Dennis Prager joins The Rubin Report to argue that the Left's intense hatred drives them to welcome natural disasters against conservatives like Ron DeSantis. He contrasts this with his own 3,500 books and visits to 131 countries, framing biblical laws from Deuteronomy as rejections of modern social equity. Prager asserts that fear of God counters fear of man, criticizing anti-religious figures from Lenin to George Soros while distinguishing weak liberals from bad ones. He defends parental authority over grades, challenges transgender ideology as the work of "scared scientists," and concludes that despite historical suffering, liberty and wisdom dissemination remain essential against secularism's moral void. [Automatically generated summary]
The only way to get out of it is, well, it's not the only way.
The best way, or one of the key ways, is disseminate what we stand for, which is why this PragerU, which is why I'm writing the Rational Bible, which is why you do what you do.
That is why, by the way, they try to shut us down.
They know we can undo.
Why is it a big deal if you go to a college campus, or I do, or Ben Shapiro, or Jordan Peterson, or Candace Owens?
Why do they give a damn?
They have four years to indoctrinate, we get 90 minutes.
Because they know in their heart we can undo four years in 90 minutes
So as we're recording this right now, you know I'm in Miami, so it looks like it hit the West Coast unbelievably hard, like Category 5.
My folks have a place over there that we're just praying isn't going to be destroyed.
But to bring it to a little bit of the politics, and then we'll get into the book, I mean, DeSantis is doing everything possible, but the media is just waiting.
Are you feeling that?
Were you talking about that on your radio show this morning, that the media is just waiting?
For one disaster to really strike so they can say this is the thing and he's incompetent and he's evil and awful.
Like they would love for destruction basically is what I'm saying.
I want you to know that it is not easy for me to say I agree with you in this case.
I think the left's hatred of us is so great that a certain amount of joy Would be in their hearts, they wouldn't express it, of course, if Florida were hurt.
And by the way, I don't think it's symmetrical.
I loathe what the Democrats have done to where I still live in California.
It would bring me no joy if some natural disaster hit California.
Well, that symmetry, or that asymmetry, as you put, that's sort of connected to what this book is about, because it's about God and the Bible and goodness and things of that nature, and you know that I'm sort of, you, as I sort of call you, you're my quote-unquote rabbi, and we're actually taping this right in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so this is an important week for the Jewish people to reflect on life and all that stuff, and you've reconnected me with a lot of these things.
That there's a reason for that asymmetry, I think.
That politics is their worldview while, generally speaking, more conservative-leaning people, and I don't mean that purely in a conservative sense politically, but conservative-leaning people have another ideology.
So, I think you know, but I'm sure most of your viewers don't, or listeners, I have been conducting the Jewish High Holy Day services as if I were a rabbi.
I'm not ordained, but as, so to speak, a rabbi for 15 years.
Actually, the first time I was there was about four years ago or so.
You were giving the sermon, and you were discussing something about same-sex couples, and you referenced David and I being at dinner at our house a few days before.
So, I want to comment on your point about the different life.
So, first, by the way, I just want, for those interested, they can watch my service anytime they want till January 1st, now or anytime, at salemnow.com.
The whole thing, I explain everything, non-Jews watch it even more than Jews do, because there are a lot more non-Jews than Jews, but it appeals to everybody.
So anyway, I actually noted on my show, when I returned from my two-day break, how important it is in my life that I have another life, a life of religion.
And when one doesn't have that, And everything, everything is secular.
There is a real danger that, and this is the danger of the left, part of it, everything is then politics.
Everything.
The purpose of your life, the meaning, it's your interest, it's your passion.
It's not my interest, it's not my passion.
I'm passionate about the ultimate questions of life, which is why I'm writing my Bible Because if people understand the first five books, which are by far the most important in all of the Bible, Jesus would have said that as Jesus, and as a Jew, which he was, the most important books actually ever written.
You will find this fascinating.
I just learned this, sadly, after I'd already completed Deuteronomy.
