Baby Richard

Beginning in April 1995, Dennis devoted every hour of his radio show for six weeks, much to the dismay of his bosses and listeners, to the Baby Richard controversy. Why this obsession? Because the story exemplified Prager's belief that blood means nothing and values mean everything.
In his March 25, 2002 column, Dennis wrote:

I took the news of the forced resignation of Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene — for having had sexual contact with an 18- or 19-year-old woman 11 years earlier — very hard.
You see, in 1995, Greene and I were the two most vocal voices in America in defense of a 4-year-old boy taken away from his family and given over to a birth father whom the boy had never seen. The boy, Danny Warburton, was known as “Baby Richard,” though at the age of four, he was hardly a baby.
The Illinois Supreme Court, in a vote of 5 to 2, overturned a lower-court ruling to leave Danny with his parents and his brother, and to hand him over forever to a birth father who soon after abandoned the boy again. The justices did not even provide a way for Danny to communicate with his family, the only family he had ever known.
At Danny’s birth, the birth mother had legally given adoption rights over to the Warburtons, a fireman and homemaker — his parents virtually from birth.
Bob Greene in the Chicago Tribune and I, through my radio talk show and writings, poured our hearts out for this boy. I devoted half a year to writing an analysis of that horrific decision and the blood-is-more-important-than-love thinking that made it possible.
How could these Illinois Supreme Court justices use their power to hurt, rather than protect, a child? As the case involved Chicago residents, Bob’s voice was uniquely powerful. Against the judgment of those in the media who believe that the public easily gets bored with any issue, he devoted column after column to making readers like me weep for Danny Warburton and for his mother, father and brother.
Were it not for Bob Greene, I would have known much less about the situation and not obtained the information I desperately needed to make my daily case against Illinois Supreme Court. Also, knowing that I had a major ally in the media enabled me to do something I have never done in 20 years on the radio — devote more than a month to the same subject, every day, for three hours. 

Moriarty's dramatic account of the four-year battle by Czechoslovakian immigrant Otto Kirchner to regain custody of his son from the couple who had adopted him at birth is in direct contrast to the condemnation of him that defined the case back in the mid-1990's. It ultimately changed adoption laws in several states.

Although it appeared to the public that the biological father of the boy had suddenly appeared on the scene to rip his 4-year-old son from the loving arms of his adoptive parents, the father's court battle for custody actually began before his child was three months old.

One aspect of Moriarty's "rest of the story" is that the adoptive parents, Kim and Jay Warburton, and their attorney had actually coerced Daniela Kirchner, a young, vulnerable, then-single immigrant mother, into signing away rights to her baby without the knowledge or permission of the birth father. For years, beginning when the child was a tiny infant, the conflict between the adoptive parents and the biological parents raged through courts and state legislatures, fueled by intense media coverage of a highly toxic nature against the biological parents.

Nothing in the history of the human race has caused more evil than the belief in the importance of blood.
Many of the greatest evils in history -- from the universal practice of slavery to the caste system that has permeated the Hindu world -- have emanated from the blood-based belief that I owe allegiance only to my group.
But it is in the twentiest century that blood-based beliefs have caused the most cruelty and destruction:
* The Turkish slaughter of the Armenians.
* The German near-extermination of the Jews of Europe (the Holocaust).
* The Japanese mass slaughter and enslavement of other Asians.
* The Chinese slaughter of the Tibetans.
* The mutual mass slaughter of Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.
* Apartheid in South Africa and racist laws against blacks in America.
* The enslavement and mass slaughter of blacks in the Sudan.
* The "ethnic cleansing" by Serbians in Bosnia.
Every one of these evils was a result of blood-based beliefs.
The only great twentieth-century evil that did not result from blood-based beliefs was communism, which dehumanized people by defining them according to class or Party affiliation rather than race.
As regards children, blood-based thinking has been at the root of the belief in parental ownership of children -- "you are my blood, I own you." A feeling of ownership over children has led to or justified the enormous amount of abuse and humiliation of children and to such practices as male relatives murdering a daughter/sister for losing her virginity before marrying.
Of course, blood-based values aren't entirely destructive... They have led to one positive development: the fostering of love and responsibility toward family members. Yet even these two positive results have often had negative consequences...
Obligations toward blood relations have frequently led to believing that one has no obligations to non-blood. The more people have based love for people on blood, the more they have tended to diminish the value of people who are not blood related. Hence, the great amount of inter-tribal, inter-clan, inter-racial, inter-ethnic, and inter-national hatreds.
Another negative consequence of blood-based values has been described...as "familism", not trusting anyone outside of one's family... [A] major explanation for the development of North America and the relative non-development of South America has been the prevalence of familism in South America.
...[F]eelings of responsibility and even love toward family members are created; they are not the "natural" result of blood relationships...
When people do care for family members it is because they are family members, not because they are blood (even though most people believe that it is blood that is the source of that caring). We think that blood love is natural, almost instinctive. It isn't.
The desire to eat or to engage in sexual relations is natural, but caring for blood relations has been culturally cultivated...
If blood were a factor of any significance in determining family love, biological parents would be considerably more likely than adoptive parents to love their children. However, by any measurement we are capable of making, parents of both adopted and biological children love them identically...
Adoption also provides proof that obligation toward family members emanates more from cultural values than from blood ties. Members of adoptive families feel just as obligated toward (and close to) family members as do members of blood families...
Husbands and wives are family -- indeed, they are often the individual to whom one feels closest in life -- yet they are not blood related...
Throughout the world the family of one's spouse is considered one's family -- yet, like our spouse, none of this family is blood related...
Friends provide the most obvious example of non-blood love...
If parents loved their children because they are blood related, why do they continue to love their child even if they come to loathe the child's other blood parent?

"The reason that Hitler so hated the Jews was a belief in blood. The Jews are the world's polluters of blood purity. If you are into the purity of blood, the Jews are your quintessential enemy because wherever the Jews are, they assimilate in part and stay Jewish in part. They are part of you but not fully part of you because of their blood. If they fully assimilate, they are still dangerous... The assimilated Jew was the ultimate polluter of German purity. If you believe in the purity of the nation, the Jews are the quintessence of opposition to you."

"The only nation to keep its identity and still be all over was the Jews."

"He [Pharoah] doesn't like that the Jews are all over Egypt, maintaining their identity but also a part of Egyptian life. He was interested in blood purity."

All of the evils Prager ascribes to belief in blood purity are the flip side of genetic altruism. When parents prefer their own children to other people's children, they're preferring their own blood. When people develop their in-group identity, be it ethnic or religious, they simultaneously tend to devalue out-groups. That's just basic social identity theory and it is how the world works.

Prager's theses are easy to test. Does genetic similarity predict closer ties than less genetic similarity? The evidence is clear that it does. 

As late as 1923, only 2% of children without parental care ended up in adoptive homes, the others going to foster homes or orphanages (Adoption, 2014). And a large chunk of that 2% involved adoptions between related families. These statistics are mirrored by my family tree: whenever children were left with no provider, they would be adopted by an aunt or an uncle or placed in a foster home. In those days, changing your family identity was as unthinkable as changing your religion or nationality.

To deal with the surge of illegitimacy, progressive-minded people now turned toward a seemingly great idea. On the one hand, there were babies abandoned by deadbeat dads. On the other, there were middle-class families with loving homes. Why not transfer these babies from the dads who don’t love them to the ones who can?

The 20th century is littered with great ideas that proved to be not so great. Adoption is no exception. One negative outcome, which could have been foreseen, is that adopted children tend to replicate the psychological profile of their biological fathers. In one study, Gibson (2009) notes:

Adoptees were more likely than genetic offspring to have ever received public assistance, been divorced or been arrested. They also completed fewer years of schooling and were more likely to have ever required professional treatment for mental health, alcohol and drug issues.

[...] This supports other research showing that, compared to genetic children, American adoptees have a higher overall risk of contact with mental health professionals, specifically for eating disorders, learning disabilities, personality disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [...] They also have lower achievement and more problems in school, abuse drugs and alcohol more, and fight with or lie to parents more than genetic children [...]

These problems are not due to adoptive parents shortchanging adoptees. In fact, the reverse seems true:

This study categorically fails to support the hypothesis that parents bias investment toward genetically related children. Every case of significant differential investment was biased toward adoptees. Parents were more likely to provide preschool, private tutoring, summer school, cars, rent, personal loans and time with sports to adopted children. (Gibson (2009))

Adoption does seem to improve the behavior of these children. It lowers their risk of committing violent crime, although they remain just as likely to commit other offences:

The possibility that genetic factors are among the causes of criminal behavior was tested by comparing court convictions of 14,427 adoptees with those of their biological and adoptive parents. A statistically significant correlation was found between the adoptees and their biological parents for convictions of property crimes. This was not true with respect to violent crimes. There was no statistically significant correlation between adoptee and adoptive parent court convictions. Siblings adopted separately into different homes tended to be concordant for convictions, especially if the shared biological father also had a record of criminal behavior. (Mednick et al., 1984)

With respect to intellectual capacity, adoptees likewise seem to benefit from their new homes, although the benefit tends to wash out over time. When children with two white biological parents were adopted into white middle-class homes, they initially did somewhat better than their non-adopted siblings, as seen on IQ tests at the age of 7. By the age of 17, however, the situation had reversed, with the adoptees falling behind their non-adopted siblings in terms of IQ, GPA, class ranking, and school aptitude (Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, 2014).

Clearly, adoptees are getting some benefit although the benefit is less than what some may think. It also comes at a price. When the family unit is reoriented toward social welfare goals, it can no longer serve its original purpose of perpetuating a genetic heritage.

Dennis Prager advocates the "proposition nation" (a country primarily united by common beliefs) as well as the "proposition family" (a unit primarily based upon shared morals). He wrote: "As a father, my purpose is not to pass on my seed, but to pass on my values."
James Kirkpatrick argued: "Nor can any real family hold together on the ground of ideology. We love our parents and our children because they are ours—not because we agree with their view of the Constitution."
In the second edition of Ultimate Issues, Prager wrote that the Jews' greatest problem is that "fewer Jews know that they have a message." The solution? "Jews must be taught why to be Jewish." In other words, Jews must be taught that they are a proposition nation.
In the Spring/Summer 1986 issue, Prager wrote:

I would say that the Jewish identity of Jews, including Jewish leaders, let us say, fifty-five and older, is overwhelmingly ethnic. They were born and raised in a Jewish world and they are Jewish only for this reason. Few have gone through the soul searching of asking "Why am I a Jew?"
If I am Jewish, I said, I want to be Jewish because I chose to, not because I was raised in it. That's why I studied all these other religions. I wanted to come to Judaism on my own.

It seems literally racist to object to [intermarriage]... And the truth is, for irreligious Jews, it is racist because their argument against intermarriage is purely ethnic and racial, not religious and ethical. The only reason that I am ultimately opposed to intermarriage is because I want to see somebody carry on Judaism, not ethnicity.

Liberal thinker T.A. Frank wrote in Vanity Fair Feb. 6, 2017:

For the past two decades, prevailing opinion has embraced the idea of the United States as an “experiment,” a “propositional nation” or “creedal nation,” as Irving Kristol described it in 1995. In contrast to older nations, America is bound together by people “dedicated to the proposition” of constitutional democracy as laid out by Lincoln. It’s an appealing idea for a great number of reasons. It helps bridge our ethnic divisions, and it gives newcomers a fast track to assimilation. That citizenship is an act of will, a buy-in rather than something more organic, helps remove nationhood from the realm of “blood and soil,” a conception of nationhood that predated the Nazis but won’t soon recover from their embrace.

Still, while stressing the creedal nature of the United States is effective up to a point, it resonates more among intellectuals than among ordinary people. Ideas can help create a community, but they cannot alone sustain it. Ask most people why they join armies, and they’re likely to speak of home and country more than propositions. Similarly, while ideas can strengthen bonds in a family—shared Catholic faith, for instance—most families aren’t based on ideas. They’re formed instead by proximity, affection, habit, and, more often than not, blood ties. Adherents of Trumpism therefore see in creeds only a limited panacea for our societal rifts, and in high levels of migration or workplace turnover an increase in existing pressures.

Americans have never achieved the social cohesion of, say, 1940s England, where an unconscious patriotism and a sense of family offered what George Orwell called a “substitute for a world-view.” But we know that the sense of community in the United States used to be stronger. Many Americans have felt a way of life slipping quickly away—the “rug pulled out from under your feet,” as Gessen and Navratilova put it—often at the hands of trade and immigration. And not all are conservatives. A few years back, liberal humorist Joel Stein wrote a funny but edgy article about seeing his hometown of Edison, New Jersey, transformed by Indian immigration and trying “to figure out why it bothered me so much.” All of us feel the influences of ancestry and sense of place.

In the Winter 1986 edition of Ultimate Issues, Dennis wrote that the Mormons should be allowed to build a study center in Jerusalem:

The opposition to the building of a non-Jewish center in the Jewish state is very instructive of the moral and psychological state of many Jews today. Most obviously, it reveals a strong strain of intolerance. Just imagine, for example, if another country forbade the construction of a Jewish center. Wouldn't these very same Jews cry -- correctly -- "bigotry" and "anti-semitism"? Apparently, to many Jews the tolerance that is demanded of non-Jews is not be demanded of Jews...
Israel and Jewry would appear [if they back out of the deal] -- not without reason -- to non-Jews as religious bigots and as a people that demands rights for itself that it is unwilling to extend to others...
Between the illusory assurances of a non-democratic, hermetically sealed Jewish state and the risks of an open and democratic one, I choose the latter...
Finally, as far as this religious Jew is concerned, let every religion on earth set up a center in Jerusalem and thereby become acquainted with Jews and Judaism...
There is...an unfortunate movement among some Jews toward the elevation of nation and land to a value coequal with God and above ethical monotheism.

Another reason that Dennis supported the Mormons building a center in Jerusalem corresponds with his desire for increased immigration to America: "I want members of other religions exposed to Judaism. I believe that Judaism is so impressive..."

Jared Taylor wrote in 2012:

Any American or European who wants an ethnostate of his own is a frothing bigot, whereas Israelis who want the same thing are heroes in their own country and respectable statesmen here. It is entirely understandable that American patriots should be angry about the double standard, but it is more useful to laud the Israeli example than to complain about it. The Israeli government is doing exactly what we would like our government to do. We should point to Israel as a model and encourage our rulers to copy it rather than grouse about others getting away with things we can’t do. We should celebrate this Israeli policy just as we would a similar outbreak of sanity in Canada or Australia.

Many Muslims, including the 9/11 terrorists and Sayyid Qutb, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, came to America, hated it, and set about to murder Americans.  

So what best predicts a child's education attainment (and with it future income and family stability)? Blood or home? As the Times of London reported: "NATURE not nurture is the main determinant of how well children perform at school and university..."

He also has a sometimes bizarre anti-biology approach to all ethical matters. For instance, he considers racism as the most grievous human sin throughout history, and so anything at all that even acknowledges race as a reality is offensive. He was (completely rightly, in my opinion) appalled at the “Baby Richard” episode during the 90s, where an adopted child who had lived with his new parents from near-infancy to around age four or five was removed and given back to the formerly absentee biological father. He described the danger in ascribing so much importance to blood (and again, this seems like a perfectly valid point), but he takes this view to the extreme and says blood is completely meaningless. For instance, he has said many times that if the hospital mistakenly gave him another person’s baby and he kept that child for a day, he would not want to bring it back to switch it for his biological child. Of course, for every sane and decent person there’s a threshold of time after which the emotional connection overrides biology, but one day?

Auster replied:

I was just talking with a Jewish friend the last couple of days who has the same absolute opposition to the slightest hint that “blood,” i.e., descent, matters in the definition of a people, particularly the Jewish people. He said this rejection of any racial or ethnic component is central to Judaism, since what makes a Jew is the covenant with God. To non-Jews, of course, this staunch Jewish rejection of ethnic tribalism seems risible, as Jews are the oldest and most famous tribal people on earth. 

To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent of variation in income can be predicted based on your parents’ earnings. In contrast, my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage...

Does this imply that individuals have no control over their life outcomes? No. In modern meritocratic societies, success still depends on individual effort. Our findings suggest, however, that the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited. We can’t know for certain what the mechanism of that inheritance is, though we know that genetics plays a surprisingly strong role. Alternative explanations that are in vogue — cultural traits, family economic resources, social networks — don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Family names tell you, for better or worse, a lot: The average life span of an American with the typically Jewish surname Katz is 80.2 years, compared with 64.6 years for those with the surname Begay (or Begaye), which is strongly associated with Native Americans. Heberts, whites of New France descent, live on average three years less than Dohertys, whites of Irish descent...

The notion of genetic transmission of “social competence” — some mysterious mix of drive and ability — may unsettle us. But studies of adoption, in some ways the most dramatic of social interventions, support this view. A number of studies of adopted children in the United States and Nordic countries show convincingly that their life chances are more strongly predicted from their biological parents than their adoptive families. In America, for example, the I.Q. of adopted children correlates with their adoptive parents’ when they are young, but the correlation is close to zero by adulthood. There is a low correlation between the incomes and educational attainment of adopted children and those of their adoptive parents.

These studies, along with studies of correlations across various types of siblings (identical twins, fraternal twins, half siblings) suggest that genetics is the main carrier of social status.

Steve Sailer's Jan. 26, 2017 blog post on "Freudianism as a Jewish Delusion" hosted some sharp observations on common weaknesses in Jewish thinking:

* Jews used psychoanalysis as a form of status signalling (it also showed you had money to burn). In the same way, Jews of the 50s-70s generation loved, loved, loved having an illness to discuss. Illness one-upmanship was a standard part of any conversation that had one or more Jews involved.

But the smarter and more hostile Jewish intellectuals also used Freud as a weapon to dismantle Gentile societies, and in this they were exceptionally successful. Sure, the use of “Freud” as a term has declined, because he’s no longer needed as a faux-authority figure. We are well beyond that now, but all the gender-as-a-social-construct, homo-philia, pornophilia, race mixing propaganda, and so on, it all stems from Freud and the Jewish compulsion to be part and parcel of every decadence movement in society.

Marx was similarly weaponized, of course, in a much blunter way by the Russian (((Bolsheviks))). The great, bloody revolution was never something they managed in America or Western Europe, but they managed a revolution just the same.

* There does seem to be a trend in psychology for Jewish psychologists to focus more on verbally-based therapy (with varying levels of success). In contrast, gentile psychologists tend to be more interested in non-verbal therapy, such as creative visualisation and brain-body therapies, or understanding dysfunctional behaviour through animal studies and evolutionary psychology.

* Literally every single Jew I’ve ever known – and I am a recovering lawyer, so that’s one Hell of a lot of Jews! – has had a therapist. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve known maybe three or four gentiles with one.

Do Jews more readily do this stuff of just more readily admit it? Are they seeking attention by seeing a therapist, or by telling others they do so, or both? I do also observe a heck of a lot more neurosis among Jews, yet less actual mental problems. Thus my theory about it as an attention-seeking behaviour; a kind of Munchausen syndrome, as it were.

After all, they do like obsessing over how unique and special and tormented they are as a people, so it follows thet would do so as individuals as well…

Mar. 25, 2014, Dennis said: "Good values are not permanent. Good values have to be reinforced every generation. Nothing lasts unless it is restated for every generation. Every child is a blank slate. They are not born with the existing values of the parents and the parents' society."

As John Derbyshire wrote about people like Dennis: "The bloodless, deracinated, group-indifferent, 'blank slate,' omnisympathetic creature promoted by the merchants of Political Correctness is one I do not recognize as human... Their lofty pretensions to have risen high above us grubby group-identifying lesser beings strike me as just another form, a particularly obnoxious form, of in-group status-striving."

In the Fall 1986 edition of Ultimate Issues, Dennis wrote:

I, for one, had always tended to side with the nurture crowd... Moreover, I wanted to believe that people, not uncontrollable forces such as genes, determine their own and others' personalities.

My thinking all changed in one day -- the day my son was born. He came out with a personality! Without parental influence, without watching a single television show, and without a single word of wisdom from me, he already had a personality. And, my God, so did all the other kids born that day at that hospital....

Sure enough, my common sense observation was recently confirmed by the latest scientific data on the issue. the December 2, 1986 issue of the New York Times, published an article under the title: "Major Personality Study Finds That Traits Are Mostly Inherited."

"The genetic makeup of a child," the article begins, "is a stronger influence on a child than child rearing, according to the first study to examine identical twins reared in different families."

The study goes on to explain this study and delineate which traits are more inherited than others. These traits include virtually everything we associate with human personality.

The day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced, I said to my then-teenage son, “David, please forgive me. I am handing over to you a worse America than my father handed over to me.”
Unfortunately, I still feel this way.
With the important exception of racial discrimination — which was already dying a natural death when I was young — it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.

Recently, the Jewish Journal provided coverage to a diatribe by Dennis Prager, who attacked gay and lesbian rabbis. We Los Angeles-area rabbis feel that we can respond more fully and more appropriately within our own constituencies to the specifics of Prager’s poorly argued, homophobic, indeed cruel, reading of Jewish values.
We are rabbis, male and female.
We are rabbis, heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual.
We are rabbis, discharging holy tasks that we feel called upon to do.
We are rabbis, serving in different movements.
We are rabbis, serving various constituencies.
We are rabbis, reflecting diverse theologies.
We are rabbis, embodying tradition in distinct ways.
We are rabbis, committed to teaching and perpetuating our glorious heritage.
We rabbis affirm one another in the work that we do.
We rabbis support each other in our personal lives.
We rabbis glory in the diversity of the rabbinate.
We rabbis honor the different talents that we each bring to our ministries.
We rabbis recognize that each bring strengths to our people.
We rabbis acknowledge that each rabbi is a bearer of Torah.
We rabbis celebrate that we include so many who are so qualified and so caring.
May every Jew find the rabbi who best suits his/her needs. May every Jew be grateful that other Jews find rabbis who meet their needs. May every rabbi be granted the insight, wisdom and sensitivity to meet the spectrum of religious, educational, cultural, social, intellectual, emotional and spiritual needs of our people, to the best of our capacities.
Rabbi Leslie Bergson, Claremont Colleges
Rabbi L.B. Sacks-Rosen, Congregation Shaarei Torah
Rabbi Elliot Dorff, University of Judaism
Rabbi Don Goor, Temple Isaiah
Rabbi Moshe Halfon, Temple Ami-Shalom
Rabbi Avi Levine, Temple Beth Israel
Rabbi Jane Litman, Kol Simchah of Orange County
Rabbi Debra Orenstein, Wilstein Institute for Jewish Family Policy
Rabbi Arnold Rachlis, University Syngagogue }
Rabbi Joel Rembaum, Temple Beth Am Rabbi
Steven Carr Reuben, JCC of Pacific Palisades
Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Beth Chayim Chadashim
Rabbi Rafael Goldstein, Los Angeles Jewish AIDS Services
Rabbi Steve Tucker, Temple Ramat Zion
Rabbi Neal Weinberg, University of Judaism
Rabbi Bridgit Wynne, Leo Baeck Temple

By the end of January [1997], the Jewish Journal had published my one essay on homosexuality and rabbis, and then published an editor’s rebuttal, a statement on the low moral level of my ideas signed by 16 rabbis, seven letters attacking my decency, and one letter agreeing with me.
Had I written that Israel should make Jerusalem a bi-national city; or that Jews should consider adding Buddhism to their Jewish identity; or that Jews should observe the Sabbath on any day of the week that best suits them, I would not have received more opprobrium.
There are a number of reasons for this:
First, Los Angeles has a particularly large concentration of left-wing rabbis.
Second, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal is the most monolithically left of any mainstream big-city Jewish newspaper. That is why the editor would not publish my piece unless accompanied by a rebuttal. While pieces from the Left are published every week without rebuttal, a piece against the Left cannot be published alone.
Third, while most practicing Jews agree with me, most Jews, like most non-Jews, have been rendered publicly silent by the ferocity of leftist invective on the gay issue. No decent person wants to be called “homophobe.”
Fourth, few people know either the need for, or the importance of, making the case for preserving the heterosexual ideal. I have been writing on Judaism for 25 years, and have only recently come to understand the heterosexual revolution that the Torah and Judaism wrought.
I had decided not to reply to any of the letters that maligned me (not one dealt with issues I actually raised), but when the 16 rabbis maligned me, I knew that a response was necessary.

