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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. 
Said Dennis Sept. 17, 2010: “I spoke at a rally [for Baby Richard] in Chicago. And I cried in the middle of my own talk, it was so painful, that whole issue, in part because my child [Aaron] was the same age and also adopted at birth and the thought of his being taken away was nightmarish.”
According to Wikipedia: "Karen Moriarty, a therapist for the biological parents, told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2003 that Danny has adjusted well to life after the custody battle. She documented the case in the book Baby Richard -- A Four-Year-Old Comes Home. Moriarty decried the media's treatment of the Kirchners, claiming that Bob Greene never spoke to Kirchner or Janikova in spite of writing so frequently on the case."
Susan Brandenburg reported July 4, 2007:
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.

In Think A Second Time, Dennis wrote:
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?
Around 1995, in his first lecture on the Book of Exodus as part of his 18-year project to teach the Torah verse by verse, Dennis said: "The Jewish dream is that the world not be based on blood ties. It is the only dream ultimately that will save humanity given the horrors of blood historically. Blood beliefs are the greatest source of cruelty in history because if you are not my blood, you are not valuable. That's how people have lived."

"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

Anthropologist Peter Frost wrote:
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.
This is like wanting to be a member of your family because you chose your parents, not because you were born to them. Few people with IQs under 130 (about 2% of whites and orientals) are going to spend much time thinking, "Why am I a Jew/American/whatever?" This exquisite agony is the luxury of the comfortably-off, high-IQ abstract thinkers such as Prager.
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..."

"Russell W." wrote to Lawrence Auster about Prager:
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. 
Economist Gregory Clark wrote in the New York Times Feb. 21, 2014:
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.

O.J. Simpson Not Guilty Verdict Oct. 3, 1995

Dennis Prager wrote June 10, 2008:
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.
Judaism, Homosexuality & Civilization II

In mid-November 1996, Dennis Prager told the editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Gene Lichtenstein, that he wanted to submit an article on Judaism and homosexuality. Gene said he’d publish it. Two weeks went by and nothing appeared. Prager called Gene and asked what happened. Lichtenstein said that he so disagreed with the piece that he would not publish it without publishing a rebuttal in the same issue.
Gene sought a rabbi to write a rebuttal, but none of them would, despite their strong disagreement with Prager’s ideas. So Lichtenstein wrote a rebuttal which he published with Prager’s essay in the Journal’s November 22nd issue.
The Jewish Journal then published a series of letters, almost all attacking Dennis. The most significant was signed by sixteen rabbis, four Conservative and 12 Reform. “Apparently,” wrote Dennis afterwards in his journal The Prager Perspective, “Mr. Lichtenstein does not believe that the letters he publishes need engage issues or even approximate respectful dialogue. The letters… were of a level so low, so filled with invective and even hatred toward me that I wonder if Mr. Lichtenstein wonders about the moral level of his ideological allies. I wonder whether he was embarrassed by what he published week after week. Or perhaps, he took the high road in engaging me, while happily publishing all those who took the low road.”
I remember the Sabbath morning at Stephen S. Wise temple after these letters were published. There was something completely different about Dennis Prager’s demeanor. He was shaken in a way I had never seen before. It was the rabbis’ letter that did it, I suspect. Two of the rabbis who signed it were friends — Neal Weinberg and Elliot Dorff. 
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
Dennis Prager wrote in his journal The Prager Perspective:
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.
Prager’s response in the Jewish Journal was headlined: “Dennis Prager: Firing Salvos at his Rabbinic Critics”
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.
Five of the 16 rabbis (Orenstein, Dorff, Sacks-Rosen, Weinberg, Wynne) responded:
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.
One rabbi apologized to Dennis -- Neal Weinberg -- and letters poured into the Jewish Journal, supporting Dennis and his position. Rabbi Joseph Telushkin wrote:
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.

Conservative Rabbi Michael Gotlieb of Congregation Kehilat Ma'Arav, Santa Monica, wrote in:
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.

Reform Rabbi Mordecai Finely, of Ohr Torah, wrote:
…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."
Rabbi Daniel Gordis took on his colleague Elliot Dorff in an essay that he submitted to the Jewish Journal, but the editor, Gene Lichtenstein, refused to print it unedited. So Gordis decided to not publish it there.

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.

“I have actually introduced gay male friends to other men,” said Dennis in a 2009 (?) lecture on “Feelings: Key to the Liberal Mind.”

Feb. 7, 2013, Dennis Prager said: 
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.
Mar. 20, 2013, Dennis described the ACLU "as the single most destructive organization in the United States."
"The ACLU has more money than any school district. They just bully their way. People are just intimidated. The ACLU are left-wing bullies. Anything that represents traditional values must be destroyed."
"Civil liberties in this country are so well protected that they have nothing left to do but to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization as we have known it. They loathe it."

Is God In Trees?

In the Spring of 1997, I sat near Dennis Prager on a Saturday morning at Stephen S. Wise temple while he took furious notes (it is a violation of Jewish law to write on the Sabbath and Prager rarely breaks this law except when he’s pushed to sign an autograph, etc) on the sermon by atheist professor Daniel Matt on the Big Bang. Dr. Matt saw spiritual significance and ultimate meaning in such natural phenomena.
Prager disagreed and devoted the June 1, 1997 edition of his newsletter The Prager Perspective to the question, “Is God in Trees?”
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.
In a 1995 lecture on why God is important (tenth lecture on Exodus), Dennis said: “When I look at a mountain, I want to [bow down]. I feel insignificant. When I visited the Himalayas, I was shaken… The tops are where jet planes fly. I am not a nature worshiper. I am a God believer, a supernatural God, and I am standing there and this is awesome. I am insignificant. This is where it’s at.”

