Dennis Prager and Dave Rubin dissect the political landscape surrounding Donald Trump's inauguration, contrasting feared Armageddon with the necessity of pursuing change through ideas rather than violence. They define leftists as enemies of liberalism due to their focus on victimhood, debate gay marriage's societal implications, and defend the Electoral College against purely democratic systems that favor populous states. Prager attributes school restrictions on PragerU videos to leftist algorithmic trolling while advocating for stronger libel laws to curb frivolous lawsuits, ultimately arguing that maintaining objective Judeo-Christian morality is essential to prevent societal collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.