Jan. 20, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:21:40
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(upbeat music) | |
| Well, this is it. | ||
| Our last direct message before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. | ||
| According to half the media and countless celebrities, January 20th will be the beginning of the Armageddon. | ||
| According to Trump supporters and lots of anime avatars on Twitter, January 20th will be the single greatest day in world history. | ||
| I however think that the truth lies somewhere in between the bloviation of Michael Moore and the memes of Pepe the Frog. | ||
| In the space between these two extremes is some incredibly fertile ground for those of us who want to make this country sane again. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| When was the last time you felt that there was so much going on that was changing the world all around us all at once? | ||
| Maybe you're thinking back to 8 years ago when Barack Obama ran on hope and change, but I actually think that there's more opportunity right now than there was then. | ||
| We can debate whether Obama was a good president or not. | ||
| I'd say pretty much yes on domestic policy and basically no on the international front. | ||
| But in terms of actual change, did much really change or did the system just keep chugging along? | ||
| By the way, I don't have much of a problem with that system chugging along. | ||
| For all its faults, our system is still a pretty great one. | ||
| But if change was what you wanted 8 years ago, I'm not really sure that's what you got. | ||
| With Trump though, there can be no doubt that change is coming. | ||
| Everything about Trump, from the way he debated, to his tweets, to his cabinet picks, have been different than anything before. | ||
| You may not like any of his tactics or his choices, but you can't argue that change isn't happening right now, this very second. | ||
| And if you don't like the change you see, it is your duty as a citizen to have your voice heard. | ||
| Get out there, protest or volunteer, be part of the process with which you are so upset right now. | ||
| Of course by the same token, if you're happy Trump won, and you think he's the answer to political correctness and the rest of society's ills, then you're about to be tested too. | ||
| It's one thing to be against political correctness and for free speech when you're in the opposition, but it takes real character to be against political correctness and for free speech when it's your guy that the words are aimed at. | ||
| I think that most of you who watch this show aren't really on either one of these teams, and instead care more about principles than party. | ||
| Actually, I really believe it's not just you watching this channel who believe this, but it's pretty much everyone out there who isn't on the Democratic or Republican payroll. | ||
| Many Republicans made it clear they wouldn't work with Obama, which led to gridlock, which led to Trump. | ||
| Now, many Democrats are making it clear that they won't work with Trump, which really just makes them as bad as the Republicans they've been complaining about for the past 8 years. | ||
| This isn't how our system is supposed to work, by constantly being held hostage by two parties who care more about stopping the other one from succeeding than doing anything positive themselves. | ||
| This is clearly where we are, however, and this is why change, real change, is needed now more than ever. | ||
| The change shouldn't be about whether you vote for a Democrat or vote for a Republican though. | ||
| It should be about how much power we give any of these people to control our lives. | ||
| Violent protests, which unfortunately I think we're going to have more and more of, We'll only bring more authoritarianism and state power. | ||
| We need to change attitudes and win the battle of ideas, not just the battle of the day. | ||
| That's why I've spent the last year and a half talking about having honest conversations and dealing with difficult topics. | ||
| Every time we forego real debate and silence our opponents, we spawn a new set of people who will come in with easy answers. | ||
| This is the space that the true bigots and actual authoritarians will flourish in. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're far leftists who want to silence critics or far rightists who want to kick out immigrants. | ||
| They don't want conversation, they want control. | ||
| It's also why I'm completely convinced that a new center is developing faster than even we realized. | ||
| Traditional labels are becoming increasingly meaningless as people realize that the battle is no longer Democrat vs Republican, nor is it us vs them. | ||
| The battle lines are now those who are truly for freedom vs those who would stifle it in the name of tolerance or in the name of security. | ||
| Thanks to the internet though, and the rising group of voices who are calling out this nonsense, we're starting to win some of these battles. | ||
| And if Trump has taught us anything, People like a winner. | ||
| Alright Donald, you won, so now it's time to do some real interviews and respond to some real criticism. | ||
| I've got a chair for you right there. | ||
| So while maybe I've lost the left, or the left has lost me, I now see that fertile ground and I'm going to start planting some seeds. | ||
| These seeds will not only be to grow new alliances with liberals and conservatives, but even Marxists and progressives. | ||
| I have no desire to silence them or any of the people I disagree with. | ||
| I want to continue to talk about the ideas which will help us avoid that whole pesky Armageddon thing that I mentioned earlier. | ||
| We can do this together, not by deplatforming and through violence, but by consistently showing that the ideas of freedom and liberty and the rights of the individual are the best way to attain a society that values true human equality. | ||
| Joining me this week is author, radio host and columnist Dennis Prager. | ||
| A few weeks before the election, I was at an event for his YouTube channel, Prager University, and I heard Dennis' keynote speech. | ||
| I heard Dennis speak through his conservative lens about how the wonderful experiment that is America, and his deep concern for the future of this country, While I know we have our disagreements about religion, gay marriage, abortion, and a bunch of other things, I see Dennis as someone I can build a bridge with because he'll honestly tell me what he believes and I'll do the same. | ||
| For every liberal that he may convert to conservatism, I think I can convert just as many conservatives to liberalism. | ||
| And, as I said before, these labels are becoming more and more meaningless by the day. | ||
| It doesn't matter if we agree on every little thing. | ||
| What matters is that we'll defend the other person's right to liberty and freedom. | ||
| As we enter this new phase of change, it'll be up to us as to whether the change is positive or negative. | ||
| Our system is stronger than one man, but one man can change the world. | ||
| Let's trade hope and change for the courage of our convictions and let the chips fall | ||
|
unidentified
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where they may. | |
| Joining me this week is an author, a nationally syndicated radio host, a columnist, and the | ||
| creator of Prager University right here on the YouTube channel. | ||
| Dennis Prager, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Dave, great to be with you. | ||
| So somehow we've only met once, although I feel that we're in the same space and that I know you sort of just through your public self. | ||
| But the one time we met, we were on Larry King's show on my old home Aura. | ||
| And you know, they bring you on as the conservative and they brought me on as the liberal. | ||
| And I think it was a little bit around my kind of waking up to what was happening with the left. | ||
| And we kind of agreed on a lot. | ||
| Not on everything, but we agreed on a lot. | ||
| Do you find that odd that sometimes you can agree with a liberal because you are a conservative? | ||
| I can agree with a liberal. | ||
| I can't agree with a leftist. | ||
| I make the distinction between liberal and left constantly because it needs to be made. | ||
| The left is an enemy of liberalism. | ||
| And I love liberalism. | ||
| I'm called a conservative, but the irony is I don't know pretty much of any value that I've changed since I was a liberal. | ||
| Remember, I was born in New York. | ||
| That's A. B, a Jew. | ||
| C, Columbia. | ||
| That's a lot of liberal stuff right there. | ||
| That's a lot of democratic stuff, at least back then. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So that was a given to me. | ||
| All those three things, it's like I always say, on my birth certificate it had, you know, on the days when you still had gender, gender male, you know, political affiliation, liberal or democrat. | ||
| So it was just a given. | ||
| But I haven't changed my values. | ||
| The left has taken over the word liberal and so therefore I consider those values inimical to everything liberalism stood for. | ||
| So one of the things that I've been saying is that lately defending my liberal values is becoming a conservative position. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| When did that change for you? | ||
| It changed for me. | ||
| There were two seminal issues. | ||
| I knew I was not on the left during the Vietnam War, which I was in college, and I knew communism was evil and my life is devoted to fighting evil. | ||
| That's what I care about more than anything. | ||
| I hate people who hurt people deliberately. | ||
| I hate them. | ||
| I want them destroyed. | ||
| I want evil destroyed. | ||
| I have not wavered in that passion since high school. | ||
| That's all I really... I mean, I care about a million things, but that's my greatest care. | ||
| I want to destroy evil. | ||
| Nazism, communism, Islamism, you name it. | ||
| And the left didn't. | ||
| The left hated Nazis, but they didn't hate communists. | ||
| So it meant they didn't hate evil. | ||
| And that's my first realization that I wasn't on the left. | ||
| But I still thought I was a liberal, but not on the left. | ||
| And then Ronald Reagan came, and in one sentence, it all turned for me. | ||
| And then I became a Republican. | ||
| And that was, government is not the solution, it's the problem. | ||
| And that was an epiphany. | ||
| And I thought, that's right. | ||
| There are truths that are so real that if you have an open mind, it doesn't take more than five seconds to realize it. | ||