Sixteen “heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual” rabbis signed a letter to The Jewish Journal, calling my piece on homosexuality and Judaism “cruel,” a “homophobic diatribe” and “poorly reasoned.”
Concerning the charge of “cruelty,” my article did not contain a harsh word, let alone words of cruelty. In fact, I wrote that a homosexual Jew is, of course, as much a Jew as any of us, and that gay-bashing is a moral offense. I wrote that Judaism is rooted in the ideal of heterosexuality, but there is not a shred of cruelty in that. The only cruelty in this whole issue is in the rabbi’s letter.
As for “homophobic,” shame on these rabbis for emulating the McCarthy right by giving someone they disagree with a horrible label instead of responding to arguments. The rabbis did not quote me once. They wouldn’t, because if they did, it would be obvious that they engage only in ad hominem attacks, not intellectual or religious responses.
“Poorly reasoned”? Andrew Sullivan, a prominent gay spokesman and former editor of the New Republic, publicly lauded my arguments as a model of fair debate on the issue. And if my article was so poorly argued, why didn’t any one of these rabbis write a response showing the world just how poor my arguments are?
And, now, bisexuality is defined as Jewish too. I thought the argument on behalf of Judaism holding homosexuality as just as Jewish a practice as heterosexuality as just as Jewish a practice as heterosexuality rested on homosexuals not having a choice. But don’t bisexuals, by definition, have a choice of which sex to love?
What depressed me about the letter was not the name-calling instead of dialogue. I experienced that when I debated the Jewish rightist, the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, and I experience it from the Jewish left. I am used to being attacked, since, unlike these rabbis who work and live among those who agree with them, I am used to debating my positions and being attacked every day, three hours a day.
What is most depressing is to see three respected Conservative signatories to the letter. With my friend Elliot Dorff’s signature on this letter, and that of the Conservative movement’s teacher of prospective converts, another friend, Rabbi Neal Weinberg, and the signature of one of the seminary’s former heads, one wonders what has become of Conservative Judaism. Does it only differ from the left wing of Reform in its commitment to religious rituals? Does Conservative Judaism actually now hold that drinking milk after eating chicken is religiously wrong, but a person having sex with both sexes is religiously acceptable? Does Rabbi Weinberg teach prospective converts to Judaism that Judaism doesn’t care whether a Jew has sex with the same sex or even with both sexes? Would Rabbi Rembaum perform a same-sex marriage? If he would perform such a marriage, has he told his congregants? And if he wouldn’t, why isn’t he labeled a “homophobe”?
Most Jews, myself included, were appalled at the hate-filled descriptions of the late Yitzhak Rabin that emanated from parts of the Jewish right. In what way do the hate-filled descriptions of me by these rabbis and all the other nine letters you published against me differ?
I am disappointed by something else – the absence of public support from the many rabbis who I know agree with me. Hopefully, The Journal will now receive a letter signed by twice as many rabbis in support of what I wrote. But if the Los Angeles Jewish community and its rabbis do not find maintaining the Jewish male-female ideal worthy of their attention, I do not want to be a voice crying in the wilderness, while those arguing for acceptance of bisexual behavior among rabbis are considered mainstream.

We signed the substantive portion of the original rabbinic response…[that] affirmed our desire for a pluralistic and inclusive rabbinate, made up of…various sexual orientations…
We neither saw nor approved, and from what we have gathered, at least a few other colleagues neither saw nor approved, a preamble that characterized Dennis Prager’s position in unfortunate and unjustified terms. While we disagree profoundly with Dennis Prager’s argument, we regret that out names were attached to those personal remarks and, more important, that they were printed at all.
We hope that people on all sides of this issue will avoid provocative rhetoric and engage in this important communal discussion with respect and civility.

The letter you published charging Dennis Prager with being homophobic is so untrue that I find it painful to see that it was signed by no less than 16 rabbis, all of them bearers of a tradition that regards spreading a damaging untruth about a person, as one of the most serious offenses a Jew can commit.

I do not know most of the rabbis on the list, but there are four whom I do know and for whom I have sincere affection and respect: Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Debra Orenstein, Joel Rembaum and Neal Weinberg. I turn to these four people - I am sorry to do so in a public forum, but since Dennis was attacked in public, I feel the need to respond in public - to ask if they carefully read Dennis' original article. And if they did, could they please cite what it is that he wrote that justifies them labeling him homophobic, a label as ugly as antisemitic.

I have known Dennis Prager for 18 years. I worked for him for 11 summer sessions at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, where he served as the director up until 1983. He has influenced countless numbers of Jews (myself included), many of whom went on to the rabbinate and other key posts of leadership throughout the Jewish community. Say what you will about Dennis, one thing he is not: homophobic.

What pains me about the letter, "Rabbis, One and All," is its tone. Who should know the power of words and the pain they can inflict, more than my fellow rabbis? My 16 colleagues who signed the letter did nothing more than attack Prager personally. They offered nothing in the way of an alternative point of view. … To merely discredit someone with whom you disagree on such a sensitive issue is as unsophisticated as it is ungodly.

More than a decade later, Rabbi Gotlieb would perform Prager's third wedding.

Rabbi Leonid Feldman of Temple Emanu-El of Palm Beach, FL, wrote: 

As a Conservative rabbi, I was ashamed that some of my classmates at the seminary participated in the ugly personal attack against Dennis Prager. I was also shocked to find that one of the teachers I used to respect [Dr. Dorf], also participated in unfairly discrediting an opponent instead of addressing the issues.

As a former Soviet citizen and a Refusenik, I was horrified by the similarity between the letter signed by the rabbis and the letters against Refuseniks and dissidents that used to be printed in Pravda.

…Dennis has conducted his side of the debate responsibly, accurately, thoughtfully and, considering that he is taking a side that can hurt people's feelings, humanely. …Rabbi Dorf stated that Mr. Prager "maligned" Conservative Judaism. I could find no maligning whatsoever in Dennis' response to his detractors. Rabbi Dorff states: "Prager accuses the Conservative movement of restricting itself to ritual matters alone." In fact, Prager only asked if Conservative different from Reform in matters of ritual alone…

Indeed, the greatest irony of this whole debate is found in another part of Rabbi Dorff's response to Prager. Dorff states, "…rabbinical schools of the [Conservative] movement do not admit sexually active homosexuals to their student bodies…" This is precisely the stance which Prager has advocated, but one that Dorff labels…as "morally odious and deeply un-Jewish."

Dennis asked, where were the Orthodox? He emailed a rabbi on the Orthodox right, a friend [perhaps Yitzhock Adlerstein], who responded:

You don't REALLY have any doubts about the Orthodox position on homosexuality, do? The number of Orthodox rabbis who still bother to look at the Journal, though, is probably less than five. I am not kidding.

And you haven't exactly made it easy, over time, for people in the Orthodox camp to run into your corner of the ring and help hold your hand aloft. There are too many other positions that come with your territory that we have to distance ourselves from.

So we are all in a bind. You're discovering that the only ones who will hold a line in the final analysis are the Orthodox. But you don't always like that line, and then do exactly what the Conservatives are doing on this issue: pick and choose. So you are left out in the cold.

And so are we. We completely, categorically, enthusiastically support what you are saying about homosexuality - and can't find a safe way to say it.

So all I can do is offer you a personal congratulations; an invitation to join Truth any time you want; and the satisfaction of knowing that outside of the pages of the Jewish Journal there is no question that you have the complete support of the frum community. Hopefully of the Ribbono Shel Olam {Master of the Universe] as well.

If you had a son in the Scouts and his Scoutmaster was openly gay would you be comfortable sending your son and his troop on the overnight with that Scoutmaster? If so, would you be okay with sending your daughter and her troop on an overnight with a male Scoutmaster?

If gay Scoutmasters are admitted, a lot of people won't put their kids into the Scouts. Not out of hatred of gays, but concern that Scout leaders would be a problem if they were gay. Not because all gays are pedophiles, but only men, straight or gay, have any proclivity to pedophilia. The issue is male sexuality, not gays.

I know this is much too complex for the ACLU. They are so blinded by ideology and corrupted their ability to use common sense, that they don't understand what I've said. As soon as they hear a word, a buzzer goes off. The left-wing brain is composed to respond on cue.

I recently heard a Jewish professor/author lecture on the Kabbalah. Like many other non-traditional Jews, he uses the Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) to sustain his nature-centered views. “God is in the bark of a tree,” he told the audience.
Many nontraditional Jews and Christians, not to mention followers of New Age thinking, maintain as this professor does, that “God is in the trees” and “Trees are divine.”
There are three problems with this view: theological, logical, and moral.

One of the great lines ever comes from a Christian pastor.
I did an hour this week [on the radio] about my disappointing people. Because I got this email from someone and I never answered his email, which was apparently very warm about how I had touched his life. I apparently didn’t reply to his email. I get 200 emails a day… It’s impossible.
He wrote me another letter — you’re a phony.
Folks, I’ve been disappointed by the same thing in my life. I wrote this Christian pastor a long letter telling him how great this idea was and that I was going to use it in my own work. I never heard from him. Do you think I think any less of him? I don’t know if he got it. I don’t know if he read it. If he did, I hope it touched his life. It’s narcissistic to expect that everybody will react because you wrote a letter.
And the great line? When God says about Adam it is not good for man to be alone, it is a statement that even God is not enough.

In 28 years as a radio talk-show host, I have not consciously humiliated a single person — whether a caller to my show or a public figure.
…From the day I started on radio, I realized how easy it would be to violate this fundamental principle of Judaism. When the rabbis came up with the dictum equating humiliating a person with killing him they could not have imagined a time when one person could humiliate another before millions of people at one time. Yet, of course, that is exactly what a broadcaster can do.

It is as unlikely a place as any, but for Laurie Zimmet and Moshe Lans, Iraq will always remind them of how much they have in common and what brought them together. Zimmet enlisted in the United States Navy Reserve in August of 2001, two weeks shy of 9/11. She worked in various military positions and was sent to the Persian Gulf, including Iraq in 2003. After seven months, she returned to the United States, eventually returning for a year of service in Iraq in 2005. Within a few weeks of her and Lans’ arrival, serendipity struck.

KABC radio in Los Angeles decided in 2000 that they wanted all local programming. With the choice to drop syndication or KABC, Prager moved November 10, 2000 to KIEV, soon KRLA, 870 AM in Glendale in November, a less prestigious Los Angeles radio station. KRLA has the weakest signal of any of LA’s talk radio stations.
“It has never been done before and I doubt it will be done again, but [KABC] allowed me to stay on the radio knowing I was leaving.” (Jan. 2002)
With a longer drive to work, and with a tendency to arrive at the station just a few minutes before going on air, Prager got caught in traffic several times and did not make it to his show on time. Either somebody would fill in for him or Prager would be patched through via his cell phone.
In 2003, Allen Estrin became Prager’s radio show producer. He pushed Dennis to get enough sleep. He said he can tell a drop in the quality of the show when Dennis does not.
“I have basically married Allen,” Dennis said Nov. 11, 2009.
Prager earns about a million dollars a year from his radio show (somebody who worked with Prager told me circa 2000 that Dennis earned about $600,000 a year from his radio show).
May 14, 2012, Dennis told Hugh Hewitt that the previous year he paid $30,000 in taxes to California.
Said Dennis Oct. 7, 2010: “I’m on well over 100 stations, 120, whatever it is. If I read an ad, I am putting my name behind what I am endorsing. I think I have a 100% batting average that what I have personally endorsed has been worthy of endorsement… There have been sponsors that I stopped endorsing.”

In a lecture delivered circa 2005, Dennis talked about what he thinks about while doing his show.

1. Keep calm. "I have a passionate nature so this took some self-control... When I hear a talk show host yell at a listener, I think they lost the battle... The calm one sounds rational."

2. Humor. "People often say they love my sense of humor. My humor is very dry."

3. Personal. "In my wife's view, I share too much about my life... The more personal and real that I am, the more effective."

4. Energy. "You must speak on radio with high energy... That sounds normal. To sound natural, that is the one unnatural thing I have to do -- to speak at a high energy level the whole time. I was given few tips by program directors, but that was one of them. One thing I often got was higher energy level. I would think that was fake, but I realized to be effective on the radio, you have to be real and high energy. When the show is over, all I want to do is play Spider Solitary. I don't want to work. I don't want to talk to anybody... I want it to sound effortless. You can't think about me. You should only think about what I am saying. My [goal] is that you do no work."

5. I talk on the radio as if I am talking to people who do not agree with me. "How can I talk in a way that that person might listen to me again?"

6. "You have to be interesting with every sentence. That's one thing every talk show host is good at -- being interesting."

7. "You can't umm and ahh. Silence is ok."

8. "Variety of topics is my trademark."

9. "Do not be offended by people who call me bad things... If you think you are the greatest when you are complimented, you will think you are the worst when you are insulted... I had a colleague at KABC who took this stuff in and he had a few heart attacks. He just took it in. If he was insulted, it bothered him. If he was complimented, he thought he was the king of the hill. If I get one, it won't be because of the show."

10. "You cannot aim to be loved."

11. "Nothing is allowed to intrude [on my concentration on the show]... You are tuning in to interesting, high-energy Dennis every day."

12. "Don't talk about what you don't know about."

Y2K

Said Dennis Oct. 7, 2010: “I will admit that that was the one time I fell for a hysteria. You know why? It made perfect sense.”

Breast Implants

Apr. 20, 2012, Dennis Prager was asked: "I was calling to get your opinion of breast augmentation?"

Dennis: "Here's my question for a mature woman, not a high school girl: Why would there be a reason not to?"

Mary: "I guess the opinions of other people thinking you're being vain?"

Dennis: "What does being vain mean?"

Mary: "That you are more concerned with your outward appearance than what you are inwardly?"

Dennis: "That's weird."

"If you shampoo and do your hair, are you not concerned with other people?"

"I don't know a good argument against a mature woman getting breast augmentation unless she has beautiful breasts."

Mary: "What about people who say, 'You should just be happy with what God gave you'?"

Dennis: "I think it is one of the ten stupidest lines I've heard in my life."

"What if God gave you essentially no breasts?"

Mary: "That's pretty much what I've got."

Dennis: "What if you're born deaf?"

"I would ask somebody, 'Why would God want to handicap me in attracting men?'"

"I think you care more about others if you do want to look good. Why should you brush your teeth as often or use mouthwash or deodorant? What does vain mean? Does it mean you care how you look? If so, I'm vain. I care how I look."

"Exactly how you came out is how God made you and you should do no alteration? What about Siamese twins? Did God make them Siamese twins? Did God make people deaf? Did God make people with all sorts of impediments? It is an insult to God to say that the way you came out of the womb is what God wants. Did God make you a brunette?"

Apr. 18, 2012, relationship expert Alison Armstrong said: "When a man's female type walks by, procreate breaks through the focus of providing and protecting... I've watched it happen to you during the show. You're in the middle of providing your show when your type shows up on the TV screen... They put up a lot of your type on TV."

Dennis: "On Fox News."

Dennis Prager & Orthodoxy II

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Dennis spoke regularly for Aish HaTorah, then he said something that went too far for its tastes, and I don’t believe he’s spoken for Aish since 1992.
“We failed with Dennis,” Aish founder Rabbi Noah Weinberg is reputed to have said to his faithful (relayed to me by several Aish HaTorah sources between 1994-1997).

In 2000, Prager rejoiced in the Democrats’ nomination of Orthodox Jew Joseph Lieberman for vice-president. He wrote in the September 2000 issue of The Prager Perspective:

If Senator Joseph Lieberman is indeed Orthodox, it is an Orthodoxy that is considerably more elastic than the modern Orthodoxy…that I studied and saw practiced 12 years of yeshiva…
…Had I been cut this much slack growing up in the Orthodox world, I might still call myself Orthodox.

Around the year 2000, Dennis Prager helped found a Chabad day school in the Conejo Valley. On the radio, he occasionally tells the story of a secretary suing the school (under the Americans with Disabilities Act) because she had to walk up a small hill to go to the bathroom.
By contrast with his long friendship with Chabad rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, Dennis has long had a love-hate relationship with Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, the head of the Chabad Lubavitch movement in Southern California. Around the year 1995, Rabbi Cunin prevented a talk Dennis was going to give for Chabad (in the San Francisco Bay Area?).
Around the year 2006, Dennis became a monthly speaker on Sabbath mornings at the Persian nominally Orthodox Nessah synagogue in Beverly Hills. Even though it is against Orthodox Jewish law, Dennis would drive to the shul on Saturdays to give his talks until the shul was forced to stop this (even though most of its members drive to the shul on the Sabbath), and insist that Dennis not drive if he was going to speak in shul on Shabbos.
“I am part of a religion that has roles,” Dennis said Apr. 13, 2010. “While I am not Orthodox, I am a fellow traveler in many ways. I have great admiration for things that they do. I happen to endorse the idea of roles. I don’t know what would be gained in Orthodox Judaism if women became rabbis. You say equality. All right, but equality and sameness are not the same thing. There’s nothing that argues that women are not equal. Maybe it is good that men have some specific roles because then they embrace them. Men deeply need an area to carve out as their own and it is very good for boys to see men in religion. Everybody knows that women gravitate to religion more than men, so it is particularly important that boys have male models of men in religion.”

9/11

Dennis got up on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, expecting to take the day off the radio so he could take his son David to the airport to fly to Israel to enroll in yeshiva.
In a lecture on “Secular Religions”, Dennis said: “We allowed our oldest son to go to Israel during the worst of the terror. He spent six months in Jerusalem. He heard two terror bombings. He felt he wanted to go. It had been scheduled for years. His ticket to Israel was 9/11/01. I was going to take the day off from radio to take him to the airport to say goodbye to send him off to terror-filled Israel. Then it was terror-filled America and his flight was delayed for a month.”
Between 1995 and 9/11, terrorism expert Steve Emerson said that Dennis Prager and Geraldo Rivera were the only broadcasters to have him on. (May 5, 2010)
On the Sabbath morning after 9/11, Dennis Prager told the Mountaintop Minyan at Stephen S. Wise temple, “I stand before you as a proud member of the world’s two most hated peoples — Americans and Jews.”
Dennis said in a January 2002 lecture on his ideological autobiography, “Before September 11, I was very pessimistic about this country. I believe Osama Bin Laden did more good for America than any other single person in my lifetime. He has turned this country around. People are asking what’s so special about us? People are allowed to be patriotic now.”
Sept. 11, 2002, Dennis wrote that "it is clear that 9-11 did far more good than harm. America has become a better place because of that attack."
In a 2004 lecture on the 13th chapter of Deuteronomy, Dennis said:

Nine eleven changed Jewish life… The things that I can say in lectures to Jews now that do not elicit hoots and boos and derision is unbelievable. I could not talk about Jewish choseness before 9/11. Nowhere do Jewish audiences now find this bizarre. Real evil has confronted them. The centrality of Jew hatred in the world has made it evident that there may be some truth that Jews walk a different path. Any Jew with any Jewish identity is now prepared to hear this without laughing or bouncing the lecture fee. I am stunned. I speak more now in Jewish life than ever before. Sixty two Jewish communities last year and I don’t take all the ones I’m invited to. I can’t obviously.
I say this almost all the time and it’s unbelievable to me. I’m pinching myself. They’re not yelling at me? They are giving this a standing ovation in Dallas? The largest group of Jews ever to convene in Texas I spoke to last year and I spoke about [Jewish choseness]. There is no other way to understand Israel and the centrality of Jews in the world and the hatred? I believe America is hated because it is the one society in history to affirm Jewish choseness. It is the one Judeo-Christian society in history. You latch on to the Jews, and you get the blessings and the hatred of a lot of people.
It’s not just 9/11. It’s the eruption of Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred and America-hatred so that all of it wrapped together is shaking people up. Not only can I say to Jews certain things that I couldn’t say before, but to non-Jews. I couldn’t talk about America being chosen before 9/11. I would’ve been dismissed as a kook and set off to some weird radio station.

I wanted him to see Israel and it had some of the effect.
It is a very powerful thing for an identifying Jew to go into a world that is Jewish. You never have that experience [outside of Israel].
Let’s take Hebrew. When he was watching Dragon Ball Z in Hebrew, I had a big smile on my face. He didn’t understand the dubbed language. For him to know that Hebrew is alive. It’s not just the language he’s learning for his bar mitzvah was a powerful experience. Wow, they even do cartoons. Not just Isaiah.
One time he said, Dad, do you realize that five of the letters between one and ten begin with the letter shin? He was starting to think about the Hebrew language as he had never done before except under semi-coercion. 

He learned for the first time that there are people who want to kill Jews. It wasn’t abstract.
We were taken, because of the nature of my work, to see the last bus blown up by the Palestinian terrorists in which eight people were murdered and many maimed. He didn’t have a supercilious attitude. He saw holes in the seats where human beings were maimed and killed.
He told me at times that he was nervous when we drove by a bus. I’m happy for that. Life isn’t just Dragon Ball Z cartoons. He’s old enough now.
He slept perfectly well at night. He didn’t have nightmares.
He even worried about eating in any restaurant. He was happy when we went to restaurants where there weren’t a lot of people because he understood that they want to blow up a lot of people. I told him about choseness and that this is the price we pay but look at how everybody goes around normally.
He saw the fence being built. He asked a tremendous number of questions.
This was my 15th trip to Israel. It has always been a religious battery-charger for me. I am the battery-charger for a lot of people. People tune in to me and I charge them up as Americans, Christians, Jews, but I’ve got to get my batteries charged too.
My son [David] went there at the height of the terror and it changed his life. He said, ‘Dad, before I went, pretty much the biggest issue in my life was would the Lakers win another championship. And now the biggest issues in my life have to do with God, good and evil.’
That’s pretty good for eight months abroad. That’s what Israel would do when you’re studying Torah in Jerusalem and you hear the blasts three times in a year, you hear people blown up. You take life seriously. There are epic battles going on with Israel as the fulcrum.
I was across the street [in Bethlehem in April 2002 when the Church of the Nativity was taken over by Palestinian gunmen]. It was a rather harrowing moment. When Israeli soldiers say, ‘Run, there are snipers’, you really run. I’m not sure it was wise to visit. My wife is shaking her head. (2005 lecture on Deut. 19)

Apr. 11, 2012, Dennis Prager said: "As countries become more left, two of the characteristics they embrace are secularism and internationalism. The reason that ends up with vast support for the United Nations -- you don't believe in any transcendent ethic because you don't believe in God. God is the source of a transcendent morality. But they know that you have to have a transcendent morality or there is no such thing. You can't say that what is right for me is right for me, because then you have no argument against mass torture, mass rape, mass genocide.

"Since there is no God who is the source of a trans-national and trans-individual morality, the United Nations supplants God, supplants religion. The United Nations gives you a transnational and trans-individual morality. What is right? What the United Nations says is right." 

Life Lectures

In January 2002, Dennis Prager decided to do something he had never done before — give speeches primarily about himself. They took place on a listener cruise to Antarctica. One speech was on his personal life. The other speech was on his ideological journey.

In the first, Dennis said: “Fran thinks I say everything on the radio…”

“I bought my father a computer about eight years ago with only one intention — dad, please write your autobiography. You have an interesting life. Please tell it. It will be good for you and good for your descendants.

“After eight years learning everything about the Internet and computing, now he’s starting to write his autobiography. He says he is so enamored of technology and one big reason he doesn’t want to die is that he wants to see what the next operating system will be like. I totally relate to that.”

George W. Bush

Dennis Prager loved President George W. Bush whose dubious legacy includes occupying Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of trillions of dollars on the false premises that these countries threatened America, removing standards for mortgage lending to racial minorities unlikely to repay such loans sending America into the worst recession since the Great Depression, allowing in millions of low-achieving illegal immigrants from Mexico, and campaigning in 2000 against profiling Arabs at airports.

Dennis wrote Mar. 11, 2003: "I believe that either divine intervention or good luck on the magnitude of a lottery win explains George W. Bush’s rise to the position of president."

Dennis wrote Feb. 3, 2004:

I have loved and admired this man [George W. Bush] ever since I felt that I got to know him during his presidential campaign. (Before his winning the Republican nomination, I knew so little about him and thought so little of his chances of defeating Al Gore that I voted in the California primary for John McCain.) I believe that this man is changing history for the better, that he is the dam holding back the waters of chaos, that he saved this country at a time when Democrats would have failed it, and that he is both kind and strong, real and decent, powerful and humble.
So when I had the opportunity to stand in line with my wife and youngest child to simply shake this man’s hand, I rushed at the opportunity. I waited in line as excited as most people would be to greet their favorite Hollywood star. Wearing a silly grin, I told the congressmen and senators around me that I felt like a 7-year-old about to meet Willie Mays or Derek Jeter. I even broke into a sweat.
…My wife told him that when she lights the Sabbath candles every Friday night in our home, she says a prayer for him. And I told him that I say a prayer for him each week at synagogue.
Unless he is a faker — and I believe that I can sense a faker a mile away — it was clear that the president was moved. Which is exactly what we hoped for. We know how much he values prayer, we know how much hatred he receives, and we suspect that he does not often associate Jews with those prayerfully supporting him.
He stopped and told us that only those who understand prayer could understand how much this means to him and asked if we would like a family photo with him. Imagine your child getting to take a photo with every member on his favorite baseball or football team and you can imagine my excitement.

Lawrence Auster wrote in 2005 that folks like Dennis had already given away the game:

Our quasi-religious faith in America as the spreader of freedom around the world grows in proportion as our actual America loses its culture, its morality, its spiritual and historical cohesion, and its will to defend itself, not to mention its real liberties, which are not to be confused with its modern, liberationist liberties. We can’t defend the actual America anymore, because we fear that we’ve already given so much of it away that the attempt to bring it back would make us seem like extremists or cranks. So, needing something to believe in, but no longer having a real country to believe in, we turn what’s left of our country into a mission to achieve universal democracy, and we believe in that instead.

The more we empty our country of its historical meaning, the more hysterical becomes our embrace of Bush’s messianic rhetoric, which is not about America, but about the world.

After 2007, few people aside from Prager saw Bush in a positive light. Steve Sailer, for instance, saw W. as "Chauncey Gardiner with a mean streak", "irresponsible" and "uninterested in proficiency and honesty". 

As a Sailer reader wrote in 2006:

...[T]he pundits look like complete fools: the conservative pundits who decided to become Bush cultists in 2002-4 are now forced to grapple with the fact that they've been defending a complete failure, and the milquetoast "liberal" pundits -- the ones who wrote that Bush was basically a good guy, beloved by all, and the Democrats needed to go along with the Iraq war but pledge to do it more competently (the TNR/Washington Post type of "liberals") -- are also looking like idiots.

Among the mainstream punditariat I'm now seeing a certain amount of incoherent rage, usually directed at the "isolationist right" (if the pundit's conservative) or the "angry left" (if the pundit's liberal). It's the rage of bubble-dwelling pundits who can't forgive the "extreme" left and right for having been right all along while they were busy writing about what a swell guy Bush is.

