors.
We love doing this.
But the ideas that would not get out, the books that would not be known, the authors about whom you would never have heard, the stories that would never have been told but for your support of the stations is why I love to do it.
I also have to just tell you, I love this job so much.
Next week, next week, I'm going to interview two authors.
One of them is Vince Flynn.
How many of you like Mitch Rapp, right?
Mitch Rapp sold about 100 million books.
Last week I talked to Ken Follett, and I love talking to these people who create all day long, and I love to introduce them to you and try and ask the questions.
But I'm also going to talk next week to Dr. Condoleezza Rice.
And Dr. Rice, I thought I knew something.
Do you know anything about her?
Yeah.
Her memoir?
You know where she grew up?
Birmingham, Alabama.
On the day that the four little girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama, she was two miles away in her father's church when the explosion wracked Birmingham.
And at the end of this memoir, I put this memoir down.
It's the first half of her memoir.
And I think, I'm ashamed that I did not know and tell America more about this extraordinary woman.
And that's what we get to do.
We do it over and over again.
That's our job.
Our mission is really, in the words of Alex Haley, the great African-American novelist who wrote Rhodes It's on his tombstone, find the good and praise it.
And we do that a lot, and we love to do that, and it's because of your allowing us to do that.
So thank you for coming out tonight.
Thank you, Lou, for doing a marvelous job hosting it, and thank you for supporting KTIE.
Dennis, you're going to.
There's an encore in there somewhere.
Visit Prager University, too.
And before we all go, and thank you again for everyone for being here tonight and supporting our event here for KTIE.
And thank you, of course, to our great guests here tonight, Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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