It's the fifth book, but it's my third.
I didn't go in order.
And you will find this fascinating, as I did.
The founders of the country cited Deuteronomy more than any other religious or secular work in their writings and in their speeches.
That's how much this book influenced the creation of the freest country ever made.
And so that should be, if one needs one, and I think does one need one, most people never heard of Deuteronomy.
But it is a phenomenal work of the five books.
It's Moses' summary of everything.
This, Israelites, this humanity, is what is important.
I'll give you one example.
So I wrote a column for Fox giving seven great insights just from the book.
Do not show partiality in judgment.
There is a specific law In both Exodus and Deuteronomy, you cannot, it's specific, you'll love this Dave, you cannot favor the poor man who comes into your court.
Let me just ask you something on that before you continue.
Did you always have that within you?
I mean, I think you've always had it for the now eight or so years that I've known you, and people know this story, but at the height of COVID, When I dragged you out to a Trump rally and you literally said to me, unvax you and unvax me, I hope I get COVID here.
And then of course the media all called for you to die and you eventually did get COVID and you survived much to their chagrin.
But the point is you weren't being dominated by fear.
Was that always in you or was that something you learned very early?
I have been honest enough to say, if the anti-religious left, and the left is anti-religious, from Lenin to Soros, if the left had produced kind, intelligent, wise people, my religious beliefs would have been challenged.
I fully acknowledge it.
Because I judge ideologies by their product.
And that's why I don't judge people's theology or philosophy, but the left is wrong on everything,
ruins everything, and most of them aren't nice.
I'm not talking liberals, you know I make a distinction.
You know it's interesting because as you know we just had Justin a couple weeks ago and
we've got number two, baby number two on the way.
But we did the bris at eight days.
And, you know, if you look at it from a purely secular point of view, it's somewhat of a crazy thing to do.
You bring this perfect thing into the world and then you're cutting this child.
That's what you're doing.
And I remember David and I had this talk before about, you know, our thoughts on everything.
And my overriding feeling about it was that my parents did it, their parents did it, their parents' parents did it, and way beyond that, for something like 5,783 years.
It's almost grotesque in a bizarre sense to think that way.
But do you think that that, so you're writing this book as all of this COVID craziness is going down, and you're making this distinction between, you know, politics and having a religious worldview or just something that's not politics.
And then you see the people in the name of science sort of become, I wouldn't say religious, they became cult-like in their following of this stuff.
That must have been interesting to be writing this at the same time.
All right, Dennis, now I'm going to ask you the hardest question I can ask you, because you gave me the perfect segue, which is the thing that my mom often says to me.
She says, I know you've become good friends with Dennis Prager, and, you know, I agree with Dennis Prager on a lot of things, but he always talks about character, how important character is, but he voted for Donald Trump.
One with great character, one with a compromised character, but who treats cancer better.
Which would you go to?
You don't choose everybody on character.
You choose a leader on what he will do or she will do, as the case may be, for your country.
Whether they are kind or monogamous or whatever, that is between them and their spouse and God.
Between me and them, John F. Kennedy had orgies in the White House.
In my opinion, incidentally, this is truly incidentally, I believe that Joe Biden's character is so much more deficient than Donald Trump, they won't even end up in the same place in the hereafter.
They won't be neighbors.
Nevertheless, it doesn't matter to me.
I don't vote for president based on what I perceive as their character.
America is more important to me than whether Donald Trump slept with a porn star.
That is of no interest to me whatsoever.
It's of interest to me if my son does it, but I'm not voting for him for president.
The only thing I didn't know since high school, I don't mean I haven't, I've learned a ton, but the only big thing I didn't realize until Ronald Reagan, that's when I became a Republican, the truth of his great one sentence, the government is not the solution, it's the problem.
That is what, in one sentence, people say, how can you get so much done in five minutes in a PragerU video?
I just want to make something clear to your viewers.
The most important thing in life is wisdom, good intentions, Don't mean crap.