Looking back from 2014, the careers of the pundits who were wrong about invading Iraq (Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Fred Kagan, Robert Kagan, Victor Davis Hanson, John Podhoretz, William Kristol, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Fareed Zakaria) have prospered while those who were right (William S. Lind, Robert Scheer, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter) have had few rewards. The pro-invasion pundits appearing on Prager's radio show between 2002-2012 outnumbered the opposed by about ten to one and being massively wrong did nothing to diminish their air time (on Prager's show and elsewhere).

As with prostitution, success in punditry has nothing to do with being right (witness the success of frauds Malcolm Gladwell and Steven "Freakanomics" Levitt) and everything to do with serving customers what they want.

As Daryl G. Press notes in his important book, Calculating Credibility, when a country backs down in a crisis, its credibility in subsequent crises is not reduced. “A country’s credibility, at least during crises,” he writes, “is driven not by its past behavior but rather by power and interests." Thus, the fact that America suffered a humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War did not lead Moscow to think that the U.S. commitment to defend Western Europe was not credible.

Early this past summer, Mel Gibson invited me to see “The Passion,” his film on the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. The invitation was significant in that I was the first practicing Jew and active member of the American Jewish community to be invited. He did so because he believed, correctly, that he could trust me. I have long worked to build trust between Jews and Christians, especially traditional Christians.
…I cannot say that I am happy this film was made. Nevertheless, if the vast majority of Christians and Jews of goodwill try hard to understand what film the other is watching, some good can yet result. The last thing Jews need is to create tension with their best friends. And the last thing Christians need is a renewal of Christian hatred toward Jesus’ people.

I was in Miami Beach, Florida, this past weekend.
And I got evicted from my hotel.
Yes, the Trump International Hotel notified me and its other guests that we all had to leave the hotel because Hurricane Jeanne was headed to the South Florida coast.
…I was in Miami Beach to serve as scholar in residence at a prominent local synagogue for Yom Kippur. Upon arrival at the synagogue Saturday (the holiday began at sunset Friday evening), the 700 or so people were told that the synagogue was closed due to the impending hurricane. Many other synagogues closed in mid-afternoon. Why? Largely because of fear of liability engendered by the local government (that itself was afraid of liability) that declared a “mandatory evacuation.”

17. Beginning, in or about January 2001 through in or about late 2003 or early 2004, Prager and his assistant Alan Briese delivered the master tapes of the Radio Show to Prager LLC’s office. During this time, Prager and his assistant Alan Briese represented to Cross-Complainants that these master tapes were lawfully taken from the Radio Station [KRLA] and Cross-Complainants [Scott Webley and TPP] were to transfer these recordings onto cassette tapes and/or CD for sale and distribution.
18. Salem, with Prager’s knowledge, consent, and/or direction, knowingly and intentionally, and to further the business of Prager LLC, Salem uploaded electronic feeds of each daily broadcast from the Radio Show directly onto the Website in or about late 2003 or early 2004. …to on or about January 13, 2006. Prager LLC made the Radio Show available to its customers by way of electronic downloads…
21. …Prager LLC offered a membership subscription for a variety of services.
22. Cross-Complainants…believe…that Salem discovered in or about the summer of 2005 that Prager LLC was a successful and profitable business venture….
23. At this same time…Cross-Complainants learned Prager had entered into an agreement with Salem regarding the Radio Show… Salem contended Prager had transferred all production and syndication rights to the Radio Show… Salem wrongfully demanded that Prager LLC, including its members Webley and Prager, turn over the Website and anything related to the Radio Show to Salem…
24. On or about January 13, 2006, Salem discontinued the uploads of electronic recordings of the Radio Show onto the Website.
25. Shortly thereafter, customers contacted Prager LLC and complained that they could not access the downloads of the Radio Show. Because the downloads of the Radio Show ere no longer available, Prager LLC was forced to refund membership subscriptions…
27. On or about June 14, 2006, Salem Radio filed an action in the Ventura County Superior Court entitled Salem Radio Network Incorporated v. The Prager Perspective, LLC and Scott Webley…transferred to Central District of the Los Angeles Superior Court…BC 358558. The Salem Lawsuit alleges in part:

a. Salem Radio and Prager entered into an agreement on or about November 6, 2000 that only Salem Radio would produce and syndicate the Radio Show.
c. Webley and Prager LLC, not Prager, wrongfully copied the Radio Show from 2001 to January 2006 onto the Website. Webley and Prager LLC then marketed, sold, and distributed electronic and tangible expressions of the Radio Show on the Website and collected $300,000 in revenue without compensating Salem Radio.

34. Prager breached the Agreement [with Scott Webley] by entering into the Salem agreement…conspiring with Salem to stop the electronic downloads of the Radio Show onto the Website, and conspiring with Salem to sue Webley…
41. Prager made these representations with knowledge that they were false when made…with an intent to deceive Cross-Complaints to market, sell and distribute such materials.
44. Prager’s misrepresentations were willful and malicious…

…That the ACLU would write a letter protesting three little plaques at the Grand Canyon with verses from the book of Psalms provides a clear example of how intent the organization is on destroying the Judeo-Christian moral foundations of this society. This, after all, is the same ACLU that went to court in Florida to protect a Muslim woman’s right to be photographed for her driver’s license ID wearing a veil! If it ain’t Judeo-Christian, the ACLU is a big fan of religion.
…But I was incensed that the National Park Service of the United States of America would remove plaques acknowledging the Divine as the author of natural beauty (“How varied are your works, Lord! In wisdom you have wrought them all; the earth is full of your creatures” was the subversive inscription on one of the plaques). I therefore devoted an hour of my radio show to this subject on the day the news item appeared, and asked my listeners (especially those who hear me on KKNT in Phoenix and KVOI in Tucson) to send me an e-mail if they were prepared to join me on a march to the Grand Canyon. I also urged all my listeners to call the Park Service in Washington, D.C.

Linda Gottfredson said that breastfeeding is the evolutionary norm. Not breastfeeding lowers intelligence.

American Renaissance magazine reported in 2010:

Professors Charlie Reeve and Debra Basalik of the University of North Carolina have compared state IQs to several different health measures. For example, more mothers in states with high IQs breastfeed their babies (0.33), ensure that their infants are immunized (0.20), take better care of their teeth (0.51), get more exercise (0.51), and refrain from smoking (0.29). At the same time, high-IQ states have lower infant mortality (0.54), lower rates of HIV infection and AIDS (0.39), lower overall mortality (0.46), lower rates of heart disease (0.56), and lower rates of adult obesity (0.36) and child obesity (0.46).

When it comes to Israel, Dennis wants to keep it a Jewish state. Mar. 24, 2014, Dennis's questions to his guest Caroline Glick revealed his concerns:

* "Everybody thinks one-state is the end of the Jewish state."

* "On what do you base that? Why have we been fed the wrong [demographic] figures all these years?"

* "If the [demographic] numbers had not been false, you would not be advocating the one-state solution?"

* "[Her book] is primarily based on what she contends are the real numbers of Jews and Palestinians in the area west of the Jordan river, west of the state of Jordan, and if everybody was in one state, there would still be a two-thirds Jewish majority."

* "The notion of a Palestinian state would end... What's in this for a Palestinian?"

Caroline: "Full civil rights. Freedom. Everything."

Dennis: "Everything but their own national expression."

"What do you say to having millions of people in your population who want to annihilate your state?"

Caroline: "We're talking about three million people and a lot of them do but what can you do? You have to prevent them doing that... I don't understand why we should have sympathy for aspirations of people whose aspirations are based upon negating us and destroying us."

Dennis: "Having within your population millions of people who loathe you and feel they were cheated out of their own national expression, you don't worry about that?"

But look at Europe. Its experience proves that the different immigrant approaches of the host countries matters less than what the immigrants bring with them...

Finally, the French have traditionally tried to do with their immigrants almost exactly what the neocons recommend here: cultural assimilation, education in civics theories, monolingualism, meritocracy, separation of church and state, and all the rest...

Officially, France is what the neocons say America is: a "Proposition Nation" defined by adherence to ideological concepts rather than by descent. Indeed, the American and French "propositions" are basically identical...

But they've failed miserably with their huge North African Muslim population, which now makes up somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the population. (The French are so neocon that they refuse to count by ethnicity.)

Indeed, this French neocon philosophy probably can't survive the impact of the Muslims. France's Muslims are now so poor and hostile that the most dynamic political figure, the center-right Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy (himself the son of aristocratic Hungarian immigrants), has called for France to junk its tradition of equality under the law and institute affirmative action for Muslims.

Similarly, Brazil, despite its endless boasting about having no race problem, recently imposed racial preferences.

The trend in France, and Brazil, follows Sailer's Law of Quotas:

"In the long run, ideology is irrelevant; instead, there will be affirmative action if at least one politically significant ethnic group is well below average in competitive ability."

A new study by the United Way of Los Angeles finds that 53 percent of the city's adult population—3.8 million people—are functionally illiterate. [United Way, Literacy@Work: The L.A. Workforce Literacy Project, September 2004.]

The percentage soars to 84 percent in heavily Hispanic south L.A., dropping to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley. 

When we last checked, only 41 percent of Los Angeles' population was foreign-born. Thus the illiteracy problem in that city is not limited to immigrants. Many of their U.S.-born children must also be functionally illiterate.

The neocons argue that immigrants should be admitted based on their current—or eventual —assent to the propositions underlying the United States government, such as “All men are created equal.” But the neocons have failed to answer numerous questions about how their philosophy would work...

President Bush has asserted that most Iraqis share our fundamental political values. If that’s true of the furious Iraqis, who are notorious even among other Arabs for self-destructive lunacy, then how many billions of other foreigners qualify to move to America?

And exactly whom would the propositionists keep out, other than the most fanatical Muslim fundamentalists? With the exception of a handful of refugee dissidents, the vast majority of immigrants to America are in it for the money and are willing to mouth whatever platitudes would be required to get in.

Finally, there’s an insidiously Jacobin implication to propositionism. If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving in them make thought criminals like you and me? 

Ultimately, propositionism seems less like a well thought-through philosophy and more like ethnocentric nostalgia, an intellectualized exercise in ancestor-worship. Emotionally, the neocons abhor asking tough questions about today’s immigrants because they see that as the equivalent of asking tough questions about their own Ellis Island immigrant forebears and, thus, about themselves.

Auster replied: "That is one sick liberal. He has not even read in the papers of the endless series of rapes and murders of white Americans, not to mention lesser crimes, performed by Mexican and other Hispanic illegal aliens, including murders of their white employers?"

Another poster replied:

Dennis Prager...has a deeply heartfelt, emotional investment in believing that, while Americans are turning their backs on “conservative values,” there is somewhere else on the face of this earth a superior “other” culture—a simple, pious, goodhearted folk, who will work as servants for his family for practically nothing and who embody the old-time values he reveres... When reminded of the rampant corruption, immorality, violence, and cruelty which these same Mexicans have created in abundance in their failed, backwards country of origin, Prager typically excuses it all as entirely the accidental quirks and flukes of a broken political system—having nothing to do with any sort of cultural or societal ills of Mexicans at large. I live in Los Angeles and I also know where Dennis Prager lives: it’s an outlying, heavily private security-guarded community nowhere NEAR any of these “other” people whose values he supposedly admires so much. His kids have all attended exclusive private schools (not the LAUSD, with its Mexican-style 60% dropout rate) and I doubt Mr Prager socializes with many of the working Americans he delights in seeing downgraded from middle-class status to the level of third world peasants.

Internet poster "Gary M." wrote to Lawrence Auster in 2008: 

Prager interviewed Michelle Malkin a number of years ago on his radio show about her book,Invasion. At one point, Malkin became so distressed by what she was hearing from him, that she stopped and asked, “Mr. Prager, do you even believe we should have a southern border?”

...Prager seldom, if ever, has anything but gushing praise for immigrants of the Mexican variety. He says he favors a border fence, but... he is one of these people who also supports a huge increase in legal immigration to go along with any reductions a fence might provide in illegal immigration.

For his encyclopedic Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, Peter Watson interviewed 150 scholars from around the world about who was responsible for the great innovations. Watson recounted that "…all of them—there were no exceptions—said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note."

"I can't wait for the Senate immigration bill to pass so we can start importing more Latin Americans."

Jan. 28, 2014, Dennis said: "How could blood have culture? That's pure racism. That's what the Nazis believed."

"I have never found blood important. I have always believed love and values infinitely more important than blood or sperm or egg. I'm always amazed by people who live in the modern era and have such primitive beliefs."

"I don't say genes have no impact on the way people behave. I think genes are significant. I'm talking about blood. Blood and genes are not the same thing. I want my children to have my values. I don't care if they have anything biological about me."

"Everything in life is ultimately values. That's all that matters... Do you fight for the good versus the bad? Race is one of the least significant things in the human species, up there with shoe size."

Prager's distinction between "blood" and "genes" makes no sense. Genes determine a man's blood. Blood is just one of many reflections of genes. A single gene, for instance, determines the ABO blood type. According to Wikipedia: "Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism's cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. All organisms have genes corresponding to various biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type..."

Gene Expression wrote:

The median IQ of European peoples is now listed as 99, and this mostly holds for rich countries in the North and poor ex-Communist ones in the East, as well as white Americans, Australians, etc., and whites in six different Latin American nations.

In World on Fire Amy Chua describes the relationship between economic status and "Indian-blood" throughout Latin America: "Latin American society is fundamentally pigmentocratic: characterized by a social spectrum with taller, lighter-skinned, European-blooded elites at one end; shorter, darker, Indian-blooded masses at the other end..." (p 57). 

As an example she describes her experience in Mexico: "Almost without exception the Mexican officials, lawyers, and business executives we dealt with were light-skinned and foreign educated, with elegant European names. Meanwhile, the people doing the photocopying and cleaning the floors were all shorter, darker, and plainly more "Indian- blooded." While considerable social fluidity exists in Mexico, it is also true that lightness of skin correlates directly and glaringly with increasing wealth and social status." (p 59)

The trends Chua observes within Latin American countries also appear to operate between these countries, with countries with mostly European populations, like Chile and Uruguay, being the most economically developed and countries with largely Amerindian populations, such as Bolivia and Ecuador being the least economically developed. Coblogger emeritus Godless Capitalist once compared 12 South American countries and found a correlation of .96 between GDP-per-capita and percentage of the population that is white.

Lynn's data confirms this general picture with intelligence as well. Both with between country differences (e.g. Uruguay (96) and Chile (99) score like European countries, while Ecuador's IQ scores range within the 80s), and within country differences; to use Chua's Mexico as an example, last year Lynn tested a representative sample of 920 in Mexico with the Standard Progressive Matrices and found that whites had an IQ of 98, Mestizo (mixed race) 94, and Native Indians 83 - all compatible with Chua's observations of a "spectrum" of "social status" by amount of "Indian-blood".

On Nov. 14, 2013, Dennis Prager said: "Importing people, large numbers of whom don't share your values, is not a good answer for these [European] countries."

If the values of big government are the problem, how come big government societies like the Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway are prosperous? And when Scandinavians move to the United States, how come they prosper while fourth-generation Mexican-Americans do not? How come 65% of American Jewish adults over 25 graduate from college and 50% of Asians, 30% of non-Hispanic whites, 18% of blacks and only six percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans (with similar statistics for other good things in life like wealth, health, credit worthiness, which largely fall in accord with IQ scores)? Perhaps big government has less to do with it than human capital.

Dennis has historically spent more time on his radio show talking about adultery than about immigration (the index to his books Think A Second Time and  Still the Best Hope contain no entry for "immigration" nor is the topic ever tackled in Prager's 16 years of publishing a personal journal) even though the human capital of a country will have more effect on its welfare than 99% of political legislation. You won't find many prosperous countries, for instance, where the average IQ is under 90.

In 2013 and 2014, Dennis opposed immigration reform aka amnesty because it would predominantly legalize immigrants from Latin America "with left-wing values" who were unlikely to vote Republican. (Feb. 4, 2014)

A major reason Dennis supports a big increase in legal immigration to the United States is demography. "We're not reproducing and we'll increasingly have an older population and that has tremendous economic implications, all of which are negative." (Feb. 4, 2014)

Here are the world's youngest countries:

Liberia	18.4	18.3	18.4	2010 est.
Tanzania	18.3	18.0	18.5	2010 est.
Madagascar	18.1	17.8	18.3	2010 est.
Angola	18.0	18.0	18.0	2010 est.
Gambia, The	18.0	17.9	18.2	2010 est.
Afghanistan	18.0	17.9	18.1	2010 est.
Zimbabwe	17.8	16.7	18.9	2010 est.
Somalia	17.6	17.4	17.7	2010 est.
Gaza Strip	17.5	17.4	17.7	2010 est.
Mozambique	17.5	17.1	17.9	2010 est.
Sao Tome and Principe	17.5	17.0	17.9	2010 est.
Benin	17.3	16.9	17.8	2010 est.
Mayotte	17.3	18.1	16.5	2010 est.
Zambia	17.2	17.1	17.3	2010 est.
Malawi	17.1	17.0	17.3	2010 est.
Ethiopia	16.8	16.5	17.2	2010 est.
Burkina Faso	16.8	16.6	17.0	2010 est.
Congo, Republic of the	16.9	16.7	17.2	2010 est.
Burundi	16.8	16.6	17.0	2010 est.
Chad	16.6	15.5	17.8	2010 est.
Congo, Democratic Republic of the	16.5	16.3	16.7	2010 est.
Yemen	16.4	16.8	16.0	2010 est.
Mali	16.2	15.8	16.6	2010 est.
Niger	15.2	15.0	15.4	2010 est.
Uganda	15.0	14.9	15.1	2010 est.

Would you like to live in any of these countries? Would you like America to become more like them?

By contrast, here is a list of the world's oldest countries:

Monaco	48.9	48.0	49.9	2010 est.
Japan	44.6	42.9	46.5	2010 est.
Italy	44.3	43.0	45.6	2010 est.
Germany	43.7	42.3	45.3	2010 est.
Jersey	43.4	42.5	44.2	2010 est.
Hong Kong	42.8	42.4	43.2	2010 est.
Guernsey	42.7	41.8	43.5	2010 est.
Austria	42.6	41.5	43.6	2010 est.
Finland	41.6	40.2	43.0	2011 est.
Greece	42.2	41.1	43.2	2010 est.
San Marino	42.1	41.3	42.8	2010 est.
Slovenia	42.1	40.4	43.7	2010 est.
Belgium	42.0	40.7	43.3	2010 est.
Sweden	41.7	40.6	42.9	2010 est.
Bermuda	41.6	40.2	43.1	2010 est.
Bulgaria	41.6	39.4	43.9	2010 est.
Spain	41.5	40.1	42.9	2010 est.
Liechtenstein	41.4	40.8	41.9	2010 est.
Hungary	41.3	39.1	43.2	2011 est.[3]
Switzerland	41.3	40.3	42.4	2010 est.
Croatia	41.2	39.3	43.0	2010 est.
Serbia	41.1	39.4	42.9	2010 est.
Netherlands	40.8	40.0	41.6	2010 est.
Denmark	40.7	39.8	41.6	2010 est.
Canada	40.7	39.6	41.8	2010 est.
United Kingdom	40.5	39.4	41.5	2010 est.

Which countries are more likely to be prosperous in 100 years? The old countries listed above or the young countries?

On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: "I would like more black African immigration to the United States to bring those family values here."

Which African family values? Africa is a disaster with an 8% rate of AIDS infection. Africa has 18% of the world's land, 15% of the world's population and 1% of the world's GNP. Who wants to import that way of life?

Gene Expression wrote:

References to the subject from the 60s and 70s typically gave Africans an IQ much like African Americans, thus Jensen (1973) wrote: "We do know that studies of the intelligence of Negroes in Africa have found them to average at least one sigma below Europeans on a variety of tests" (p. 66). Lynn (1978) is no exception. It wasn't until 1991, that Lynn had revised this estimate dramatically to minus 2 standard deviations, which has been the source of much anger and controversy ever since. Well, the current volume drops it a little bit lower even, to an IQ of 67 as the median score from 57 studies collected from 18 different African countries. Similarly, the average IQ of black populations from 6 locations in Latin America and the Caribbean is 71. This is virtually the same as the score for Ethiopians in Israel. In developed, predominately white countries, a second cluster of scores emerge for black Africans. African-Americans, of course, score about 85, while the median IQ from 20 studies of blacks in Britain is 86.

Ernest Van Den Haag, who Prager often cites in other matters, wrote in National Review in 1965:

One need not believe that one’s own ethnic group, or any ethnic group, is superior to others... in order to wish one’s country to continue to be made up of the same ethnic strains in the same proportions as before. And, conversely, the wish not to see one’s country overrun by groups one regards as alien need not be based on feelings of superiority or ‘racism’. ...The wish to preserve one’s identity and the identity of one’s nation requires no justification...any more than the wish to have one’s own children, and to continue one’s family through them need be justified or rationalized by a belief that they are superior to the children of others.

Van Den Haag wrote in the Dec. 1, 1964 issue that intelligence could be accurately gauged by IQ tests, that it is largely heritable and that integrated education hurts whites and "demoralizes" blacks. "I am all in favor of improving the quality of education for all. But this can be done only if pupils are separated according to ability (whatever determines it). And this means very largely according to race."

Feb. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "The best explanation [for anti-Semitism] was given by a non-Jew, Ernest van den Haag. He was a major thinker that not everyone remembers today and it is too bad. He was quite something. Whatever he wrote on, he wrote with brilliant clarity. He wrote The Jewish Mystique. He said the Jews introduced a universal Judge Who demands certain behaviors and for this they have never been forgiven."

On pg. 165 of his book on James J. Kilpatrick, William P. Hustwit wrote:

The northern new conservative journalist Irving Kristol cautioned William F. Buckley to drop any criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act "in terms of racial differences." To do otherwise would be "political folly" and injure the conservative movement.

This kind of talk about race kept Prager from identifying as conservative until the conservative movement changed to a color-blind neo-con (aka Jewish) perspective in the 1980s. 

Mar. 21, 2014, Dennis said: "One of my heroes [was] William Buckley Jr. He was a great man and a great thinker. I had the occasion to have dinner with him and it was a highlight of my young life."

Dennis Prager wrote a July 17, 2002 column entitled, "Why My Son's Best Friend Is Black."

...[B]lack Americans have been choosing segregation. You can see it at lunch tables in many schools, in the separate black graduation ceremonies and dorms at colleges, in the proliferating number of race-based professional organizations, and in choosing to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. ...I still believe in the racial ideal I was raised with -- integration.

...Second, it is most relevant that my son is a religious Jew and that his friend is a religious Christian. 

...Steven is a wonderful boy who happens to be black. My son is a wonderful boy who happens to be white. Race is a non-issue to them, as it always should be among good people. For both boys, their religious identity is more important than their racial identity. Because Steven and my son are both religious, they have, often unwittingly to be sure, many values in common. When we explain to Aaron that Steven cannot play on Sunday mornings because he is at church, Aaron entirely understands; he was at synagogue the day before and couldn't play with Steven at that time. Both boys know the importance of watching their language, making blessings before eating, and much more. Steven and his little brother usually join my family at our Friday night Sabbath dinner, and almost always wear a yarmulke at the table. In fact, Steven expresses more interest in the religious rituals than the average secular Jewish guest -- once again illustrating that values, especially transcendent ones, are far more humanly unifying than race or ethnicity. Any member of my family is more likely to bond with an African-American Christian than with an irreligious Jew.

It is difficult to overstate my pleasure at seeing these two boys becoming close friends. All credit must go to Steven's mother. She has chosen to live among non-blacks and to raise a son with Christian, human and American identities that are at least as strong as his African-American identity (which, for the record, she hardly ignores -- Steven speaks fluent French in order to keep alive the language of his Haitian grandparents).

At our Sabbath table I see the real American dream unfold, and only wish more Americans of all colors and ethnicities would share this dream. Why is my son's best friend black? Because they share values that transcend race, and because they live near each other.

Why did God create us differently? Why did God make me black and you white? Why did God make the next guy Korean and the next guy Asian and the other guy Hispanic? Why did God create the Indians?

Well, it's interesting to me to know why now. When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches, you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it.

White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world.

Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure.

When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality.

When you put all of that together, guess what it makes. It forms a complete image of God. God made us different because he was trying to create himself. He was trying to form himself, and then we got kind of knuckleheaded and kind of pushed everything aside.

As a Reggieist (i.e., one who considers human biodiversity both a reality and a net blessing), I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity.

For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests -- by necessity objective and standardized -- can never measure this adequately.

Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?

Why is white basketball more structured? "Because the white culture places more of a premium on winning and less on self-indulgent preening and chest-beating." 

In the 1977 NBA championships, the Portland Trailblazer (with a largely white core) matched up with the largely black Philadelphia 76ers. "They beat us in six games," Dawkins said, "and the series marked the most blatant example of the racial difference in NBA game plans. We were much more flamboyant than Portland, and certainly more talented. We had more individual moves, more off-balance shots, more fancy passes, more dunks, and more entertaining stuff. But everybody wanted to shoot and be a star (including me), and nobody was willing to do the behind-the-scenes dirty work."

"The black game by itself is too chaotic and much too selfish. No one player is good enough to beat five opponents on a consistent basis. The black style also creates animosities among the players because everybody ends up arguing about who's shooting too much and who's not shooting enough."

When black Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman made an epic rant Jan. 19, 2014 after his team defeated San Francisco in the NFC championship game, Dennis Prager said: "I expect human decency [from athletes]. Perhaps I am spoiled because the sport I follow most avidly is hockey and you don't get this [way of talking after a game] in hockey."

