Timeless Wisdom: What I Learned from Ronald Reagan
Dennis Prager critiques liberal policies, tracing their roots to Reagan’s "government is the problem" ethos, and argues they undermine morality—47% of Americans pay no taxes while welfare dependency erodes dignity. He highlights distortions like excluding Jewish boxers or Austrian composers for political agendas, accusing the left of prioritizing inclusivity over truth. Prager frames U.S. as the "last stand" against Europe’s progressive dominance, insisting conservative values better serve societal good despite moral double standards and lawsuit-driven decisions like Air’s refusal to enforce dress codes. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com. Dennis Prager.
Thank you.
Well.
Wow.
Wow.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Very intimidating when you get the standing ovation before you speak.
You really better deliver.
Well, I could actually spend a good part of my time thanking everybody who has made this possible.
Forgive me, by the way, I have a slightly hoarse voice.
I don't know why, but I do.
Isn't it annoying when you get anything in the summer?
You know, if you get in the middle of winter, it's totally unnoticed.
Nobody should get a cold in the summer.
It's wrong.
It's just morally wrong.
Anyway, be that as it may, the brain is functioning, and that's what matters.
I just want to say that Senators Armstrong and Andrews, you have done something wonderful with this Institute and with these weekends that you have created.
I want to thank you and salute you.
It's an honor to be part of this all-star cast.
I often say on my radio show, and I make no judgment on this, but I'll be somewhat self-revealing here.
There are two types of people.
You know, you always have that, two types of people, right?
Here's one of the two types distinctions.
There are those who want to be a star, and there are those who want to be on an all-star team.
And you need them both.
I have no judgment here, but I far prefer being part of an all-star team.
And that's what I am when I come here.
And thank you for having me and the rest of the all-stars that you bring.
It's a very, very big deal.
Let me tell you that the great battle is a moral ideas battle.
The congressman who said those very kind things about me and of course Brian Taylor of my beloved KNUS, they have spoken and you have heard about Ronald Reagan and you heard the congressman say that he needs someone to translate.
Does Prager speak liberales?
I do.
That's the interesting thing.
I should now say I speak five languages.
That is a very good point.
No, it's actually a very good point and a very important one.
I was raised speaking liberales.
I am classic.
I am the stereotypical liberal.
Brooklyn, New York, Columbia University, Jewish.
What else is there?
I mean, it's like redundant.
And I speak liberales fluently.
That is why, as one of the reasons, hopefully, if I am effective, it's because I know their language.
And part of the language is to be liberal is to be kind.
To be conservative is to be stingy.
To be liberal is to be compassionate.
To be conservative is not to be compassionate.
And the list goes on.
The self-esteem of the left is enormous.
That's why they founded the self-esteem movement, one of the silliest movements they've ever founded.
And there's competition for that title.
You must understand.
Silliest liberal movement is a very large group of nominees.
But the self-esteem movement, and a lot of conservatives bought it, got to raise kids with self-esteem and so on.
It's turned out the Atlantic Monthly, which is a liberal, thoughtful liberal magazine, had a very powerful article recently on how devastating it has been to children to think highly of themselves without doing anything to merit thinking highly of themselves.
I always tell the story about my older boy, when he was 10, he got a trophy for, well, I won't say for what, that's the punchline.
He got a trophy at the last game of his baseball season.
He came in last.
His team came in last, which is good Prager sports tradition.
And he came in last.
So I said, David, what's the trophy for?
And he thought and he thought and he thought.
He said, for playing.
I said, you got a trophy for playing?
Does it say that?
To David Prager for playing.
They didn't win.
By the way, even the kid who didn't play got a trophy.
I want to tell you, I got no trophies as a kid.
My older brother did because he was good.
He was a real athlete.
This is part of the idea of the left.
They have very high self-esteem.
Our task is to win the moral rhetorical battle.
To show that the nanny state, the welfare state, is not a compassionate and good thing.
It is heartless.
Government ultimately is heartless because nobody is there.
