Dennis Prager argues America faces unprecedented division, split not over slavery but on every issue, creating two distinct nations. He critiques secular Jewish shifts toward socialism, condemns pandemic lockdowns as historical mistakes that enriched the wealthy while harming children, and champions natural immunity over mainstream medical protocols. Prager advocates homeschooling to escape institutional indoctrination, promotes his PragerU content as superior education, and asserts that fear drives politics more than love or hate. Ultimately, he warns that the left threatens American liberty, urging reliance on alternative media platforms to preserve freedom against perceived systemic bias. [Automatically generated summary]
This might help give your viewers More faith in how committed I am to honesty.
I am not staying for the noble reason of fighting.
I fight every day.
I would fight if I were in Florida.
But I wouldn't be fighting Florida.
I would be fighting wokeism, leftism, wherever it is.
I'm not staying because I think California is salvageable.
At this time, I do not think it is salvageable.
People who vote for district attorneys who will increase death are not salvageable.
So I'm here because there are too many people I adore.
You two were among them and you left and I totally understand why you did.
But I founded a synagogue here which means a great deal to me.
Every single week I have this time with people I truly love.
I speak at the synagogue.
I'm sort of, again, the unofficial rabbi.
And, of course, other people.
I've been here for 40 years.
It's a long time.
You make a lot of friends.
But I'm not here because of the fight issue.
If you want to fight, you can fight anywhere in this country, from Montana to California to Florida.
And I wish everybody did fight.
But specifically with regard to California, I'm here because of people.
By the way, if a lot of the conservatives of California move to other states, that's great for the battle against the left, because it increases the non-left vote in those states.
The worry is when Californians who are on the left flee California, or flee New York, And then bring the policies that they fled to the new states.
Well, I can tell you from being here just for a couple weeks, I've mentioned this on the show almost every day, the people that I'm meeting here who are the new refugees here, they know what they fled and why they fled.
So I'm very hopeful.
I'm very, very hopeful on that front.
But but all right.
What do you think?
Let's let's go with that for a little bit.
What do you think really is the future of America if this mass migration happens if basically there'll be sort
of minorities like you in California that that will be fighting the good fight but won't have
political power and then we'll have places in red states that may be more aligned with us what what is
the united bond of the United States of America if this continues in this direction which to me
it has to actually at this point for all intents and purposes there are two Americas I think
Americans are more divided now than they were during the civil war
During the Civil War, they were divided on this spectacularly important issue of slavery.
But otherwise, they were not divided.
And that's a big deal, obviously, but still, right now, the division is on every issue.
We agree, essentially, on nothing important.
And...
Look, there's a fantasy in me that all the big cities of the country secede.
It's not geographically possible because you couldn't have such a non-contiguous country.
But if New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and San Francisco and Seattle and Philadelphia, if they all made their own country and left the rest of us, even with all the finance that they would take, all the money, all the banks, It would be paradisiacal for the rest of us.
But it can't happen because of the geographical issue.
So what has to happen is, I think, what you just painted.
The scenario you painted was of people coalescing in the states they agree with.
So before we go too far, we've we've done the abortion debate.
We've done the death penalty debate.
People have seen us talk about all those things.
But I want to back up to where I started that you already mentioned, because you I do sort of consider you my rabbi, but you are not technically a rabbi, but you do host these weekly services.
And I've gone now for years to the high holiday services that you host.
And I think it's, for me, really reignited something about belief and faith and tradition that maybe got lost a little bit over the last decade or so.
And I found the services to be very moving.
You go out of your way not to talk about politics, even though the room of 500 people on, you know, Yom Kippur services are probably going, oh, man, I wish.
Well, I know for a fact this past year, because it was about five days before the California recall, And everybody wanted you to say something, but you make a point of not doing that.
But you relate the stories of the Bible, obviously, to today.
So to that point, one of the things that we've discussed a bunch privately, and I think, well, you've certainly discussed it a bunch publicly, is sort of what's gone on with the secular American Jews.
That something very strange has happened here.
You've actually written books that at least have danced with this.
That basically so many of the purely secular Jews traded in all of the tradition, all of the knowledge, et cetera, all of the history.
For pure secularism or basically I eat bagels and I watch Seinfeld, something like that.
And for me to even bring this topic up is a little bizarre because I have a big identification with that and I pretty much watch Seinfeld every night and there are parts of Judaism that are so connected to sense of humor that I think has kind of kept us around for 5,000 years, which Seinfeld did a joke about that too.