Hockey is overwhelmingly a white game and professional football is overwhelmingly a black game. Blacks are better at rhetoric (visit a black church for example) and trash talking than are whites, who tend to be better at team work.

In the Olympic 100 meter dash going back to 1984, all 64 finalists have been of West African descent. In the NFL, former Giant Jason Sehorn is the only white starting cornerback since 2000.

Another way to see the importance of race is to look for flourishing cities, states or countries with majority black populations. I can't think of any.

Another way to see the importance of race is to look at the two places leading the way in America in volunteering -- the white cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City. Whites tend to be more altruistic than other races and the least interested in organizing in their own racial interest. The societies they create tend to be prosperous and therefore attractive to non-white immigrants, while blacks never create affluent countries.

As Steve Sailer wrote: "Contemporary American mainstream conservatism has been deformed by its allergy to leftist identity politics into arguing that traditional concepts of identity, such as ethnicity, race, kinship, sex, religious membership, and class, not only shouldn't mean anything, but that they don't mean anything, which is awfully silly."

Thinkers such as Sailer see the world more clearly in some ways than does Dennis because they give race its due. As Sailer wrote in 2007: "We realize that race is an inextricable part of human nature. Why? Because 'race' is the inevitable outgrowth of 'family.' A racial group is an extremely extended family that is inbred to some degree. When you start from this simple but profound definition, you can begin to answer all those questions that baffle and irritate...about why humans continue to act as if blood relations were important to them. (Quick answer: because they are.)"

Why bother to talk about the realities of race when it will only hurt your career? Sailer answered: "I believe truth is more beneficial to humanity than lies, obfuscation, ignorance, wishful thinking – and even hipness."

Maybe each particular group must feel that they have a theoretical chance to dominate or else there will be a psychological schism too large to bridge without overt domination of one group over another.

A diverse society therefore has two options: living a lie that every group is equal in ability (eventually backed by force as it fails) or a caste system backed by force.

This would seem to argue against neoconservative color blind society that ignores group differences.

A Sailer reader emailed: "If a critical mass of blacks decides to abide by the White egocosmos, it will damage the credibility of its black counterpart, and thus compel (eventually) blacks to accept being in second place in the dominant paradigm. Thus where going by the book might be the better individual strategy, the preservation of group vanity requires the instillment of an alternative paradigm reflecting the endowments of African-Americans, where they come in first and whites in second." 

In a September 23, 2008 column, Dennis Prager predicted black race riots if Barack Obama is not elected:

And it could become a rage the likes of which America has not seen in a long time, if ever. It will first and foremost come from within black America. The deep emotional connection that nearly every black American has to an Obama victory is difficult for even empathetic non-blacks to measure. A major evangelical pastor told me that even evangelical black pastors who share every conservative value with white evangelical pastors, including pro-life views on abortion, will vote for Obama. They feel their very dignity is on the line.

Recalling his 1985 meeting with George Kennan, architect of America's containment policy against the Soviet Union, Vincent Chiarello wrote:

I remember...Kennan’s deep pessimism about the future of the United States. Time and time again, he came back to the same theme: that unfettered immigration from non-European nations would be a disaster, and that the thin line that separated the U.S. from the rest of the world would disappear. ... [Harvard political scientist Samuel] Huntington was fiercely opposed to the notion of America as “a propositional nation.” Kennan emphasized that same objection by repeatedly pointing out our Anglo-Saxon roots and cultural heritage. I cannot help but believe that, toward the end of that session, Kennan, who was to live to more than 100 years, was saying that Anglo-Saxons, that is, the white race, were being endangered by a flood of unassimilable strangers that would shake the nation to its very foundational core.

There will be those who will say, 'Oh, it is our duty to receive as many as possible of these people and to share our prosperity with them, as we have so long been doing.' But suppose there are limits to our capacity to absorb. Suppose the effect of such a policy is to create, in the end, conditions within this country no better than those of the places the masses of immigrants have left: the same poverty, the same distress. What we shall then have accomplished is not to have appreciably improved conditions in the Third World (for even the maximum numbers we could conceivably take would be only a drop from the bucket of the planet's overpopulation) but to make this country itself a part of the Third World (as certain parts of it already are) thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions that might have continued, as it now does, to be helpful to much of the remainder of the world by its relatively high standard of civilization, by its quality as example, by its ability to shed insight on the problems of the others and to help them find their answers to their own problems.

Stereotypes

In a dialogue with Princeton professor Robert P. George (published on Youtube April 11, 2016), Dennis said: "In Philadelphia about five years ago, there was a very large audience. I began by saying, 'I just want to thank WNTP, my local affiliate here in Philadelphia, AM 980.' And about a thousand people yelled out, '990!' And I said, 'I'm Jewish. I can get it for you for 980.'"

Intelligence

Like all of the Western world's public intellectuals who are more interested in status than in truth (see Jason Richwine's 2013 dismissal from the Heritage Foundation for an example of what obvious truths one should not say publicly if you want to get ahead), Dennis Prager says he cares little about IQ. By being deliberately obtuse, he gets to have a nice life, make millions of dollars, enjoy vast popularity and go on television regularly. On the other hand, he sacrifices truth for cant.

Jan. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "All of my life I have said that the most important macro value, societal value, is truth. Virtually all evil emanates from lies."

Feb. 18, 2014, Dennis said: "People think brains are more important than everything. I knew at such a young age that was not true. I saw these kids in high school, some of them had such magnificent brains, but they couldn't navigate life. There were kids with great brains who cheated on tests..."

"I think those studies [that show a correlation between IQ and delayed gratification], if they exist, are crap. The idea that IQ correlates with character sickens me. You think a person of normal intelligence doesn't understand delayed gratification but a person with an Einstein IQ understands it better?"

Caller: "I think they're able to live in the future a little bit more."

Dennis: "Do you know how many brilliant Nazis and Communists there were? There were more intellectuals who supported Stalin than hardhats. I'm giving you a powerful example of the lack of correlation between brilliance, great brains, and decency. There is no correlation."

Caller: "Maybe it works better in the other direction and say that most people who become petty criminals and live lives of characterless drift tend to not have high intelligence."

Dennis: "That's a good question. I don't think it's necessary. I think people of completely average intelligence can be superior human beings. I don't think the saints of the 20th Century, like those who rescued Jews in the Holocaust, had extraordinary IQs."

"The brains thing blows my mind. I know I have a good brain, but I have rarely been impressed with brains. So what? It's a blessing like a good voice is a blessing. It never excited me when I would meet brilliant people. If they weren't good, they were boring. I felt that as a child and I feel that today. Goodness interests me more than brilliance."

"This reveling in brains drives me crazy. It's like revelling in baseball ability. If you have it, great, but it doesn't make you who you are."

"The stupid stupid notion that brains determine your life. Common sense is more important than brains. Wisdom is more important than brains... The average person is perfectly intelligent enough to deal with life. I have met very very few people that I walked away thinking, that person has a very low IQ. Everybody I work with at my home radio station is bright. Every single person. Since it runs across the gamut of human background, I have to believe that the vast majority of people are bright... I know one rocket scientist who is an emotional and psychological basketcase. It's a very narrow greatness, brains. Without wisdom, common sense, and character, it's nothing."

"If you don't know what to do with your IQ, what's the good of having a Stradivarius IQ?"

"People put up bumper stickers, 'My child is on the honor roll.' I've never been impressed with that. How about, 'My child is honorable.'"

Philosopher Michael Levin said in 1998: "Belief in the reality and significance of intelligence is inversely correlated with education, which is correlated with IQ. You have to be very intelligent to believe there is no such thing as intelligence."

Gedaliah Braun wrote in 2009:

I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that called for an apology.

It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking—as does planning for the future—and that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African...

It has long seemed to me that blacks tend to lack self-awareness. If such awareness is necessary for developing abstract concepts it is not surprising that African languages have so few abstract terms. A lack of self-awareness—or introspection—has advantages. In my experience neurotic behavior, characterized by excessive and unhealthy self-consciousness, is uncommon among blacks. I am also confident that sexual dysfunction, which is characterized by excessive self-consciousness, is less common among blacks than whites.

Time is another abstract concept with which Africans seem to have difficulties... It appears that the Zulu word for “future”—isikhati—is the same as the word for time, as well as for space. Realistically, this means that these concepts probably do not exist in Zulu thought. It also appears that there is no word for the past—meaning, the time preceding the present. The past did exist, but no longer exists. Hence, people who may have problems thinking of things that do not exist will have trouble thinking of the past as well as the future.

This has an obvious bearing on such sentiments as gratitude and loyalty, which I have long noticed are uncommon among Africans. We feel gratitude for things that happened in the past, but for those with little sense of the past such feelings are less likely to arise...

In America, blacks are said to have a “tendency to approximate space, numbers and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy.” (Star, June 8, 1988, p.10.) In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice the identical triumvirate—space, numbers, and time. Is it just a coincidence that these three highly abstract concepts are the ones with which blacks — everywhere — seem to have such difficulties?

White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later that power outages began, which eventually reached crisis proportions. The principle reason for this is simply lack of maintenance on the generating equipment... In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it would be hard to argue that this is wholly unrelated to the fact that when people throughout Africa say “nothing works,” it is only an exaggeration. 

Whereas Western cultures internalize norms—“Don’t do that!” for a child, eventually becomes “I mustn’t do that” for an adult—African cultures do not. They rely entirely on external controls on behavior from tribal elders and other sources of authority. When Africans were detribalized, these external constraints disappeared, and since there never were internal constraints, the results were crime, drugs, promiscuity, etc. Where there have been other forms of control—as in white-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa, or the segregated American South—this behavior was kept within tolerable limits. But when even these controls disappear there is often unbridled violence...

One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the diminished understanding of time, is that Africans evolved in a climate where they could live day to day without having to think ahead. They never developed this ability because they had no need for it. Whites, on the other hand, evolved under circumstances in which they had to consider what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store enough fuel and food for the winter. For them it was sink or swim...

According to now-discredited folk wisdom, blacks are “children in adult bodies,” but there may be some foundation to this view. The average African adult has the raw IQ score of the average 11-year-old white child. This is about the age at which white children begin to internalize morality and no longer need such strong external enforcers...

Another aspect of African behavior that liberals do their best to ignore but that nevertheless requires an explanation is gratuitous cruelty. A reviewer of Driving South, a 1993 book by David Robbins, writes:

"A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence ... It’s like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise appear normal. ... At the slightest provocation their blood-lust is aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and agonizing death.” (Citizen [Johannesburg], July 12, 1993, p.6.)"

There is something so unspeakably vile about this, something so beyond depravity, that the human brain recoils. This is not merely the absence of human empathy, but the positive enjoyment of human suffering, all the more so when it is “slow and agonizing.” Can you imagine jeering at and mocking someone in such horrible agony? During the apartheid era, black activists used to kill traitors and enemies by “necklacing” them. An old tire was put around the victim’s neck, filled with gasoline, and—but it is best to let an eye-witness describe what happened next:

“The petrol-filled tyre is jammed on your shoulders and a lighter is placed within reach . ... Your fingers are broken, needles are pushed up your nose and you are tortured until you put the lighter to the petrol yourself.” (Citizen; “SA’s New Nazis,” August 10, 1993, p.18.)

The author of an article in the Chicago Tribune, describing the equally gruesome way the Hutu killed Tutsi in the Burundi massacres, marveled at “the ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible thought. It’s beyond my reach.” (“Hutu Killers Danced In Blood Of Victims, Videotapes Show,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1995, p.8.) The lack of any moral sense is further evidenced by their having videotaped their crimes, “apparently want[ing] to record ... [them] for posterity.” Unlike Nazi war criminals, who hid their deeds, these people apparently took pride in their work...

In 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old American on a Fulbright scholarship, was living in South Africa, where she spent most of her time in black townships helping blacks. One day when she was driving three African friends home, young blacks stopped the car, dragged her out, and killed her because she was white. A retired senior South African judge, Rex van Schalkwyk, in his 1998 book One Miracle is Not Enough, quotes from a newspaper report on the trial of her killers: “Supporters of the three men accused of murdering [her] ... burst out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain.” This behavior, Van Schalkwyk wrote, “is impossible to explain in terms accessible to rational minds.” (pp. 188-89.)

These incidents and the responses they evoke—“the human brain recoils,” “beyond my reach,” “impossible to explain to rational minds” — represent a pattern of behavior and thinking that cannot be wished away, and offer additional support for my claim that Africans are deficient in moral consciousness.

I have long suspected that the idea of rape is not the same in Africa as elsewhere, and now I find confirmation of this in Newsweek:

“According to a three-year study [in Johannesburg] ... more than half of the young people interviewed — both male and female — believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute sexual violence ... [T]he casual manner in which South African teens discuss coercive relationships and unprotected sex is staggering.” (Tom Masland, “Breaking The Silence,” Newsweek, July 9, 2000.)

Clearly, many blacks do not think rape is anything to be ashamed of.

The Newsweek author is puzzled by widespread behavior that is known to lead to AIDS, asking “Why has the safe-sex effort failed so abjectly?” Well, aside from their profoundly different attitudes towards sex and violence and their heightened libido, a major factor could be their diminished concept of time and reduced ability to think ahead...

An article about gang rape in the left-wing British paper, the Guardian, confirms this when it quotes a young black woman: “The thing is, they [black men] don’t see it as rape, as us being forced. They just see it as pleasure for them.” (Rose George, “They Don’t See it as Rape. They Just See it as Pleasure for Them,” June 5, 2004.) A similar attitude seems to be shared among some American blacks who casually refer to gang rape as “running a train.” (Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler, Vintage Books, 1995.)

Africans, I believe, may generally lack the concepts of subjunctivity and counterfactuality. Subjunctivity is conveyed in such statements as, “What would you have done if I hadn’t showed up?” This is contrary to fact because I did show up, and it is now impossible for me not to have shown up. We are asking someone to imagine what he would have done if something that didn’t happen (and now couldn’t happen) had happened. This requires self-consciousness, and I have already described blacks’ possible deficiency in this respect. It is obvious that animals, for example, cannot think counterfactually, because of their complete lack of self-awareness...

In his 1990 book Devil’s Night, Ze’ev Chafets quotes a black woman speaking about the problems of Detroit: “I know some people won’t like this, but whenever you get a whole lot of black people, you’re gonna have problems. Blacks are ignorant and rude.” (pp. 76-77.)

If some Africans cannot clearly imagine what their own rude behavior feels like to others—in other words, if they cannot put themselves in the other person’s shoes—they will be incapable of understanding what rudeness is. For them, what we call rude may be normal and therefore, from their perspective, not really rude. Africans may therefore not be offended by behavior we would consider rude — not keeping appointments, for example. One might even conjecture that African cruelty is not the same as white cruelty, since Africans may not be fully aware of the nature of their behavior, whereas such awareness is an essential part of “real” cruelty.

I am hardly the only one to notice this obliviousness to others that sometimes characterizes black behavior. Walt Harrington, a white liberal married to a light-skinned black, makes some surprising admissions in his 1994 book, Crossings: A White Man’s Journey Into Black America:

“I notice a small car ... in the distance. Suddenly ... a bag of garbage flies out its window . ... I think, I’ll bet they’re blacks. Over the years I’ve noticed more blacks littering than whites. I hate to admit this because it is a prejudice. But as I pass the car, I see that my reflex was correct—[they are blacks].

“[As I pull] into a McDonald’s drive-through ... [I see that] the car in front of me had four black[s] in it. Again ... my mind made its unconscious calculation: We’ll be sitting here forever while these people decide what to order. I literally shook my head . ... My God, my kids are half black! But then the kicker: we waited and waited and waited. Each of the four ... leaned out the window and ordered individually. The order was changed several times. We sat and sat, and I again shook my head, this time at the conundrum that is race in America.

“I knew that the buried sentiment that had made me predict this disorganization ... was ... racist. ... But my prediction was right.” (pp. 234-35.)

Africans also tend to litter. To understand this we must ask why whites don’t litter, at least not as much. We ask ourselves: “What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere? It would be a mess. So you shouldn’t do it!” Blacks’ possible deficiency in abstract thinking makes such reasoning more difficult, so any behavior requiring such thinking is less likely to develop in their cultures. Even after living for generations in societies where such thinking is commonplace, many may still fail to absorb it.

Say the authors of the book, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, "Contrary to Dennis Prager, psychological studies that overturn our common sense are sometimes right. Indeed, one of our primary goals in this book is to encourage you to mistrust your common sense when evaluating psychological claims. As a general rule, you should consult research evidence, not your intuitions, when deciding whether a scientific claim is correct. Research suggests that snap judgments are often helpful in sizing up people and in forecasting our likes and dislikes, but they can be wildly inaccurate when it comes to gauging the accuracy of psychological theories or assertions."

When it comes to studies Dennis likes, he has a difference attitude. Mar. 26, 2014, he said: "There is no evidence to support the notion that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease. I have been eschewing chicken skin for the past 25 years. It makes me sick to think of all the boring chicken I've been eating when all the taste is in the skin. You don't know how much importance I attach to this that this is the new study. It applies to so much."

"I bought the saturated fat issue. I've been eating non-fat yoghurt, which, with one or two exceptions, is white paste. The ultimate -- non-fat milk. Why not ask for white water?"

According to Steve Sailer: "The greatest trick the intelligent ever pulled was convincing the world intelligence doesn't exist."

Sailer wrote: "Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad -- for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms."

Sailer wrote:

To quantify the statement that "Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration," in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.

Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.

Joel Stein of the LA Times found in 2007 that people of Jewish background hold a large majority of the most powerful positions in Hollywood.

This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.

John Derbyshire wrote: "I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT—not ever again—be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently."

Experts in IQ such as Richwine note: "IQ scores can be thought of as individual probabilities that aggregate into certainties in large groups." In the words of NYU's Steven Goldberg, IQ is to achievement in people what weight is to achievement in offensive tackles in the NFL.

Slate published an essay by two Psychology professors Apr. 14, 2014:

IQ predicts many different measures of success. Exhibit A is evidence from research on job performance by the University of Iowa industrial psychologist Frank Schmidt and his late colleague John Hunter. Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers.

IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity. In a 2001 study published in the British Medical Journal, Scottish researchers Lawrence Whalley and Ian Deary identified more than 2,000 people who had taken part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932, a nationwide assessment of IQ. Remarkably, people with high IQs at age 11 were more considerably more likely to survive to old age than were people with lower IQs. For example, a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population) was 21 percent more likely to live to age 76 than a person with an IQ of 85. And the relationship between IQ and longevity remains statistically significant even after taking SES into account. Perhaps IQ reflects the mental resources—the reasoning and problem-solving skills—that people can bring to bear on maintaining their health and making wise decisions throughout life. This explanation is supported by evidence that higher-IQ individuals engage in more positive health behaviors, such as deciding to quit smoking...

Given everything that social scientists have learned about IQ and its broad predictive validity, it is reasonable to make it a factor in decisions such as whom to hire for a particular job or admit to a particular college or university. In fact, disregarding IQ—by admitting students to colleges or hiring people for jobs in which they are very likely to fail—is harmful both to individuals and to society. For example, in occupations where safety is paramount, employers could be incentivized to incorporate measures of cognitive ability into the recruitment process.

Professor Linda Gottfredson wrote:

1. IQ (as long as it's a good measure of g) predicts a broad range of life outcomes better than does SES [socio-economic status], from GPA to longevity. Corollary: You can wash out IQ's apparent predictive superiority only if you load your SES battery with additional surrogates for parents' or own g.

2. The phenotypic correlations between IQ and measures of social class (education, occupational prestige, income) are from a half to two-thirds genetic in origin.

3. SES cannot explain the big IQ differences among siblings growing up in the same household: They differ two-thirds as much in IQ, on the average (11-12 points), as do any two random strangers (~17 points). This is a glaring fact that SES enthusiasts have studiously ignored.

4. Adult functional literacy (e.g., see the fed's NALS survey) predicts life outcomes in exactly the same pattern as does IQ, though they won't tell you that. Functional literacy is measured by having subjects carry out everyday life tasks, such as using a menu to figure out the price for something. Persons scoring at levels 1-2 (out of 5) have been described as not having the ability to use their rights or meet their responsibilities in the modern world (40% of whites, 80% of blacks). Pick out a few NALS tasks at various levels and ask your critic what % of adults s/he thinks can perform them. They will be shocked and so will you when you see the data--go to my 1997 "Why g matters" article for NALS, or my 2002 "highly general and highly practical" chapter for health literacy items--e.g., on diabetes.

5. IQ predicts on-the-job performance better overall than any other single predictor (SES isn't even in the running), it predicts better when performance is objectively rather than subjectively measured, and when the tasks/occupations are more complex in what they require workers to do. At the same cognitive complexity level, IQ predicts job performance equally well in manual and non-manual jobs (e.g., trades vs. clerical. The exact same complexity pattern is found with functional literacy--the hardest items are the most complex (require more inference, are abstract rather than concrete, contain more distracting irrelevant information, etc.)

6. A large followup of Australian veterans found that IQ was the best predictor of death by age 40 (had 50+ predictors). Vehicle fatalities were the biggest cause (as is typical), and, compared to men with IQs of 100+, men of IQ85-100 had twice the rate and men IQ 80-85 had three times the rate. (Remember, SES could not explain this.) The US (and apparently Australia) forbid induction of persons below IQ 80 because they are not sufficiently trainable--found out the hard way.

7. Finally, if you succeed in describing g as a general learning and reasoning ability (one that gives high g people an increasing edge when tasks are more complex), then it is easy to show g's life and death relevance when you describe how health self-care and accident prevention are highly dependent on learning and reasoning. Consider what it takes to be an effective diabetic--lots and lots of judgment on a daily basis, or you're likely to lose your sight, your limbs, etc.

Gottfredson wrote:

Of all human traits, variation in general intelligence (g) is the functionally most important in modern life. The first question that behavior genetics tackled was ‘‘how heritable are within-group differences in intelligence?’’—the answer: ‘‘very.’’

Gottfredson said: "Keep in mind that false belief in infinite human malleability led to some of the worst horrors of the 20th century. I also think it is patronizing and usually self-serving when elites contend that the American public cannot be trusted with certain facts."

Gottfredson wrote:

If all 13‐year‐olds took the same 15‐minute test (WASI), I could give you each child’s odds for all these adult outcomes without knowing anything else about them.
– Drops out of high school,
– Holds mostly unskilled jobs, skilled jobs vs. professional jobs
– Performs those jobs well
– Lives in poverty AND
– Can find a particular intersection on a map, or grams of carbohydrate per serving on a food label
– Adheres to a medical treatment regimen for diabetes or other chronic illness
– Dies prematurely

Gottfredson wrote:

The first step in assessing the real-life importance of g/IQ is to determine whether scores on highly g-loaded tests (tests that measure g well) predict differences in valued life outcomes. Correlations do not prove causation, but they are a first step in doing so. The most studied outcomes are performance in school (such as school marks and achievement test scores), performance on the job (mostly supervisor ratings), socioeconomic advancement (level of education, occupation, and income), and social pathology (adult criminality, poverty, unemployment, dependence on welfare, children outside of marriage). The relations of intelligence to health, health behavior, resilience in the face of extreme adversity, longevity (length of life), and functional literacy (the ability to do routine reading, writing, and arithmetic tasks in modern societies) have also begun to draw much attention. Thousands of studies have looked at the impact of mental abilities on school and job performance, and large national longitudinal studies in both Europe and the United States have shown that IQ is related to various forms of socioeconomic success and failure. Here are their most general findings about g’s association with life outcomes.

Correlations with IQ are pervasive. IQ predicts all the foregoing outcomes to some degree. Subjective well-being (happiness) is the rare exception: it is regularly found not to correlate meaningfully with IQ level. In general, g relates more to instrumental behavior than emotional reactions.

Correlations with IQ vary systematically by type of outcome. IQ’s predictive value ranges widely, depending on the outcome in question. For example, when averaged over several years, performance on standardized tests of academic achievement correlates about as highly with IQ as two IQ tests do with each other (over .8 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0). In contrast, correlations with IQ are closer to .6-.7 for school marks, years of education completed, and longevity. They are about .5 with prestige level of occupation, .3 to .4 with income (the correlations rising with age), and .2 with law-abidingness.

Correlations with IQ are higher when tasks are more complex. To illustrate, when jobs are ranked in overall complexity of work, the correlations between IQ and job performance rise from .2 for simple, unskilled jobs, to .5 in middle-level jobs (skilled trades, most clerical work), to .8 in the most complex (doctors, engineers, top executives). Stated another way, it matters little how intelligent workers are in low-level jobs, but it matters a great deal in high-level jobs, regardless of whether the job seems academic or not.

IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental. IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background...

Social privilege theory also predicts that the impact of environmental conditions will accumulate with age, but longitudinal studies show that IQ actually becomes more heritable over the life span (from 40% before entering elementary school to 80% by mid-adulthood). Perhaps most surprising of all, differences in family advantage have no lasting effect on IQ by adolescence, at least in the U.S. and Europe, so family members are no more alike in IQ by adulthood than their genetic relatedness would predict...To take one example, the post-World War II communist government of Warsaw, Poland, assigned families of all social classes to the same housing, schools, and health services, but this social leveling failed to narrow intelligence differences in the next generation...

The pattern is that, when two groups differ in average IQ, the proportions of their populations found at each point on the IQ distribution differ most at the extremes, or tails, of the IQ distribution. This is seen most clearly by looking at the ratios in the bottom three rows of Figure 3. Take, for example, blacks and whites above IQ 100. Blacks become progressively rarer, relative to whites, at higher IQ levels: 1:3 above IQ 100, 1:7 above IQ 110, and only 1:30 above IQ 125...