| Does that necessarily make you a Republican, or does that really just make you a classical liberal? | ||
| And I know, I always say on this show, I have to use a lot of these terms that I think are starting to lose meaning, but we need them just to sort of frame some of this stuff. | ||
| No, no, I'm a big fan of labels, that's fine. | ||
| But so what made you then say, okay, well now I'm a Republican? | ||
| Because you could use that Reagan quote and say, well, I'm a classical liberal. | ||
| It's liberty and individualism and limited government. | ||
| Yes, but the home for classical liberalism is the Republican Party, to the extent that they're not big government people, which George W. Bush was, for example. | ||
| But the only home between Democrats and Republicans for limited government people is the Republican Party. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you sense that changing now? | ||
| Obviously we're gonna have to talk a little bit about Trump here. | ||
| I think at first maybe you you weren't supporting him and then you kind of begrudgingly were and then I think basically you supported him, is that? | ||
| Yes, well I actually, I'm proud to say, although time will tell whether I will be proud to say, but I was thoroughly consistent I was opposed to him the most among all the Republicans, and I wrote piece after piece in National Review, Town Hall, and other places where my column appears. | ||
| I was as anti-Trump as anyone, but I wrote from my first column, if he wins the nomination, I will vote for him. | ||
| And my thinking was clear, and in retrospect was clear. | ||
| I kept giving this analogy. | ||
| If you have two doors, over one door it says man-eating lion, and over the other it says maybe a man-eating lion. | ||
| I will open the maybe a man-eating lion door. | ||
| I don't see it as a big dilemma. | ||
| So this really was more of a reflection of your feelings on Hillary than anything else. | ||
| No, it's my feelings on the left. | ||
| Defeating the left is as great a moral urgency as defeating Islamism. | ||
| Those are the two enemies of Western civilization as we know it. | ||
| And I say that with sadness. | ||
| There are a lot of nice people on the left. | ||
| There are probably not that many nice Islamists. | ||
| I'll grant that. | ||
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The Islamists wouldn't be too thrilled about this. | |
| They would not. | ||
| Two Brooklyn-born Jews? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, the left wouldn't be too thrilled about this either. | ||
| We're going to get into a little bit of that. | ||
| But I mean it sincerely. | ||
| Look at what they're doing to the university. | ||
| The university is now becoming a fascistic place. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| With the semi-quasi-violent suppression of dissenting voices. | ||
| And the reason? | ||
| It is the only place the left runs without opposition. | ||
| So when the left is free to do what it wants, just look at your local university and you see what's happening. | ||
| Okay, so then, what's happening there? | ||
| What do you think is in the mind, and I was around these people a lot for a long time and I don't know that I have the right answer to this. | ||
| What is happening where they have created this system of what now I'm calling the oppression Olympics where your victimhood is the highest virtue that you can have and we have to place everybody's victimhood below yours because that means you're better than them and all that stuff. | ||
| What happened there? | ||
| Where did this come from? | ||
| Well, for one, it's very hard. | ||
| Analyzing the left has been as complex to me as the search for string theory is among physicists. | ||
| Because it's so emotional that there isn't a logical consistency. | ||
| One answer to your question is, the left does not divide the world between good and bad. | ||
| I do. | ||
| But the left doesn't. | ||
| The left divides it between rich and poor. | ||
| And strong and weak. | ||
| Or victim and victimizer. | ||
| So you don't get your strength from being right. | ||
| You get your strength from being a victim. | ||
| From being the underdog. | ||
| That's the reason the left is pro-Palestinian. | ||
| Anyone with a moral compass that works some of the time knows that there is no comparison between Israel and the Palestinians, morally speaking. | ||
| But the left roots for the Palestinians because they don't measure by good and bad. | ||
| They measure by weak and strong, black and white, west and non-west, first world and third world, but not good and evil. | ||
| So that's a big factor that's taking place on the campus. | ||
| How do you define good and evil before you go any further? | ||
| The same way you do. | ||
| I mean, it's not a trick issue. | ||
| Good is treating people decently, is having openness to opposing views without suppressing them, is not building concentration camps. | ||
| I mean, this is not rocket science, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, so last time I saw you was at your Prager University event, and you gave the keynote speech, was it the keynote speech? | ||
| And it was right before the election, and I sensed that you actually do want to build some bridges with these people, which is probably partially why we're sitting down. | ||
| That you weren't, I didn't think you were really, it's clear you I don't like what's happening with the modern left, but I do sense that you're trying to figure out a way to reach out to some of these people, which is what you're doing with PragerU. | ||
| Are you seeing any real attraction in waking some of these people up? | ||
| Oh, I know we're waking some people up, because there is no, not one of the 150 Prager University videos, which are all five minutes, and some really fine thinkers give them, not one of them yells at you. | ||
| It's, here is our position, here is the reason, and here are the facts behind it, and have a wonderful day. | ||
| So, it's- Isn't it funny that that became not the norm? | ||
| I mean, people say to me all the time, Dave, I love your show because you talk to people. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Well, I get that. | ||
| Do you know, I get that's funny you should say that. | ||
| I've been broadcasting 33 years. | ||
| And the most common, among the most common, maybe it is the most or it's among the most common reactions I get. | ||
| God, you know what I really love about your show? | ||
| Is you're calm. | ||
| You never yell. | ||
| In fact, I do yell about four times a year. | ||
| Where something will get me so angry, maybe six times a year. | ||
| And I always apologize for yelling. | ||
| And readers, listeners, tell me, we love it when you yell because it's so rare. | ||
| And they realize, you know, you can prick me and I'll bleed. | ||
| But I just can't stand yelling. | ||
| Yeah, well, to me, it's sort of like a well-placed fuck. | ||
| I don't say it that often, even just saying it now. | ||
| I probably haven't said it on air in quite some time. | ||
| And I brought it out of you. | ||
| You see the way you've enraged me here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you feel like you have made some traction because you're hearing from people that are saying, wow, there's some discussion here. | ||
| Right, the problem is, and it is a problem, the, what is the word? | ||
| When you're not taught, you are indoctrinated. | ||
| The indoctrination of American kids begins so early. | ||
| You're taught now in third grade. | ||
| You are taught in many of the states about carbon emissions. | ||
| They don't show them a Bjorn Lomborg video saying that we're wasting trillions of dollars | ||
| to lower the temperature by a fraction of a degree. | ||
| They don't show them because they don't believe there are other sides. | ||
| There are truth-tellers and deniers. | ||
| There are truth-tellers and anti-science. | ||
| By the way, one of the things, because I studied leftism, that was my, I studied communist | ||
| affairs, Marx, leftism, and one of the things that they have always excelled at is one word | ||
| dismissals of their ideological enemies. | ||
| So Stalin called Trotsky, Trotsky the father of Bolshevism, he called him a fascist. | ||
| So Trotsky was a fascist. | ||
| There was no need to debate Trotsky. | ||
| You call him a fascist and then have him killed with an ice pick. | ||
| And that's in a nutshell what the left does. | ||
| Six herb. | ||
| Sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. | ||
| There was no need to think on the left. | ||
| Because you have a one-word dismissal of your opponents. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So, so far I know that 90% of my audience listening to this is going to go, alright, this Prager guy, for a conservative, this makes sense. | ||
| I mean, you're hitting the keys that I hit here all the time. | ||
| So, what about on something like science? | ||
| Because you just mentioned science. | ||
| This seems to me where the Republicans and the right It just doesn't add up. | ||
| We're still debating evolution. | ||
| We're debating climate science. | ||
| I'm not a scientist. | ||
| I've brought climate scientists in here who have said in unison, basically, they agree. | ||
| By the way, I've had Alex Epstein on, his book's right there, Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, and I was happy to talk to him as well, and he takes it from a different angle, and I'm happy to have those conversations, and I don't pretend to know everything, so there you go. | ||
| But science, to me, is one of the things where the right has just No, science is one of those things where the left has effectively demonized the right. | ||
| The position... I've never met somebody on the right who said the science is wrong. | ||
| It's not science... Well, evolution, for example. | ||
| Okay, well, alright, so you want evolution? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| So evolution is a very complex issue, believe it or not. | ||
| Now, by the way, I don't have a particular axe to grind. | ||
| I happen to believe in God, and my position for most of my life was, okay, God created evolution. | ||
| I have no issue. | ||
| So you can concurrently believe in those feelings? | ||
| Yes, but it's not my position any longer because I simply know more science. | ||
| And the science on evolution is not nearly as established as people think it is. | ||
| Because the paleontologists themselves are not so certain that it occurred in anywhere near the way they believe it did. | ||
| Two quick things on that. | ||