But can you talk about that a little bit?
Because I get this a lot from evangelicals now, because I have so many evangelicals that like me, and they'll be like, Dave, what's going on with the Jews?
Meaning that they're voting for the party that pretty much hates them, that hates Israel, against their economic interests, etc.
When Jews leave Judaism, they don't leave religion.
They leave the Jewish religion, or they leave traditional Judaism, and then they adopt or found other movements that are, in their eyes, the new religion.
From Marx, to Betty Friedan, to whomever you wish to choose.
And it's a tragedy for the Jews, it's a tragedy for the world.
What does that tell you about just human nature in terms of belief?
Because I've definitely come around to this, that my atheist friends, some of whom are your friends too, that they end up believing in something one way or another.
I think that's in essence what you're saying.
You can trade all that stuff in for another set of views, but you're going to end up believing in that and usually it's kind of worse.
So what, so actually help me as my, as my, uh, proxy rabbi.
One of the things I've been talking about on the show a lot for the last two months, maybe more than anything else, is my last remaining liberal friend.
So the Bill Maher types who get it on free speech and they get it on wokeism and they get it on critical race theory and all the stuff, but they seem unable to get to the end of the road, which is that perhaps Liberalism in its modern sense, or the Democratic Party in its modern sense, or some version of those things, is what led to all of this, and they might have to vote for you scary religious Republicans.
What do I do with these people?
I want to be open, but I also want to get them to the end of the road.
So, I grew up an Orthodox Jew, and I'm still quite observant, but not fully Orthodox.
And I, of course, kept kosher for all of my youth.
Then, when I was in England for my junior year, I figured it wouldn't hurt my parents' feelings, and I violated every ritual law in Judaism, because I didn't want to observe out of habit, but out of conviction.
And then I came back to many of them.
So that for much of that year, I didn't keep kosher at all.
And I remember, this is what I want to tell you, what this has to do with your question.
So I remember the first time I ate ham and it was, it was somewhat emotionally jolting experience.
Now fast forward.
I also remember the first time I voted Republican.
And I want you to know that that was tougher.
Emotionally, than the first time I ate ham.
I thought I was betraying everything good that I had ever learned.
I had gone over to the dark side by voting Republican.
That is how deep the belief in liberals, forget leftists, is that as bad as the left is, I can't vote Republican.
The toxicity of the message That the danger is on the right has been so effective that Bill Maher could never vote Republican.
Look, you may be right, and you're probably more of a realist, and maybe I'm still a little bit of a dreamer, but I'm going to work hard on getting the guy to move.
By the way, my friend, I don't know if you've ever seen any of these videos on PragerU, but there was a guy Very handsome guy, by the way, who did a video that was all about people leaving the political closet.
Anyway, we'll send you the whole catalog, you'll dig it.
All right, I wanna talk about COVID a little bit because I went with you in October of 2020, a month before the election.
I said to you, Dennis, you gotta come with me to one of these Trump rallies in Beverly Hills.
I had gone the week before by accident.
I had driven past one after breakfast and I said, I'm just gonna walk in there and see what happens.
It was the most joyous, spectacular thing I had ever seen at a political, From a political perspective, at least.
And I called you the next day.
I said, Dennis, you got to come to this thing.
We go to this thing.
This is that, you know, still at the peak of COVID or whatever you want to call it.
There's thousands of people smiling, happy, dancing, singing, joyous.
And as we're walking to Santa Monica Boulevard, we had to park a couple blocks away.
You said to me, and neither one of us were vaxxed, you said to me, you know what?
It would probably be good if I got COVID here.
That's what you said.
Uh, you then did get COVID about a year later and were attacked in the most vile ways on Twitter and everywhere else for getting COVID while not vaxxed.
I think you see where I'm going with this.
Can you just lay out what your story was on all of this?
And I also want to give you credit.
Actually, I'm doing too much talking as the interviewer, but I'll give you I want to give you credit on saying you said back in April of 2020, which is now almost two years ago, your exact quote related to lockdowns, quote, the worldwide lockdowns are the greatest mistake in human history.
That's what you said basically two years ago about all this nonsense.
Then we walk into a rally and you were prepared to get COVID.
By the way, I hate being told I look good, because I heard many years ago this great line, there are three ages in life, youth, Middle-aged and you're looking great.
And anyway, so yes, so it took some courage to say in the second month of the lockdown, it was the greatest mistake in history.