Happiness Is A Serious Problem

In January 1998, Dennis published his fourth book Happiness Is A Serious Problem. “My wife Fran has had to endure my preoccupation with happiness for some times,” Dennis wrote in the introduction to his book. “She has also graciously sat through many of my lectures on the subject, including four consecutive nights in four South American countries (in slower English, no less) and has read every word and made critical suggestions. She and our wonderful children, Anya, David, and Aaron, are already happier people – thanks to my finally finishing this book.
“…My wife is often dissatisfied with the level of communication in our marriage. In her view, we could almost always be more open and honest about our feelings and spend more time together. While she is happy in our marriage, her dissatisfaction with the level of our communication ensures ever greater intimacy and therefore a better marriage.”
“Religion is supposed to give you moral standards and peace,” Prager told the Jan. 22, 1998 Washington Times. “If you walk around distraught, your religion has failed.”
But why are people more unhappy than ever?
“I think the expectations are simply greater,” he says. “People expect just about everything, and they don’t stop to do the things that make them happy.
“People would be happier if they asked, before they do anything, `Will this make me happier?’ If they did, they’d watch less TV. They’d learn an instrument, spend time with friends, read books, get deeper, do things that last. Happiness comes with doing things that last.”
Prager said that writing Happiness Is A Serious Problem was his most difficult professional accomplishment. Dennis said that if he was naturally ecstatic, he could never have written the book because he would not have thought up most of his happiness tips.
Prager’s friend Joseph Telushkin helped edit his book. “Joseph scrawled on every page: ‘Good point. Bad point. Dumb point. Simple point…’ And he was always right.”
How does Dennis cope with grave disappointments? “At least I have God. I can still study my Torah. I can still listen to Bach,” he says. “I have to feel that I am growing. I argued about this on my talk show. People were saying they’d be dead rather than in Christopher Reeve’s position,” referring to the popular actor whose fall from a horse made him a quadriplegic.
“There isn’t any part of me that’d rather be dead than a quad,” Prager says. “There’s a lot we have, and I love life.” (Washington Times)

Employees

Dennis Prager usually employs women. Slender blonde Laurie B. Zimmet, born in June, 1963, served as Prager’s personal assistant from 1995 – 2000. The avid mountain climber taught for several years at the day school of the Pacific Jewish Center, founded by Michael Medved. She met Dennis and Fran at Brandeis-Bardin in 1991, establishing immediate rapport. The Pragers’ boy Aaron called her “Aunt.”
“My assistant, Laurie Zimmet,” wrote Prager in his introduction to Think a Second Time, “is more than my right arm, she is a source of ideas, a proofreader; and a one-person support system.”
Dennis said to Laurie in a 1996 lecture on Exodus 20: “If I don’t [do a good job repeating your point], feel free to resign. Did I tell you that she sent me to New York for no reason? I don’t even want to tell you because it would hurt her feelings that she got the date wrong and I went to New York for no speech. Do you know what it is like to walk on 33rd St. for no reason. It’s a phenomenon very few of you will experience in your life, being 3,000 miles from home for no reason. She’s the best though. She really is. You just have to live with that stuff. Everyone of us a quota of flat tires and you have to meet it.”
Reacting to the Congressman Mark Foley scandal, Dennis wrote Oct. 24, 2006: “…I oppose any sexual activity between a politician and a page, even of majority age. In my capacity as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host I have had numerous young women (and men, but they are not relevant to this discussion in my case) serve as interns. I have always believed that in their eyes I was supposed to represent the ideals that I stand for, not a man on the hunt for young flesh.”
Prager’s one prominent male assistant was Mark Wilcox who developed the Micah Center for Ethical Monotheism. Prager and Wilcox left on bad terms in late 1994. Said one source who worked with both of them, “Mark hates Dennis.”
While some former employees and work associates of Dennis Prager are happy to trash Prager to me privately, they are not willing to go on the record with their criticisms for fear he will sue them. Prager is quick to threaten lawsuits to defend his reputation.
“Most men do not like to be vilified,” said Dennis May 7, 2010. “I am vilified. While I get to hear many beautiful warm things said to me on the radio, if you look me up on the Internet and any expletive you can think of put in with my name and you will get thousands of hits. Do I enjoy it? I don’t enjoy it. Do I lose sleep over it? The only thing I ever lose sleep over is when I am misquoted. It drives me crazy for idealistic reasons. I live so that I can have a good influence on people. If people change what I say, they undermine my ability to do good and that really does make me angry. If people call me names, that truly doesn’t bother me.”
Dennis Prager has an insatiable desire for appreciation. You can hear it in his voice when he gets a thoughtful and genuine compliment on his radio show. Every year on his birthday (since about 2001?), he has asked for the birthday present of letting him know how he has touched your life.
Dennis said June 23, 2010, “The original sin [by General Stanley McChrystal]… you don’t have a guy from Rolling Stone live with you for a month. If a guy from Rolling Stone lived with me for a month, it would be devastating, and I have a very clean and happy-go-lucky life but I know it would be portrayed in profoundly dark ways.”
People who’ve worked with Dennis Prager seem evenly split between those who hate him and those who love him.
After more than five years of listening to him on the radio, I met Dennis Prager in person the Super Bowl weekend of 1994 in Tampa Bay. We spoke several times that weekend. He said that if I ever moved to Los Angeles, he might have work for me.
I moved to Los Angeles in March. I had my job interview with Mark Wilcox in April. I did not get the job.
Mark and I talked for about two hours that afternoon. Mark said that Dennis was not an easy man to work for. Mark recounted offering some unsolicited feedback on one of Prager’s essays in progress and that Dennis had crumpled the paper up in front of him and thrown it in the trash.
Mark said that he was responsible for getting Dennis to change his party affiliation to Republican in 1993.
(In a 2010 interview at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said: “It was a black woman Republican who came over to me at a speech and said, ‘It is time for you to register as a Republican. Put your registration where your mouth is.’ She was right. She gave me the form.”)
Around this time, Dennis stopped describing himself as a “passionate centrist”, a phrase he’d used for more than 15 years.
Jan. 15, 2011, Dennis said: “I still think of myself as a passionate centrist. I dropped the term because in modern terminology, there’s no question I am a conservative. I thought it would not sound terribly honest if I agree with conservatives 92% of the time and called myself a centrist.
“I still think I’m a liberal, but liberalism has been taken over by leftism. I’ve always been anti-left.
“What I am today in terms of positions is conservative.
“I do recall making a conscious decision. I don’t think any one event did it. I recall saying to myself, ‘Dennis, it won’t sound real. You keep taking conservative positions. Call yourself that.’ I always want to sound real even though in my heart and mind I know I am [a centrist].
“Religiously, I really am a passionate centrist.
“Conservative works. That is more received as honestly given. I’m happy to take the term.”
As a moral leader, Dennis Prager offers a big fat juicy target for those who want to allege he does not live up to his teachings. As someone who has followed Dennis Prager closely since the fall of 1988 and has always been as open to hearing criticism of him as praise, I’ve never seen any evidence of serious wrongdoing on Prager’s part. According to the best I know, Dennis Prager largely lives up to his public ideals.
A lot of people like to test Dennis Prager’s ethics by asking him for favors such as rides, free books, free speeches, and loans. They see him as this endless reservoir of kindness and they get ticked off when they have to lose their illusions.
I’ve heard Dennis say that some of the biggest mistakes he’s made came from a desire to do good.
I remember one Sabbath morning in 1995, Dennis picked up a hitchhiking Jew and gave him a ride to Stephen S. Wise temple. At the end of services, Dennis got up and gave a little talk to raise money for the guy who was apparently in dire need.
A lot of people gave money.
Then the guy turned out to be a jerk, hassling the female rabbi Tova August and security had to be called to get rid of him. 
In a 2004 lecture on Deuteronomy 13, Dennis said:
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.
On August 2, 1998, Dennis Prager turned 50. “Fifty did hit me,” Dennis said Aug. 3, 2010. “I had such a great time when I was young… There was a real great time then because it was much less burdened by any issues. You just realize that that can not go on forever. There was a book that made an impression on me early on — Necessary Losses by Judith Viorst.