| One is, of course, it just needs to be stated, that evolution has zero explanation, I mean zero, none, for the creation of life. | ||
| There was no evolutionary jump between inorganic and organic. | ||
| And they acknowledge that. | ||
| They just say one day they'll find one, but there isn't one. | ||
| So the evolutionist has nothing to say about the origin of life. | ||
| They have something to say about the origin of species once life begins, but that's a big difference. | ||
| The second part is, they don't have a lot to say even on the origin of species. | ||
| When you look at, there was this thing called the Cambrian, what was it, the Cambrian... | ||
| My wife knows she's going crazy because she's in the other room. | ||
| She's the real maven on this. | ||
| We don't do an IFB here, so there's nothing I can do. | ||
| The Cambrian explosion, that's it, explosion. | ||
| This was when vast numbers of species arose, but much too quickly for evolution to have accounted for them. | ||
| And there are so many qualified scientists who have taken this on. | ||
| Even the famous Harvard paleontologist who's passed away, whose name eludes me for the moment, but he wrote about this. | ||
| He was an atheist or agnostic, you know, but he said he had punctuated evolution, which | ||
| is almost an oxymoron because it's, you know, where just things burst in one day. | ||
| Evolution's a long game. | ||
| Anyway, my only point is that it's not as clear as they make it. | ||
| Now if somebody says to you, "I don't believe that the world was created in billions of | ||
| years, that the world was created in six 24-hour periods called days." | ||
| That is a rejection of the science on the matter. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Okay, so I'm glad you're making that distinction, because neither one of us are evolutionary biologists, so we can say as much as we know on that. | ||
| By the way, just for the record, just today I had an interview with Jerry Coyne, who's a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, who would, I'm sure, take issue with some of the things you're saying here, but we don't have to bicker over those little things. | ||
| But when someone looks at the literal six-day thing and all that... Right, but here I just want to say, forgive me, I really do forgive you. | ||
| Yeah, let's get it. | ||
| I don't give a hoot if somebody believes God created the world in 60, 24-hour periods. | ||
| I care if they reject vaccines, if they don't give blood transfusions. | ||
| In other words, I don't care what people believe. | ||
| I care how people behave. | ||
| There's a very important principle in my life. | ||
| So if you happen to believe that God created the world, which I don't because the science negates it, but if you believe, and I believe that the Bible is divine and all that good stuff, but nevertheless, if you do believe that, here, it is possible to be a professor of medicine And believe God created the world in six days. | ||
| I know that sounds oxymoronic, but it isn't. | ||
| Religious belief is religious belief, and scientific belief is scientific belief for many people. | ||
| I like to reconcile them, but some just say, I'm not reconciling them, this is what it says, I take it, and now I would like to go back to my medical lab, please, to do research on cancer. | ||
| Right, so in some way though, is that reconciliation sort of splitting the difference of what you truly believe? | ||
| Me, Dennis? | ||
| Yeah, that in a certain way... No, I believe in science and religion. | ||
| I don't think that there's a conflict at all. | ||
| Truth is truth. | ||
| There's a Hebrew saying, the signature of God is truth. | ||
| If something is true, I must believe it. | ||
| Because it's true. | ||
| I am religiously obligated to believe it if it's true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if a doctor, let's say you had to have heart surgery or something, and you had two doctors to choose from, and they had the same exact medical background, one of them said, I believe in evolution and science and all that stuff, and the other guy said, well, you know, the Earth was created in six days and God... Right, I would flip a coin. | ||
| So that would have no meaning to you because you really can compartmentalize. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| No, no, because they can compartmentalize, not because I can. | ||
| Right, I guess you're not compartmentalizing. | ||
| They can. | ||
| Because I know, you see, here's the interesting thing. | ||
| There are a lot of orthodox Jews. | ||
| I'm a religious Jew but not orthodox. | ||
| But there are a lot of, so I have this, I have no axe to grind. | ||
| There are a lot of orthodox Jews who are doctors, who are physicists, who are chemists, biologists. | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| They believe the Torah is from God, and they then go to the lab and do wonderful scientific work. | ||
| So obviously, they live with both. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what does that say about humans in general? | ||
| That we're just able to live with conflicting... Well, alright, I have an interesting theory on that. | ||
| This is why the left scares me more than... The left is scared by religious Christians, for example. | ||
| I'm not scared by religious Christians at all. | ||
| And again, I emphasize, I'm not a Christian. | ||
| I got your PragerU card. | ||
| It said Merry Christmas. | ||
| I freaked out and I sent a letter to the FBI. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| We were interviewed. | ||
| They told us you sent them. | ||
| The fear that they have is not comparable. | ||
| And here is a theory. | ||
| So here's my theory. | ||
| The human being clearly needs to believe some non-rational things. | ||
| I believe that that is part of what the human mind must have. | ||
| So the religious person, the healthy, and I'm talking about healthy religious and healthy non-religious, apples and apples. | ||
| The healthy religious person confines his non-rational thought to religiosity. | ||
| The secular person, when they have the non-rational, they're much scarier. | ||
| Because that is not about splitting of seas, or Jesus walking on water. | ||
| It's about real life. | ||
| The amount of the non-rational that is believed on the left, that is scary. | ||
| So basically- Whereas the non-rational in religious realm is not necessarily scary. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| You believe you murder people, you get 72 virgins, that's scary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But there's a lot of people that believe that. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| That's why I used Christians. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| America was founded by fundamentalist Christians who produced an incredibly rational society. | ||
| And the competitive marketplace, the free market, liberty, these were very rational ideas. | ||
| They were very religious. | ||
| Not all, but many of them were. | ||
| So, you know, I welcome secularism in Iran and I fear secularism in America. | ||
| Right, that's, I mean, there's something really there. | ||
| Between those two things, we probably have the right society, I suppose. | ||
| So, it's interesting because I see this constantly, and I'm sure you see it too, this constant attacking of straight white men, of Christians, all of these things, and what you're saying basically is, we were born out of Christianity, America, and we've become absurdly tolerant, and yet, not absurdly tolerant, I think it's wonderfully tolerant. | ||
| Yes, yes, uniquely. | ||
| Uniquely, right. | ||
| And yet, we have, there's just this idea out there that we are the most intolerant place. | ||
| How do you fight those ideas back? | ||
| How you fight the irrational is very hard. | ||
| It's very hard because you can give evidence. | ||
| I give evidence for America being the least racist society that had multi-racial elements in it in history. | ||
| And it doesn't convince people. | ||
| If people have a vested interest in believing something, You can't talk them out of it. | ||
| And this is why I fear the left. | ||
| Their world would collapse. | ||
| It is like the famous book written when Stalin made his pact with Hitler. | ||
| All these communists in the left who had followed Stalin, not all, many of them, thought, oh my God, I've been believing in nonsense my whole life. | ||
| The God That Failed. | ||
| It's a very famous book from, I think, the 50s or maybe the 40s. | ||
| And it was about that. | ||
| The left, why do people believe in communism? | ||
| I mean, it is drivel. | ||
| The thing is drivel. | ||
| But when people drop Judeo-Christian religions, Catholicism, Protestantism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism, Judaism, when people drop those, they don't stop yearning for religious certitude. | ||
| So what they end up with is secular religious certitudes, and they are at least as scary. | ||
| So I don't think you would quite word it this way, but I guess I would word it as they're letting go of the sort of easier answers that religion might provide, and then it's a little easier to sway them in the secular arena. | ||
| Would you say that's fair to say? | ||
|
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Yes, it is. | |
| Although I don't think you would word it quite that way. | ||
| No, no, that's fine. | ||
| And it's also easier for another reason. | ||
| Secularism makes no moral demands on you, tells you there is no God who judges you, so it's awesome. | ||
| You feel great about yourself by taking the right position on any left-wing issue. | ||
| I love blacks, I love gays, I love Muslims, I love whoever the victim of the month is. | ||
| And I'm a wonderful human being. | ||
| My daughter is a great girl. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Does she cheat on tests? | ||
| I don't know, but she does in fact. | ||
| She does 10k run for breast cancer. | ||
| That doesn't make your daughter a good girl. | ||
| That's a very sweet thing that she does. | ||
| But you are judged by your character. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And there's no more character emphasis. | ||
| So I suspect, since you live here in LA, that you're friends with probably a lot of completely secular non-believers. | ||
| You may not even know they're non-believers. | ||
| So what's the part that I'm missing? | ||
| I consider myself totally secular. | ||
| I try to live by some sense of morality and whatever, and like everyone else, I fail at it sometimes. | ||
| But what's the piece that you can't stay on the good path, so to speak, without religion? | ||