I made clear I was saying the greatest evil.
There are so many evils that that dwarf this.
But in terms of mistake, there's nothing comparable.
It turned out, by the way, to produce some evil.
But still, it's still the greatest mistake.
I was right.
What has been done to children around the world is a form of child abuse, the likes of which we have not seen except on individual levels.
We have not seen communal child abuse like we have now, masking five-year-olds and two-year-olds on airplanes, masking the kids outdoors at recess, not allowing them to go to school, in many cases for nearly two years, and when they go to be masked, This has all been a form of child abuse.
What we have done to small businesses and made the wealthiest scum unbelievably rich,
like the tech giants, all we've done is transferred wealth.
The lockdowns have transferred wealth from the middle class to the ridiculously upper class.
That's all it has done economically.
Needless to say, what we have done in terms of inflation, everything about the lockdown has been disgusting and they didn't work.
That's the irony.
They didn't work.
And any American who cares at all about truth knows that the states that locked down did no better than the states that did not lock down.
We had a real experiment here.
Not one child, not one child in Sweden died and they kept their schools open all of the pandemic.
They didn't close them for a day.
Kids didn't wear masks.
Why didn't people use that as a lesson?
I don't know, because people don't follow science.
They follow fear.
So, I was right, and I say periodically on my show, I've been right on virtually every important issue for 40 years.
This is not a brag.
It's either true or not true.
Yes, it is true.
And why is it true?
Because I'm only committed to what is true.
I don't have any other agenda.
What is true?
That's why I can't be a leftist, because truth is not a left-wing value.
It's a liberal value.
It's a conservative value.
It's not a left-wing value.
That's why the left suppresses dissent.
Truth is pravda.
It is what the Communist Party says is true.
Pravda means truth.
As regards my own COVID, yes, I believed that from the beginning, or nearly the beginning, I studied this a lot, it is better to have natural immunity than anything else, and I did not believe I would die from COVID.
I didn't believe I would die from COVID because I was taking hydroxychloroquine and zinc, vitamin D, and ivermectin for the entire year, or year and a half.
And I believed that it would ensure that I would have a mild case.
And I got Delta, the tougher one, and nothing happened.
I got chills for about three days.
I lost taste for half a day.
That was the worst part.
Cheese tasted like plastic.
And then I broadcast three days later.
So, I was right.
By the way, just one horrible thought.
Harvey Risch of Yale School of Public Health, epidemiologist, said on my show about half a year ago that American doctors, American medical institutions have probably killed hundreds of thousands of Americans by denying them therapeutics.
I believe that to be true.
My view of American medical institutions and many doctors has gone 180 degrees. Doctors saved my life. I will always
be thankful to them.
My surgeries were a hundred percent successful on my back and on my neck and I've been great.
So I'm very grateful to them.
But at the same time, they are responsible, I think Harvey Rich is right, for hundreds of thousands of deaths
because of their unscientific, irrational opposition to therapeutics such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
This is what I went on a crazy rant on my show this morning, and I don't do the rant that often, right?
I'm a pretty measured guy.
But what do we do to the people that got us here, and the people that are still dragging us into these seemingly endless, this endless pit of hell?
The Kathy Hochul in New York, the Eric Garcetti who holds his breath when he takes pictures, Gavin Newsom.
You know all the people, the people who are still doing it.
Uh, despite no scientific evidence, do we need to have some kind of Nuremberg trials?
What?
I mean, should they be just banned from public office?
Like what would a healthy society do?
And I guess I mean this not only at a political level, but for you also at either philosophical or spiritual level, it doesn't seem to me that if we're ever going to really heal from this thing, we can just move past it.
Like we're, we're in the phase now where we're moving past it.
Cause the Democrats are realizing they're going to get crushed in the midterms, but We need to remember what these people did.
What would a healthy society do in this greatest mistake of all time, as you described it?
He's just like the one in Philadelphia, San Francisco.
These are the George Soros funded people whose sole agenda is to increase murder
in the cities in which they work.
That is their agenda.
I truly believe that, by the way.
Now, if you said to them, do you want to increase murder?
They would say, no, we want to decrease the imprisoned.
But they're the same thing.
Okay?
It's like...
You can't have hot snow.
You can't have less imprisonment and less murder.
It's just... I'm sorry, but adults... Actually, you don't have to be an adult.
A five-year-old would understand that before they go to college.