Bill Clinton – Monica Lewinsky Scandal

March 23, 2010, Dennis said: “It was the most uncomfortable, miserable time I had as a radio talk show host in 29 years of broadcasting. The entire thing was troubling to me on all grounds.”
“It was the only time I ever went to work not wanting to go to work. All of you know how much I love and treasure my job, but I felt everybody was brought down by this whole thing. I said at the time, ‘I can’t believe America is preoccupied with a stained dress. This is what we’ve come to?’ It was a plague on everybody.”
Dennis wrote Jan. 13, 2004: “...I have never attributed a statement to anyone for which I did not have a reputable source. Furthermore, I have particularly high standards to protect the dignity of public figures. For example, I may have been the only talk show host who never allowed a Monica Lewinsky joke to be broadcast on my show.”
Dennis wrote April 20, 2010:
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.
Syndication

When Prager’s radio show went national in 1999, Laurie Zimmet sought and achieved the role and title of producer, but when Prager was dropped by his syndicator (Jones Radio Network) in late 2000, and picked up by the Christian organization (Salem Communications Corporation), the new group balked at picking up several of the expenses of their predecessor, including Laurie as producer. Prager’s biweekly newsletter, The Prager Perspective, also ceased publication because the new syndicator did not want to pick up the tab.
By that time, such print publications seemed quaint.
Zimmet took other work, eventually serving in Iraq. On August 5, 2009 Lubavitch.com published:
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.
In 2004, Dennis took his 11-year old son Aaron to Israel.
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.

Dennis supported invading and occupying Afghanistan after 9/11 ("I'd rather die fighting evil than live ignoring it, and that goes for my children," said Dennis May 9, 2014 in support of American intervention in Afghanistan and elsewhere) but he had no position on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling it the greatest gamble by a president in a century. Once the battle joined, Dennis said America had to win for the sake of its prestige. In other words, "keep shoving American troops and money into a meatgrinder" for honor.
John Mearsheimer wrote in 2014:
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.
Nov. 1, 2010, Dennis said: “When George W. Bush won the second time, I came close to sobbing on the air out of relief because I knew we would’ve left Iraq, among other things.”
After the last American troops left Iraq August 18, 2010, what exactly was accomplished at the cost of seven trillion dollars? On Feb. 20, 2014, Dennis said: "In Iraq we fought the greatest evil of our time today, the violent Islamists, we defeated them, we defeated one of the most grotesque dictators of the 20th Century, and if we had stayed there, just as we did in Japan, Korea and Germany, there would have been a lot more peace today."
Dennis said October 28, 2008: “If John Kerry had won [in 2004], we would’ve been defeated in Iraq. A defeat in Iraq would have reverberated around in the world in a massive renaissance of Islamic terror. The United States of America would’ve been defeated by Al Qaeda and other terrorists and it would not end. This war would’ve only increased.”

The Passion

Dennis Prager played an important role in the controversy over this 2004 film. Prior to his weighing in, the Jewish Right (as represented by such figures as Rabbi David Lapin and Michael Medved) appeared united with their Christian peers in arguing that Gibson was a victim of left-wing smears, but Prager wrote:
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.
Miami Yom Kippur 2004

Dennis wrote Sept. 28, 2004:
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.”
I wonder if Dennis Prager rethought his position after Hurricane Katrina took 1,836 lives in August 2005.