You knock on the door and a bureaucrat answers if you get any answer.
There was a time in America when you knocked on the door and the church down the street answered.
The Rotary Club answered.
The Kiwanis Club answered.
There were more associations in America than in any other country or all other countries combined.
The state has obliterated them.
Catholic charities does not any longer function in Massachusetts and in Illinois in the area that they had been the greatest activists in, and that is adoption, because they had this odd belief that you give a child for adoption first to a healthy, married man and woman.
If they're not married, they didn't qualify for first choice.
If it was two men, they didn't qualify for first choice.
It's not anti-gay any more than if you're not married, it's anti-heterosexual.
Or if you're single, it's not anti-heterosexual.
It's not anti-anybody.
It's the odd belief that Catholic charities had that if you have a child who needs a home, your best chance, no guarantees in life, but your best chance is with a married man and woman.
But that is bigotry now.
That is considered bigotry in Illinois by state law.
It is bigotry.
And in Massachusetts, so they're no longer in the business of adoption.
That's what the state does, the larger the state.
We're here honoring Ronald Reagan.
He changed my life.
I'll never forget his inaugural address, and he said, in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.
I did not know that.
I feel silly.
I do.
I feel silly.
I wasn't a liberal, but I didn't know that.
By the way, which therefore made me a liberal.
The issue is the size of the state.
The great moral dividing line is about the size of the state.
And I am here to make the case with 10 arguments that the bigger the state, the smaller the citizen.
It is a phrase that I came up with, and we have bumper stickers with that phrase.
It summarizes the conservative position, which is the American position.
That doesn't mean we love America, they don't love America, none of that nonsense.
It has nothing to do with love.
There is such a thing as normative American values.
A big state is not a normative American value.
It is a European value.
The left in this country wishes to be Sweden.
The right in this country's country does not wish to be Sweden.
That's it.
In a nutshell, that is the difference.
We do not look to Western Europe as a model.
By the way, just a little tiny example of the enormous moral battles that go on here.
Those of you who hear my show know a model of my show is I prefer clarity to agreement.
Here is a clarifying difference between Western Europe and the United States, or at least Western Europe and American values.
This evil monster, Brevik, who murdered now 77 people, most of them kids, do you know what his maximum sentence will be?
21 years in prison.
That averages out to about two months per murder.
That is a statement of how they look at murder in Western Europe.
That is a statement of the contempt they have, in my opinion, for human life.
Your death is worth two months in prison.
It's vile.
We who believe if you commit premeditated murder, you do not deserve to live, value life more than they do.
In the United States, you can get more time in prison for tax fraud than for murdering 77 people in Norway.
What does that say?
It's a very important little distinction.
It is not more moral to have such a nothing punishment.
The man, the German fan, remember that, who stabbed Monica Selles, the tennis star, in the back, ruining her career, just came over and put a giant kitchen butcher's knife in her back, never served a day in his life in prison in a German prison.
They understood his issues.
That's the liberal mind.
I could, and if I had the time, well, actually, I do have the time.
It's called my radio show.
I have three hours a day, and sometimes it's not enough to speak about the moral defects of the liberal position.
But what must be understood is most of the time, not all the time by any means, and the further left you go, the meaner the spirit.
But many liberal people are utterly decent people.
By the way, they can't say that about us.
They can't.
The moment liberals acknowledge that a conservative can be as kind and well-intentioned as they, they have cut the rug from undernet.
They have removed it from under them.
They must believe we mean poorly.
I'll never forget, we play on my show clip after clip of liberals saying just matter of factly how bad conservatives are.
The Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic Party, said, for example, unlike conservatives, we liberals don't go to bed at night.
We go to bed at night worried about kids who don't have enough food.
We don't care about kids who don't have enough food.
That's how he believes.
I'm paraphrasing a Larry King question where he just said, what is it about conservatives that they have such a problem of kindness?
And I like Larry.
I was on Larry King a dozen times.