| Well, there are many reasons. | ||
| I mean, why can't, you know, that I'm good to my neighbor, and I'm good to my partner, and those type of things. | ||
| So let me say, as I say a billion times, This is really critical. | ||
| If there's no God, there's no good and evil. | ||
| There are only opinions about good and evil. | ||
| Having said that, there are wonderful atheists and agnostics and secularists and there are terrible religious people. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| But if you want the long-term survival of a good society, it cannot be done without God. | ||
| It will be an utter failure. | ||
| And the failure in Europe... Europe is a failing society. | ||
| It... because it doesn't stand up for anything. It stands for nothing. | ||
| Europe stands for nothing, except for feeling good about its own morality, for its socialism, for... | ||
| you know, we'll take care of everybody with a safety net that we can't pay for. | ||
| So we'll bring in millions of Muslims who will de-Christianize and de-Westernize society, | ||
| and there will be no Europe in 20, 40 years. | ||
| That's what's happening. | ||
| America actually cares about retaining the Judeo-Christian bases because it knows what George Washington said in his farewell address. | ||
| Or was it the second inaugural? | ||
| No, second inaugural is Lincoln. | ||
| But what he said, I guess the farewell address. | ||
| Anybody who thinks That you can have a survival of morality without religion is thinking foolishly. | ||
| And this guy was no fundamentalist. | ||
| But the founders understood no God, no liberty, no God, no small government, no God, no good and evil. | ||
| So yes, people like you, I have no doubt that you're a good person. | ||
| You have a little doubt? | ||
| No, I don't even have a little doubt. | ||
| You strike me as For a whole host of reasons, a very decent and inquiring mind and so on. | ||
| I know that exists, but you are the product of the Judeo-Christian system that you no longer hold by. | ||
| So my question to you is what's going to pass this on to generation after generation? | ||
| And it's not being passed. | ||
| The vast majority of kids today, indeed for the last 25-30 years, would save their dog before a human. | ||
| Because they love their dog and they don't love the stranger. | ||
| They say it. | ||
| They proudly announce, I would save my dog. | ||
| Because we don't have objective morality, which says man is created in God's image, dogs are not. | ||
| We have subjective morality. | ||
| What do you love? | ||
| I love my dog. | ||
| So this must put you in a strange position with Trump, though, because I think out of all of the Republicans that you could have chosen, you certainly could have said Ted Cruz, you certainly could have said Marco Rubio. | ||
| I said he was my last choice, but he's the only one who could have defeated the left. | ||
| It supersedes everything. | ||
| Right now, the left is so nihilistic a force in the world that almost anything supersedes it. | ||
| I mean, there is a level of evil that I wouldn't vote for, obviously, even to defeat the left. | ||
| But there is no such living Republican. | ||
| Right, so for, let's say, a long-time fan of yours, I'm sure you got emails like this that said, all right, I know Prager, he's moral, and he's decent, and all of these things. | ||
| He's voting for a guy, or now supporting a guy. | ||
| Right, I get that a lot. | ||
| He's now supporting a guy who will say anything he wants, tweets all this crazy stuff, is a narcissist, I don't know what his moral center is. | ||
| I mean, that's what I kept saying the entire time, is I just don't know what the guy's moral center is. | ||
| I think there's a chance things are gonna be great, I really do. | ||
| That's right, I didn't know his moral center, that's why I said there were two doors. | ||
| Man-eating lion, that's the Democrat. | ||
| Maybe a man-eating lion, that's Trump. | ||
| So between maybe and definite, of course I'll vote for maybe. | ||
| Is this just a completely unique political situation? | ||
| Is there anything in your life that you can remember where it was like this? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| There was an article in one of the major papers today, I don't know if it was the Times or | ||
| the Wall Street Journal, but one of them, about the uniqueness. | ||
| This is a whole new episode. | ||
| It was like Jackson, Andrew Jackson transformed the country, FDR transformed the country. | ||
| This might be one of those transformative moments. | ||
| It might be the end of at least one of the parties as we know it. | ||
| There are a whole host of things that could happen. | ||
| I don't know what will happen. | ||
| I do know this though, and I say this to the conservatives who call in and are still sort | ||
| of never Trumpers. | ||
| I said, if somebody would have given you his cabinet list a year ago and said, we don't know who the nominee will be, but this will be the cabinet, what would you have said? | ||
| And they would have said, we would have been ecstatic. | ||
| Right, so ironically, he ended up going more conservative in his cabinet than he ran on. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| So he's got the Trump people, the MAGA people, are annoyed at him about the cabinet, and the conservatives are going... Well, I don't know if the Trump people are... Well, because I think there's a sense that maybe it's a little more... No, well, they're okay. | ||
| A little more state power, sort of. | ||
| The people who were not conservative who voted for him don't care who he points to cabinet. | ||
| They care whether he improves the economy. | ||
| Do you think there's a danger in just the way, the cult of personality around him, that we have a leader that really is superseding logic and reason, even if you end up liking some of the things, and he lowers some taxes, and we don't get involved in crazy military things. | ||
| Do you think just that cult of personality, now we certainly had it with Obama too, from a different. | ||
| You answered my question, yes. | ||
| I answered my question? | ||
| Yes, you answered your question, that's well said, yes. | ||
| It'll be very difficult to match the amount of cultiness around Obama. | ||
| So the change, and this is what I mentioned at the top of the show before you sat down, Obama came in with hope and change. | ||
| In a certain respect, there wasn't a lot of change. | ||
| He did some things. | ||
| Oh, he changed. | ||
| So what are some of the things that he really changed? | ||
| Well, he changed what percentage of the economy is health, and he changed that. | ||
| To move toward a one-payer economy. | ||
| That was a huge change. | ||
| I think everything he changed, I think he changed America's role in the world to becoming a bystander. | ||
| You know, Assad, there's a red line in Syria if you use chemical or biological weapons. | ||
| So he uses those weapons, nothing happens. | ||
| So it's a green light to Iran, do whatever you want in Syria. | ||
| Russia takes over Crimea. | ||
| Gee, that's really unfortunate. | ||
| But I still won't arm the Ukrainian government. | ||
| So he is backed down in every instance. | ||
| Then the agreement with Iran. | ||
| The only government in the world that has announced it wishes to commit genocide. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty significant. | ||
| And there's a great Talmudic phrase, those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. | ||
| So the nicer he got to Iran, and Castro, the tougher he got on Netanyahu. | ||
| So this is classic, this is a rule of history. | ||
| It's a 2,000 year rule from the Talmud. | ||
| Those who are kind to the cruel will be cruel to the kind. | ||
| Obama and the left perfectly encapsulate that vision. | ||
| So I suspect I know your answer to this, but going to Israel for just a second, you're a big defender of Israel, I saw your, I think you did a video before PragerU about Israel, did you do something before? | ||
| That was PragerU? | ||
| That was, yeah. | ||
| Okay, so that was even before I knew about it. | ||
| That was a viral one, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, where you gave, I thought, a very thoughtful, historically accurate version of what the truth is, and you know, the big line, I think, well I'll let you say that, the end line. | ||
| Basically what you say about laying down weapons. | ||
| Oh, yeah, the headline was, yes, if tomorrow Israel announced | ||
| we are fighting no more, we are disbanding our army, we are dismantling | ||
| our armaments, what would happen the next day? | ||
| And if the Arabs announced, you know, we are laying down our arms, we are fighting | ||
| Israel no more, what would happen the next day in that scenario? | ||
| Well, in the first scenario, there would be genocide. | ||
| Israelis would be wiped out. | ||
| There would be mass murder, torture, and rape in the streets of Israel. | ||
| On the other scenario, there would be peace within a week. | ||
| Yeah, so I basically agree with that. | ||
| So what is the obsession with Israel? | ||
| I mean, as I pointed out the day of the Kerry speech. | ||
| The obsession in the world? | ||
| Yeah, the obsession in the world. | ||
| As I point out the day of the Kerry speech, I posted an image of the entire Middle East with one little orange sliver amongst all of this other stuff. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And this thing is tiny. | ||
| We're talking about at one point, I think including the West Bank, nine miles wide at one point. | ||
| They have one international airport, the one place where gays and atheists and Christians and Baha'is and all of these people, it's the only place where you can see an Orthodox Jewish man on a bus sitting next to a woman in a hijab. | ||
| I mean, it's the one place of coexistence and they're obsessed with it. | ||
| And this is where I feel like I've completely lost left. | ||
| I have tried desperately to bring some clarity to this and I don't know that I can. | ||
| What's the obsession? | ||
| Well, in the final analysis you have really hit one of my deepest beliefs in life and it's a religious belief. | ||
| Jew hatred and Israel hatred is Jew hatred. | ||
| Not criticism of Israel. | ||
| Nobody ever, no one has ever said if you criticize Israel you're an anti-Semite. | ||
| But if you support those who wish to destroy Israel, whether you feel that you're a Jew-hater or not is irrelevant. | ||
| If you say, I want Italy destroyed, you can't say, I'm not anti-Italian. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, why of all the 200 plus countries on Earth is only one targeted for destruction, and by sheer coincidence, it's the only Jewish country in the world? | ||