They understand a lot more about life.
So I said, it's interesting.
They probably will recall Gascon now because of the murder rate in Los Angeles.
And this is what people do.
They elect the left.
This is the history of Latin America, for example.
They elect the left.
The left destroys their freedoms, their country, and their economy.
And then they put the right in power, which fixes things up to a certain degree, or more than a certain degree.
And then they think, ah, we need more equity.
And then they re-elect the left, and it's all a cycle.
People will not remember what the left did to destroy this country two years after the right fixes it up.
Look at how Trump fixed this country.
I just had Jason Reilly on.
He's the brilliant black writer for the Wall Street Journal.
And he wrote this book, The Black Boom.
And the guy can't stand Trump, but he also loves truth more than he can't stand Trump.
So he writes a book about how good the economy was for blacks.
Unprecedentedly good.
But do people care?
No, they don't care.
The people who claim to care about blacks voted for Biden, who's ruining things for blacks, and for whites, and Hispanics, and everybody else.
The man is a bad man and a disaster, the worst human being to ever be elected president, in my opinion, as a human being.
I think Trump is saintly compared to Biden.
So this is what they there is no memory that is that's the long answer to your short question There is no memory people don't remember what the left did they don't remember listen the Stalin is popular in Russia the man who murdered 20 to 40 million Russians or an Ukrainian Soviet citizens is popular in Russia Mao is popular in China.
He killed 60 million Chinese.
Now for every one of those whom he killed, think of the ripple effect of the people whose lives were ruined because of that death.
So if we accept that, and I do, I accept that people don't remember and I accept that these things are cyclical and the left ruins things and then the right fixes it.
You know, I come from New York.
They're in New York City.
David Dinkins demolished progressive lefty, demolished New York City.
Who had to fix it?
Scary Rudy Giuliani.
Scary in air quotes, obviously.
But okay, but putting aside that we accept that, in your perfect world, what would we do to break that cycle?
I mean, what would a healthy society, not what we're in right now, what would a healthy society do so that we would not forget, so we could break that cycle?
Every awful thing increases as you get more educated.
Now, not real educated.
I'm crazy about education.
But if you love education, you must hate most of American schools.
So the first thing I think about what to do, take your kids out of the schools.
That defunds the schools, not defund the police, defund the schools, take the money and give it to parents to do what they want with it to educate their children.
So that was one.
But you're really asking, if I have it correctly, is what do we do about the bad guys?
You're right, but that's sort of, it's almost utopian.
All we have to do is defeat them.
Whether they lead a miserable life afterwards or not, Is of interest to me, but not nearly as much as defeating them.
That's what matters to me the most.
Some, I mean George Soros, I think God will punish him.
So I actually, I get some, I get immense, not some, immense peace from my belief that a good God governs the universe.
Because there is so much evil in this world, and it bothers me that there is so much, that belief that God ultimately makes things right in the next world, in the afterlife, gives me tremendous solace.
So let's talk about the New York Times and mainstream media for a minute, because I'm 45 years old.
You've got a couple of years on me.
And for from where I'm sitting, it seems that in the last 10 years, mainstream media, corporate press, whatever you want to call it, that it's just become nothing other than lies and nonsense and obfuscation of truth and almost complete 180 of reality on almost every important issue.
Period.
And, you know, they defend Democrats and Republicans are always racist.
OK, fine.
A lot of people say to me, well, David, it's always been like this.
Now my my new conservative audience will say, Dave, this is what we were screaming about in 1980.
Um, do you think it's always been like this?
Is there some new version of it?
Because now we can expose it thanks to internet video clips and that we can see when they chop the word not off the beginning of a sentence or something like that.
Or, or is just this, is this the same old game that they've been playing maybe since the fifties?
I mean, maybe since TV news really started sixties.
My, my belief is that They were always biased, but that the level of lying, the level of editorializing in newspapers, the crackpots that they published on the opinion page.
I mean, James Reston was their 60s, 70s, maybe 80s giant.
He was a pure liberal.
I didn't particularly care for his columns, but they would be considered today centrist.
When I read Charles M. Blow, who, all he does, I wonder if he spends more than an hour on any column.
I wonder if he spends a half hour on many.
During the Trump era, It was all about, uh, how horrible Trump was.
It's fascinating.
Do you know that I made, I just cursorily, I went through Charles M Blow columns and I took out adjectives that he used to describe Donald Trump.
And I came out with about 30.