IQ 75 signals the ability level below which individuals are not likely to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies. They are likely to be eligible for special educational services in school and for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from the U.S. government, which is financial support provided to mentally and physically disabled adults. Of course, many do marry, hold a job, raise children, and otherwise function adequately as adults. However, their independence is precarious because they have difficulty getting and keeping jobs that pay a living wage. They are difficult to train except for the simplest tasks, so they are fortunate in industrialized nations to get any paying job at all. While only 1 out of 50 Asian-Americans faces such risk, Figure 3 shows that 1 out of 6 black- Americans does.

IQ 85 is a second important minimum threshold because the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level. Although the military is often viewed as the employer of last resort, this minimum standard rules out almost half of blacks (44%) and a third of Hispanics (34%), but far fewer whites (13%) and Asians (8%). The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs. Individuals in this IQ range are not considered mentally retarded and they therefore receive no special educational or social services, but their poor learning and reasoning abilities mean that they are not competitive for many jobs, if any, in the civilian economy. They live at the edge of unemployability in modern nations, and the jobs they do get are typically the least prestigious and lowest paying: for example, janitor, food service worker, hospital orderly, or parts assembler in a factory.

IQ 85 is also close to the upper boundary for Level 1 functional literacy, the lowest of five levels in the U.S. government’s 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). Adults at this literacy level are typically able to carry out only very simple tasks, such as locating the expiration date on a driver’s license or totaling a bank deposit slip, but they typically cannot perform more difficult tasks, such as locating two particular pieces of information in a sports article (Level 2), writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill (Level 3), determining correct change using information in a menu (Level 4), or determining shipping and total costs on an order form for items in a catalog (Level 5). Most routine communications with businesses and social service agencies, including job applications, are thus beyond the capabilities of persons with only Level 1 literacy. Their problem is not that they cannot read the words, but that they are not able to understand or use the ideas that the words convey...

IQ 105 can be viewed as the minimum threshold for achieving moderately high levels of success. It has been estimated to be the point at which individuals have a 50-50 chance of doing well enough in secondary school to be admitted to a four-year university in the United States. People above this level are highly competitive for middle-level jobs (clerical, crafts and repair, sales, police and firefighting), and they are good contenders for the lower tiers of managerial and professional work (supervisory, technical, accounting, nursing, teaching). Figure 3 shows that Asian-Americans are 6-7 times more likely than blacks to exceed the IQ 105 threshold. The percentages are 53%, 40%, 27%, and 8%, respectively, for Asians, whites, Hispanics, and blacks.

IQ 115 marks the ability threshold for being competitive as a candidate for graduate or professional school in the U.S. and thus for high levels of socioeconomic success. Partly because of their higher educational promise, individuals above this IQ level have the best prospects for gaining the most coveted occupational positions in a society. This is the IQ range in which individuals can be self-instructing and are, in fact, expected to instruct, advise, and supervise others in their community and work environments. This is therefore the IQ range from which cultural leaders tend to emerge and be recruited. The percentages exceeding this threshold are, respectively, 40% (Asians), 28% (whites), 10% (Hispanics), and 4% (blacks).

The most notable difference among Jewish groups is average IQ. While the Ashkenazi average is 110, the Sephardic average is about 99, close to that of Europeans. The Mizrahim score about 91, markedly lower than Europeans, but higher than the Arabs with whom they have lived, whose average is about 84. The genetically distinct Falashas have IQs of about 70, typical of sub-Saharan people.

These IQ differences have had an important impact on the achievement of each group. This is especially clear in Israel, where they live side by side. The Israeli population of about 6 million people (in 2000) is about 40 percent Mizrahim, about 40 percent “European,” and about 20 percent Arab Muslims. Comparisons are complicated, however, because the 2.4 million characterized as European include 110,000 Sephardim. Furthermore, many in the group classified as European Jews are immigrants from Russia, a large number of whom—some Israeli demographers estimate as many as 900,000—are not Jews at all. They are ethnic Russians “who pretended to be Jews in order to obtain permission to leave the Soviet Union.” For these reasons the average IQ of those classified as European Jews is estimated to be about 106, lower than would be the case if all were Ashkenazim.

Nevertheless, on all measures of social and educational success, the Europeans do better than the Mizrahim, who in turn do better than the Arab citizens, a ranking perfectly consistent with IQ estimates. Of particular interest are the Ethiopians, who do very poorly, and behave like American blacks. According to an Israeli researcher, many “identify with an ‘aggressive and semi-criminal African-American youth culture’ and have become a ‘kind of ethnic underclass.’"

Charles Murray said:"IQ is a raw material to which you add all sorts of other things [such as ethics and industriousness] which we don't know how to measure well."

"Half of the children are below average, which by the way, I have gotten hissed for saying on college campuses... The limits on the ability to learn are quite strict... There are sharp constraints on what anybody who is average to below can learn."

Dennis refuses to read the 1994 book by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, The Bell Curve. Best not to know. 

Yet when it came to a topic he cared about -- marijuana use -- Dennis read approvingly from the Wall Street Journal Jan. 23, 2014 that marijuana lowered teenager's IQ: "I believe that."

So in Prager's view, IQ matters not at all except for when it does.

Steve Sailer wrote in 2009:

Have you ever noticed how in the New York Times' universe, IQ is unquestionably valid and terribly, terribly important in the Health section of the newspaper? (See, for example, the NYT's recurrent coverage of the effects of the exposure to lead in reducing I.Q.) In this Health section article, for example, the Times is getting worked up over an IQ test given to 2-3 year olds, which is pushing the age limits of IQ testing. And the sample size is only 53. And yet, there's absolutely zero quibbling about the usefulness of IQ testing in this article. It's simply assumed that, of course, everybody knows that a difference in average IQ scores of about eight points is a big deal. Yet, in the Education section of the Times, where you might think IQ would be even more relevant, it rarely comes up. And when it does put in an unwelcome appearance, it is often dismissed as discredited.

Dennis has math skills below that of the average crack dealer. In that respect, he's the opposite of Charles Murray, who has an MIT PhD in quantitative analysis. One way of understanding Prager's veneration of common sense over studies is that Dennis can't analyze statistics and therefore he prioritizes his gut. 

In a 2009 interview at the International Society for Intelligence Research, Dr. Murray said: "Intelligence is absolutely essential in economics and political science except it is always called 'educational attainment.' It is the construct that dare not speak its name because people will not confront that educational attainment is statistically highly correlated with cognitive ability and it just might be the cognitive ability that is responsible for social outcomes."

"People who deal with public policy on the right are every bit as scared of IQ as people on the left. I keep thinking this is bound to end real soon, within the next decade, as neuro-scientists and geneticists unravel this story."

"The ability of social scientists to not look at things they don't want to look at is stunning."

"You do not have to make a choice between writing about these topics and sacrificing your devotion to the truth. You can write about almost anything as long you write it obscurely enough. The great example of that was David C. Rowe. He wrote a piece for one of the major psychological magazines about the architecture of the black-white difference and it was an incredibly powerful argument that what you were looking at was not the result of environmental differences. It was an elegant piece of work but it was also very difficult. David did not go out of his way to make it obvious what he was saying and it got no flack."

"If you decide you are going to write for a general audience and you are on some of these taboo topics, you better be the right personality type. Arthur Jensen has such great equanimity that it never touched him. Phil Rushton just has a great time with the whole thing and thoroughly enjoys the fight. I was clinically depressed for about six months after The Bell Curve came out. I hated it. It was no fun."

"I've got a book in the works, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I have now figured out a way to avoid being called a racist. I'm just going to talk about non-Hispanic whites... It just makes the whole interpretative process easier."

If IQ shapes how people turn out more than preaching does, than Dennis Prager is less important, but if what America most needs is moral instruction, then Prager is the man.

Dennis said on his radio show (circa 1995) that anyone who believes that blacks have on average a lower intelligence is a racist. He was embarrassed to have had a guest on his show (circa 1994) who said that different races have different statistical IQ (accepted by virtually all psychometricians).

On Oct. 23, 2013, Dennis said to his guest, John Alford, associate professor of political science at Rice University and one of three authors of the new book,Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences: "Isn't that a risky thing that you undertook to argue that there are biological bases for political positions?"

Sometimes telling the truth is risky.

Because Dennis refuses to learn about IQ, much of reality befuddles him. For instance, he doesn't know why many employers require a college degree as a substitute for banned IQ testing of potential workers.

Law professor Amy L. Wax wrote in 2012:

Although non-cognitive capacities make some difference, general intelligence is simply a more important variable for achieving proficiency in a wide range of occupations. This is true even in professions, such as nursing or teaching, that would seem to depend heavily on special non-cognitive skills like compassion or patience. Indeed, it is safe to say that cognitive ability better predicts on-the-job performance than does any personality trait or talent that IOP experts have yet identified. Conscientiousness — the personality trait with the strongest documented link to job success — shows a correlation with job performance in the range of about 0.2 to 0.4, in contrast with the significantly higher correlation of 0.5 or more for IQ. Contrary to the Supreme Court's assumption in Griggs, the comparative power of IQ extends even to relatively uncomplicated positions requiring modest skills, such as clerical or retail work. What this means is that hiring on the basis of intelligence — as opposed to other, non-cognitive personal attributes or talents — will almost always produce better-performing workers.

On Oct. 31, 2013, a caller asked: "Why I agree with everything you said about the educational system in the United States and how you could much more wisely spend $50,000 a year on education, the bottom line still in this country is that you cannot get a substantial job in this country without a degree. How do you get around that?"

Dennis: "There is an answer -- social pressure on companies to drop that awful that awful policy that you have to have a college degree when it is irrelevant to 99% of the jobs that people do with a college degree. I would like to know why you need a college degree for almost any job in this country?"

As James Taranto doesn't stick his head in the sand on this issue, he can describe in the Wall Street Journal "the historic origins of the higher-ed industry's credential cartel. As we've explained before, it goes back to Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that companies could not administer IQ tests because they had a racially "disparate impact"--that is, it discriminates against blacks because they score more poorly on average than whites do.

"The disparate-impact test in Griggs, written into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, applies only to employers. Educational institutions are free to administer IQ tests, which is essentially what the SAT and other entrance exams are. To assure that their degrees pass muster as a condition of employment, colleges and universities go to extreme lengths to ensure a "diverse" student body, including discriminating in favor of blacks (and selected other minorities) in admissions."

On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: "We have in the United States a certain percentage of conscienceless people. When I think about this knockout game and the laughter that accompanies it, we have a certain percentage of young people, disproportionately among blacks, that are conscienceless. At some point are we going to drop this notion that racism causes this and just confront this terrible fact?"

Former Heritage Foundation policy analyst Jason Richwine points how IQ affects morality:

IQ, a construct that psychologists use to estimate general intelligence, has been separately linked to elements of social capital, such as sophisticated ethical thinking, altruism, planning for the future, political awareness, adherence to informal community standards of behavior, and cooperation for the greater good.

The social attitudes of citizens are the building blocks of social capital, and IQ plays a role in shaping many of them. For example, psychologists have developed measures of moral reasoning that overlap substantially with IQ. When confronted with a moral dilemma, a person operating at the lowest level of moral reasoning would consider only his own self-interest. As moral reasoning becomes more sophisticated, people tend to give more consideration to community welfare, and to apply abstract principles to resolve moral dilemmas. Because of the cognitive demands of such reasoning, smarter people are much more likely to transcend simple self-interest in their ethical thinking. People who do so are likely to be better neighbors and better citizens.

Intelligent people are also likely to be more altruistic, which could help form tighter bonds within communities...

It makes intuitive sense that smarter people should be able to internalize future rewards more easily. They are probably more future-oriented because they can better manipulate their surroundings, whereas incompetent people exert less control on their future, making it murky and unknown. Whatever the cause, the impulsivity of low-IQ people has serious implications for social capital. People in less intelligent populations will be less willing to set up networks for potential long-term payoffs, make personal investments in the community, and follow basic norms of behavior with the expectation of future reciprocity.

The American Psychological Association (APA) tried to set the record straight in 1996 with a report written by a committee of experts. Among the specific conclusions drawn by the APA were that IQ tests reliably measure a real human trait, that ethnic differences in average IQ exist, that good tests of IQ are not culturally biased against minority groups, and that IQ is a product of both genetic inheritance and early childhood environment. Another report signed by 52 experts, entitled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” stated similar facts and was printed in the Wall Street Journal.

So when Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, speculated in 2005 that women might be naturally less gifted in math and science, the intense backlash contributed to his ouster.

Two years later, when famed scientist James Watson noted the low average IQ scores of sub-Saharan Africans, he was forced to resign from his lab, taking his Nobel Prize with him.

When a Harvard law student was discovered in 2010 to have suggested in a private email that the black-white IQ gap might have a genetic component, the dean publicly condemned her amid a campus-wide outcry. Only profuse apologies seem to have saved her career.

In none of these cases did an appeal to science tamp down the controversy or help to prevent future ones. My own time in the media crosshairs would be no different.

So what did I write that created such a fuss? In brief, my dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on a variety of cognitive tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive deficit rather than to culture or language bias. It analyzes how that deficit could affect socioeconomic assimilation, and concludes by exploring how IQ selection might be incorporated, as one factor among many, into immigration policy.

Because a large number of recent immigrants are from Latin America, I reviewed the literature showing that Hispanic IQ scores fall between white and black scores in the United States. This fact isn’t controversial among experts, but citing it seems to have fueled much of the media backlash.

While dining out last week, I periodically looked up at one of the television monitors to see the score of the first game of the NBA finals. As there was no sound on to interrupt diners’ conversations, the monitor was in caption mode: One could read rather than hear the words spoken. At the conclusion of the game, an announcer was interviewing a member of the victorious Miami Heat players. I saw from the captions the player saying the words “they isn’t.”

Closed captions display the words spoken. They don’t correct for poor grammar.

All I could think was: How can a grown man in America today say “they isn’t” rather than “they aren’t”?

First, how is it possible for anyone to graduate an American elementary school, not to mention a high school or, most incredibly, attend college, and leave with an inability to conjugate the verb “to be”?

Second, has anyone — a parent or another relative, a teacher, a friend, a coach — in that player’s life ever corrected his grammar?

I assume that the answer to the second question is “No.”

And I assume that the answers to both questions are related: The left, which dominates our culture and educational institutions, has too often lowered standards for black Americans. Even worse, it has declared that if you are black, “they isn’t” is not only not to be corrected, but many in academia have declared it an acceptable form of English, i.e., Ebonics, or Black English.

It doesn’t end. I saw “they isn’t” the same week the Democrats and others on the left virtually unanimously condemned all Republican attempts in state legislatures to pass legislation requiring voters to show a photo ID. The Democrats labeled it a means of “disenfranchising” blacks. Many Democrats compared it to Jim Crow laws.

“Jim Crow, move over — the Wisconsin Republicans have taken your place,” charged Wisconsin Democratic State Sen. Bob Jauch, referring to his state’s new voter ID law.

It is hard to imagine a more demeaning statement about black America than labeling demands that all voters show a photo ID anti-black.

Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S.. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language...

The bell curves for some groups (Jews and East Asians) are centered somewhat higher than for whites in general. Other groups (blacks and Hispanics) are centered somewhat lower than non-Hispanic whites...

The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks...

IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Its relation to the welfare and performance of individuals is very strong in some arenas in life (education, military training), moderate but robust in others (social competence), and modest but consistent in others (law-abidingness). Whatever IQ tests measure, it is of great practical and social importance.

A high IQ is an advantage in life because virtually all activities require some reasoning and decision-making. Conversely, a low IQ is often a disadvantage, especially in disorganized environments. Of course, a high IQ no more guarantees success than a low IQ guarantees failure in life. There are many exceptions, but the odds for success in our society greatly favor individuals with higher IQs.

The practical advantages of having a higher IQ increase as life settings become more complex (novel, ambiguous, changing, unpredictable, or multifaceted). For example, a high IQ is generally necessary to perform well in highly complex or fluid jobs (the professions, management); it is a considerable advantage in moderately complex jobs (crafts, clerical and police work); but it provides less advantage in settings that require only routine decision making or simple problem solving (unskilled work).

There is no persuasive evidence that the IQ bell curves for different racial-ethnic groups are converging.

Linda Gottfredson wrote:

Adults near the threshold for mild mental retardation (IQ 70) can usually learn simple work tasks (mopping a floor, answering a telephone, etc) if given sufficient hands-on, one-on-one, repetitive instruction and supervision. People of average psychometric intelligence (IQ 100) can learn a wide variety of routine procedures via written materials and demonstration. Individuals near the threshold for mild giftedness (IQ 130) can be self-instructing...

On the whole, g is not correlated with differences in personality, temperament, or physical strength, and it is only moderately correlated with interpersonal... skills...

Finally, g level has highly generalized effects on individuals' wellbeing, from physical health to social status... g...is generally the best single predictor -- better than socioeconomic status -- of both the good and the bad life outcomes that concern policymakers (e.g. success in school and work, delinquency)... Compare, for instance, the risks facing young white adults of very low IQ (below 75) to those of very high IQ (above 125). The former are twice as likely to become divorced within five years (21% versus 9%), but their risk of unemployment is 6-fold (12% versus 2%) and living in poverty is 15-fold (30% versus 2%)...

Cohort studies reveal robust relations between childhood IQ and adult mortality... [E]ach additional IQ point was associated with a 1% reduction in relative risk of death...

IQ was the best predictor of motor vehicle fatalities [three times as high for people with IQs 80-85 as compared to those scoring 100-115].

Mar. 20, 2014, Dennis said: "Very few people are stupid... What renders people to stupid conclusions is agendas."

According to Linda Gottfredson, 40% of urban out-patients don't understand when their next doctor's appointment is scheduled, 70% don't understand how many pills of a prescription to take, and 95% don't understand the informed consent form. Stupidity kills and it is not evenly distributed among the races. 

According to the results of the NALS 1993, most blacks can't write a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill, let alone use an eligibility pamphlet to calculate SSI benefits. About half will struggle to locate an intersection on a map.

When I worked in insurance and law offices, many of our black and latino clients didn't know how to use a self-sealing envelope. I had to include instructions in our letters. Many couldn't spell the street they lived on. One latino got a big settlement, spent it all on cocaine, and promptly got arrested for raping a girl in a park. 

Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Mar. 16, 2014:

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Martin Luther King

Dennis Prager often praises Martin Luther King. On Jan. 27, 2011, Dennis's Facebook page said: "Celebrate Martin Luther King day today by reading and sharing the profound 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail.' Print it out and put it on the kitchen table for the kids to read. It's an important national holiday. Put the flag out and talk about the Reverend and read excerpts at dinner tonight."

National Review through the 1970s supported white segregation around the world while Dennis has always called such segregation "evil", including in his first edition of Ultimate Issues.
Will Herberg, who Prager often cites about Judaism, blamed Martin Luther King for the 1965 Los Angeles Riots, writing in the Sept. 7, 1965 National Review:

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the ‘cake of custom’ that holds us together. With their doctrine of ‘civil disobedience’ they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes...that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance... And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted ‘school strikes’ sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit violation of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed.

In its August 24, 1957 issue, National Review editorialized against giving blacks the right to vote because it would threaten civilization in the South: 

The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct... It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class... Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.

But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named ‘civil rights movement’–that is, the Negro revolt . . . . But the Court carries its share of the blame. Its decrees, beginning with Brown, have on the one hand encouraged the least responsible of the Negro leaders in the course of extra-legal and illegal struggle that we now witness around us... Brown, as National Review declared many years ago, was bad law and bad sociology. We are now tasting its bitter fruits. Race relations in the country are ten times worse than in 1954.

Dr. Montagu, who composed the UNESCO Statement on Race, has again skillfully trimmed the facts of anthropology to fit the Liberal propaganda line. Every anthropologist knows, for example, that aborigines in Australia propagated their species for a hundred thousand years without ever suspecting that pregnancy might be a consequence of sexual intercourse. Equally striking evidence of intellectual capacity is provided by the many peoples that never discovered how to kindle a fire or plant a seed. But Dr. Montagu, after making a great show of cautious objectivity, proclaims that ‘anthropologists are unable to find any evidence’ of ‘significant differences in mental capacity’ between ‘ethnic groups.’ If you can tell such whoppers with a straight face, you too can ask the ‘United Nations’ to recognize your right to largesse from the pockets of American taxpayers.

Starting in 2002, NationalReview.com published Dennis Prager's column every week. Once dominated by professors, the publication now primarily features pundits reacting to the events of the day.

In an Apr. 2, 2013 column praising the greatness of the Bible, Dennis included Martin Luther King in the same sentence as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln:

It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as "deists." It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. (yes, “the Reverend,” almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, “Dr.”) Martin Luther King, Jr., got his values.

It is values, not genetics, that account for white and asian accomplishment, according to Prager. Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis wrote:

In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race...

For example, from the day they enter college, many students are taught about white privilege -- how innately advantaged white students (and all other whites are). Last week, the president of Western Washington University posed the question on the university's website: "How do we make sure that in future years we are not as white as we are today?"

Imagine if the president of the University of California at Berkeley had posed the question, "How do we make sure that in future years we are not as Asian as we are today?"

Inner city young blacks who work hard in school are routinely chastised by other black youth for "acting white."

Regarding white privilege, last year, three academics at the University of Rhode Island wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"The American Psychological Association's educational goals for the psychology major include sociocultural and international awareness, with learning outcomes regarding mastery of concepts related to power and privilege. Other professional organizations, including the American Sociological Association, have developed similar learning goals for teaching in higher education. Instructors have been charged with teaching their white students to understand their own privileged positions in society relative to those of marginalized groups."

The key point here is that the word "values" never appears. Instead of asking what values made America's Founders great, the left asks what race, gender and class privileges enabled those men to found America. Instead of asking what values does the white majority (or, for that matter, on some campuses, the Asian majority) live by in order to succeed, and how can we help inculcate those values among more less successful people of all racial and ethnic groups, the left asks what privileges do whites have that enable them to get into colleges and graduate at a higher rate than blacks and Latinos.

The undermining of the very concept of values was starkly made clear last month at a national inter-college debate tournament.

As reported in the Atlantic last week:

"On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president's war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities."

In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like 'nigga authenticity' and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee's rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. 'F--- the time!' he yelled.

In a national intercollegiate debate contest, a black debating team won by transforming the topic of the debate, one that that had nothing to do with race, into a race question.

But to object to this, or to argue that a team might be disqualified for yelling "f--- the time" when told it had gone over the time limit, or to ask what performing hip-hop has to do with the topic "whether the U.S. president's war powers should be restricted" -- is now deemed to act white.

Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis said: "The American dream, the American value system, the Judeo-Christian value system is that race does not mean anything. It is the only moral belief. The Left has picked up where racial fascism left off."

"The answer to the racism of the '30s, '40s, and '50s, was to end racism, not to institute it in a different form."

"Why would I want to answer negative racism with affirmative racism? You have the same treatment of all people irrespective of color. The only answer to racism is to be color-blind. When you are not color-blind, you are racist. Well-intentioned racism is not better than ill-intentioned racism."

May 14, 2014, Dennis said: "We're told about old white men. The bane of society. Guess who supports the arts? Old white men. As they move on, who's going to support the arts. Boy, is this country going to long for old white men one day, especially left-wing institutions, all supported by them."

"Old white males should go on strike. See what happens to the institutions of America. To the museums. To the orchestras. To the ballets. To the operas. To the colleges. Who do you think gives to all these endowments? Who do you think buys the tickets to these [classical music] concerts? Last time I was at Disney Hall, it didn't look all that multi-racial and multi-ethnic to me. Pretty much all old white males and females. Maybe the group they love to attack has done some good for society or is that racist? Whenever the Left uses 'racist', it means that they don't have an argument."

"These WASP males made the greatest country in the world. It had nothing to do with their color. They could have been BASPs -- Black Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But they weren't. You are only allowed to crap on WASPs. If you say anything good, you're called a racist."

"You can have this stupidity about white privilege but you can't have white contributions. Can you imagine that? White contributions. Which do you think has been greater?"

"Why are Nigerians among the most successful Americans? What privilege did they have? What privilege did Koreans have to make such success in one generation?"

Why Are Jews Liberal?

Here are some highlights from a 2005 column by Dennis Prager as selected by Lawrence Auster:

* … Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well.

* Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right-wing—such as the words “right-wing” and “conservative.”
 
* Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion—especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity—with anti-Semitism.

* Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every “ism” of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion.

* The Jews’ religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.

* Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews’. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as “world citizens”; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.

As Prager describes it, the overwhelming majority of Jews oppose, fear, and regard as evil everything that our society is based on: conservative values, free enterprise, religion, Christianity, even nationhood itself, and they are compelled to these anti-American views by what they see as their religion.

One of the deepest disappointments in my life has been Jews’ opposition to wars against evil. I had always assumed that, as the victims of so much evil throughout history, and as heirs to the great moral teachings of the Bible and Judaism, Jews, of all people, would support fighting on behalf of victims of the greatest evils.

Take fighting Communism, for example. Along with Nazism, Communism was the most genocidal movement in human history; it actually enslaved and murdered considerably more people than Nazism. Yet, most Jews didn’t support anti-Communism in general nor anti-Communist wars in particular. Even worse, Jews were disproportionately pro-Communist. In Stalin’s time, the Yiddish press was the most pro-Communist press in the Western world. And among those in the West who gave Stalin the secrets to the atomic bomb, nearly every one was a Jew.