You know, he means, well, that is, if they didn't believe we were mean-spirited, they couldn't stay liberal.
They have to believe they mean better than we, but we don't have to believe that we mean better than them.
We have to believe that we do better than them.
We measure morality by what happens, not what is intended.
Very, very big distinction between us.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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Christian Healthcare Solutions00:15:14
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
So let me give you these 10, and I could give you 20, 10 failings of progressive policies on the character of a society.
Number one, the bigger the government, the less citizens do for one another.
Makes perfect sense.
Americans knew you help your neighbor, you help your parents, you help your children.
We just knew that, and we always did.
So the question is: who does it?
If the state won't do it, the church will, the synagogue will, the volunteer club will, the free loan society will.
I mean, it's endless.
It is endless.
The Glee Club will.
The Bowling Club will.
The Sisterhood will.
The Brotherhood will.
They're all dying because the state destroys the alternatives.
There are no such alternatives in Western Europe.
If you want to help your parents, you go to the state.
Not to mention that we have this notion now we take for granted that the state educates our children.
Why is that superior?
That was not the original American ideal.
The state, if so, the bigger the state, the less we do for one another.
That is why Americans with the same exact socioeconomic status as Western Europeans give far more charity and volunteer far more time.
Because the European has been taught the state will take care of everybody.
Number two, the welfare state may well be well-intended, but it is a Ponzi scheme.
Lawrence Kudlow made this point.
I had made it before him, but I'm happy an economist made the point.
I'm not an economist.
It's a Ponzi scheme.
People are paying in to support the people who previously paid in, but there isn't enough coming in, so it will collapse like every Ponzi scheme does.
It's not meant to be a Ponzi scheme.
By the way, I had the author of a biography of Ponzi on my show.
Ponzi was a good guy, he just got messed up, and so we had to keep collecting money to pay the other people who paid in earlier.
He didn't mean bad.
Ponzi turns out to have been somewhat of a saint.
I'm not kidding.
I'm not kidding.
He heard of a girl who was in a fire, and he gave his own skin for her skin crafts.
A total stranger.
Ponzi is the quintessential liberal.
Means well and creates something destructive.
That is what liberalism is.
Means well and destroys.
Doesn't mean to destroy.
But remember, one of my mottos: being left means never having to say you're sorry.
Number three.
Well, let me just say one more word about number two.
I live in California.
California is broke.
It's not only broke, it's broken.
Liberals broken.
Nobody can argue, no one, no one with a shred of commitment to honesty can argue conservatives broke California.
Liberal policies in a state where they can do whatever they want have broken the golden state, the state people went to to get rich.
You now go there to get poor.
You leave to get rich.
It's very sad.
It's a beautiful state.
It's very sad.
Number three, citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic.
You know what the big worry of the Western European is?
It certainly isn't how do I protect countries like America worries about protecting countries, right?
37,000 Americans died saving South Korea from becoming like North Korea.
How many Germans died saving South Korea?
How many French?
How many Italians?
How many Spaniards?
We die for others.
You know what the big concern of Western Europeans?
All Western Europeans.
Vacation time.
They riot over vacation time.
They riot over what age is the retirement age.
Riots take place over these issues.
This is narcissism.
It doesn't matter what is happening in Cambodia.
It doesn't matter what is happening in Syria.
I want my vacation time.
That's it.
That's the big concern.
I want a four-day work week.
I want it all paid for.
The European Union has now added under its list of human rights, are you ready?
I couldn't make this up.
The right to travel on a vacation to a foreign country.
It is now in the list of human rights.
It's not a privilege.
It's a human right.
Number four, the liberal welfare state makes people disdain work.
They look at us Americans as much too hardworking.
I know a dear young woman, about 30.
How old is Anetta?
30?
Who's married a good American friend of ours and has fallen in love with the United States.
And she told me that in Germany, there's a simple law.
If you own a store in Berlin, in Dusseldorf, it doesn't anywhere, and you want to keep it open an hour longer to make more money, you cannot.