And that was just looking, you know, cursorily through a number of them.
The level of, uh, of evil and, and Moronhood, Moronity.
Which is probably owned by Paul Krugman, who is... No, he's just a vicious idiot.
He gives a bad name to the Nobel Prize in economics, that he won one, but I'm not a Nobel Prize fan, outside of the sciences anyway.
Anyway, long story short, it was always like this.
The reporting from Vietnam was biased, as an example.
Of course, they completely downplayed the Holocaust.
During the Holocaust, that's one of the well-known things.
They completely, they denied, they didn't even downplay, they denied that there was a famine in Ukraine, induced by Stalin to murder genocidally.
about 6 million Ukrainians starved to death in a couple of years, 1932 to 1934,
or '31 to '33, whatever it was, and they denied it.
They literally denied... Their reporter, James Durante, put up in a beautiful apartment by Stalin
and supplied with the luxuries of life.
The guy denied it, denied what was happening in Ukraine.
So it's not new, but it's far, far worse.
Do you know they fired their editor, their longtime opinion page editor, because he invited a Republican senator to write a piece?
Well, I don't know about janitors and construction workers, because I think most certainly the construction workers are probably more sophisticated in their understanding of life than most Harvard professors.
I mean that literally.
I never engage in hyperbole.
I think that Buckley's comment about, you know, rather be governed by the first thousand names in the Boston phone book than a thousand Harvard professors is an entirely accurate one.
But no, we have to change, we have to create our own institutions.
That's what we have to exchange.
Yes.
Look, in its way, I would, I say with a completely straight face, I would be happy to be put on a lie detector to test my honesty on this matter.
The vast majority of people, if they don't have their child studying STEM, science, technology, engineering or math, would do infinitely better having their kid watch PragerU videos and write An essay on each one, and read the bibliography that accompanies the videos, then go to Princeton.
The E and the U, well, the fact that you even knew that shows you how much reading you've been doing.
In the scriptures, as they say.
Anyway, so I departed for a year because of COVID, because they delayed the Bible commentary.
I did a commentary on the oldest holiday in the world, Passover.
It's literally the oldest holiday, and the most important.
It is the most important holiday in human history, for many, many reasons, and Christians will relate to it, because the Last Supper was a Passover Seder.
So I'm explaining it in the rational Passover Haggadah.
Haggadah is the Hebrew name for the service.
And this is my way of bringing these ideas to more people.
So, back to your institutions, about substituting for institutions.
We need to create a brand new... Look, the religions failed.
My column, my latest column, is on the failure of America's religions in COVID.
How rabbis, priests, and ministers went like sheep.
They just, yes, yes government, whatever you say government, oh there's no reason for our people to show up for services.
It's much more important to keep social distancing.
I mean, if you can't look to rabbis, priests, and ministers for courage, And dissent from irrational governmental orders, we're in trouble.
I have to say, that's partly why going to the services that you've held these, you've been doing it for years, but I've gone for the last five or six years or something, that's why it's been so important, because even last year, That's right.
in the middle of COVID and you guys wanted to wear a mask, you could.
Do you think it would have been completely flipped if Trump had won?
If Trump was the president for these last two years and had been saying the exact same things as Biden and Fauci was saying the exact same things and all the mandates and all that, do you think it would just be completely flipped?
And all of the lefties now who are completely for mandates, but they'd be saying, well, it was Hitler pushing the mandate.
Alright, so let's talk about fear for a second because one time I asked you, I think we discussed this publicly once before but it's worth mentioning again because you just brought up fear.
Right when I started getting a little more popular or when the Why I Left for the Left video came out and I was suddenly getting hate for the first time.
Just endless amounts of hate online from the supposedly tolerant people.
I got a few death threats and people were saying all sorts of mean things to me and I was worried about, you know, when I walked out of my house like I just was.
And I said to you one day, I said, Dennis, what do you do about security?
And this is exactly what you said to me.
You said, Dave, you know, I've done my radio show from the same studio for the last 25 years or something.
And I suppose one day I could be walking out and someone will be there with a machete, but when it's your time to go, it's your time to go.
And then you laughed, and I laughed, and I know you meant it, and I know you would prefer not to be decapitated, but I think that illustrates exactly what you're saying about fear.
You don't have fear related to this, but I don't think it's because you're magical.
I think it's because of everything else you're laying out here, related maybe to belief or your feeling about humanity, et cetera, et cetera.