They mean nothing.
The amount of evil done by people with good intentions is greater than the amount of evil done by sadists.
So if you think you're good because you have good intentions, join the list of people who haven't done any good.
You need wisdom to make a better world and to make a better character for yourself.
These five books are wisdom about every aspect of life.
I am I am so in love with the Torah, the first five books, and thank God I know them in Hebrew, because obviously I don't think I could have done this without knowing the Hebrew.
I am so in love with it that you'll find this, you who are making your way gradually to a less secular life, you'll find this of interest, and I say this now a lot in speeches.
I don't believe in the Torah because I believe in God.
I believe in God because I believe in the Torah.
My vehicle to belief in God is rational.
That's why my series is called The Rational Bible.
This is the third of five of those books.
My vehicle to God is not miracles, is not visions, is not emotion.
It is, and I'm not saying everyone's vehicle, but mine is reason.
The Torah is my rational vehicle to God.
And I make that case in each of these volumes.
So I gave you an example of those two laws.
Here's another one, let's see.
Oh God, you shall, okay.
The Ten Commandments is repeated in Deuteronomy.
God says it in Exodus, and Moses repeats it in Deuteronomy.
And Deuteronomy means in Greek, second law.
So this is Moses reviewing everything.
So, one of them is, of course, you shall now have no other gods.
And I point out in both Exodus and Deuteronomy, we have more gods today than any ancient pagan had.
When you think of the false gods that people believe in today, and I go through them, and it's like, just one example, science.
Do you sense that over the last couple years because of the COVID craziness and the way our politics has become, you know, cult-like or whatever, that people are waking up to something more rational or maybe they're not saying, okay, I'm ready to make that leap of faith.
You had a certain set of people, but that there is something happening.
You know, it's like, if you're going to tell people that they're sons or their daughters, they might go, you know, maybe some of that old stuff in the Torah or some of those other old books is pretty good.
I'll be totally honest, I wrote them in the order that I thought would appeal to people to get them involved.
If I started with Deuteronomy, nobody would know what the hell I was doing.
But everybody heard of Exodus, and everybody heard of Genesis.
So I started with the two most widely known books, and I'm working my way through... I mean, when I get to Leviticus, if you ask the average... I believe this, truly.
If you went on Harvard campus and said to a kid, You know what Leviticus is?
You would probably say no.
Well, Leviticus is the favorite horse in the Kentucky Derby.
Wait, I want to back up to, as I've jotted down a couple notes here, I usually don't have to jot down notes for an interview, much less with a friend, but there's so much going on here that I actually did write a few things down.
And you obviously, you do this all the time on your radio show and everywhere else, you talk about goodness so much.
And you connect that, really, to the Torah, that it's not just knowledge or wisdom, as you would put it, but goodness is also baked in there.
And it doesn't seem like we have a lot of that right now.
So my underlying belief, and that of the Torah, is that God wants people to be good.
That is why, and it's one of the reasons that I am in love with the Torah, it makes clear you don't have to be a Jew for God to reward you.
You can be a pagan, you can be, obviously they didn't exist then, but later a Christian, you can be anything.
God judges your behavior, not your theology.
And that is one of the greatest lessons.
It's called ethical monotheism.
It is my fundamental belief.
If one wants to become a Jew, one is more than welcome.
But the Jewish belief is not that you have to be a Jew to be saved.
You have to be a good person.
Nobody is perfect.
I said good, not perfect.
God made us flawed, and so we have to do the best we can.
You want to do the best you can, you have to learn wisdom.
You can't be a good person if you're a fool.
That's the basic, fundamental understanding.
And in order to gain wisdom, you have to study wisdom.
That's why I wrote a column a few weeks ago.
I had more wisdom, and so did all the kids in my class at Yeshiva, than 90% of today's college professors.
Again, when I was 15.
I had more wisdom, and so did my other yeshiva classmates, and so did Christian kids in traditional Christian schools, than 90% of the professors in America today.