In The Courts

On January 17, 2007, I shelled out $4:75 to search “Dennis Prager” on the LA Superior Court website and found nine cases.
Here’s Dennis Prager (Aug. 6, 2006) vs. The Prager Perspective. Here’s the TPP cross-complaint for breach of oral contract and misrepresentation (filed Oct. 5, 2006). Dennis Prager answers were filed Nov. 8, 2006.
The dispute has since been settled.
In a case filed May 15, 2000, Bank of America sued Dennis Prager for not paying back a loan of over $30,000. The plaintiff filed to dismiss the suit in September, 2000. I assume there was a settlement.
In case number SC 033536 filed November 7, 1994 (EARL KORCHAK, ET AL VS LIGHT MANAGMENT SERVICES, INC ET AL) Dennis Prager was one of four plaintiffs in this lawsuit that would be dismissed August 2, 1995.
On December 23, 1994, Dennis Prager along with MULTIMEDIA ENTERTAINMENT INC. were defendants in the case (BC 118757) TIM STEPHEN VS MULTIMEDIA ENTERTAINMENT INC ET AL. The plaintiff asked for dismissal of the case with prejudice on September 9, 1996.
Around 1999, Dennis met Scott Webley, a former actor on General Hospital (1977-1978) who owned a production company (ShowBiz Studios) and several Internet businesses (Showbiz.com, etc).
According to Los Angeles Superior Court case BC 357131 (in an Oct. 5, 2006 filing by Scott Webley’s attorneys, responding to this August 6, 2006 filing by Dennis Prager’s attorneys), Prager and Webley agreed orally in late 2000 or early 2001 to operate The Prager Perspective Limited Liability Company to sell Prager’s writings, radio show, and talks via dennisprager.com, etc, and to split the revenues.
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…
The dispute was settled in early 2007. Dennis felt he had been massively betrayed by Scott Webbley. It was unlike anything he experienced before.

The Grand Canyon

Dennis Prager wrote Aug. 5, 2003:
…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.
Said Dennis in a 2007 lecture on Leviticus 1: “I battled for the plaque and they reinstated it. I went to Phoenix to give a speech at a synagogue. About ten nuns showed up from the local order that had put the plaque there originally. They came to thank me and they did a dance around me.”

Breastfeeding

In 2003, Dennis Prager devoted two columns to breastfeeding: "The religious-like fervor for breast-feeding and loathing of bottle-feeding need to be explained. I acknowledge having no scientific basis on which to challenge the many scientific studies that point to the health benefits of breast-feeding -- such as fewer infant infections, fewer early allergies, getting the mother's antibodies, and so on. I do, however, believe that in a health-conscious home, these benefits are negligible."

The blog Gene Expression wrote in 2006 that breastfeeding "is practiced almost three times as much among white Americans than African-Americans and has been associated with IQ gains of nearly 10 points. It is likely that effectively encouraging breast-feeding would have a positive impact on the next generation of African-Americans."

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).
Immigration

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?"

Yet, when it comes to America, Dennis has long supported mass immigration and he has expressed no interest in maintaining a majority population of whites and a dominantly white culture (even though it was whites who created the United States of America). Echoing Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager has often said he is "more afraid of what America will do to immigrants than what immigrants will do to America."

Jan. 9, 2014, Dennis said: "It's a nation of immigrants. The difference is us, not them. We tried to Americanize them then."

Au contraire, wrote Steve Sailer in 2004:
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."

What Mexicans in particular and Latin Americans (outside of Cubans) have done in general in America mirrors their low achievement in their native lands. Edward S. Rubinstein wrote in 2004:
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.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about half of hispanics in America are basically illiterate, and the problem is getting worse. "Among Hispanics, the percentage with Below Basic prose literacy increased 9 percentage points between 1992 and 2003..." By contrast, only 7% of whites and 24% of blacks are this illiterate.

Oct. 5, 2010, Dennis wrote an open letter to American hispanics. Though for high rates of legal immigration, Dennis said: "No country in the world can allow unlimited immigration. If America opened its borders to all those who wish to live here, hundreds of millions of people would come in. That would, of course, mean the end of the United States economically and culturally."

Hispanic-Americans, along with blacks, are located primarily at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. They consume more government services than they pay for in taxes and it seems to be in their group interest to vote for higher taxes and more welfare. By contrast, it is in America's group interest to restrict such immigration.

Prager's pro-immigration position is closer to the neoconservatives (William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, etc) than to the conservatives such as Steve Sailer:
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.

Internet poster Stephen T. wrote about Prager to Lawrence Auster Nov. 24, 2006: "If his wife needed some chores done while he was out of town and told him she intended to go to a street corner and randomly hire a Mestizo Mexican day laborer in the country illegally to work around the house with her in his absence, he would feel completely relaxed and have no worry whatsoever about her safety. However, if she said she was going to hire an American man to do the same thing, Prager said he would greatly fear for her well-being."

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.

On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis said: "Why is the [American] latino population so left of center? Because they left countries whose culture is big government. We have not taught them. We haven't taught anglos, or the people who have been here the longest -- blacks. We haven't taught anybody what American values are, so why would we expect a latino to be in favor of a small government United States?

"They have not asked the question -- why is America prosperous and Mexico not? And El Salvador not? Guatemala not? Nicaragua not? Colombia not? Why?"

To Dennis, the answer is simple -- values. Jan. 3, 2014, Dennis said: "Latin America is the greatest enigma in the world. The most exhilirating people as a rule. You can't go to Latin America and not fall in love with the people. The sum is worse than its parts. They produce terrible governments and terrible ideas and an inordinate number of terrific people."

Latin America does not produce ideas. It borrows them from westerners. Steve Sailer wrote:
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."
Latin Americans tend to under-achieve -- both inside and outside of Latin America -- their IQs (Venezuela's average IQ is 84, Mexico's 87, Brazil's 87, Colombia 89, Chile 90, Argentina 96 while the United States is 98). 

Sailer wrote in 2005: "Latin American politics was long dominated by imported ideologies, such as Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s and laissez-faire in the 1990s. They were largely irrelevant because none of them dealt directly with Latin America's essential political problem: the enduring racial conflict originating in the Conquest of a half millennium ago."

Sailer wrote in 2006: "Latin Americans do the worst on school achievement tests relative to their IQs than any other large group of people. Some of that is cultural -- Mexicans, especially, don't like to read and don't like to go to school..."

Sailer wrote in 2005 about American Hispanics, noting "a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics..."

Mar. 26, 2014, Dennis said: "Why did North America prosper and South America did not? In North America, they had private property. In South America, it went back to the king. The state was gigantic in South America and the individual was gigantic in North America and that's the difference to this day."

"Why is America prosperous and El Salvador not? The answer to that will explain everything. That is the Republican/Democrat divide. It's not the people. Your people are as bright and industrious as ours. It can only be the values. People from Latin America bring the values of Latin America to the United States and there is a receptive community that shares those values -- the left."