How could that be? How could so many people who see themselves as bearers of a great moral legacy, or who simply see themselves as highly moral, have either been supportive of the greatest mass murder machine ever devised; or, as was more often the case, opposed fighting the greatest mass murder machine ever devised?

On what moral grounds did Jews oppose supplying the South Vietnamese government with arms to help save itself from being taken over by Communist North Vietnam? Most American Jews not only opposed fighting the Communist regime of North Vietnam, they even opposed merely supplying the South Vietnamese government with military hardware so that it could defend itself when, in violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, North Vietnam attacked South Vietnam. And in those very same accords, America had promised to replace every South Vietnamese bullet and tank lost in defending itself.

After all, American Jews hadn’t opposed the Korean War, in which nearly 37,000 Americans and more than two million Koreans died. That war was a mirror of the Vietnam War. The southern half of the Korean peninsula — just like the southern half of Vietnam — was pro-West and anti-Communist; and the Communist North, backed by China and the Soviet Union, sought — in both Korea and Vietnam — to forcefully impose Communism on the south.

Nothing has changed today. Most American Jews vigorously supported President Barack Obama’s plan to remove all American troops from Iraq. The consequences, which everyone who opposed this plan knew would happen, were that Iraq would go from relative stability to mayhem and bloodbath. Why hasn’t this mattered to most American Jews?

In mid-November 2006 it was reported that Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress (for Minnesota‘s 5th congressional district), “will take his oath of office with his hand upon the Koran, the Islamic holy book.”^[1][2] In reaction to the news, conservative media pundit Dennis Prager criticized the decision in his November 28, 2006 column entitled “America, not Keith Ellison, decides what book a Congressman takes his oath on.”^[3] The column attracted national attention from both Ellison and Prager supporters. Presented with the fact that all members of the House officially swear in (or affirm) en masse without the use of any religious text, and that such works are only used in ceremonial reenactments afterwards, Prager stated “that’s the whole point: it’s exactly because it’s ceremonial that it matters”.^[4] In response to a wave of criticism, Prager released another column on the topic on December 5, 2006 entitled “A response to my many critics – and a solution”.^[5]
 

Prager rescinds call for Ellison not to serve

Despite writing that Ellison wants to use “the Koran. He should not be allowed to do so …If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book [the Bible], don’t serve in Congress”,^[3] in a telephone interview with the Associated Press, Mr Prager said he did not think Mr Ellison should be banned from serving. “I don’t think anything legal should be done about this.”^[4] In an interview with USA Today’s Andrea Stone, Prager announced “that he’s going to keep pressing the issue, though he conceded that trying to ban Ellison from choosing to use a Qur’an ‘may well be’ unconstitutional. He’ll be writing and talking about this issue again”. Prager said “I’m not arguing legality. I’m arguing what you should do.”^[33]

Prager dismisses Tanakh Oaths

Prager’s Nov. 28, 2006 article claimed that “for all of American history, Jews elected to public office have taken their oath on the Bible, even though they do not believe in the New Testament”.^[3] While for all of American history Jews elected to public office have indeed taken their oath on the Bible, several American members of Judaism elected to political office “have departed from the [Christian] Bible as well. Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle used the Tanakh when she took her oath in 2002, and Madeleine Kunin placed her hand on Jewish prayer books when she was sworn in as the first female governor of Vermont in 1985.”^[21] In the Federal Congress Debbie Wasserman Schultz also used a Tanakh(see above), as did Ed Koch (D-NY) who served in the US House from 1969 to 1977.^[34] Likewise, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) who is now entering his seventeenth term of office, stated “he had never used a [Christian] Bible at his own swearing-in ceremonies.”^[34]

When asked about this Prager said these “Jewish officeholders who had insisted on the Hebrew Bible were “secularists” who didn’t believe what was in it anyway.”^[33]

When confronted on November 30, 2006 CNN’s Paula Zahn Now by Eugene Volokh with the fact that “[Associate] Justice [of the Supreme Court, Arthur] Goldberg used the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible.” Prager responded “Justice Goldberg used [the] Old Testament, which is part of the American Bible.” Volokh began to point out that the lack of New Testament in Goldberg’s Bible proved that Prager’s assertions were mistaken, but was cut off as the segment ran out of time.^[28]

In his Dec. 5, 2006 article Prager again acknowledged some Jews had used the Tanakh, “Even the vast majority of Jews elected to office have used a Bible containing both the Old and New Testaments, even though Jews do not regard the New Testament as part of their Bible. A tiny number of Jews have used only the Old Testament. As a religious Jew, I of course understand their decision, but I disagree with it.”^[5]

Prager calls on Ellison to bring Bible with Qur’an

In his December 5, 2006 column entitled “A response to my many critics – and a solution”, Prager’s solution in the title is for Ellison to swear on the Islamic Qur’an which he believes to be sacred along with the Christian Bible which he does not. Prager wrote “It is not I, but Keith Ellison, who has engaged in disuniting the country. He can still help reunite it by simply bringing both books to his ceremonial swearing-in. Had he originally announced that he would do that, I would have written a different column — filled with praise of him. And there would be a lot less cursing and anger in America.”^[5] In a Dec. 7, 2006 interview Prager continued along these lines, saying “I’m afraid we are becoming a diverse, secular society without any roots, and this is symbolically an example of that. The Bible is the repository of our values, not the Constitution…and I’m asking him to honor that and include the Bible along with the Koran.”^[37]

As an example Prager has referenced the case in 1999 when “M. Osman Siddique, a Virginia businessman of Bangladeshi origin, used the Quran to take the oath when he became the U.S. ambassador to Fiji and three other Pacific nations: Nauru, Tonga and Tuvalu. He took the oath on the Bible and the Quran, with the Quran on top”.^[38] Siddique was “the first Muslim to be appointed to represent the United States abroad as an Ambassador. Following his swearing-in ceremony, Siddique said he believed he was the first American ambassador of the Islamic faith to take the oath of office with his hand on the Holy Qur’an. The Christian Bible is traditionally used to swear in US officials and Siddique said his wife, Catherine Mary Siddique, provided one for the ceremony.”^[39]

Appearing on MSNBC with Tucker Carlson, Prager said “If he [Ellison] had the Koran and a Bible as one Muslim ambassador did about 10 years ago, I think it was the ambassador to the Fiji Islands, don‘t recall exactly, I wouldn‘t have ever written the column. …If he can‘t bring the Bible along with his Koran, that’s a statement that we ought to take seriously. …We should pressure him to doing the great thing to unify Americans and bring the Bible along with the Koran. That’s not exactly a terrible demand. It doesn’t in any way compromise his Islamic faith. It says that he is saying to the American people, look, I am part of you. I don’t want to demolish the tradition that has been unbroken since George Washington. I don’t think that’s too much to ask of Keith Ellison.”^[25]

Ellison did not denigrate the Bible and spoke of the influence both Catholicism and Islam had on his development saying “people draw strength and moral courage from a variety of religious traditions. Mine have come from both Catholicism and Islam. I was raised Catholic and later became a Muslim while attending Wayne State University. I am inspired by the Quran’s message of an encompassing divine love, and a deep faith guides my life every day.”^[40]

Prager’s Dec. 27, 2006 column

On December 27, 2006 Prager returned to the issue in a column called “The culture war is about the authority of a book”^[49] Prager espoused that the root of the controversy was over people arguing if the Torah was inspired or not, “Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? …What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. …a belief or lack of belief in the divinity of a book dating back over 2,500 years is at the center of the Culture War in America…it not only explains these divisions; it also explains the hatred that much of the Left has for Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Mormon Bible-believers. For the Left, such beliefs are irrational, absurd and immoral. Which is exactly how most conservatives regard most leftist beliefs…This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book [the Torah] dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about.”^[49]

Prager also listed beliefs he claimed were held by liberals, “leftist beliefs, such as: there is nothing inherently superior in a child being raised by a mother and father rather than by two fathers or two mothers; men and women are not basically different, but only socially influenced to be different; Marxism was scientific; that the Soviet Union was not an evil empire; it was immoral for Israel to bomb Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor; morality is relative to the individual or society; there is no moral judgment to be made about a woman aborting a healthy human fetus solely because she doesn’t want a baby at this time; material poverty, not moral poverty, causes violent crime, etc.”^[49]

It has been noted by many that Keith Ellison’s support of access to abortion and gay rights is at odds with the traditional interpretation of the Qur’an, “Chances are, if Muslims saw another candidate with Ellison’s stands on gay rights, abortion, and his suspiciously boiler plate platform on Israel, Iran, and the Middle East, they would not support him. Yet Ellison has the admiration of his Muslim constituents…the notoriety supersedes the reservations. Beyond this, Muslims in the west should realize that they are seeing the face of future generations take shape, generations that might adopt cultural and political values that aren’t necessarily the same as their forebearers or against Islam as they choose to practice it. Politically speaking, issues like equal rights for gays within a pluralistic society make sense when Muslims demand the same equal protection”.

Lawrence Auster wrote Nov. 24, 2006:

Prager supports mass immigration and is a passionate crusader against “racism” (he even labels as “racist” people who prefer to marry people of the same race). [Robert] Spencer for his part proposes a rather demanding questionnaire that prospective Muslim immigrants would have to answer to demonstrate that they are not believers in jihad, but beyond that he does not criticize America’s non-discriminatory immigration policies or call for the end of Muslim immigration or even its reduction. Prager and Spencer both believe that Muslims, with the exception of those nasty radical Muslims whom they want to screen out, can be assimilated into America. But then Prager and Spencer express shock and outrage that a Muslim American who has been elected to Congress intends to take his oath of office on the Koran. Well, what did they expect? Did they think that even a moderate Muslim would want to take his oath on the Jewish and Christian scriptures?

...Ellison’s election to Congress is part and parcel of the ongoing Islamization of American life that has been brought about mainly by Muslim immigration. Without that immigration, Islam would have remained a tiny insignificant element in America, and Ellison would not have been elected to Congress. Or, if he had been elected, it would have been seen as a freak occurrence, not conveying the threatening message that we are losing control over our culture and institutions. In any case, Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants will inevitably be elected to Congress and other offices in the future, and will inevitably want to take their oath on the Koran, and what will the right-liberals say then?

Prager’s and Spencer’s reaction exemplifies the incurable superficiality of right-liberalism. The right-liberals assume that all human beings are the same, and therefore that all non-Western peoples including Muslims (except for certified extremists) can be assimilated into America. The right-liberals then are surprised that these aliens believe in their own, non-Western religions. Their surprise proves that the right-liberals have never subjected their universalist belief system to the slightest critical examination. They have never asked themselves if it is really true that all people can assimilate into America. They have never said to themselves, Gosh, if we admit Muslims into America, won’t they want to make Islam a part of America? Somehow they assumed that no matter whom we admitted into America, America would remain the same—that Muslims would somehow stay in some private, insignificant sphere, doing their jobs, paying their taxes, raising their children, without actually becoming active members of our society and thus bringing their own desires, preferences, and belief systems into the public sphere where they would visibly affect and transform America.

By contrast, traditionalists recognize that Muslims are (and here comes the little fact that endlessly shocks the liberals) Muslims. That’s right, folks: Muslims are Muslims. The people with whom Muslims share a sacred bond of solidarity are their fellow Muslims (including jihadists and terrorists), not Jews and Christians. Their model of behavior is Muhammad, not Jesus. Their law is the sharia, not the Constitution. Their holy book is the Koran, not the Bible. From which it follows that if we don’t want elected officials in this country to be taking their oath of office on the Koran, we must do whatever is necessary to prevent the increase of the Muslim population. We must, at a minimum, not admit Muslim immigrants. We must, at a minimum, deport Muslim non-citizens. And to the extent that Islam is already here, as a result of immigration or conversion, we must restrict and delegitimize it, as a belief system that is totally incompatible with the laws and customs of our society and our character as a people.

Prager and Spencer seem to want the effects of such a policy—they want Ellison to be stopped from swearing on the Koran—without articulating the policy itself. That is, they don’t want to say that Islam, as a religion incompatible with our Constitution, must be deprived of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. In brief, they think they can have traditionalist, non-liberal results (namely the preservation of a recognizable and cohesive society based on a common culture), without embracing traditionalist, non-liberal principles.

Lawrence Auster wrote Dec. 5, 2006:

On one hand, like a conservative, he posits that America has a particular moral and religious culture. He says that the Judeo-Christian tradition is central to American life and must never be challenged. On the other hand, like a liberal, he insists on the totally non-discriminatory inclusion in this country of Muslims who obviously are going to challenge that culture. And when, as has inevitably happened, the Muslims do challenge it, Prager’s conservative side springs back into action and he denounces the Muslims for disrespecting the American tradition!

...He improvises his own Torah as he goes along. His position in this case, announced from on top of his personal Mount Sinai, is that all office holders in the U.S. regardless of their religious beliefs must take their oath on the Bible, because the Bible is the source of our values and our constitutional principles of liberty. Of course there is no U.S. law requiring this, but such is the Gospel according to St. Dennis, which transcends U.S. law. At the same time, St. Dennis insists on the mass immigration of people whose religion commands them to crush beneath their feet biblical religion and the people who follow it.

...Prager, quite rightly, wants America to be a particularist, “Judeo-Christian” society. Yet his liberal principles of equality and non-discrimination lead inevitably to the destruction of the religious and moral particularity that he prizes.

Obviously I agree with Prager that the Koran does not belong in American public life. But unlike Prager I am consistent on the point and say that Muslims themselves do not belong in America and that it is a fatal mistake to allow their immigration hither.

Auster wrote Dec. 6, 2006:

In a traditionalist America, Muslims would not be allowed to immigrate or be naturalized. The Koran would not be allowed any place in our public life. Also, in a traditionalist America with a restored federal Constitution, the individual states would have restored to them their right to have religious establishments if they chose, and to institute restrictions on citizenship, the franchise, and political office based on religious belief, as was true of many states up to the mid 19th century. Obviously, there would not be enough Muslims in such an America for a Muslim Congressman to be elected, but, if there were, he could not use the Koran to take his oath on, because it would be understood that the Koran has no place in the United States and in the several states...

This would not be a violation of the First Amendment, since Islam is not a religion as ordinarily understood. Islam is a tyrannical religio-political system aimed at the destruction of every non-Islamic government including our own. Therefore Islam should have no rights as a religion in this country. 

In the 19th century, a series of federal statutes and court decisions banned both the Mormon practice of polygamy and the promotion of polygamy, on the basis that polygamy is antithetical to our civilization. Any religious rights that the “religiously based” practice of polygamy might have claimed were superseded by the larger fact that polygamy is incompatible with our very civilization. I think the same reasoning ought to be applied to Islam.

Now what I’ve laid out above is an ideal situation. What do we do in our actual situation? As I said, given our present, liberal institutions, I see no legal basis to stop Ellison from doing what he wants. If we want to stop him from doing what he wants, we must change our system in a fundamental manner, namely, by limiting the application of the liberal principles of freedom and equality to those groups and cultures and religions that are compatible with, or at least not dangerous to, our society. Tolerance and equality have their place, but they cannot be our ruling principles. No society can survive for long if non-discriminatory tolerance and equality are its ultimate guide. Look at Britain as it heads into the abyss. Therefore the liberal principles of tolerance and equality must be limited by the parameters of our actual culture and of our structural, non-liberal political principles, such as, for example, national sovereignty and constitutional limits on government. Things radically antithetical to our culture, our sovereignty, and our constitutional structure should not receive tolerance and equal treatment. Meaning that we would officially and formally strip Islam of its free exercise rights. At present we are obviously not living in a traditionalist society, but if we want to stop Muslims from bringing their religion into American public life, we must begin moving in that direction.

To sum up, there are two consistent and principled ways of approaching this problem.

There is the consistent liberal path, which says that all people must be admitted equally into America, have equal religious rights in America, and can take their oath on the Koran and even institute sharia law if they want.

Then there is the consistent traditionalist path, which says we have a certain Constitution, a certain form of government, a certain form of society, a certain understanding of individual rights, certain common moral beliefs, and a certain culture. We do not include and tolerate all things equally, but only those things that are compatible with our actual culture.

Dennis Prager is caught between these two positions, and does not understand the nature of the contradiction or even the fact that he is caught in it, because he takes for granted his liberal principles AND his conservative attachments and he simply assumes he can have both. In reality he cannot have both. If he wants to preserve America as a Judeo-Christian society, then he must restrict citizenship to people who are compatible with such a society. And if he wants to have a truly liberal society, then he must let everyone in and not complain when the newcomers start to make America over in their image.

Auster wrote in 2007:

No one on our side, including me, had thought about what Muslims actually do as part of their daily routine. Maybe we figured they prayed or whatever in private. But now we suddenly realize that in institutions throughout America they are doing their Islamic thing in shared public spaces, and expecting everyone else to adjust. These issues never came up when we began letting Muslims immigrate; we never asked ourselves what their customs are and do we want these customs in America. The other day I stepped through the actual steps of both the washing and the prayer, as described at a Muslim website. It’s quite a complex procedure, for example, each foot must be washed three times, whatever that means. The person must “clean” his ears with his index finger and “clean” behind the ears with his thumb. The person must sniff water into his nostrils and blow it out. To think of people doing this in workplace restrooms or college dorm restrooms several times a day is simply appalling. Yet, as I’ve said, we’ve never heard about this before. This is where the rubber meets the road in the assimilation question. No honest person can say that such customs are conformable with America and with any Western society. The Dennis Pragers and Norman Podhoretzes of the world, who want to us to wage war on “Islamofascists” abroad while we continue welcoming Muslims into America, cannot honestly maintain that Muslim foot baths belong in the shared public spaces of America.

So, now that we’re starting to get a glimpse of the existence and the scale of the problem, what do we do about it? If we are Dennis Prager, we insist that all religions are welcome in America, but that if the people we’ve let in actually practice their religion, that is terrible.

Auster proposed a final solution to the problem of Islam in America:

Since Muslims, admitted legally to the U.S., and acting within the law once they are here, have the divinely mandated aim of destroying our system, and can destroy our system, we must respond accordingly. It is not a matter of calling Muslims criminals or terrorists. It is a matter of determining that the religion of Islam is antithetical to our culture and civilization and therefore must, at the least, be severely restricted.

This can be accomplished in two ways. Congress could pass a law declaring that Islam is not a religion in the usual sense but a political movement inherently dangerous to our civilization, our laws, and our liberties. This would remove First Amendment protections from Islam and enable the government to pass further laws regulating, restricting, or even prohibiting Islam. Any such laws would, of course, face continual constitutional challenges.

Which leads to the second and more radical approach. We could pass a Constitutional amendment declaring that, notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution and any laws of the United States, the religion of Islam cannot be practiced in the United States. By placing the prohibition of Islam in the Constitution, by saying that Islam is incompatible with our existence as a society, we would be making a fundamental statement about the kind of society America is, and that is precisely the kind of thing that belongs in the Constitution. After the Civil War, slavery was prohibited, not by statute or presidential proclamation, but by an amendment to the Constitution, indicating that slavery has no place in the United States. Up to that point, slavery had been legal in much of the U.S., and during the Civil War had been ended by presidential proclamation under wartime powers. Slavery was only truly extirpated from the U.S. by the Thirteenth Amendment, which superseded all previous laws and all Constitutional protections that had given slavery a place in this country. It is time to think about doing the same with regard to Islam.

With the Thirteenth Amendment as our model, the amendment could be written as follows:

Section 1. The religion taught by the Prophet Muhammad in the Koran and in the Islamic Traditions or Hadiths, and formalized in the Islamic schools of jurisprudence, also known as the Sharia Law, shall not be practiced within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. This article supersedes any contrary provision of this Constitution and of the laws of the United States, and of the constitutions and laws of the several states.

Section 3. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The constitutionality of any laws passed by Congress pursuant to this article shall not be subject to the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary.

In 2006, Dennis almost said that the West was at war with Islam. Lawrence Auster wrote:

He says Islam has always been an imperialistic religion, conquering other lands and peoples, and that this is based on the Koran. He then does the kind of thing that critics of Islam should do repeatedly. He establishes the actual connection between Islamic sacred writings (the Koran and the Hadith) and actual Muslim practice, by showing how Muhammad’s command of total war on humanity has been quoted and followed by respected Muslim leaders over the centuries:

The Prophet Muhammad in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’”

Saladin (great 12th-century founder of the Ayyubid dynasty that included Ayyubid Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and much of present-day Saudi Arabia): “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.”

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (father of the Islamic revolution in Iran): “We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”

Osama bin Laden in November 2001: “I was ordered to fight the people until they say ‘there is no god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.’”

But then having made this powerful and decisive point about Islam, Prager half-throws it away:

We pray that there arises a strong Muslim group that is guided by the Quranic verse, “There shall be no coercion in matters of faith.”

But until such time, we had better understand that we are not merely fighting a war on terror, but a war against an ideology that wishes us to convert, be subject to Islamic law, or die.

In September of 2007, after Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University, James N. wrote to Lawrence Auster:

Prager said, “Iran has one of the worst records in the world in basic human rights,” as an intro to why we needed to “do something.”...

The question is, “Do the Iranian (or other) people have the right to practice Islam?”

All they are doing in Iran, in Egypt, in Indonesia, in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, is practicing Islam. Does Dennis Prager believe we have the right to deny them that “basic human right”? Or does he believe that “basic human rights” RULES OUT the practice of Islam?

Exactly. This is the foreign policy analogue to his absurd anger over Keith Ellison’s swearing in on the Koran. He wants Muslims to come into America, then gets furious when they behave as Muslims. He inchoately expects them to assimilate, but hasn’t thought critically about what this would mean.

When he says Muslims must assimilate, what he really means (though he will never recognize this) is that they must give up Islam.

When he says Iranians must practice human rights, what he really means (though he will never recognize this) is that they must give up Islam.

If he recognized that his demands for Muslim assimilation and for Muslim practice of human rights would require that Muslims give up Islam, which short of mass apostasy is impossible, his non-discriminatory position, based on the assumption that all people are basically alike, would fall apart.

And here’s how he gets to the bottom of the issue. He cites the opinions of a handful of “moderate” Muslims in the U.S. who argue for a reformed Islam, chiefly the supremely ridiculous Zuhdi Jasser, and on that basis Prager concludes that, yes, Islam can be reformed.

Israel

In a 2006 essay, Dennis wrote about the Hamas landslide: "That is one reason why the Bush doctrine — we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world — is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life — from the most personal to the most macro — by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality."

It seemed strange to me because it simply assumes that the Bush doctrine of spreading democracy in the Muslim world is the opposite of thinking wishfully and denying reality...

The election proves the left wrong about the Palestinians. But how does the election prove that spreading democracy to Muslims is valid? Hasn’t the election proved that spreading democracy to Muslims leads to a Hamas government?

Or is Prager suggesting that the real purpose of spreading democracy is to smoke out the Muslims and demonstrate once and for all how destructive they are, so that we won’t have to deal with them any more and can treat them as enemies and make war on them or seal them off or let them go to hell?

But of course that’s not the purpose enunciated by the leader of the spread-democracy movement, President Bush. He’s spreading democracy not because he wants to expose and discredit Muslims as incurable terrorists, but because he thinks that democracy will make the Muslims peaceful and friendly.

So the Hamas election is at least as much a reproof to Bush as it is to the left. But in the fanatically polarized mindset of today’s “conservatives,” every issue must be seen as showing the left wrong and Bush right. A shattering blow to the whole Bush Doctrine is interpreted as a vindication of Bush and a repudiation of the left.

In a speech at U.C. Berkeley May 5, 2008, Dennis said: “I was not a pro-settlement person. I did not speak out much about it. When it was asked in a forum like this, I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t use my radio abilities to criticize Israel.”

“Here is why I don’t speak out against Israel. If Israel did something evil, that would be a different story… Baruch Goldstein. There I did speak out because that was evil. Beyond that, I’ve had this attitude, which I tell American Jews, if you want to get involved in Israeli policy making, make aliyah (move to Israel). It is not our children who are in the Israeli army. We do not take those buses that are blown up. I have supported every left-wing and every right-wing Israeli prime minister…

“My opinion is as important as when people ask me, if you were God, would you have made a mosquito? I’m not God, it is irrelevant what I would do. And I’m not Israeli.”

“I wish Israel would’ve built only a handful of settlements that were absolutely necessary for security or religious reasons.

“But I always have this question — why is it OK for one-quarter of the Israeli state to be Muslim but Palestine must be judenrein? If Muslims can live in the Jewish state, then Jews can live in the Muslim state.”

Yesterday Prager interviewed Paul Collier, a British economist and author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The discussion was an ostensibly conservative take on the subject suggesting something beyond foreign aid was necessary to solve these nations’ problems. It turns out three of the poorest nations are Sierra Leon, Nigeria and Uganda. Prager then wondered what made Uganda so different from, say, Hungary or Chile. They listed a series of differences. Corrupt governments was first, but according to the expert Uganda has a relatively benign government as of late (though why it is prone to bad government, including once having a cannibal as head of state, was left unasked). After going through the usual economic list—natural resources, access to water, industrial production—Collier suggested that Uganda had “bad neighbors” whereas Hungary and Chile had good ones. At no point in the hour was the culture of these three nations mentioned as having anything to do with their relative economic states.

Now, Chile is the most European of Latin American nations except for Argentina. Since Pinochet left office in 1981 (in a voluntary plebiscite) Chile has enjoyed the fruits of the economic reforms he initiated. The majority of the Chilean ruling class is Basque in origin, along with large numbers of Italian and German descendants, and of course native peoples, a very stoic, solid type I might add. Whatever is responsible for Chile being Chile and Mexico being Mexico, much less Uganda, has nothing to with any of this. Mexico’s natural resources dwarf Chile’s by the way.