We studied wisdom.
We understood, for example, we knew that people's nature is not basically good.
And the average professor probably thinks human nature is basically good, which is the beginning of foolishness.
You can't have a coherent worldview if you think human nature is essentially good.
That we have a bunch of people who just want to take advantage of people who are not wise?
I mean, if you just turn on almost anything, it's like, man, you'd have to be pretty unwise to be buying any of this nonsense from mainstream media these days.
I should mention that, actually, last time I saw you was just a couple weeks ago with Jordan Peterson, and you were in town because you were doing, correct me if I'm wrong, his biblical series.
When you have these talks, so I met, I wasn't with you guys that night, but I was with that whole crew, the biblical crew, a night or two later.
When you're with all these people, and I think you were the only one coming at it from a Jewish perspective, but then there were obviously Christians and Catholics and all sorts of other things.
Do you find that there are really places of divergence that can't be sort of accommodated or that you can't walk away and all be kind of okay?
I mean, for example, Oz Guinness, whom I fell in love with, he was one of the others.
He has written about 30 books, which is three times more than I've written.
He, for all intents and purposes, he was like a fellow Jew in terms of thought and theology.
Of course he believes in Christ, he's a Christian.
But otherwise, he was my ally on every point, and most of them would be.
There is much greater difference between a conservative and a left-wing Jew than between a conservative Jew and a conservative Christian, or a liberal Jew and a liberal Christian.
The divergence today is right-left, not Christian-Jew.
Bad things happening to good people and testing us.
I don't regard all suffering as a divine test because it would imply that if your kid has cancer, God gave your kid cancer.
I don't believe that for a second.
God created a world where bad things can happen.
And my best answer to this question, which I've been absorbed with all of my life since high school, I heard a statement from a rabbi, Milton Steinberg, and I think he said it, I didn't hear it from him directly, I read it.
The atheist has to explain the existence of everything else.
I find that the best answer I've ever heard to this problem.
I don't deny it's a problem, unjust suffering.
I don't deny it.
But compared to what the atheist has to explain, literally everything else, and for which he has no explanation, then I'm back to belief in God with my question.
Um, well, I know somebody is watching this thinking, but wait a minute, Dennis, I can accept what you said on Trump related to the, uh, you know, whether he had sex with other women or whatever, but he does seem like he wants to be loved.
So you're making a distinction between sort of someone who has, let's say followers or supporters that love them versus he's not going for institutional love or something.
I mean, Trump, Trump, you could say Trump loves Trump, but that Trump does what he does for love Given the swiftness with which he will lash out at people, he's the last person I would accuse of doing what he does for love.
If you act Nobly, and not in pursuit of love, you will end up with a lot of love.
So, you know, one of the most common things people say to me at airports and restaurants, they say, oh, you know, I just want you to know I love you, but eh, I'm sure you hear it all the time.
There's worse things you could Google about either one of us, I'm sure.
You know, that actually- That is correct.
That actually reminds me of something that, I hope you don't mind me bringing this up, when Jordan and I and you had dinner a couple weeks ago, and I was fortunate enough, I don't know how many people would trade almost everything they got to right before they're about to be a father to sit down with Dennis Prager and Jordan Peterson.
And one interesting thing that we noticed between the three of us is that, if you don't mind me saying, you are 74 years old, Jordan is 60 and I'm 46, so we have 14 years between the three of us, which was just sort of...
Yeah, it was just sort of interesting to think about.
But you said something when we were talking about how to parent and teach the children the right thing and all this.
You said something to the effect of how that whatever your parents' faults were, whatever you might look back and fault them for, that you said, but I turned out to be a good moral person, so I can let all of those things go.
But I thought it was a really decent way of Moving forward in life, because everyone's got issues with their parents, but a lot of people are just focused on them all day long.
As a general rule, exceptions, there's a rule in law, what is it?
Bad cases make bad law.
Nothing can cover every instance.
Do we all acknowledge that we should stop at red lights?