"It used to be that when people came to this country, they didn't have those [leftist] values. They came to America and they knew, wow, this country is prosperous. I want to be prosperous. So therefore I am going to go into business and I will make a first generation business and I will work 18 hours a day and then my children will be prosperous. And that's exactly what happened, whether you were an Italian immigrant, a Russian immigrant, a Jewish immigrant. But now it's different. Values are brought that have a receptive audience. The more that latino immigrants decide to exalt the individual, the worse it is for the Democrat party."

On May 16, 2006, the AP reported: "With guns drawn, plainclothes police in a suburb of South America's largest city stopped and frisked motorists in a hunt for gang members who set off a five-day wave of violence that left at least 133 dead by Tuesday."

Sailer headlined: "Ahh, the Sweet Life in Latin America!"

He continued: "Real life is making the Brazilian gangster cult film City of God look like Sesame Street."

"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.

William Buckley wrote an April 8, 1969 column called “On Negro Inferiority." He praised Arthur Jensen’s research about race and IQ as “massive, apparently authoritative." He added: "Professor Ernest van den Haag, writing in National Review...brilliantly anticipated the findings of Dr. Jensen and brilliantly coped with their implications."

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.

I wonder what would happen to this neighborhood if six Haitian families (with identical values to the family above) moved in? What would happen to property values? Prager's Haitian friends sound like lovely people, but statistically speaking, Haitians, inside America or inside Haiti, have high rates of crime, including murder, and STDS, including AIDS.

And what happened to this friendship as the two kids grew up? As About.com pointed out: "The older children get, the more likely they are not to socialize closely with peers of a different race." Aaron is now in his 20s. I suspect his closest friends are not black just as Dennis's closest friends are not black.

Would Dennis ever write a column about his son's best friend being white? No, that's too boring. This wonderful black family that stimulated his column is the exception that proves the rule that everywhere in the world, including Africa, as compared to whites and orientals, blacks throughout history have tended to low levels of achievement and literacy and to high levels of crime and dysfunction, whatever the cause. No society, including America, and no neighborhood, has been able to import large numbers of blacks without importing those higher levels of crime, dependency and dysfunction. Despite trillions of dollars of social experiments, these problems have proved intractable.

No white or asian country has successfully assimilated blacks as a group to life results that match the majority population (just as whites and orientals as a group have not matched black strengths in preaching, rhetoric, sports, improvisation, charisma, dance, rap, jazz, etc). Blacks, whether as communities or countries, have never, statistically, met the levels of literacy, education, income, and lawfulness of their white and asian neighbors. 

Despite these universal and obvious differences in behavior between the races through all times and in all places, according to Dennis, race should be a non-issue to all good people. "I'd be happy to have five kids from different races so long as they had my values," said Dennis Jan. 22, 2014.

Who are you going to believe about the unimportance of race? Dennis Prager or history? Surely you won't believe your lying eyes? Good people don't notice patterns. That's racist.

Different races have different strengths. As the black reverend and former NFL star Reggie White said:
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.

Steve Sailer holds by Reggie White's thinking and hence he's more real about life than Dennis:
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?

Good thing that doctors don't follow Dennis Prager's color-blind approach as different medicines often work differently for different races who frequently have different health challenges. As Dr. Sally Satel wrote (with assistance from Steve Sailer) in the New York Times in 2002: "In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works."

Forbes reported in 2005: "A flood of studies has emerged showing racial differences in how patients suffer from disease--or benefit from drugs--in ailments ranging from osteoporosis to cancer. And several more have looked at the effects of drugs on particular racial groups. Many of the doctors conducting the studies are African-American."

Steve Sailer wrote: "Knowledge of racial differences in genes is a good thing: it tells blacks that they should be extra careful to limit salt intake, that they should get checkups for prostate cancer, that they should imitate Jews with their Tay-Sachs disease testing and find out if they are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia, etc."

So in matters of life and death, race can matter very much.

Another way to see the importance of race is in sports. As the former black star Darryl Dawkins said: "Black basketball is much more individualistic. With so many other opportunities closed to young black kids, … if somebody makes you look bad with a shake-and-bake move, then you've got to come right back at him with something better, something more stylish… It's all about honor, pride, and establishing yourself as a man."

Regarding high school basketball, Dawkins said: "So if you're not scoring beaucoup points, if your picture isn't in the papers, if you don't have a trophy, then you ain't the man and you ain't nothing. Being second-best is just as bad as being last. And if a teammate hits nine shots in a row, the black attitude is, 'Screw him. Now it's my turn to get it on.'"

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."

With a nod to the Tom Wolfe insight above, a Steve Sailer reader emailed him:
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.
In his 1993 memoir, Kennan wrote:
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."

Psychologist James Thompson wrote: "Rindermann found that higher IQ countries (not just East Asian ones) tended to be more moral, less corrupt, more humane and more liberal in their approach to human freedoms. One can certainly argue that intelligence does not guarantee morality, but that is a different point."

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.

According to Dennis: "Use your common sense. Whenever you hear the words, studies show' -- outside of the natural sciences -- and you find that these studies show the opposite of what common sense suggests, be very skeptical. I do not recall ever coming across a valid that contravened common sense."

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).

Psychologist Byron M. Roth wrote:
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 you want to compare the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa with Singapore, Japan and China, I think the differences in IQ explain a significant part of that difference. If you want to compare Italy and Germany and Sweden, I don't think that's going to buy you a lot. IQ is a fairly blunt instrument."

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.

On Dec. 6, 2013, Dennis said: "In the car crash of the Fast & Furious star [Paul Walker], there were kids who went by and stole from the crash afterward and I always think this, what happens to the conscience in such persons? You're a living vulture? There's a car crash and two dead people and you go and steal from it? I admit this is silly, but it is always my initial reaction that I want to interview them."

An interview with such criminals would likely show they have an IQ in the retarded category and don't think about consequences.