It's not fair to the guy who's closing at five.
So you can't stay open till six.
The idea that people should work hard, and of course what has happened as a result is no hard work is really venerated, not the hard work of producing children.
Western Europe isn't replicating itself.
The more liberal you get, it's not a matter of wealth.
That's only part of the story about why people have fewer children.
Religious people have more children than secular people.
Why is that?
You see a big family in the United States, you assume one of the following.
They're Mormon, Catholic, evangelical, or Orthodox Jewish, correct?
Did you ever see a family of nine kids and the parents are democratic activists?
I really wonder if there's one in the United States of America.
Any hard work is disdained by the left.
Only the hard work of having the government expand.
Then they're prepared to work very hard.
They'll knock on your door.
Number five, nothing guarantees more the erosion of character than getting something for nothing.
To be used to getting something that you didn't pay into.
Michelle Bachmann was entirely right in saying every American must pay even a dollar in federal income tax.
It is corrosive.
It is corrosive to human character to pay nothing.
47% of Americans do not pay a penny in federal income tax.
I have the bizarre notion that there's more wisdom in the Bible than in the New York Times.
It is a very big dividing line between me and others.
The biblical notion is every Israelite gave half a shekel, everyone.
If they were too poor, they'll borrow it.
There's no dignity in not paying in.
That's what the liberal doesn't understand because human dignity is not a big deal on the left.
Equality is big, but not dignity.
There is no dignity in having others pay for you.
It is humiliating.
In Jewish life, it is one of the ironies of life that Jews are liberals.
This is one of the great battles of my life as someone deeply involved in Jewish life.
You know what I tell Jewish liberals?
Why don't you preach what you practice?
Jewish liberals live utterly conservative lives.
Utterly.
Emphasis on education, emphasis on marriage.
Jews are so big on marriage.
You know that.
As soon as a Jew sees a single human being, they, oh, you know, I think I know somebody for you.
I think I know somebody.
I'll never forget, I give you my word of honor, I took two young, handsome Catholic priests to a Passover seder of mine many years ago.
Every woman at the table was thinking, you know, I know a Betsy.
Betsy would be great.
And I kept kicking them.
Celibate, celibate.
They didn't care.
Single, single.
And I'm going, celibate, celibate.
No, it's a real irony.
Jews live, they work hard, they defer pleasure, they emphasize education, everything.
And then when it comes to policy, they adopt the opposite view.
That's why I say to my fellow Jews who are liberal, preach what you practice.
And a lot of liberals would be like that.
It is very bad to get something for nothing.
It is very bad.
47% of our society determines what the other 53% will pay.
Can you imagine a bowling club that ran that way?
Not everybody, everybody's a member of the bowling club.
And those of you who don't pay a nickel towards dues, you decide how much the others who do pay will pay in dues.
Can you imagine that?
It's inconceivable that a bowling club would run that way.
We run the United States of America that way.
Plus the issue of the dignity.
Getting something for nothing is a very, very bad thing.
Number six, the bigger the government, the more of the corruption.
This is perhaps, it's almost never mentioned, and it might be the biggest of the ten principles I'm speaking of.
The bigger anything is, the bigger a business, the bigger anything is, the more likelihood, the greater the likelihood of corruption.
Let me tell you one very major thing that no one likes to talk about.
Do you know who has committed the greatest evils of history?
Big governments.
Big secular governments.
Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, all big states.
Why would anybody trust the big state?
It's amazing how many callers have imbibed the college message.
Oh, more people have been killed by religion than anything else in history.
Oh, really?
No, more people have been killed by governments than by anything else in history.
And just in the 20th century alone, and none of them were religious.
You don't learn that in college.
Comes as a shock to my listener.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
Gee, I never thought of that.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
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 Healthcare 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 anytime.
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.
Join CHM today by visiting chministries.org slash wellness.
That's chministries.org slash wellness.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
Why is big government, why doesn't big government have a bad reputation?
Why?