| Why, of all the people in the world, has only one been targeted for true genocide? | ||
| We speak genocide here, genocide there, genocide everywhere, but the one true genocide, take every baby, every child, every grandparent who is a Jew, and gas them, slaughter them, shoot them, bury them, only Jews. | ||
| Jew hatred is the only, and I wrote a book on this called Why the Jews, Jew hatred is the only hatred that is exterminationalist. | ||
| That's very important. | ||
| Whites who hated blacks did not wish to exterminate all blacks. | ||
| You name, and it's a terrible hatred, it's not a defense of it, but there was no other. | ||
| There is a desire to wipe out the Jews, and the desire to wipe out Israel is part of the desire to wipe out the Jews, and it is a reason that I believe in the truth, ultimately, of the biblical narrative, especially the first five books of the Torah, that when God chose the Jews, this chosenness led them to be the world's hated people, because they ended up the conscience of the world. | ||
| So is the irony that I think if you took, I think you've talked about this, I'm sure you've talked about this, and I think it was in one of your books actually, that if you took most Jews in America, they're totally secular. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And most are totally leftist. | ||
| Right, and so I think Ben Shapiro, he says they've traded their religiosity for leftism. | ||
| Right, who said this? | ||
| Oh yeah, you're right. | ||
| I've been saying it since Ben was born. | ||
| Probably before Ben was born. | ||
| But that is exactly right and Ben is right and whoever says it is right. | ||
| The way I put it is Jews are to isms what Italians are to operas. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| put it is Jews are to isms what Italians are to operas. | ||
| If Jews, think about it, every ism Jews either created or led, except for Nazi. | ||
| Communism, Humanism, Socialism, Capitalism. | ||
| Capitalism. | ||
| That's not an ideology, that's just an economic way. | ||
| You know, environmentalism, feminism, Betty Friedan, you know, you name it. | ||
| Trotsky, you know, three of the possible successors to Lenin Upon his death. | ||
| Three of the five. | ||
| There were only five people. | ||
| Three of them. | ||
| Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Trotsky were Jews. | ||
| Bukharin and Stalin were not Jewish. | ||
| So in an odd way though, aren't you making an argument against religion here? | ||
| Because if the idea is that, well, this was the chosen group, and look what, you know, as what's-his-name, as Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof, I wish we could be chosen for something else. | ||
| Well, isn't that actually an argument against religion, because the Jews were sort of set up, whether it's divine or man-made, that there was a set up that, guess what, you're going to be exterminated and kicked across the world? | ||
| Right, so if you would have asked me, if I'd have been at Sinai, and I would have been told, this is what's going to happen to the Jews, because they're chosen, I would have said to God, thanks but no thanks. | ||
| Have you been to Sinai? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you hiked the mountain and everything? | ||
| Ironic, yes. | ||
| And did you have any religious... I've done it. | ||
| That's not the stuff. | ||
| I am moved by the text more than I am by any physical place. | ||
| But I'm atypical in that way. | ||
| I don't get all that choked up at any monument or stuff like that. | ||
| All right, so one more thing on this, and then we'll move to a couple other issues. | ||
| What do you think about, also, that the story has been lost here? | ||
| What the actual history of the land is? | ||
| That's another thing that I try to explain to people. | ||
| You talk about the partition plan. | ||
| You talk about the fact that it was British. | ||
| You talk about that it was actually part of the Ottoman Empire before that. | ||
| There were no people called the Palestinian people, which people will say you're racist for. | ||
| There were Arabs there in a place known as Palestine. | ||
| There were also Jews there. | ||
| In 1930, the people known as Palestinians were the Jews. | ||
| And they were boycotted. | ||
| I mean, you can look at New York Times articles where the Arabs were boycotting Palestine. | ||
| So all of this stuff, even when I say it, I feel like I'm already unleashing a torrent of hate. | ||
| But how do you beat people that won't accept history? | ||
| Not only in this specific instance. | ||
| In all honesty, there really is no way. | ||
| My dream with Prager University, let's say, or my radio show, or anything that I do publicly, Is to say what is true, and I know that a certain percentage of people will say, wow, I didn't know that. | ||
| Whereas the majority will say, oh, you are a, and call you a bad name. | ||
| And that's what, so you can only hope that the number of people who will say, oh, I didn't know that, I'm gonna change my mind, is greater than you imagined it would be. | ||
| That's the only hope. | ||
| But it's dispiriting that facts don't matter. | ||
| Hey, Hitler said Jesus was an Aryan, not a Jew, and the Palestinians say he was a Palestinian, not a Jew. | ||
| It's beyond lie. | ||
| It's entered a new realm. | ||
| Yeah, and so do you think we're post-truth now? | ||
| That seems to be the new meme that we've hit this place. | ||
| Yes, but the post-truth is coming from the enemies of Western liberalism. | ||
| It's not coming from the right, who is protecting Western liberalism. | ||
| It's coming from the left and from the Islamists. | ||
| That's the irony. | ||
| So, let's critique the right a little bit. | ||
| You've got to have some critiques of the right, right? | ||
| I don't have that many critiques of the right except that they don't know how to fight. | ||
| They don't know what they stand for. | ||
| They forgot. | ||
| It's like the choir forgot its melodies. | ||
| But by and large, I have to say, and I never thought I would have said this as a kid, growing up as a Jew in New York, but the people on the right that I have met Of course there are exceptions, because there are disgusting people on the right and there are beautiful people on the left, but by and large the people on the right that I have met have been kind and decent and loving and, you know, they give more charity, they adopt more kids from... I don't mean just general adoption, that's left and right, but they adopt... I was just with a right-wing guy who | ||
| He and his wife had two biological children and then they adopted two more children from China. | ||
| Not newborns. | ||
| Kids with terrible illnesses. | ||
| That is overwhelmingly done by religious Christians in America. | ||
| It's not done by Europeans. | ||
| It's not done by secular in America. | ||
| Of course, I know that they're accepted, but overwhelmingly... It must get tiring having to say that all the time. | ||
| I feel the same way too, believe me. | ||
| It drives me crazy, because then, you know, you see yourself quoted, and so you have to make, you know, it's like clarification for the foolish. | ||
| But in any event, I've just been touched by that. | ||
| I'm a Jew. | ||
| I have been overwhelmed by the kindness of so many evangelical Christians. | ||
| So real quick, let's just talk about what you just mentioned there. | ||
| Just sort of being a public person where you have to measure your words all the time. | ||
| Was it always like this? | ||
| Like when you were doing radio 30 years ago, did you feel that you had to constantly qualify every sentence, check every adjective? | ||
| There was no internet. | ||
| to play everything you said and you know take it out of context or whatever but as soon as it developed I did take and even earlier than that I did start with a motto in my brain be sure that no one sentence can kill you and I am very very careful about how I speak and I'm amazed that in 33 years of tens of thousands of hours | ||
| of live, it's not, you can't do anything, it's live radio. I have never been caught on something that | ||
| could hang me. | ||
| You just jinxed yourself horribly. | ||
| Nah, I don't believe in jinxing. | ||
| I'm very scientific. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't believe in superstition. | |
| Do you think that there's just a certain amount of mental space that that takes up? | ||
|
unidentified
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It does. | |
| Even having to think about it, because that's what I talk about a lot. | ||
| That's one of the reasons I leave the show like I just went through. | ||
| I work out harder. | ||
| In the show than with my trainer at the gym. | ||
| Just to sort of contain the potential errors. | ||
| It's a chess game. | ||
| It is a three-hour grandmaster chess game. | ||
| And I suspect you would argue that all of that has to do, again, with the left and the buzzword. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| Because they've pinned everybody into it. | ||
| Well, look, I wrote a piece. | ||
| Every so often I write pieces that have nothing to do with politics or religion or anything. | ||
| But have to do with the private sphere. | ||
| So I wrote a piece about eight years ago. | ||
| My syndicated column was, when a wife is not in the mood, obviously for sex. | ||
| I got it. | ||
| So my argument is that if you love your husband, if you have a loving marriage, he's a good man, and knowing how important sex is to him, That even if you're not in the mood, why not give it a try? | ||
| Because we can't be guided by moods. | ||
| And I wrote, what if you're not in the mood to go to work? | ||
| But you know it's important, you have to go to work. | ||
| So guess what? | ||
| The Daily Kos, they read my piece, and the Daily Kos headlines, Prager advocates marital rape. | ||
| And then what do you do? | ||
| Do you spend any time trying to clean it up, or do you just leave it as is? | ||
| It is not possible to clean up the left. | ||
| However, I will just say, just for the record, there was a man at the Daily Kos who wrote in the next issue, or next day, or next week, I can't stand Dennis Prager. | ||
| He's right wing. | ||
| I can't stand him. | ||
| I want to make it clear. | ||
| I can't stand him. | ||
| Did I say I can't stand him? | ||
| And then says, but give me a break. | ||
| The guy did not advocate marital rape. | ||
| So what does that say about just the state of affairs in terms of the internet then? | ||