"I think America is deteriorating... When there are bunches of kids walking around playing the knockout game...and then videoing it and putting it on the Youtube... The number of children born from mothers who are not married."

Where are these problems at their worst in America? In black and latino life. As America allows in more immigrants with low IQs, the country heads towards Idiocracy.

As Jason Richwine wrote for Politico:
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.

Dennis Prager is squarely among those denouncing the above experts in IQ while freely admitting he knows nothing about IQ. He showed his obliviousness in this June 7, 2011 column:
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.

Reality reveals, however, that neither leftism nor America's education system is failing blacks (or whites or Asians or Latinos), because, according to the 2013 PISA test results (with life results to match), "Asian Americans outscored all large Asian countries (with the exception of three rich cities); white Americans outperformed most, but not all, traditionally white countries; and Latino Americans did better than all Latin American countries. African Americans almost certainly scored higher than any black majority country would have performed."
People with low IQs of any race are going to have more difficulty with grammar and getting photo identification and other tasks of life, whatever the education and political system.
Fifty two of the leading thinkers on intelligence published this essay in the Wall Street Journal Dec. 13, 1994 in support of The Bell Curve:
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.
Dennis responded: "Charles Murray talked about IQ in one of his books. He spoke about average IQs among blacks in America and whites in America, but Krugman might as well argue that Charles Murray argued for the genetic inferiority of whites to asians because asians have higher IQs than whites."

"I don't care about IQ. I admire Charles Murray. He's one of the important thinkers of our old time but I do not find that important. IQ does not make you inferior or superior. Is there one person listening to this program of any race who believes that the measure of a person's worth is IQ?

"I've always argued that IQ is largely irrelevant. I am so committed to that that I do not know my IQ and I do not know my children's IQs nor do I give a damn. What difference does it make? Does it make you wiser? No. Does it make you happier? No. Does it make you more decent, kind or moral? No. It's one tiny little tool. That's all. It may be very helpful if you are going to do rocket science or higher mathematics."

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.

Sam M. Jones wrote for National Review (NR) in 1957 that "the problem of school integration in the nation’s capital may be eventually solved by the steady migration of the white population out of the District of Columbia.” Jones cited IQ differences, “a white average ranging from 105 to 111 and a Negro average of 87 to 89.... Data on juvenile delinquency...revealed a marked increase in truancy, theft, vandalism and sex-offenses in integrated schools. Dances and dramatic presentations have been quietly given up by most high schools. Senior and junior class plays have been discontinued. Inter-racial fights are frequent and constant vigilance is required to prevent molestation or attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls. In contrast, the schools outside the integrated neighborhoods have no more such problems than they had four years ago."

On the the tenth anniversary of Brown, NR editorialized June 2, 1964:
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.
In the Nov. 2, 1957 issue, classicist Revilo Oliver reviewed Ashley Montagu’s Man: His First Million Years:
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.
In 1979, William Buckley said about Martin Luther King: "When it was black men persecuting white or black men–in the Congo, for instance–he was strangely silent on the issue of human rights. The human rights of Chinese, or of Caucasians living behind the Iron Curtain never appeared to move him."

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.
Lawrence Auster, a Jew who converted to Christianity, wrote:
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.
Dennis Prager wrote Oct. 14, 2014:
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?

Contrary to what Dennis Prager alleges, Judaism has been strangely silent about the need for Jews to lobby their non-Jewish host nations to fight wars against evil. There's also nothing in Jewish history to suggest that this has been a historical practice of Jews. Instead, Jews, like all other groups, push for policies that are in their self-interest.

The Most Controversial Thing Dennis Prager Ever Said

According to Wikipedia (taken April 6, 2010):
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”.
As of Nov. 8, 2013, the Wikipedia entry on this controversy is about 20 times as long as its entry on Dennis Prager.
In a column Dec. 5, 2006, Dennis wrote: “In addition, there was widespread coverage on left-wing blogs, which, with no exception I could find, distorted what I said, charging my column and me with, for example, racism (see below), when race plays no role at all in this issue or in my column. For the record, because I deem this a significant statement about most of the Left, I found virtually no left-wing blog that was not filled with obscenity-laced descriptions of me. Aside from the immaturity and loathing of higher civilization that such public use of curse words reveal, the fury and hate render the leftist charge that it is the Right that is hate-filled one of the most obvious expressions of psychological projection I have seen in my lifetime.”
Introduced before a speech at U.C. Berkeley May 5, 2008 as a “spirited controversialist,” Dennis said: “How many people at your age, I’m speaking to the students here, when somebody asks you what do you want to do when you graduate, you say, ‘I’d like to be a spirited controversialist.’ It’s not the sort of occupation one anticipates in life.
“I’ll never forget the former University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and currently the American Jewish University, had a number of years ago the following ad for its distinguished speaker series: ‘The University of Judaism is proud to present this year Nobel laureate and conscience of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, internationally renowned Jewish educator Yitz Greenberg and the controversial Dennis Prager.’ That’s it?
“I never wake up any day and think, ‘What rumpus can I cause today?’ I seem to do so periodically but that is not my intent. I’m very easygoing. I wrote a book on happiness. How many controversialists spend ten years writing a book on happiness?”
In a speech Jan. 24, 2007, Dennis said: “It’s very rare that passion defeats reason when I speak. I’m very rational, I’m very calm. I was so passionate. Nobody had raised this issue. It was new to me too. I wrote sentences such as, ‘Keith Ellison should not be allowed to take his oath on the Koran.’ That was a mistaken sentence. I acknowledged it immediately. He is allowed to do whatever he wants. He can take his oath on the phone book. I totally understand that. My concern…has been…the place of the Bible in American life. If we don’t get our values from that book, where will we get our values from?”
On March 14, 2011, Dennis said: “I have refrained from saying anything critical of Congressman Ellison because of the article I wrote years ago when he was first sworn in and sworn in on a Koran, and I wanted him to swear on a Bible rather than a Koran. I think I made a mistake. My reasoning was sound. My values were sound. My upshot was not sound. I said it at the time and I say it again today.
“I actually apologized to him in the halls of Congress. We met up. I apologized. He not only accepted my apology very graciously, he told me his mother is a big fan of the show. She listens every day.”
Jan. 9, 2014, Dennis said: "I believe the best Islam ever will be created in the United States... I believe the best Christianity ever formed was in America... Judaism only didn't create as great a thing as was created here. Christianity alone didn't create as great a thing as was created here."
In a 2010 interview at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said: “Religion on the Line. My beginning in radio. Exactly ten years from August 1982 to August 1992. I was 34 years old and I was brought in to moderate between a priest, minister and rabbi every week. After five years, virtually every week I brought in a fourth religion. I brought in Muslims regularly. I got very close to the Muslim community. It was when they didn’t say a word about the slaughter of Israeli children in pizzerias [2000-2002] that we had a falling out. It was very painful to me. I went to the home of the leading Muslim in LA [Mahmoud Attoot (sp?), cardiac surgeon] and he came to my home. We got quite close and then nothing. I know they made the perfunctory statements against terror. That was after 9/11.
“I opened my show to them. They were very grateful. They had me speak in mosques.”
Dennis got no support from prominent Jews for his stand on Keith Ellison, and certainly not from Orthodox Jews (who cannot say as Dennis does that their American identity is as important to them as their Jewish identity). It is impossible to imagine an Orthodox Jewish intellectual making Prager's argument that Keith Ellison should swear on America's Bible (the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament). Traditional Jews don't talk about "America's Bible" and rarely talk about "Judeo-Christian" anything, preferring instead to practice their religion as far away from Christians as possible. Orthodox rabbis instruct Jews to not "swear" oaths (to say "I affirm" instead of "I swear") and when they must place their hand on the Bible in a judicial setting, it should only be on the Hebrew Bible. So when Dennis explains he doesn't have the temperament to be Orthodox (7/13/01), it reveals how many of his public positions are shaped by his psychology and life choices.
The Ellison incident illustrates how Dennis Prager believes as much in Americanism as in Judaism, and that sometimes his Americanism trumps his Judaism, a religion that says nothing about which non-Jewish scripture a Muslim politician in American should swear upon when entering office.