Not only that, oh, they say, well, big, big corporations are corrupt.
Fine.
I never argue.
We're not big corporation fans.
We're freedom.
We're economic freedom fans, but we're not big corporation fans.
Big corporations are not conservative.
GE is not conservative.
No, just know that.
The head of GE is a big time pro-Democrat liberal.
This notion, they have invented this notion that big business is conservative.
It never was.
They did so much business with Lenin that there was a statement that Lenin and his Bolsheviks had.
Western companies will vie with one another to sell us the rope by which we will hang them.
It's a very famous phrase of Lenin.
But when all is said and done, no big company has a police force.
The government does.
No one's been arrested by Coca-Cola.
You can be arrested by the big state, which I will talk about as an example later.
Welfare State Corrupts Family Life00:02:55
Number seven, the welfare state corrupts family life.
That's the biggest single part of the problem in the inner city.
Where women began to look to the state for a husband instead of to a man for a husband.
The big state has a terrible impact.
Instead of bonding as two people to support a family, I don't have to bond with anybody.
I just go to the state and it will support my children.
And not only that, the more children I have out of wedlock, the more the state will pay.
It has a very corrupting impact on family life.
Number eight, the welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults.
When I was a young man, when I was a boy, I knew, I didn't meditate on it, I knew it.
My task is to marry, support a wife, and support a family.
That was it.
No longer.
No longer.
Boys do not have that dream.
Ask women dating.
They'll tell you boys don't have that dream, including boys of 40, known as the man-boy.
The man-boy was produced by something in society.
They didn't come out of nowhere.
But the idea of a boy dreaming of supporting a family, that's macho.
That's John Wainish.
We don't want that.
Well, you got your wish.
You don't have that.
That's exactly what you don't have.
I play on my show the longest, loudest, sustained applause I have ever heard.
You know where it's from?
A college in the Washington area where President Obama spoke and announced, and now you can stay on your parents' health insurance policy until the age of 26.
Had he announced a cure for cancer, I don't believe the applause would have been as great.
It was hysterical applause.
And I just thought about myself, this is not bragging, believe me.
I would not have applauded if I were in college.
I wanted to be independent at 21.
I wouldn't have applauded that I can now be dependent until 26.
By the way, I bet if he announced till 36, they would have screamed in applause.
The notion of being dependent is not a negative.
It is a positive.
Where Are All The Men?00:11:12
So the next time your daughter asks, where are all the men, tell them the Democratic Party and its policies got rid of them.
And that's the truth, Ruth.
Number nine, as a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism, and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evil and even to defend them.
They have no budget for defense.
It's all spent on making sure people can have fewer hours of work and have more vacation time and have more benefits and more benefits and more benefits.
And who will fight evil?
America.
Anyway, they deny there's evil.
There really isn't evil.
Evil is an American term.
You have no idea how many French and German experts and scholars I've had on my radio show who just say, you know, you, especially when President Bush was president, they would say, you know, you Americans like to talk about good and evil.
We Europeans, we don't talk about good and evil.
That's very American.
And they're right, it is very American.
That's entirely right.
We do talk about good and evil.
That's why we alone have tended to fight evil, not the Europeans.
That's very, it's a very big deal.
That's another, and that's a phenomenon of the left.
You don't fight evil.
You fight carbon emissions.
It's very important you know that.
I always say, my grandson, I finally have a grandson.
When my grandson and hopefully other grandchildren will grow up, it'll say, what did Papy Dennis fight?
Because in his time, I read there was a great division.
He thought they should fight Islamist terror and communist evil, and others thought that they should fight global warming.
Which did grandpa fight?
I hope that my grandchildren know which one I fought.
But this is clarifying the differences.
I don't know how a person of the left could differ with what I just said.
And they'll add, well, that's because we consider global warming the great evil.
There's always a new great evil that has nothing to do with evil.
That has to do with expansion of government.
That's what it has to do with.
The United Nations just came out with a major statement that people have no reason to live on more than $10,000 a year.