Hungary, too, was reduced to outside variables. The fact that this ancient nation was once a genuine power with Austria and takes a back seat to none in its classical music tradition and its intellectual heritage is irrelevant. But here is what gets me:

Prager, rightfully so, is very proud of Israel. Yet he denies everyone else what he readily assumes of Israel, namely, that its ethno-cultural makeup have something to do with its success and its very being. If five million non-Jews settled in Israel it would cease to be Israel, but somehow if five million Ugandans settled in Hungary it would still be Hungary? It has been said, correctly in my view, that if a Jewish state had been created in modern day Uganda it would be an economic success. Can one think of a state with 1) worse neighbors, or 2) scarcer natural resources than Israel? Given the economist’s criteria, there is no way to explain Israel’s position vis-a-vis Uganda except to ask about the culture, including the ethno-culture, of each.

This is something I have noticed among liberal Jews: a refusal to allow others to affirm what is celebrated in one’s own—distinctiveness.

I have never talked with a self-identified Jew who assented to the idea that Jewishness has anything to do with ethnicity, meaning a peoplehood formed at least in large part of common descent. It is an absolute axiom with Jews that Jewishness does not involve ethnicity. Culture, religion, shared history and values, yes, but not ethnicity. That the most famous ethnic people in the world deny that the are an ethnic people is pretty funny, but there it is. It’s another of the consequences of the world’s 12-year experience with Adolph Hitler that the very people he sought to destroy as a people, now, as a result of that event, deny that they are a people—for the same reason that the whole Western world says that ethnic or racial discrimination is the worst evil.

Since Prager (I’m assuming) does not acknowledge a Jewish ethnicity, he is not attributing Israel’s success to ethnicity while ignoring the role of ethnicity in other peoples’ success or failure, and so there is no double standard.

However, you said that Prager and his guest not only ignored race/ethnicity, but ignored culture too. There you may have him in a double standard. My guess is that they stayed away from culture because, ahem, culture gets too close to ethnicity, in the sense of something that is passed on from generation to generation and therefore expressing the essence of a group. To suggest that the cultures of sub-Saharan Africans are dysfunctional, is too close to saying that sub-Saharan Africans themselves are dysfunctional [for a First World way of life].

Prager's reaction to IQ and race mirrors that of Oxford economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Wars, and Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, who had the following interaction on the Freakanomics blog:

Q. What do you think of Richard Lynn’s findings about race differences in intelligence and their relatedness to Africa’s continuing state of underdevelopment? In his work, Mr. Lynn compiled the results of numerous studies which appear to show fairly unambiguously that average I.Q.’s in sub-Saharan Africa are below 70. Studies furthermore show that this disadvantage is almost certainly inherited genetically. — Denis Bider

A. I don’t know this stuff and don’t want to. But I am just about prepared to believe that the average Chinese person is smarter than the average Englishman. Despite this, the average Englishman is more than 10 times richer than the average Chinese person — so intelligence is manifestly not closely related to the performance of an economy. 

As journalist Steve Sailer commented: "In other words, 'Please don't Watson me! I'll be however stupid I have to be in order to keep my nice job at Oxford.'"

Family Life

After living 79 years of their lives in Brooklyn, Prager’s parents moved to Englewood, New Jersey (near Dennis’ brother Kenny) in 1997. Max got an hour almost every year on Prager’s radio show.

In a lecture on Deuteronomy (the 22nd, delivered in February of 2004), Dennis said: “I decided when my children were born, that I would never be too busy for them because I’m always too busy. There’s no time my children cannot come into the home office where I work and start talking to me. It doesn’t occur to them. I have never said, I can’t talk now.

“I have a theory that if you talk to your kids when they want to talk to you, they’ll talk to you when you want to talk to them.”

In March 2004, Dennis said: “It is valuable to my children that I have a special seat at the dinner table. We’re never at the dinner table at my house, it’s fairly academic but at least we are on the Sabbath. Whenever we are, that’s dad’s seat. Do you think I care about dad’s seat for me? For my ego?

“I ask that my kids the first time at the day we see each other, that they get up and give me a hug. I give them a hug too. I don’t stand there and wait for them to genuflect before me. I’d do that with my father when he’d walk in the room. I’d not just sit on the couch and say, hi dad.”

“I let my kids argue with me. Do you know how I know it’s OK? Because in the Torah, people argue with God. He finds its OK.”

“God never says, ‘Because I said so.’ Parents always say, ‘Because I said so.’ As a kid, I hated it because there were times they were wrong, which is inevitable. The number of times I’ve been wrong when arguing with my kids is the most humbling part of my life. When the six year old child turns out to be right is very hard to admit. I let my kids argue and sometimes they were right.”

Said Dennis in a 2001 lecture on Numbers 30-31, “Aaron always used to ask, ‘Who’s the boss?’ He was fixated when he was four who was the boss in the house.”

Said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 25: “When my son [David] was eight years old, nine years old, he said, ‘Can I use a tape recorder on Shabbat?’ I said yeah, if you record Shabbat songs or Torah study, which ended the use of the tape recorder immediately. It became an academic issue. What he wanted to record was some popular stuff or to make jokes and hear himself talk.”

Said Dennis in a 2001 lecture on Numbers 27-29: “We allowed our youngest child to watch what we called Shabbat videos. If the subject was the Torah, he could watch the video. Electronics was not the issue, the content was. In my opinion, it worked well.

“We rarely go out Friday nights to home. One Friday night we went to a home that allowed television. He was about five, six years old. He came running over and said, ‘I can’t believe it. They’re watching secular television.’ He knew the difference between the holy and the secular thanks to a Shabbat ritual.”

Dennis said he found sports and cigars a great way to bond with his sons. (May 8, 2012)

"I'm not going to say, 'Let's sit and talk.' One of my sons [Aaron] would think something was so horribly wrong that I should get an MRI. Let's talk? But let's have a cigar. But let's going to a ballgame. Of course! Then you talk... My youngest son is in LA. We went to a dozen [LA Kings] hockey games. It's very very good for us." (May 23, 2012)

On Dec. 12, 2013, Dennis was asked if his wife appreciated how much he enjoyed hockey. "Only an unmarried man could ask that question," he said. "Does she appreciate? That is a joke. I'm choking."

I notice that women tend to fake all sorts of interest in her man's enthusiasms until they marry at which point her interest disappears and her contempt begins.

Said Dennis in a 1995 lecture on Exodus 6:

My wife got very sad when one of our fish died, which was particularly funny as she had just had a tuna sandwich for lunch. I pointed out to her, ‘Fran, how sad can you get? You just had a tuna melt.’ She started laughing and crying at the same time. I realized why she had gotten sad over the death of one of our fish. We had unwisely named our fish. If you eat a sandwich and it was really a Jerry sandwich, you were having Jerry for lunch, you’d recoil. A tuna sandwich is not a problem.

I vowed after I saw my wife’s reaction, we are no longer naming our fish. It’s a puffer, it’s a yellow tang, and that’s it. Just tonight, a yellow tang died. Nothing. Dennis, could you take that out? It’s ugly. There was no emotional connection because it was a yellow tang.

Said Dennis in a 1995 lecture on Exodus 7: “I see people who don’t forgive non-malicious acts and then forgive terribly malicious acts.

“I see people who are angry at friends who forgot to show up one day for an appointment and they will carry a grudge for a year…

“Last night I was at this reception. I was with this assistant district attorney. She was asking about my having conducted the national anthem at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic.

“I said, the L.A. Times music reviewer had a comment. That while the rendition of the national anthem was well received by the crowd, he gesticulated too much.

“She said, which one wrote it? I said, I don’t have a clue. She said, ‘You don’t know who wrote a negative thing about you? I would remember it until the day I die. My husband is just like you. He doesn’t take these things personally.’ It’s an example of a male-female difference… It meant nothing to me.

“For example, it affects my wife much more than it does me when I am attacked. I’ll go home and have dinner and she is seething. ‘He should drop dead. He should have boils and frogs and blood.’ That’s the norm.”

Dennis Prager wrote:

No one in my family had ever divorced. I assumed that marriage was for life. So when my wife and I divorced after five years of marriage and three years after the birth of our son, my world caved in. I was a failure in my own eyes.

I later remarried but confided to my wife, Fran, that I couldn’t shake the feeling that my family life had failed. She asked me what was wrong with our family now (which included her daughter from a previous marriage and my son). I had to admit that, aside from the pain of being with my son only half the time (my ex-wife and I shared custody), our family life was wonderful. “Then why don’t you celebrate it?” she asked.

That’s what I decided to do. But first I had to get rid of the image of a ‘perfect’ family.

In his July 1995 introduction to his collection of essays Think a Second Time, Prager wrote about his wife: “As for my life partner, my wife, Fran, ever word in this book reflects her wisdom. She has taught me so much – about courage, patience, authenticity, women and being a father – that I can date a significant part of my intellectual and emotional life as Before Fran and After Fran.”

While they were married, Fran called Prager’s show about once a year. Once she called to argue with Dennis about his taking out a muffin from an all-you-can-eat restaurant. Another time she publicly reprimanded him for chasing a dangerous driver. In the fall of 1999, she called to talk about David’s desire to be “the head of the house” when he marries.

On January 1, 1996, Fran and her daughter Anya appeared on Prager’s KABC show for an hour. A woman phoned in to get their reaction to Prager’s liberal stand on pornography. Fran offered an ambivalent response while Anya, in effect, said that Playboyp magazine was cool. Fran hated the 1997 movie

Fran speculated that many of Prager’s filthy interests are a reaction to his yeshiva upbringing.

In the Spring of 1999, Dennis gave a series of four lectures on male sexuality at the University of Judaism: 

I talked to other guys and I realized I was in the normal range of perversion...

Jean Calvin was astonished to not find an explicit reference to fornication (sex between the unmarried) among the sexual prohibitions of the Hebrew Bible.

The area of greatest divergence between Christianity and Judaism, aside from theology, is in sex. Fornication is mentioned repeatedly as a sin in the New Testament. It is not mentioned in the Old Testament.

In attitudes towards sex, we live in a Christian country. The dean of the Harvard Divinity School, on his computer was found pornographic images. It was so terrible that it was assumed he would have to resign. I suspect that if he were at Hebrew University, the Harvard of Israel, in a similar capacity, he would not have to resign. People would've said, it's none of our business. 

In Israel, which is permeated more by Judaism than the United States, prostitution is largely legal. In the United States, it is not...

There are times when a woman would have to say no. There are things that a woman has a right to say, 'Honey, I love you but that is not something I can engage in.' On the other hand, it depends on what it is. A woman has a perfect right to say, 'I don't want to be urinated on.' If that's his thing. If it's her thing too, then it's beshert. They have met their divine partner.

If she says, 'Fellatio just grosses me out,' that's a problem. It should not gross you out to have oral sex...

I have read almost nothing intelligent on this subject [pornography]. It is so emotionally charged.

...Playboy is pornography. I subscribe. My father subscribed... Is it softer than Juggs? Yes!

The levels [of pornography] are fascinating to understand the power and meaning of sex. One level was pubic hair. Pubic hair was a major moment when Playboy began to allow pubic hair. Female genitalia is the dividing point between hard and soft porn. And pubic hair is not genitalia...

What is our aim with regard to men? Do we want to produce a man who doesn't lust except after his wife? That's the aim of traditional religion. That's the aim of women... I don't want to create men who only lust for their wife. That's a saintly ideal I don't hold for the real world. In Heaven, that's the way men are. I'd like to create a man who leads an upright life, an honorable man, who's responsible, good and faithful to his wife and to his family, and treats women as befits the treatment of fellow human beings made in God's image...

I should dedicate this course to my father. He did a rare thing. He juggled a religious life, he's been Orthodox his whole life, and subscribed to Playboy. I learned as a child that the two are not mutually exclusive -- being decent, upright, monogamous and being lustful.

When it came to masturbation, my father said to me when I was nearing puberty, 'Dennis, I don't know if you're masturbating. I don't want to embarrass you. Let me just tell you, in my view it is morally equivalent to urinating.' That was the end of the discussion. We never discussed the issue again.

I carried on this venerated Prager tradition of taking this attitude when I became a camp counselor at an Orthodox day camp. One summer I was the counselor to 13-year old boys, who were monsters. The first night of camp, I would give them a birds and bees talk. All of these kids went to yeshivas. I told them what I thought of masturbation. The effects were very powerful. I don't mean the beds all started shaking.

The boys would come over to me, not knowing any other boy had, and told me how fraught with guilt they were because their rabbis had told them that this is a grievous sin. One Jewish text compares it to murder as though one could kill sperm.

One boy had the added burden of being the child of Holocaust survivors. He was unbelievably wracked with guilt and he did it frequently.

He wrote to me constantly. I was a junior that year and I went to England. He wrote to me about his struggles with this issue. He couldn't stop writing to me about this. There was somebody he could talk to. The bigger sin in my book was what the rabbis told them, not what the boys did. I couldn't understand who was hurt by the masturbation. Who's the victim?

...I'm not going to make the case for pornography. We're not a great world for having all these magazines on the newsstand. We're also not a terrible world. There's nobody in any religion who'd rather live in any of the societies that ban pornography than to live in this society. There's a direct correlation between the banning of pornography and other human freedoms. You can't pick and choose the freedoms you want to allow.

Apr. 25, 2014, Dennis got a call from Mary who suggested a bumper sticker for Prager female listeners: "I turn Dennis on every day."

Dennis: "I love it."

On Nov. 5, 2013, Dennis interviewed model Kylie Bisutti, author of I’m No Angel: From Victoria’s Secret Model to Role Model. He asked her why models are so skinny. "What men like in a woman physically is not personified by this thinness... Since it is supposed to appeal to me... The Playboy model is not thin like the Victoria Secret model. Who runs this industry?"

Kylie: "A lot of the industry is run by men but they aren't straight."

Dennis: "So gay men run the fashion industry and they like thin?"

Kylie: "Yeah."

Prager frequently listed on the radio the vices that are not attractive to him such as drinking, gambling, violence, power, and fame.

Regarding his child-raising philosophy, Dennis Prager said: “I drive them crazy on character. I only get angry if I see meanness, if I see a lie or something like that. And if they don’t get great grades, they don’t get great grades.

“I give up a lot of things to be with my children. There is one time in life where your children are aching to spend time with you. If you don’t then, then they won’t spend time when you ache to spend time with them later. When they say, ‘Daddy, watch,’ I get up from my comfortable chair and I do watch. I’m on a book tour now. I brought my whole family to the East Coast for the weekend to be with me. It’s the best investment… to be with your family.” (CSPAN 1996)

Said Dennis in 2010: “In my house, I didn’t care what grades you got. And it showed. I did care about whether or not you complained. You could not complain. When I complained as a kid I got the old line from generations — ‘If you keep crying, I’ll give you something to cry about.’”

In his lecture on Deut. 21:15, Dennis said: “Though I am totally modern in my approach to raising children, in the belief that they must have freedom, that they can not be my clone, that they must have autonomy, that they are allowed to argue with me. You’d be shocked at what a emancipated progressive liberal father I am, probably too much at times. Nevertheless, there must be a point where disobedience can not be tolerated. Even the child needs that. As much as love, a child needs guardrails.

“With one of our children, we’ve had a number of wayward and rebellious children in their time, they’ve turned out well, when I really did set the boundary and got angry and was firm, there was actual relief in the child’s face and demeanor after that. Phew, I won’t drown. The child with tantrums wants to be stopped from the tantrum.”

The Pragers lived in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of West LA on Canfield Avenue (the home was later bought by Rabbi Steven Weil in 2000) until moving to Hidden Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, in June of 1997. Fran wanted country living and Dennis hoped it would help their marriage. I have no reason to believe that the move was Dennis's idea and it was likely one in a series of things he'd try to save his second marriage. One doesn't have to be Freud to note that the move came at the end of the first seven years of marriage when illusions about one partner have largely fallen away and the hard work begins.

From 1995 on, I rarely saw Fran at temple with Dennis.

According to a 1998 tax assessment, the Prager’s Hidden Hills property land had a $516,350 market value. Assessed improvements were valued at $466, 827. The total market value was $983, 177. The Pragers bought the property on January 13, 1997 for $945,000, taking out a loan for $750,000. On December 16, 1997, they sold their Canfield home (in zip code 90035) for $575,000.

Said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 25: “I just got a bank loan. They asked for my race. I filled in other and wrote in Mesopatamian-American.”

“I’m one of the lucky ones who can change his mind,” Fran told the LA Times in February 1998. “I’m relentless in getting him to look at emotional issues in terms of what he’s feeling, not thinking. I think I’ve helped him get out of his head more and into his heart.”

Prager told the LA Times that he’s easy to live with. “I’m even-tempered. My wife doesn’t lose me to sports or drink. I’m kind to her, but I do have all the quintessential male attributes that drive women crazy, including not remembering every conversation, and not yearning, quite as much as wives do, to confront all emotional issues.

“At a dinner party, I’d rather talk to women. The men are either talking about politics, the economy or sports, which bores the daylights out of me. I’d rather talk about babies’ feeding habits. Women think that’s a put-down and I’m blown away by that. Why is what my baby likes less elevated than how the Lakers are doing?”

The most embarrassed that I’ve heard Prager become on a phone call to his radio show came in 1995, when a woman asked him what his chief vice was. He stammered out something about sex.

On December 12, 2012, Dennis spent an hour of his show asking if we are doing overweight women who want to marry any favors if all we do is tell them how great they look. Two-thirds through the show, Dennis said he would be glad when the hour was over. "That might be the only time I've said that."

"I was told regularly in my family that I was lazy. And it hurt. It also prompted me to work very hard. I asked myself, am I lazy? And in my inner being, I certainly am. So did those comments hurt? They did. Did they prompt me to act in a more responsible and better way? They did."

Until 1997, Fran sometimes accompanied Dennis to Stephen S. Wise temple. After 1997, she almost never did.

In the year 2000, David Prager graduated from Shalhevet. Dennis wrote June 1, 2004: “At my older son’s graduation from a religious Jewish high school a few years ago, every single man in the audience wore a jacket and tie and the women were similarly formally dressed.”

Said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 28, “I am unhappy that both of my kids’ schools do not have uniforms.”

In a debate hosted by the Orthodox Union on Dec. 24, 2006, Dennis Prager said: “My oldest son [David], in a deep rebellion, has decided to become an Orthodox rabbi [which never happened].”

“My brother [Kenny], who is Orthodox, says to me, ‘I should’ve been Reform. Then my kids would be Orthodox.’”

David Prager married in 2006. Anya married in 2007.

Dec. 5, 2013, Dennis said: "I do not expect my children to be better off [materially] than I am and it does not disturb me."

In his 2007 lecture on Leviticus 3, Dennis said: “Just tonight I was speaking to my older son, who, bless him, wrote a commentary on the portion of the week read in synagogue and sends it out to his email list. I get a great deal of joy from that. In his latest one, he wrote sympathetically of the mystical tradition.

“Just tonight, I was on the phone with him and said, ‘Dave, you’re becoming a mystic.’ He said, ‘Yeah, not the whole way, but I love a lot about mysticism.’

“Of course I am thinking here I am a rationalist non-Orthodox Jew and what is my oldest son? An Orthodox mystic.

“The trick for a parent is to say, ‘Wonderful!’ The sooner you learn to say wonderful, the happier you are, the happier they are, the happier the world is.”

In a May 2012 lecture, Dennis said: "There are people who love davening (prayer). My son [David], my father and my brother."

"The siddur (Jewish prayer book) wasn't given by God. The Torah was given by God."

In a 2005 lecture on Deut. 24:5, Dennis said: “Traditional life in Europe became you are defined by your family but that’s not the way it ought to be. You are defined by you, not by your family.

“I’ve always felt strongly about this subject. I’m better known than most dads are. My kids will get when they say their name, ‘Are you related to Dennis Prager?’

“My sons are very funny. My oldest son has a more developed humor at 22 than my youngest son at 12. He’s working his way through this so he decided to answer someone in New York, ‘Dennis Prager? Yeah, he’s the third cousin on my mother’s side.’ And the guy said, ‘Cool!’

“A terrible example and this was done by a rabbi in a mid-Western city. My son told me and he never complains, that he was at a Jewish wedding. A rabbi comes over and says, ‘Are you related to Dennis Prager?’ The rabbi took him for 20 minutes around the hall introducing him as Dennis Prager’s son. He didn’t even say ‘David.’ David had no identity. David was the son of someone. To me that is incomprehensible and yet people don’t think about preserving someone’s dignity. People think family is a big deal. It’s not. It’s a big deal, who are you?”

May 14, 2010, Dennis said: “When you think you’ve had an impact on your own child, then you really think you have a point. I am just like everyone of you, just more so. People say often, what is it like to be Dennis Prager’s kid? If you ask my kids, I’m sure they’ll have a whole host of answers for that question. I have always said, the last people I think I will really influence are my own kids. They don’t see me as Dennis Prager. I’m dad.

“Yesterday I was talking to my oldest son. He was telling me, ‘You know you are so right.’ I was thinking, oh my God, really?

“It’s a cousin from his mom’s side, a young woman in her thirties who contracted cancer. He said, ‘Her attitude is so upbeat, dad, and you are so right that people who act in a positive way, they do so in spite of their circumstances and people who act depressed do so despite how good they have it in life.’”

In a lecture on Deut. 26 delivered around 2005, Dennis said: “I’m a father of three. I worry all the time [that my kids will find a good job]… The purpose of having children is to keep you humble. People have this vision that when I walk into my house, my kids say, ‘Dad, tell us about ethical monotheism.’ Not quite accurate.”

“When my kids had ambivalence about me, I said, ‘No prob. You just have to honor me.’”

“I was a fairly lenient parent,” said Dennis April 2, 2010. “There were two things, however, I had no tolerance for — meanness and complaining.”

“I can’t stand [the wearing of baseball caps backward]. While there are undoubtedly some kind and decent people who wear it backward, men specifically, I think it is a sign of childhood. I gave my kids until a certain age to wear and then banned it. There was an argument. There was objection that I didn’t know what I was talking about, but it worked. Not everything has worked. Boys have to willfully mature or they stay boys. There’s no higher appellation in life than ‘Be a man!’ The aspiration to be and act and dress like a man should be there.” Dennis wrote Aug. 26, 2003:

We are wrong when we tell our children that they cannot argue with us. In fact, because I try to formulate my views on life from the Bible, especially the Torah, I have been raising my children far differently than I otherwise would have.
My original inclination, as it is of most parents, was to regard arguing as a form of disrespect and insubordination. But early in my life as a father, something powerful struck me as I taught the Bible: I realized that Abraham and Moses both have prolonged arguments with God, and not only doesn’t God mind, He seems to welcome them.

In a public dialogue with Adam Carolla Feb. 25, 2012, Dennis said: "My younger son is 19. He's a total slob, like every male I know. He finally moved out of the house last week. He's studying. He's got an apartment. He talked to me the other night about how he now vacuums every day, he takes off his shoes when he walks into his one-bedroom little apartment lest he dirty his apartment, does his laundry, uses soap in the shower. I said, wow, why are you doing all these things? And he said, because mom isn't there to do it.
"And I said, now you know my  fight with the entitlement state. If Uncle Sam is there to do it, you won't do anything to take care of yourself."
Adam: "And possibly he's gay."
Dennis: "Possible. What's wrong with that? I didn't say he decorated it. I said he cleaned it."

Dennis Prager Divorces For Second Time

In 2004, Dennis cited personal reasons for not running for the Republican nomination for the US Senate.
Said Dennis April 15, 2011: “I never bought the idea [that we should cut the pay and benefits of politicians]. We are only going to have millionaires run for office if we do that. It sounds sweet and meaningful and it is utterly destructive. Every law passed to ban further income for politicians means that more millionaires and billionaires will run for office. The only thing these reforms have accomplished is that we have the largest percentage of the super wealthy in the U.S. Senate.
“I considered very seriously running for the U.S. Senate [in 2004]. I am not rich. It makes it virtually impossible. You have to be a household name like Arnold Schwarzenegger to come in and he was super-rich.
“This is the thinking I excoriate every day. Ask what does good, not what feels good.”
Said Dennis in a February 2009 lecture on Feelings: Key to the Liberal Mind, “When Republican candidates don’t go to NAACP meetings, I just don’t understand it. I love to speak to people who differ with me. I’d go to the convention of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. I went on gay radio. I’d go to an all-black meeting in a second to tell them to reconsider how they vote.
“I’ve said for 30 years there are two parties in America — the dangerous and the stupid. I’m a member of the stupid party.
“How stupid is the party? It almost doesn’t even know the existence of talk radio, the single biggest factor in articulating conservative values in America. I don’t think John McCain could’ve named a single talk show host outside of Rush Limbaugh, who he admitted he had never heard.
“I was gonna run for the U.S. Senate against Barbara Boxer. I don’t know that I should’ve. I think I touch more people through radio. That’s what I ultimately decided. As a senator, there’s one advantage — if you can get to the Senate, you can get to the presidency, but I don’t think that I’ll be president.
“I met with one of the highest ranking Republicans at his office [Arnold Steinberg?] in Beverly Hills and he didn’t know who I was. I don’t take it personally. It’s impossible to offend me. I wasn’t offended. I just thought, how could someone be so high up in the Republican party and never have heard of a man who had been on talk radio in his own city for 20 years? They are so out of it in the Republican party.”
“We do need an articulate charismatic spokesman. The press of course will eat up anyone who does this. I flirt with running all the time, with throwing my hat in the ring. I know I’m articulate. I know how to speak to people. I’ve had a lot of practice in this but I know among other things what the press would do to me. Talk about a track record. They would get all the recordings from 26 years in radio. They would isolate 17 different clips to show me to be every evil thing possible.”