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.
Auster added: "Even if Muslims did not gain the whole world by bin Laden-type means (which Prager opposes) but by peaceable means, once they controlled the whole world, the whole world would be under the quasi-totalitarian regime of sharia."

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?

Lawrence Auster replied:
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.

In an Aug. 2, 2012 column, Dennis asked, "Can Islam Be Reformed?" Lawrence Auster wrote:
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.
Auster wrote July 2, 2012: "Dennis Prager is a joke, a man helplessly caught in his own contradictions, such as believing that America must be open to every person and culture in the world (his liberal part), and believing that America must preserve its traditions (his conservative part)."

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."

Lawrence Auster replied:
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.”

In a 2014 essay, John Mearsheimer pointed out that the United States had few if any strategic interests in the Middle East. "Israel is now so confident of its military superiority over its Arab neighbors that it is actually reducing its conventional forces."

A Lawrence Auster reader wrote in 2007:

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.

Auster replied:
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

Boogie Nights (about the porn industry), and an hour through asked Dennis if they could leave. He said no. On his radio show, Prager said he found the movie pointless.

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.

In one lecture in the series, Dennis read a list of about 40 different fetishes from a porn site. He defined "scat."

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.

When it came to Senator Edward Kennedy, however, Dennis Prager wrote July 30, 2013:
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.

On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis wrote: "...Bill Clinton who regularly used his positions of power to take advantage of women."

When Dennis used his public speaking to meet and date women, was that using "his positions of power to take advantage of women"?

Max Prager wrote in September 2004:
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).

Dennis Prager wrote April 12, 2005:
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.

Fran Prager filed a petition for divorce (BD431230) on August 11, 2005.
Dennis did not mention this on air for more than four months.
What it was like for him in the many years previous talking on the radio (and in lectures) about marriage and sex and love and other intimate topics while his own life was in so much turmoil? Dennis Prager must be one cool cucumber. Even when I’ve seen him deeply wounded (such as by the 1996 public denouncement of him for alleged homophobia by rabbi friends), he was still in control.
Sept. 28, 2012, Dennis said to a caller: "If your wife leaves you and your little kids and you loved her, that's going to create a hole, but I tend to think that holes that are made in adulthood are really in most cases widening holes that we've had from childhood. That's been the case in my life."
On Dec. 6, 2005, Dennis wrote the first of two columns entitled “If You’re Thinking Of Marrying”. Here are some excerpts:
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?

Dennis wrote Dec. 13, 2005:
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?

During the second hour of his show Dec. 30, 2005, Dennis, crying, read an announcement that he was getting divorced.

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.

Mar. 21, 2014, Dennis said: "When that couple where now she would like any form of sexual relations once or twice a month, when they were newlyweds or even dating, was it once or twice a month? Wasn't that change unfair? Isn't that a misleading thing? He has a normal sex drive and the rules are changed on him early in the marriage?"
"If she could say to him, we're really having some form of sexual contact here regularly but I just want you to know that in ten years it will be once or twice a month, I think he should be told in advance, just like if he's attentive early on but in ten years, he prefers watching TV to attending to her, he should say that early on."

Lack of sex in a marriage is often a symptom of trouble, not just a cause. If a couple came to a therapist asking, "Why aren't we having more sex?", they'd hear points such as:

* Let us help you hear the perspective of the other person.
* Distance in the marriage can cause grave issues in sex. If you're a workaholic, if you don't spend much time with your spouse, she's not likely to want sex with you. If she wants to connect and you want to work, that creates distance between a couple. Women want to feel important and they need an emotional connection to have sex. They're not going to want to give to you if they don't feel close to you. If someone is poking you, who wants to have sex with a porcupine?
* If a spouse doesn't feel like they have much power, if they don't feel like they have an equal say, they might use denial of sex as a weapon.
* Most men are counter-dependent (fine as long as they get laid and paid, notes therapist Mark E. Smith) and many men and women are co-dependent (needy and insecure). This is not a combination that leads to lasting passion.
* Is there anything you're doing to make yourself less desirable to your spouse and to make your spouse feel unsafe in pursuing you?
* Usually all of our emotions are entangled and this can make sex feel unsafe. Until a woman feels safe, nothing good is going to happen.
* What was the model of marriage you grew up with?
* It's easy to focus on the other person in a relationship, but we can work on ourselves to get more of what we want, including sex.