With global warming, we should redistribute all of the West's income to Africa and Asia.
That's all.
And finally, which is about good and evil, the Velta Chow, the worldview of the left, is not to divide the world or see the great battle as between good and evil, but between rich and poor.
And here's my phrase, equality therefore trumps morality.
I will give you an example.
Did you know that the United Nations ranks the United States and Cuba as essentially tied in health care?
We're 36, they're 37.
Now, in most hospitals in Cuba, from everything I have read, it is hard to get an aspirin.
Why would someone be so foolish as to rank the United States and Cuba as one apart in healthcare?
Because the left doesn't really care about good and evil.
It cares about equality.
And since almost no one except the highest Communist Party leaders can get any quality health care, health care stinks for all Cubans.
That's good.
Because it's equal.
Equality trumps other values.
Better that everyone have lousy health care than that some have great health care and some have less than great health care.
That's the mindset.
It is a resentment of distinction, of any inequality.
Not good and evil.
Why has the left been always tempted by communist tyrants?
Why?
The left doesn't like mass murder.
Why have they been tempted?
Why do they make trips to visit Fidel Castro?
Why did they make trips to visit Venezuela?
Why did they make trips to visit the Soviet Union in its beginnings?
Because of equality.
Good and evil are not the primary concerns of the left.
Equality is a primary concern.
It's a very, very different vision.
They don't have the same vision for America that conservatives have.
They don't.
It's not a matter of difference in means.
There is a difference in ends.
Finally, just let me give you three examples and then I conclude about government intervention that you may not know about.
San Francisco has banned soda.
No public place may sell soda.
Okay?
Did you know that?
Did you know that they are now considering a ban on selling pets, including goldfish?
The left considers the ownership of an animal to be immoral.
And San Francisco is the most leftist city in the country outside of Berkeley.
And that is the type of law.
They have more and more laws to control people's lives.
Maryland.
High school graduates in Maryland must now, in order to get a high school diploma, show proficiency in environmentalism.
They still won't be able to write a sentence correctly.
They will have no music or art in their curriculum, but they will have seen Al Gore's film and virtually memorized it.
This is, as I say about our education system and especially our universities, our universities are left-wing seminaries.
Once you understand that, you can send your kid there.
But please understand where you're sending your child.
A Christian seminary wishes to produce a committed Christian.
The university wishes to produce a committed secular leftist.
The only difference between the Christian seminary and the university is that the seminary admits its goal and the colleges don't.
That is my only resentment of the universities, that they deny that that is their intention.
That Maryland would deny that that is its intention, even though now you must be proficient in environmentalism.
Do you think that anybody who is at all skeptical about man-made carbon emissions bringing the world to catastrophe will be allowed to speak at a Maryland high school?
It's a rhetorical question.
And finally, California, being under the leadership of the left in its state legislature, has just passed a law signed by Governor Jerry Brown that there must be in all California high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks,
they must have dedicated pages to the contributions of LGBT, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered to American and Californian history.
Now, I'll tell you what I resent.
I don't resent the LGBT part.
I resent the tampering with history.
I don't want any affirmative action in a textbook.
The purpose of a textbook is to tell history and truth, not make people feel good about themselves.
It would be like demanding that a history of the NBA have a special section on Japanese players.
Or as I remember as a kid, my funniest bar mitzvah gift, great Jews in sports.
I mean, there have been, but okay, that's not our first achievement.
Great.
And I didn't care.
That's the thing.
I remember I was a conservative, I guess, before I knew it.
I didn't care.
See, I, you know, whatever Jewish pride I have, and I have very deep Jewish pride, it goes to the fact that Abraham was the first monotheist, that we gave the world the Ten Commandments.
That's big.
That Benny Leonard was a boxer and Hank Greenberg had 58 home runs doesn't move me.
It doesn't, it doesn't.
What am I going to say?
Now, if anybody excluded Benny Leonard from a boxing book because he was Jewish, that's despicable.