| Because I'm very enthused by the fact that I do this show on the internet and I can do whatever I want and say whatever I want. | ||
| And the barrier to entry is low, which is getting a lot of great people involved. | ||
| That comes with a whole series of problems. | ||
| If anyone can get in, any idiot can put on a suit and sit at a desk and pretend they know what they're talking about. | ||
| So huge problems. | ||
| But what do you think about just that general state of that our media, nobody trusts anybody anymore. | ||
| Well, the trick is to learn whom you can trust. | ||
| But it's not all that easy, that's true. | ||
| That's why, look, in the final analysis I always say credibility is your greatest source of power. | ||
| And I have taken that very seriously. | ||
| I don't take sponsors that I can't personally endorse. | ||
| I say no to a lot of sponsors, because I... I'll just give you an example. | ||
| I mean, I hope I'm not hurting any sponsor here, but... We're fan-funded, so you're alright. | ||
| Right, but I'm not. | ||
| I'm sponsor-funded. | ||
| But I was asked... Yes, here's a perfect example. | ||
| I was asked to advertise a mattress. | ||
| A flying mattress, I might add. | ||
| But I believe that I have the greatest mattress in the world, which I currently do sleep on. | ||
| And I can't therefore say, this is the mattress I sleep on, even though they'll send me a free mattress. | ||
| It doesn't matter to me. | ||
| And I told them that. | ||
| I said, I will happily say it's a fine mattress, but I will not say it's the best, and I will not say I sleep on it. | ||
| So I'm very, very careful about credibility. | ||
| But it's hard to know whom you can't trust. | ||
| Part of it is whom, and you have to know a lot. | ||
| Certain things should strike you at the outset as, that's a little too bizarre to be real. | ||
| And then you've got to verify it. | ||
| What do you make of just how people are being funded by all sorts of crazy things right now? | ||
| So, you know, like Pierre Omidar funds Glenn Greenwald's Intercept. | ||
| I'm sure you probably don't love that site. | ||
| Or, you know, whoever's funding Salon, or Al Jazeera funds the Young Turks, or, you know, which is funded by, you know, part of the government of Qatar. | ||
| Or any of this stuff, that that's another problem we have, that now we don't know where money's coming from with everybody, like just everything's been opened up. | ||
| This is a real problem because transparency is not the answer either. | ||
| Because as we found out in America, and Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal wrote a very powerful book on this, the transparency issue has given the left a way to ruin the lives of funders of conservative foundations. | ||
| Which we don't. | ||
| They boycott their houses. | ||
| Announce publicly these are haters. | ||
| And people don't want that misery in their lives. | ||
| That's the reason the left wants transparency of donors. | ||
| So it's a very complex question. | ||
| Even though they take plenty of money from Soros and a whole series of other things. | ||
| Also, I think they've partly learned that this stuff doesn't work because even when Kellogg's just a couple weeks ago, or was it two months ago or so, did this thing with Breitbart, well then what happened? | ||
| Well, their Breitbart people stopped eating Kellogg's. | ||
| But we've come into a place where companies think they have to be in the political. | ||
| Well, they do, but this is also left created. | ||
| I don't care about, if a company, look, this is my perfect example. | ||
| Ben and Jerry's ice cream. | ||
| Ben and Jerry, if you go left of Ben and Jerry, you're in Lenin territory, right? | ||
| I eat Ben and Jerry ice cream. | ||
| Because I don't believe that the free market should allow me to boycott based on their ideology. | ||
| But that's not what the left believes. | ||
| You supported Trump, we want you to be bankrupt. | ||
| That's how they think. | ||
| We will ruin your company. | ||
| Well, I'm sure you do not like any of the ideas of Bernie Sanders. | ||
| They loved Bernie Sanders, but you said, I like their ice cream. | ||
| I'm just gonna eat their ice cream. | ||
| That's my belief. | ||
|
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And you can let it be at that and not... Well, that's the ideal. | |
| That was the American ideal. | ||
| The left has made that impossible. | ||
| The left is so constantly boycotting anyone they differ with. | ||
| I mean, what was it? | ||
| You know, Chick-fil-A. | ||
| The guy believes that marriage should be defined as male-female and he should be put out of... He's not allowed in New York, in Chicago. | ||
| I mean, that's an absurdity. | ||
| If the guy advocates same-sex marriage, would I not eat his ice cream? | ||
| I'm a conservative, religious conservative. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So what? | ||
| Well, it's all such virtue signaling, too. | ||
| I remember during that whole Chick-fil-A thing, and I was on O'Reilly arguing about Chick-fil-A, and then shortly after that, I was on The Young Turks, which is a progressive network, and they're screaming about Chick-fil-A the whole time. | ||
| I'm openly gay, and I work there. | ||
| I didn't care that much, actually. | ||
| I just thought this is one of these things that we're just outraged about, whatever. | ||
| A guy walked into the production meeting eating Chick-fil-A. | ||
| And I thought if anyone, I mean guys, I don't really care, but like you're out there screaming about Chick-fil-A | ||
| and here you are eating Chick-fil-A. | ||
| So that also shows sort of just like a general inconsistency that everybody has across the board probably. | ||
| Right, but I don't think the right boycotts with the instinct that the left does. | ||
| I mean, I can't even think of an analogy. | ||
| It's just, you take a position we don't like, we want you out of business. | ||
| Oddly, Ben and Jerry's are big Israel supporters, aren't they? | ||
| They're big what? | ||
| Aren't they big supporters of Israel? | ||
| They have a couple locations there, I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So they've confused their... That's fascinating, yes. | |
| Alright, so let's just knock out a couple other issues. | ||
| Let's just talk about hot topic stuff. | ||
| So, gay marriage. | ||
| As a man that... I sense you don't govern by the Bible. | ||
| That's sort of what you were saying earlier. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I don't think gay marriage was... Well, my values come from the Bible. | ||
| Your values come from the Bible, but you're not governing... Well, yes and no. | ||
| I mean, the Bible says do not murder. | ||
| I am governing. | ||
| You know, it's a tough call. | ||
| But if the Bible didn't exist, I'm guessing that Dennis Prager would not be a murderer. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Well, you're right, but I'm not sure that society would have created much do-not-murder emphasis. | ||
| The toughest group for the Catholic Church to convert were the Germanic tribes of Europe, because they didn't buy the notion of the Ten Commandments, and specifically do not kill, or do not murder, which is really what it says. | ||
| Because they said, what are you, nuts? | ||
| If you're stronger, you kill. | ||
| And there's no argument against that. | ||
| Only if you say, well, excuse me, the creator of the universe says it's wrong. | ||
| Woo! | ||
| But other than that, it's not necessarily wrong. | ||
| So I don't know what I would think if I had not been affected by 2,000, 3,000 years of the Bible. | ||
| I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| But I will be honest to this, so I'm sort of setting myself up to be challenged here, but it's okay. | ||
| If the Bible said nothing about homosexuality, the odds are... Well, no. | ||
| If the Bible said nothing about the importance of male-female distinction, that's what I need to explain in a moment. | ||
| My heart is with gay marriage. | ||
| Okay, my wife and I have a number, and I don't know, people mock it, but I don't, sometimes it's mockable, sometimes it isn't. | ||
| But we're very close to two gay couples, one female, one male. | ||
| The female's my niece and her wife, and the male, their partner, they didn't get married, but they're like married. | ||
| What's the mockable part there? | ||
| No, no, when anybody says some of my best friends, you're mocked for that. | ||
| But we're so close to these couples that if I really objected, it would be hard to be that close, right? | ||
| My heart is with them, let's put it this way. | ||
| But my value system warned me, and this is the key thing, and I predicted this from the beginning. | ||
| I said the reason that same-sex marriage troubles me is primarily that it makes the following announcement. | ||
| Gender doesn't matter. | ||
| Because that is the argument. | ||
| The gender of whom you marry doesn't matter. | ||
| That's the fundamental argument of same-sex marriage. | ||
| So far I'm okay with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's really logical what I'm about to say. | ||
| This has nothing to do with the Bible. | ||
| It will in a moment, but it has to still be logical even if it's biblical. | ||
| So If gender doesn't matter in marriage, then gender won't matter, period. | ||
| You have let the proverbial horses out of the barn. | ||
| Once you announce gender doesn't matter, well by golly gender doesn't matter. | ||
| And now that's exactly what is said on the progressive side. | ||
| Gender doesn't matter. | ||
| Do you know that in thousands of schools in America teachers are told do not call your elementary school students boys and girls? | ||
| Call them students, because you cannot impose a gender identity on them. | ||
| Let them choose their gender identity, if they want one, later in life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I get the slippery slope thing there. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I mean, you can look at my Twitter. | ||
| I mock these people all day long with these ridiculous terms and phrases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But it came from changing it in marriage. | ||
| Okay, so there's sort of two things there. | ||
| There's the original point about gay marriage, and then just the slippery slope that, so let's just separate those two things. | ||
| So in terms of the gay marriage, my feeling always was I should just be treated equally under the law as everyone else. | ||
| Period. | ||
| I want to enter a contract with someone, it happens to be a man, you want to enter that same contract with a woman. | ||