Yes.
How about if the guy next to you in the car, your passenger has a heart attack, and it's a matter of time that you have to get him to a hospital.
Will you go through a red light if you can?
Yes.
Will everybody justify it?
Yes.
So we all understand there are exceptions to rules, but it takes a lot, and you just have to answer to God for this, it takes a lot to justify not honoring a parent.
And I'll give an example.
You are not justified if your parent voted for Trump and you hate Trump.
You're a scumbag if you don't talk to your father or mother because they voted for Trump.
You're just a lousy, damn, narcissistic kid, unworthy of anything positive to be said about you.
And I would say that to a conservative kid who didn't vote for a parent who voted for Biden.
But there doesn't exist such a kid.
Because if we conservatives met a guy, oh, I don't talk to my father, he voted for Biden, we'd say, what are you, an a-hole?
I do think about that a lot, where it's like, you know, I had a chat with Bill Maher on his podcast, a two-hour chat, and I wanted to bring up what happened with you and him from a couple months back on his show, where you basically said, you know, Google men menstruating, and he kind of brushed it off, but it's true now, that is sort of a main point of the left, that now men can menstruate.
Okay, unfortunately it didn't come up.
But, I had a chat with him, and one of the things that we were sort of dancing around, that I was trying to explain to him in some ways, was that if someone that's conservative-leaning walks into a room full of liberals, you're going to be berated, or ignored, or treated horribly, or sneered at, or something.
If a liberal, or a lefty, whatever you want to call it at this point, walks into a room of conservatives, mostly they'll be super friendly, and then maybe they'll turn around and be like, boy, that guy's an idiot.
But it'll sort of be like, it'll be like sort of a joke.
Well, my life in a way that I was in both those circles.
I know how they both operate.
That's right.
And when you meet, if you're hanging out, you're up in beers or whatever, you're up in drinks, whatever, smoking cigars as you would with a bunch of conservatives and a liberal walks in, everyone's curious about why they think that way.
And that really almost sums up, you said every, you know, it's left versus right, but really that almost is it.
It's the people of the Borg, of the collective identity, versus the people who, it's a little messy, because you're not going to believe this, they're going to think about things a little bit differently.
Are you hopeful, Dennis?
Are you hopeful for the country and for the world?
Because when I hang with you, you're laughing.
You laugh more than anyone I know.
You've got such a boisterous laugh.
You're always having a great time.
I see you with, when fans come up to you, I mean, you're always having a ball.
But this is, you know, it's not guaranteed that this thing's gonna get us to the other side and people are gonna be better and think better and be more wise.
So, I have figured out how to have a ball as the building falls down.
I'm not saying it will fall down, but there are massive cracks in the edifice.
I am not philosophically an optimist.
I don't know how any Jew could be, given the amount of suffering, given the fact that the most advanced society culturally in the world, Germany, the place of Beethoven and Bach and Schiller and Goethe, produces Auschwitz, nobody expected it.
Nobody expected it.
So I'm not a big optimist, but I don't give a damn about optimism or pessimism.
I only give a damn about what do I have to do.
And if they died on Normandy Beach at 20 years of age for liberty in America, I could live for liberty America.
Well, speaking of being at my house, we can end with this then.
When I left California, you were at my table for the last meal, the last supper in California when I begged you and Larry Elder and a couple people to come.
The problem, as you know, is the number of people I love who are here, including, I founded a synagogue here, which is very meaningful to me every Sabbath.
And then I do my High Holy Days.
So, it's a tear.
I totally get why you moved.
I totally get it.
Dennis, I... Anyway, I really hope your people will get the Rational Bible, the new volume.
Well, look, you've changed my life, personally and professionally.
I mentioned to you at my Passover Seder this past year, we had the rational Haggadah, where you can go through the story of Passover and get wisdom, not only from you, but Jordan Peterson and some other people in our circles.
I found it, it's a little more, I would say, edible than maybe the old Maxwell House Haggadah.