Dennis Prager never credits paleo-conservative Samuel Francis for the saying, "There are two parties in America -- the dangerous and the stupid. I'm a member of the stupid party." VDARE said:

"IN AMERICA, WE have a two-party system," a Republican congressional staffer [Samuel Francis, aide to Senator John East circa 1981-1986] is supposed to have told a visiting group of Russian legislators some years ago. "There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. I am proud to be a member of the stupid party." He added: "Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called - "bipartisanship."

In 1995, the Washington Times fired Sam Francis for saying: "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

Dennis announced his divorce on his radio show Dec. 30, 2005. His second marriage had been unraveling for years.
“You can ask my wife,” said Dennis Dec. 13, 2010. “The pain that I have had in my life I have always viewed as a possibility of bringing more insights to people to help their life. Since I do have a microphone and I do write, I do have the ability to talk to more people than most people do. I’ve wanted to use whatever I’ve gathered from pain to help others.”
In an interview of author John Gray (circa 2005), Dennis Prager seized upon Gray’s comment that husbands appreciate their wives much more than wives appreciate their husbands. Dennis said this was true.
In a 1996 lecture on Exodus 20, Dennis said: “My wife often says, ‘How did you unravel that conversation? This person was totally convoluted and then you explain it like it was a road map.’ If your wife compliments you, it is a good sign. It’s not like I come home every day and hear that I’m the greatest thing in the world. It’s not a daily occurrence.”
In a 2004 lecture on Deut: 8, Dennis Prager said: “Love is a manic state… You’re taken over. Now, you can’t preserve a manic state or you’d go nuts but you can create feelings of love by doing things… I remember one bachelor who said to me, ‘What do you mean marriage is an effort? Who wants to work at marriage? I work all day at the office. I want to come home and stop working.’ So of course he got married and later divorced. I guess he didn’t want to continue working when he got home.”
Jul. 13, 2011, Dennis said that a male caller’s need for 2.5 sexual encounters a week with his wife “was a good number.”
Dennis has always opposed gossip. He doesn’t want journalists scraping through his life — or any life — looking for scandal. He’s said on the radio that he doesn’t have anything shocking in his past that he needs to hide.
Jul. 5, 2011, Dennis said: “There is not one of you, not the most angelic person listening to this show, about whom if enough were known, I could not write a history of you, a biography of you, that would make you look terrible. There is no such human, from Moses to you. You have some beloved aunt or uncle who’s like an angel, I swear to you that if enough were known, a biography could be written about them to make them look despicable. That’s what the left has done to America.”
On June 29, 2004, Dennis Prager wrote:

You can now add former Illinois Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan to the list of those gratuitously humiliated by the news media. For no good reason, the Chicago Tribune and WLS-TV petitioned to have the divorce proceedings of Jack and Jeri Ryan released and published. In it we learned that Jeri had accused her ex-husband of wanting to take her to sex clubs on three occasions to have sex in front of other people.

I happen to oppose having sexual intercourse in front of others. But I don’t want to know what Jack Ryan sought to do with his wife. It is none of my business, oh gods of media, and none of yours. And I especially don’t want his 9-year-old son to know.

But for the Tribune and WLS-TV, it was too good a story. They hid behind the excuse that it is the “public’s right to know.” But this is self-serving and hypocritical nonsense.

If the public needs to know about the sexual desires (desires, not even practices) of a senatorial candidate, it also needs to know the sexual desires of the men and women who run the Chicago Tribune and WLS-TV.

Consider the example of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. He had been expelled from college for paying someone to take his exams. His role in the death of a woman with whom he spent an evening would have sent almost anyone without his family name to prison -- or would have at least resulted in prosecution for negligent homicide. And he spent decades using so many women in so public a way that stories about his sex life were routinely told in Washington. Read the 9,000-word 1990 article in GQ by Michael Kelly, who a few years later became the editor of the New Republic...

And liberal positions were all that mattered to the left and to the liberal media that largely ignored such lecherous behavior as the "waitress sandwich" he made in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with another prominent liberal, former Senator Chris Dodd.

...Conservative politicians have the same sex drive as liberal politicians, the same marital problems and the same ubiquitous temptations and opportunities. And some will therefore engage in extramarital sex. But every conservative politician knows that should he be caught, his positions on issues not only do not provide moral cover for his conduct, those very positions condemn it.

Although our other son Dennis lives 3000 miles from us, he phones us several times during the week inquiring as to our health and what’s going on in our lives. His wife, Fran, never neglects to e-mail us with info regarding their lives and what is going on with Anya and Aaron, their children. David, Dennis’s son by a previous marriage has given us joy since he was born.

…Dennis as well has given us a great deal of joy and pride in his many accomplishments. Listening to him on the radio for three hours 5 days a week when he broadcasts nationally over close to 70 cities, reading his weekly articles on “World Net Daily” and “Town Hall”, listening to his many tapes of his lectures given throughout the world, viewing him on the most popular TV news shows and, last but not least, emceeing the 7 hour annual Chabad telethon gives his parents nachas (joy and pride).

One of the most frequently offered arguments by proponents of same-sex marriage is that it is not gays wanting to marry a member of the same sex that threatens the institution of marriage, it is the high divorce rate among heterosexuals.

…It is simplistic to maintain that the one criterion of success or failure in marriage is permanence. There are marriages that provided years of comfort to a couple and a fine home to their children that eventually end; and there are permanent marriages that have provided neither comfort to the couple nor a loving environment for their children. If the end of something renders it a failure, every one of our lives is a failure, since they all come to an end.

Finally, marriage is threatened not by divorce, but by people not marrying in the first place — as is increasingly the case in the two European societies that have redefined marriage to include couples of the same sex. Our present high divorce rate is not stopping the vast majority of Americans from wanting to marry. Nor should it. Nothing provides the antidote to narcissism, or the environment for the healthy raising of children, or the way for people to take care of one another, as does the marriage of a man and a woman. And while most divorces are terribly sad, divorce itself no more undermines the institution of marriage than car crashes undermine the institution of driving. In fact, the vast majority of people who do divorce deeply wish to marry again; painful divorce has not undermined marriage even among those who have divorced.

1. Is the person your best friend or at least becoming so?

2. Aside from sex, do you enjoy each other?

3. Is there chemistry between the two of you?

4. Does the person have a number of good friends and at least one very close friend of the same sex?

5. How does the person treat others?

6. What problems do the two of you now have? And what inner voice of doubt, if any, are you suppressing?

7. How often do you fight?

8. Do you share values?

9. Do you miss the person when you are not together?

10. Is the person unhappy?

11. How much of your love is dependent on the sex you are having?

12. What do people you respect think of the person you’re considering marrying?

He said he did not regard the marriage as a failure. They had many good years together and they raised good kids.

He said they had tried for years to work out their problems. They had gone to therapy.

Dennis said that he was worried that his listeners would take his moral teachings less seriously because of his divorce.

After telling his kids about the divorce, Dennis said his next priority was to tell his listeners.

“I received after that announcement 800 emails within a day, 799 of which were something like, I can’t believe this, Dennis, but I had tears in my eyes. I just stopped my car for a minute and took a breather. I felt like my father was telling me he was divorcing mom.

“I was stunned. I had no expectation, but I learned… that people were relating to Dennis as much as they were relating to what I was saying.” (2008 lecture on 25 years in broadcasting)

“That’s a very tough phrase, by the way, ‘Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved,’” said Dennis Prager July 10, 2009. “It’s a tough one. I have believed that. I think it’s true, but it’s a toughie.”

When it comes to love and marriage, Dennis sounds like he thinks he's the victim of bad luck. Jan. 5, 2010, Dennis said: “Let me give you a realization I came to about life that I did not know 20 years ago. The role of luck in good marriage. I am now convinced that the vast majority of long-term good marriages are good because they’re lucky that they found the right person for them. Period. End of issue.

“Had you asked me this 30 years ago, I would’ve said, shared values and a lot of noble-sounding things. People who worked hard on their marriage.

“I look at my parents who had 69 years of marriage. And they would be the first to tell you that they had a great marriage…because they were unbelievably lucky. They met the right person for themselves. People in happy marriages should be very humble about judging people who are less happy or are in divorce situations.”

Most therapists will tell you good marriages being largely a matter of luck is wishful thinking. There is no right person who is going to solve your issues.

Therapist Mark Smith said: "You fall in love because their brand of crazy matches your brand of crazy. You fall in love because the scars you got growing up match the brand of scars this one here is going to be dishing out in seven to ten years even if now she's all sweetie pie and sunshine. Our scars are in charge of falling in love. However we're loved by our parents, we will pick someone to love us like that. If you were brutally wounded in childhood, you're going to be brutally wounded in love. If you get rid of the first guy, don't tell yourself the second guy will be Prince Charming until you do the work to heal yourself. Shame does get better, abandonment issues not so much."
Wrote Dennis in 2011: "...issues related to others' marriages, divorces, and infidelities are too complex an arena for outsiders to draw immediate conclusions about a person."

And yet we do because real life teaches us that a person who stays married to a spouse and stays faithful, is more likely to be a solid person than someone who can't stay married. We also suspect that the teachings of a person who's never divorced are more likely to be solid than the teachings of someone who's had multiple divorces. There are very few great rabbis who've divorced.

In his first lecture on Numbers (circa 2006), Dennis said: “Marriage forces you to confront yourself.”

Dennis: “It’s disgusting to make these blanket condemnations of everyone who’s divorced as if they are lazy slobs who woke up one day and said, ‘I think I’ll move on here. Seventeen years, big deal. I want a more exciting life.’

“I don’t know anyone who’s divorced who didn’t go through hell, went through counseling, went through trying, went through crying.” (Nov. 22, 2010)

In his April 3, 2008 roast, nobody mentioned Prager's divorces.

Marital Obligations

If a wife loves her husband, she shouldn’t let her mood always determine whether or not she has sex with him, Dennis Prager argued in two columns at the end of 2008.

Not many twice-divorced moralists would have the courage to say such things. Dennis wrote Dec. 23, 2008:

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.
First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wife’s refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him.
…A man whose wife frequently denies him sex will first be hurt, then sad, then angry, then quiet. And most men will never tell their wives why they have become quiet and distant. They are afraid to tell their wives. They are often made to feel ashamed of their male sexual nature, and they are humiliated (indeed emasculated) by feeling that they are reduced to having to beg for sex. 

Dennis wrote Dec. 30, 2008:

In Part I, I made the argument that any woman who is married to a good man and who wants a happy marriage ought to consent to at least some form of sexual relations as much as possible....

That solution is for a wife who loves her husband — if she doesn’t love him, mood is not the problem — to be guided by her mind, not her mood, in deciding whether to deny her husband sex.

If her husband is a decent man — if he is not, nothing written here applies — a woman will be rewarded many times over outside the bedroom (and if her man is smart, inside the bedroom as well) with a happy, open, grateful, loving, and faithful husband. That is a prospect that should get any rational woman into the mood more often.

* Do you feel that you don’t want anyone to know about your sexual or romantic activities?

* Do you feel you need to hide these activities from others—friends, family, co-workers, counselors, etc.?

* Do you get “high” from sex and/or romance? Do you crash?

* Do you believe that sex and/or a relationship will make your life bearable?

* Have you ever felt that you had to have sex?

* Do you feel desperation or uneasiness when you are away from your lover or sexual partner?

* Do you feel desperate about your need for a lover, sexual fix, or future mate?

* Do you feel that you’re not “really alive” unless you are with your sexual/romantic partner?

* Do you feel entitled to sex?

* Do you believe that the problems in your “love life” result from not having enough of, or the right kind of sex?

* Do you feel that life would have no meaning without a love relationship or without sex? Do you feel that you would have no identity if you were not someone’s lover?

* Do you have sex and/or “relationships” to try to deal with, or escape from life’s problems?

* Do you find yourself needing greater and greater variety and energy in your sexual or romantic activities just to achieve an “acceptable” level of physical and emotional relief?

* Do you need to have sex, or “fall in love” in order to feel like a “real man” or a “real woman”?

* Are you unable to concentrate on other areas of your life because of thoughts or feelings you are having about another person or about sex?

* Do you feel that your life is unmanageable because of your sexual and/or romantic behavior or your excessive dependency needs?

* Have you ever thought that there might be more you could do with your life if you were not so driven by sexual and romantic pursuits?

Dec. 2, 2010, Dennis Prager said: “A man needs most from a woman in a relationship is to be admired. Not loved.

“The reason the denial of sex is so terrible to a man is not primarily the biological deprivation, but he translates it in his mind as a lack of taking him seriously, a lack of admiration and love.

“There is really only one thing that can not be overcome by most men in a marriage — being held in contempt by his wife.”

“My father was married to my mother for 69 years, 73 years together. Always, it was a sort of mantra that my father would say, ‘Your mother puts me on a pedestal. That’s what every woman needs to do for her man.’”

Apr. 20, 2011, Dennis said: “I look at troubles I have had as, and everyone who knows me intimately knows this is true, I always see one silver lining — I now have more good things I can tell the public.”

Sept. 15, 2010, Dennis Prager’s favorite expert on male-female relations, Alison Armstrong, told Dennis: “You don’t understand women and you think you do. I knew it the first time I was on your show and I wouldn’t say it. You said you thought women didn’t want sex as much as men because they don’t focus on it. I knew then that you didn’t understand women because of your idea that women focus period. Women don’t focus.”

Since 2004, Alison Armstrong has gone on Prager’s radio show about 40 times. Since 2009, she’s appeared four times a year.

La Canada Flintridge

In 2006, following his second divorce, Dennis Prager bought a home in La Cañada Flintridge. It was the height of the housing boom and he over-paid. If his house fell in value in line with others in Southern California, he lost at least 30% by 2009.

"Shortly after his arrival in La Cañada Flintridge, Prager initiated local celebrations of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in 2008 and 2009 at the La Cañada Flintridge Country Club. The event attracted hundreds, but very few of them locals, he said, and was moved west last year to Studio City.”

“I call this place Norman Rockwell-ville. This is a beautiful slice of America, that’s why. First of all, I like the way people treat each other. It has the very best small town feel. I like that a lot of times people know each other. I like the kids who work at Penguin’s yogurt, and I like the celebrations of July 4 and Memorial Day. There’s a lot to like here. It’s a decent place. A nice mixture of backgrounds. I live in a cul de sac, and one neighbor’s parents came from Syria, another came from Korea, and I’m Mr. Jew. We get along great.” (La Canada Online, Dec. 14, 2010)

May 16, 2012, Dennis said: "I've never understood the relationship between divorce and leading a war against marriage. I consider a divorce to be a tragedy and to be like a car crash. People who have car crashes have not decided to change the definition of a car. There are two people who are changing marriage. Those who don't marry. The singles. People like the new president of France who simply has a girlfriend of many years. That's a war against traditional marriage because you didn't marry. To marry and remarry does not mean you are against traditional marriage. It means your marriages didn't work."

On May 16, 2012, Conor Friedesdorf of The Atlantic asked Dennis: "Do you think that no-fault divorce, the state redefining marriage as not something 'to death do us part' but can be exited relatively easily, do you think that is a more radical change than gay marriage?

Dennis and Sue were married December 31 by Rabbi Michael Gotlieb at his synagogue, Kehillat Ma’arav, in Santa Monica, California.

The former Susan Reed [her mom is a psychiatrist], known to all as Sue, was raised in the Los Angeles area, graduated from Occidental College, obtained her law degree from Loyola Law School and was admitted to the California Bar in November 1994. After a half-year practicing business transaction law, Sue left her career to be a full-time mother to her two boys, one of whom is autistic, and shortly thereafter also to raise her two nieces after the death of their mother, Sue’s 35 year-old sister, Cyndi, [died] from cancer.

Sue met Dennis at a speech he gave for the Jewish organization Chabad in San Diego, where she lived until 2008 when she moved to Los Angeles.

Dennis Prager wrote on his website:

As many listeners and my friends and family know, my divorce after 19 years with Fran was a very painful period of my life. Happily, Fran and I remain friends and share the raising of our son, Aaron.

Many people advised me against marrying again. After all, they argued, I had no plans to have more children. And we live in a society that hardly demands marriage, let alone the remarriage of middle aged individuals. More than a few men additionally argued that I would come to value my “freedom.”

To be honest, I understood these arguments, but I believe that marriage is the greatest of all social institutions; I happen to agree with God who said in Genesis, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

Nevertheless, with all my belief in marriage, I would not likely be getting married at this time were it not for Sue, whose goodness, love, intelligence, and emotional stability have been a blessing to me and to all those who know her.

Through all that I have experienced, I believe I can fairly say that I have learned a great deal about men, women, and marriage. It is one reason I began the “Male-Female Hour” to help others in relating to the other sex and in their marriages.

Over time, I hope many of you will get a chance to meet Sue.

I thank all of you who have shown me such warm and loving support over these past few years. You have no idea how much that has meant to me.

On Dec. 31, 2013, Dennis said: "My step-son is autistic on a level that he speaks a lot to us. He picks out his Christmas gifts all year and does not unwrap them until Christmas."

La Cañada Flintridge “is both [the Pragers current home and] the childhood home of his wife Susan (who as Susan Springett graduated from La Cañada High School, which her son from a previous marriage now attends)...”

Dennis met Sue in 2004. She came up to him after a speech he gave in San Diego and the mutual attraction was immediate. Dennis drove home, presumably to his wife Fran, and got an email from Sue and their relationship began.

May 13, 2014, Dennis said: "I have the Susan diet. It's named after my wife. I've adopted it and it's been very good for me. Eat whatever you want, just eat little of it. I even adopted her method of doing that. We've known each other ten years. I adopted this after year two. I have not had a whole desert in about seven years. The way to do that is to adopt her, I never saw it in practice before her, if you give her a piece of candy, it will last about 20 minutes. I watched her do this. It's almost scalpel like, the tiny piece. It works because the taste buds do not know quantity. There's nothing more pleasurable about a giant piece of cake than a tiny sliver of cake so if you keep eating slivers, you'll reach half and you'll feel like you've had a whole piece."

In January 2010, I received emails from educator Deanna Bregman. She said she was Fran Prager's best friend. She said she had lived with Dennis and Fran. She said that Dennis had a relationship with Sue while still married to Fran. She complained: "You painted a pretty picture [of Sue]."

Sue is 15 years younger than Dennis. Apparently, she is a convert to Judaism. On page 392 of his book Still the Best Hope Dennis wrote to thank "[Conservative] Rabbi Michael's [Gottlieb] overseeing Sue's studying of Judaism."

Jan. 6, 2010, Dennis said: “I am prepared to say, and I don’t think it compromises my male persona, that I don’t like going to bed alone. I think one of the great perks of marriage is precisely those moments. And I am not talking sex.”

Dennis: “You are the wife. You are doing work in the kitchen, washing dishes or in the garden gardening. There are no kids around. Your husband stops by to say something and he grabs your tush. Are you offended? Are you pleased?”
“The politically correct answer is that this is unwanted. That it is a form of marital sexual harassment.”
“When the couple loves one another, I hold that that is a good thing. I know that it is the last thing on the woman’s mind. So what? The more your husband who loves you wants to grab you, the better it is for both of you.”
“If your husband is still doing this after ten years of marriage, I think the two of you are blessed.”
“I have this line and I will use it while in the car with my wife. It’s one of the fun sayings of marriage. ‘Honey, the last thing on your mind is the first thing on my mind.’
“That is as true as it gets in the sexual realm most of the time in a marriage.”
Mike calls: “This issue should come up only once in a marriage. Each spouse tells the other when it happens that they like it or they don’t like it. And it would never come up again.”
Dennis: “We disagree. My whole point is that if they have decided he shouldn’t do it, they should rethink the decision.”
Mike: “If it hurts somebody for any reason…”
Dennis: “We are hurt because we decided to be hurt. Because the mind decides to be hurt. Why would a woman be hurt if the husband she loves grabs her?”
Mike: “Why is anyone uncomfortable about anything?”
Dennis: “Just as I want men to rethink a lot of things they do, I want women to rethink too. If the subject was just to do what is comfortable, I would do another hour here. I don’t think we should be guided by feelings only.”
“The response, ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ would have a terribly deflating effect on most men.”
“Our screener, married for 25 years, IMs me that her husband can grab away, but he may not whistle at her to get her attention.”
“If every woman thought this was a great thing, I wouldn’t have this subject this hour. The spirit of our times is that a man doesn’t do that. He asks permission first.”
A wife calls from Phoenix. “I was loading the dishwasher last night and my husband said, ‘Could you do that again? Could you put something else in there?’”
Dennis: “Why would we deprive our wife or our husband of so much joy when the price to us is so minimal?”
“I don’t advocate this as a prelude to immediately engaging in sexual intercourse. I’m advocating that this grab be accepted for what it is — the playful sexual grab of a loving husband.”
A male caller says about his first wife who repelled his advances: “Playful touching was not welcomed. I think it had a lot to do with the eventual failure of that marriage. Some of the things that went on inside my head: ‘I felt less than, less than her. I felt that at some level I must disgust her. You internalize that and you get depressed. What I thought was an expression of love and my natural way of being was somehow wrong and repellent in her eyes.”
Dennis: “If he never sees you as a piece of meat, it’s a platonic relationship of roommates.”
“Another man is calling in to say that grabs are OK, but maybe you should also rub the shoulders and think about what she wants.
“Guys, grabbing your wife when you want is one of the most basic masculine things that you express. The emasculating messages of college have been injurious to male-female relations. Of course a man has to be sensitive to the feelings of his wife in the same way you have to be sensitive to the feelings of your male friends. It’s wonderful for your marriage if this happens and he asks you to put another dish in the dishwasher.”

In a January 2010 debate with Shmuley Boteach in Manhattan, Dennis said: “I was born with courage. I take no credit for my courage. To say some of the things I say takes courage because they go against prevailing opinion. I believe that if a wife says to her husband periodically, twice a year, ‘Honey, I know male nature, and I want you to know that I appreciate the fact that you remain faithful’ is terrific for a marriage.
“I don’t think it works exactly in both directions. I think there are things he should thank her for, but not necessarily fidelity. There are women who do battle to stay faithful, but I doubt that they are in good marriages. Men in good marriages do battle to stay faithful.”
“If we don’t agree on male nature, debate is useless. If we don’t acknowledge that male nature is variety oriented and stimulated with phenomenal ease, like seeing a thigh. That is not true for women. There are no ads featuring male thighs.”
“If a man doesn’t admit this battle [to stay faithful], he’s either lying to you or he’s asexual.”
“A man wants to know that his wife understands his sexual nature. Most men don’t tell their wives about it, which is why when I eventually write my book on male sexual nature, my working title is, ‘Your Husband is Not a Pervert’. The vast majority of men are afraid that their wives will think they are perverts if they open up about their sexual nature. So they shut down and then women wonder, ‘Why is my husband so quiet?’ Because he can’t freely talk about his nature without you thinking he’s a sicko. So I do it on their behalf. I’m the husband’s best friend.”
Dennis replied to a question from Lisa Oz: “It gives you an idea of how close my wife and I are that I can say [in front of her], yes, I see women that I would like to bang regularly but I wouldn’t. And she knows that. One of the reasons that I love her so much is that I can be that honest. I don’t know a man who is honest who would have a different answer. I know Shmuley [Boteach] does. He has talked himself into this. Fine. If he has to fool himself into — I have no desire for any other woman on earth — fine. It may be true. I’m not speaking for 100% of males. I’m speaking for 99% of males.”
“The reason I love Judaism is that it is real about men. Something has happened to negate the realizations of Judaism. Don’t sit in a room alone with a woman. Why not? Don’t you have divine energy? Would a great rabbi even think of that? Of course he thinks of it because he’s still a male.
“I’ll never forget the woman doctor who called my show once… She said, ‘Dennis, sometimes men make sick. Just the other week, I was with a male patient. He was in his nineties and he was dying. And as he was dying, he was looking down my shirt.’
“I said to her, ‘Doctor, that’s how I want to die.’”
“I want people to eat right. It is a battle for me every day not to have more dessert. My true nature is carrot cake in the morning, cheesecake at lunch and an ice cream sundae in the evening.”
“Your mind should be as translucently open as possible [to your spouse]. When I asked my wife why she loves me, she said that I have no black boxes. That she really feels she knows me.”
Shmuley: “If your wife just asked you, what did you do in the bathroom? Would you give her the details?”
Dennis: “If my wife asked me that, I would think that she has a tumor in the brain.”
Shmuley: “I think you should work on it. You should be more open.”
Dennis: “What’s on your mind and what you excrete are different.”
Turning to Shmuley later in the program, Dennis says: “If you feel that masturbation and lust is the same as actual adultery, you are in that regard Christian and not Jewish. That is what Jesus said.”
Shmuley: “I counsel so many couples today where porn is destroying the marriage.”
Dennis: “I argue that if a man looks at porn for an hour a day, which I would hardly counsel, I have 50 other questions other than that to know about their marriage. Do they love each other? Do you have an active and good sex life? If they do and the wife is not deprived of his love and affection, looking at porn does not kill the marriage. Your advice kills the marriage because you have so toxified porn that you have told women that if he looks at it, he doesn’t love you.”
Shmuley: “Porn destroys marriages.”
Aug. 17, 2011, Dennis said: “Divorce is not what kills marriage… What kills marriage is not marrying. Divorce is a tragedy. It is not a statement about marriage. It is a statement about a particular marriage. Most divorced people want to marry.”