| I totally understand that, but I knew what's gonna happen, and the price is too great. | ||
| So I would want the gay person to have every right, and I know this is not the same as marriage, and I know every argument against it, and they're sound. | ||
| They are. | ||
| It's two sound arguments against the other. | ||
| But if I think macro, not just micro. | ||
| My concern is not just the individual, it's for the whole society, and I'm afraid the society has chosen wrong in this matter because of the gender doesn't matter issue. | ||
| Okay, so basically I sense you don't particularly care because you're a caring person. | ||
| It doesn't bother you in the specifics of you're in my home studio, you're in my home, I live here with a man. | ||
| I am as comfortable with these two couples as with heterosexual couples. | ||
| And by the way, for the record, right before we started, you asked me if I was married. | ||
| You didn't know if I was straight or gay. | ||
| And I didn't sense that you cared in any way. | ||
| And then my immediate concern was, how did you meet? | ||
| I want to hear your romance. | ||
| I'm as interested as if it was a woman. | ||
| Because this is my view. | ||
| You are decent and compassionate in the micro, but you have to have standards in the macro. | ||
| And they are, in this one instance, I don't know of another one. | ||
| I can think of one other, and it's related. | ||
| If you want to hear it, it's not important. | ||
| But this is the biggest conflict that I ever had, and that's why I worked very hard on this issue, to learn what happened. | ||
| Why the Bible took the stance that it did. | ||
| But we, meaning you and me, whether you're straight or gay, we are going to pay a price for the death of gender. | ||
| The war against gender is a war against civilization, I believe. | ||
| Okay, so now we're in the slippery slope portion of it. | ||
| So that part, I would say, do you think it's possible that if you give people a chance, so you let gay people get married, that the legitimate things that you're talking about, all these silly things, I see this, where they don't even want to call them students. | ||
| I saw one school, they wanted to call them comrades, literally. | ||
| So I get that silly stuff and all the labeling and all this nonsense. | ||
| But that maybe if you let gay people get married that they would actually be allied with you in this. | ||
| But they're not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's LG... I said this... Except some of them are. | |
| It's LGBT. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If it was LGB, then they wouldn't be. | ||
| But the... See, the activists... I don't think... | ||
| So you're separating the activists from just sort of the... The activists, they're the dominant voices, and they're the ones who have the boycotts, and they're the ones who get gays angry, or blacks angry, or Jews angry, or women angry. | ||
| They're the anger creators, the activists. | ||
| You and I would have a great life, it would be a non-issue, but the activists are the anger creators, and they added the T. And I asked well before this whole thing, what does T have to do with L, G, and B? | ||
| I mean, I had a show on Sirius XM that was on the OutQ channel, the LGBT channel, which I'm happy to say no longer exists because gay people could have regular radio shows too. | ||
| So I'm glad that progress came so that there was no need for a ghettoization of a radio channel just for gay people. | ||
| I always wanted to be on the political channel anyway, and they threw me on the gay channel, so I'm fine with how it all worked out. | ||
| But I do remember... Well, I assume you'd rather be on a political channel than a gay channel. | ||
| You're not defined by your gayness? | ||
| This is as gay as it gets. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm not even doing that good at it. | ||
| I mean, wouldn't you rather be with someone a little more fabulous than this if you were going to sit across from a gay guy for an hour? | ||
| No, no, you want to be normal. | ||
| Yeah, whatever that is. | ||
| I mean, I don't even like the word normal, but this is what I am. | ||
| Normal is not defined by your sexual orientation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what normal. | ||
| I'm not saying heterosexual is more normal. | ||
| By the way, I actually believe bisexual is the norm. | ||
| So it's a very complex issue because in every society prior to the Bible homosexuality was accepted. | ||
| This is unknown. | ||
| This is truly, and I didn't come up with this, pro-gay professors did all the research for me. | ||
| So I know all about this. | ||
| I devoted, I wrote a 17,000 word essay on this 30 years, 25 years ago. | ||
| This was a revelation to me. | ||
| I thought the Bible was merely reinforcing the anti-gay feelings that permeated surrounding society. | ||
| But it was unique. | ||
| The Bible said, men, you are as happy with boys, I don't mean 8-year-olds, 15-year-olds, just as a grown man is happy with a 15-year-old girl. | ||
| In that sense, homosexuals and heterosexuals are identical. | ||
| But we are telling you, we the Bible, as it were, I'm telling you, the Bible is telling you, No, confine your sexuality to your wife. | ||
| The Bible eroticized marriage. | ||
| So the line, though, that everyone goes to, if you're talking about gay marriage, they always say, well, I'm gonna butcher it slightly, but don't lie with a man as you would a woman. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I don't lie with a woman that way. | ||
| So haven't I gotten a little trick here? | ||
| Didn't I do a little Talmudic trick? | ||
| That is a Talmudic trick. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you got for that one? | |
| I mean, I don't lie with the women that way, so it's not a problem. | ||
| All right, so since I know the Hebrew, it's not exactly, that is the way it's often translated, but the Hebrew is- I thought I could get you on this one, come on. | ||
| Do not lie with a male, and then the key words, and they're very rarely translated accurately, are Mishkeve Isha, the lying's, not as you would lie, the lying's, and it's plural, which is interesting, the lying's of a woman. | ||
| Do not lie with a male, the lying's of a woman. | ||
| So it's not what you, the gay person, would do with a woman, it's what men do with women. | ||
| But I almost had you there. | ||
| You almost did. | ||
| And you would have if I didn't know that you grew. | ||
| I would have thought touche. | ||
| Alright, so let's move on to another. | ||
| I mean, I think we got to where that needs to be. | ||
| Yes, yes, I couldn't agree more. | ||
| And that's also why I wanted to discuss that with you because I sense we weren't going to fully agree on it. | ||
| And people are so afraid of that! | ||
| Yes, well people don't hear what might be your issue. | ||
| Look, there are people on the right who, I hate to say this, this bothers me, there are people on the right who have contempt for gays. | ||
| And it's wrong, it's biblically wrong, it's humanly wrong, and it does bother me. | ||
| Yeah, so in a weird way though, so Trump on this must sort of give you a little angst because it's pretty obvious. | ||
| He couldn't care less. | ||
| He could not care less. | ||
| That's why it doesn't give me any angst. | ||
| The Supreme Court has ruled it's a non-issue. | ||
| But it must give you angst in terms of that slippery slope. | ||
| Oh it does, it does give me angst. | ||
| But I'm not sure, other than tweeting, and by the way maybe one day he will tweet it, I wish he would tweet, guess what? | ||
| Teachers can't call kids in a lot of our schools boys and girls anymore. | ||
| What do you think of that America? | ||
| I would like him to tweet that. | ||
| Yeah, so that's actually a good segue to, I'll put the other one aside for a second, but some of the political correctness stuff. | ||
| Because this is directly, I mean it's been a sort of through line of everything we've been talking about here, but it's also directly affected your channel, so the PragerU channel. | ||
| You guys, and again, you're doing videos to explain things. | ||
| I've watched many many of your videos. | ||
| I'm in one next month. | ||
| So I've never seen any hatred. | ||
| People could argue with some of the facts if they want or they could argue with maybe you're coming from a certain political persuasion or any of that. | ||
| But I've never seen anything remotely close to hate speech or hatred or any of the stuff that would get you banned or whatever. | ||
| You guys were, you weren't banned from Twitter but you were restricted in libraries. | ||
| So they can't show it in schools or libraries. | ||
| So what do you do? | ||
| It's mind-blowing. | ||
| We have a video on the origins of the Korean War. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why is that restricted? | |
| So what's happening here? | ||
| Look, this show is on YouTube, so I don't want to make the YouTube gods too angry at me. | ||
| No, they won't be angry at you. | ||
| It's a very, look, I was sure the Wall Street Journal had a featured editorial on behalf of Prager University. | ||
| Yeah, I saw it. | ||
| Saying, what is YouTube doing? | ||
| What are you nuts? | ||
| Because a lot of Wall Street Journal people have, you know, Bret Stephens has done one, Kimberly Strassel has done one, and others. | ||
| So they know about us. | ||
| What are you kidding? | ||
| YouTube, are you nuts? | ||
| So what do you think is actually happening? | ||
| Do you think some leftists are meeting at the top of YouTube and saying? | ||
| No, I think that there are leftists who troll the websites, especially among those that are successful. | ||
| And we're the biggest producer of conservative videos in the world. | ||
| 220 million views last year. | ||
| That's a serious number for anybody, even for the left. | ||
| And so they know that we exist. | ||
| And so if one bugs them, then, you know, they just, you know, say, I don't know, bad material or objectionable or hateful. | ||
| And if they get enough of those, there's an algorithm that says, OK, we got we got reports. | ||
| I don't think they sit there. | ||
| They don't monitor them. | ||
| They get feedback. | ||
| And so leftists who want to shut us down send this feedback. | ||
| But once they're contacted, once the Wall Street Journal, they then had another editorial. | ||
| They had three editorials on behalf of Prager University in the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| That's a big newspaper. | ||
| And of course not one liberal newspaper has. | ||
| So they're not liberal, they're left. | ||