If anybody is really not discussing lesbian contributions to the revolution, that's wrong.
But I can't, I just, they didn't give one example.
Show me a cross-dresser we missed in American history.
No, that's transgender.
That's part of transgender.
And you should have an absolute right to cross-dress.
That is not my point at all.
And I'm not making fun of those who that's, if that's your thing, that's your thing.
If your wife, your wife has to like it.
That's my only.
It's hard for me to imagine, but whatever works, works.
My point is only how absurd we have gotten.
That's what it means.
If there's nothing about transgendered, now that means two things.
Transgendered means those who have undergone a surgery to change sex, and I have no issue with that at all, or those who maintain their biological sex but dress as the other sex.
Where have they been missed in textbooks?
That means they will make up stuff to show kids how important the transgendered and the bisexual and the gay and I don't want this for Jews.
I don't want any law.
You must have X amount of attention to Jews in textbooks.
There should be one governing principle in a textbook.
Now, What Do I Care?00:02:37
Tell the truth.
That's all that matters.
That is all that matters.
No, let me tell you how bad it's gotten.
Let me tell you how corrupting the left is of everything they touch.
Everything.
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
I am a very, very big aficionado of classical music.
I conduct orchestras in Southern California periodically.
Brought a lot of people to, hopefully, to love classical music.
I know a lot about it.
The New York Times last year listed the 10 greatest composers, which is always a fun exercise and doesn't matter.
He didn't include Haydn or Handel, the New York Times correspondent, in the top 10, which was bizarre given that he included Debussy and Bartock, okay, who were fine, but not better than Haydn and Handel.
But he said, why?
Too many Austrians.
He, Anthony Tomasini, look it up.
There's even affirmative action there.
Too many Austrians.
So it's not really a list of the 10 greatest composers.
It's the 10 greatest composers who are not only Austrian.
Now, what do I care if all 10 are Austrian?
Why Truth Isn't Left-Wing00:03:21
What the hell do I care?
Don't I want to know who the 10 best musicians are?
Why is there no Thai on the list?
No Burmese.
Not one person from South America.
Where's Inastera?
They corrupt everything.
Because truth, there are right-wing liars, there are left-wing liars, there are left-wing truth-tellers and right-wing truth-tellers.
But truth is not a left-wing value.
Feeling good is a left-wing value.
We want to make Hungarians and French feel good.
They were off the list if Haydn and Handel were on the list.
That's what it's about.
It's utterly corruptive.
But it's so inundating of our society.
It's so daily.
U.S. Air could not kick a man off its plane.
Do you know this story?
Two months ago, a man boarded a plane on U.S. Air.
And he was wearing only panties and a bra.
You're all laughing.
You didn't have to sit next to him.
I don't know what the hell you're laughing about.
Well, lack of sympathy in this group.
Why didn't U.S. Air kick him off?
I mean, isn't it, doesn't, isn't there some concept of propriety left?
No, there isn't.
They would have been sued for bigotry, for some sort of phobia.
By the way, the man, I don't know if the man was gay, and if I had to bet, he isn't.
It has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
It has to do with propriety.
But that's where we've come.
They were asked, U.S. Air's spokeswoman was asked, why didn't you remove the guy from the flight?
She said, because we have no dress code on U.S. Air.
Well, and they don't.
They probably don't.
Dress code is considered very conservative.
Dress codes in high schools is only conservative to four, even though grades and conduct improve whenever kids have to wear a school uniform.
It's a very great battle, my friends.
And the only place still battling it is the United States.
Western Europe gave up.
The left won.
This is the last stand.
And this battle is taking place, obviously, right this moment in Washington, D.C. There is something immoral about spending more than you can afford to spend, isn't there?
But for only one, for only one party, is it considered an immoral issue?
That's the difference, and it is a huge difference.
And we have to know it because the fight is ultimately one of who does more good.
And there is no question in my mind which one does.
Thanks very, very much.
Welcome to Circle of Friends00:00:45
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
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