| A liberal paper would come to our defense. | ||
| Right, so that to me is a great example of what the difference between liberal and left is. | ||
| Freedom is the biggest issue. | ||
| Because it's free speech. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| We're talking about free speech. | ||
| Yes, that is correct. | ||
| And that's where, of course, they should defend it. | ||
| Right, and it isn't even, you know, well, let's let the Nazis march in Skokie, Illinois, which precedes your day. | ||
| Yeah, no, no, but I know it. | ||
| Are you familiar with that? | ||
| Yeah, of course, of course. | ||
| Okay, so there's a big Jewish area, including a lot of survivors of the Holocaust lived there. | ||
| The Nazis, in their great evil, you know, had a march, neo-Nazis had a march there. | ||
| And the ACLU fought on their behalf. | ||
| But now freedom of, but so, but we're not in that category. | ||
| There's no hate here as you point out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, there was something I think about. | ||
| By the way, do you know the most hated video that we've put out? | ||
| This is, I would never have predicted this. | ||
| I'm sure it's gonna have a wonderful irony. | ||
| Yes, it will be. | ||
| Our video on advocating that men get married. | ||
| That has the most amount of hateful comments directed against it. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So you guys also did a video on the Electoral College. | ||
| Yeah, it caught some fire on that. | ||
| So I see a lot of celebrities now tweeting that it's a white supremacist way of controlling everybody. | ||
| So you don't have to repeat the whole video, we'll put the link down below so people can get to it. | ||
| This country was not founded to be a democracy, it was founded to be a republic. | ||
| So what does that mean for people that don't understand? | ||
| Democracy is one man, one vote. | ||
| That's all you know. | ||
| Plurality determines everything. | ||
| There are checks on how it works in this country. | ||
| The most non-democratic thing we have is the U.S. | ||
| Senate. | ||
| A senator from Wyoming has the same vote as a senator from California, although California has 50 times more people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, by the way, I do believe if the left gets rid of the Electoral College, they will vote to get rid of the Senate. | ||
| Yeah, and then basically Wyoming and Montana and all these places will have almost no power whatsoever. | ||
| Well, that's the point. | ||
| This was set up to be the United States of America. | ||
| It's not just America. | ||
| It's states. | ||
| States now the left has taken the word states rights and they have made it into a neo-nazi term Which is what they do with almost every tradition Nazis love states rights, right? | ||
| Well, that's the theory. | ||
| Yeah, what's the theory there? | ||
| Oh because I don't think I've heard that one Oh, yeah, because then the federal government cannot suppress your racism. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So you could just yes, you start your own racist state, right? | |
| Yes, right, right So, but that's not what America was founded to be. | ||
| And you know that outside of, this is amazing, outside of the four boroughs, four of the five boroughs of New York City and L.A. | ||
| County, Trump won the country. | ||
| Just outside of that. | ||
| So you realize that's all you have to win is New York and L.A. | ||
| if there's no electoral college. | ||
| That's all you'll campaign in. | ||
| What? | ||
| Michigan? | ||
| How do you spell it? | ||
| So you'd really have a less democratic... Well, in the final analysis, yes. | ||
| You have to appeal to more people with an electoral college. | ||
| That's what they wanted. | ||
| The fact that Trump got, what is it now? | ||
| Is it three million less votes? | ||
| Five million less votes? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| So really, do you think that affects his mandate in any way or just it is what it is? | ||
| It's like, you know, I don't understand it. | ||
| My team, our team had more home runs than the other team and they won. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| There's other ways to score. | ||
| It's not based on home runs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If it were based on popular vote, he would have campaigned in New York and California. | ||
| But you win or lose on the rules going in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you sense that because, as you said earlier, that there's been nothing like this before, that there's incredible opportunity to do good for the country right now? | ||
| I don't know that Trump will grasp that opportunity. | ||
| I think there is, yes. | ||
| But do you sense that? | ||
| I did not support Trump. | ||
| I didn't support Hillary. | ||
| I really didn't like either one of them. | ||
| I don't even think I've said this publicly, but I ended up voting for Gary Johnson, which believe me, I was not happy about. | ||
| And I think in a weird way, he did the most disservice to the country, because I think if there was ever a year for a libertarian to explain some classical liberal values and small government and all that stuff, I think this was the year to get some ideas out there. | ||
| And he failed miserably. | ||
| But the day after the election, even though I didn't support Trump, I suddenly felt like there's some movement here, at least. | ||
| Yes, there is. | ||
| You can feel the tectonics shaking. | ||
| So, how do you take that and run with it? | ||
| Well, I hope, in fact, that that will take place. | ||
| I now have hope and change. | ||
| That's now my motto. | ||
| That's what I said at the top of the show. | ||
| There's actual hope. | ||
| There's change now. | ||
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| He has one quality that I like. | ||
| He doesn't care what the New York Times says about him. | ||
| That's whereas I believe all the other 17 candidates did. | ||
| But what about the free speech stuff with him? | ||
| Because it's one thing to be for free speech when you're in opposition, and it's cool. | ||
| But now that he's the president, I mean fighting with the reporters and stuff like that, do you not see that as... | ||
| I don't like a lot of these people too, and I know the mainstream media is terrible. | ||
| Fighting with reporters and suppressing free speech have nothing to do with each other. | ||
| Well, the idea that the president would go after specific reporters or specific publications, the chilling effect basically that that would have over people that want to be critical of the president, you don't see that as an issue? | ||
| No, because they don't get their viewers from the president. | ||
| On the contrary, for people on the left to be attacked by Trump is a badge of honor. | ||
| It's not even a related issue. | ||
| And he should go after them by name if they're wrong. | ||
| I mean, if he's wrong, then he will look bad. | ||
| But if CNN reports what BuzzFeed says and is the only major network to report the BuzzFeed What I believe is a lie, then CNN, which I go on regularly, so I have nothing against CNN, but they should pay a price. | ||
| Do you think we need stronger libel laws then? | ||
| Because I'm a free speech absolutist, you can say whatever you want as far as I'm concerned, but I'm starting to think that this system, we're now going back to what we said earlier about people funding different websites, just this system of constant lying, that's not within The criteria for libel in America are almost impossible to meet. | ||
| I knew Donald Trump. | ||
| I never watched The Apprentice. | ||
| I didn't know really anything about him. | ||
| But I felt that this country, I think that there are a couple of things from England. | ||
| England has stronger libel laws. | ||
| They may be too strong. | ||
| England has loser pays in courts, which I think should be the issue in civil disputes and so on. | ||
| If somebody sues you and they turn out to be wrong, why should you have had to pay your lawyer bills? | ||
| I think you would cut down the number of frivolous lawsuits in this country by 50%. | ||
| I mean, there are things we could learn from other systems, and I think libel laws might be one of them. | ||
| If I say, you know, I saw you abusing children, why should I not be brought to court for libel? | ||
| Yeah, it's funny, just in the last two or three days somebody wrote on a fairly decent website that I'm a white supremacist. | ||
| And I was about to publicly attack them. | ||
| I mean, I'm a white supremacist. | ||
| This is, like, absurd beyond imagination. | ||
| And I thought, I can either now attack them and get them the clicks, which is what they so desperately want. | ||
| In another situation, if I had a lawyer and a ton of money, I guess I could sue them for libel, or I could just do nothing and let it be. | ||
| And that's what I did. | ||
| I'm not sure you could, white supremacy, well, maybe. | ||
| That's an interesting question. | ||
| I mean, there was a bunch of other things there, but it would be close enough. | ||
| Right, I'm so used to it. | ||
| If there was no evidence. | ||
| People say to me, you'll really love this. | ||
| I get this comment a lot, or somebody will come over. | ||
| Oh, Dennis, I love you. | ||
| My wife is a witness. | ||
| I get it a lot. | ||
| It's very sweet, and I'm very touched by it. | ||
| But then they will often add, oh, but everybody tells you that. | ||
| And I say, no, no, no. | ||
| Actually, that is not true. | ||
| Type in Google Dennis Prager, asshole, and you will get tens of thousands of hits. | ||
| Just do an image search on that, and then I think that would be the... Oh, you know what? | ||
| I never thought of that. | ||
| Yeah, that's a whole other thing. | ||
| I'm sure there's memes. | ||
| I won't suggest that. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know what? | ||
| I had a ton more to talk to you about, but instead of looking at these now, and I know some of them off the top of my head, we'll do this again. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I would love it. | ||
| I really would. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| You're terrific. | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| Thanks, likewise. | ||
| All right, well, it's been a pleasure talking to Dennis, and you can check out the PragerU videos. | ||
| We're gonna put the link Write down below and don't forget to comment and like and all that good stuff so the algorithm doesn't kill us. | ||
| And follow Dennis on the Twitter. |
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