A Steve Sailer reader emailed him: "I think that most men are secretly (or openly) afraid that women don't like sex and only view it as a bargaining chip to get what they want out of males (companionship, emotional and physical support, or babies). Women are afraid that men only want them for sex and thus view emotional support of females mainly as a chore that they perform in order to get sex, or in order to have her give him children."

The 12-step group Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous posts 40 questions for self-diagnosis, including:
* 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?

In her book, The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine wrote about a husband's frustrated desire for sex with his wife: "It's just like what happens with a woman and verbal communication. If her partner stops talking to her or responding emotionally, she thinks that he disapproves of her, that she's done something wrong, or that he doesn't love her anymore. She'll panic that she's losing him. She may even think he's having an affair." (Pg. 92-93)

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: "There's no comparison. First of all, 'to death do us part' is unique to parts of the Christian ceremony in modern history. As Jew who's been married, I can tell you there's no such thing as that in the Jewish wedding ceremony and Judaism predates Christianity by 1300 years. There has never been a Jewish marriage with the words or the implication, 'to death do us part.' Divorce was always allowed and you didn't have to find fault with the other person to divorce and Jewish family life was known for being stable."
"Ask the most conservative anti-divorce person, do you think there is a bigger change between same-sex marriage and no-fault divorce, and I can't imagine one saying no-fault divorce."
On BookTV April 21, 2013, Elizabeth asks Dennis: "On a personal level, what has been the hardest challenge in your life?"
Dennis: "Divorce after 17 years was a terribly painful thing. You build hopes. You have dreams. You have a child. It's all very painful. I don't think there is a close second to that. I had every dream of a picket fence."
On August 2, 2013, Dennis was asked how he could give advice on marriage when he's been divorced. Dennis replied: "One is not related to the other. It's like, you drive so well, how did you get into a car crash? How do you know who's at fault in a car crash? A guy could've won the Daytona 500 four years running and then been in a terrible accident. Why do people assume that if you're divorced, you're at fault? It's an unfair inference to draw. One doesn't know. The outsider cannot possibly know what prevailed.
"I have wisdom on men and women...because of my experiences."

Third Marriage

From PragerRadio.com, on Jan. 5, 2009:


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.

Jan. 23, 2013, Dennis said: "I wish the advocates for the mentally ill at the people who push the position that mental illness is a source of evil. The vast majority of people in human history who committed massive evil were not mentally ill... I have a grown step-son who is autistic. He knows as clearly as I do that murder is wrong."

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."

On the next page, Dennis wrote: "Regarding Sue, words fail this professional communicator in describing the immensity of the role she plays in my intellectual life, not to mention the rest of my life. She is a sort of secret weapon during every one of my radio shows, as we instant-message (IM) one another while I broadcast. Ronald Reagan was quoted as having said that it all it took for him to feel lonely was for Nancy to leave the room. I know what he meant."
By the standards of Orthodox Judaism, Sue is not Jewish unless she converts to Judaism through an Orthodox Beit Din (Jewish law court).
Dennis wrote: "Why must we regard inter-dating as inevitably the abandonment by the Jew of his or her Jewish identity instead of the non-Jew coming to Judaism and the Jewish people?"

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.”

A review of Dennis Prager's Feb. 25, 2012 public dialogue with Adam Carolla says: "We learn that Prager’s wife can only fall asleep if what he calls “the Hitler Channel” [the Military Channel] is on in the background."

Jan. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "I watch the ID channel. It's my wife's way of falling asleep. A couple of homicides and you doze off. I can't avoid it. We share a bed."
April 9, 2010, Dennis listed his wife’s little joys in life — “books, coffee, dogs, walks, planting, ’70s music, choral music.”
Said Dennis June 25, 2010, “I want my dog to make me laugh. That is the greatest contribution he can make. I’m not looking for love. I get more laughs from this basset hound than you count.”
At Stephen S. Wise temple in 2010, Rabbi David Woznica asked Dennis: “What is the greatest consistent source of joy in your life?”
Dennis thought for a second and a little sheepishly, said, “OK. My wife.”
Dennis grips and ungrips his chair for a few seconds of silence and then adds: “By the way, since I like to be open, it was a long, I’ve had my own issues in that arena as is known and that is no reflection on anybody else. Just to be able to say that is a wonderful thing to say.”

Oct. 21, 2010, Dennis talked about a conversation he had with a man on a plane: “I told him that my wife doesn’t complain and never yells at me. He said, ‘Were her vocal chords removed?’”
Nov. 10, 2010, Dennis said: “My wife will have me check out some women.”
Dec. 28, 2010, Dennis said: “I get enough disagreement outside of my house. Inside my house, I really like harmony. The more you agree on [as a couple], the better. When you step outside the house, you can take on the world. Inside the house, you don’t want to take on your spouse.”
From Prager’s show March 16, 2011:

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.”

Oct. 31, 2011, Dennis said his wife travels with him 80% of the time. "Ideally you should spend as much time together as possible.""When my wife was a waitress at a well-known chain, the manager on a number of occasions just grabbed her breasts. She told him to let go and that was it. My wife could've ruined his life. I wonder if he could not go to jail for sexual assault. I don't condone what he did and I never did such a thing in my life... A playful grabbing of the waitress's breast by the manager is not gulag nor is it sexual assault."

Dennis wrote Nov. 15, 2011 about his wife: "She is a non-practicing lawyer with a particular interest in and knowledge of taxation and the economy. She decided to stay home to be a full-time mother to her two boys (one of whom is autistic) and her two nieces (who lost their mother, my wife's sister, to cancer, when they were very young). Between talk radio, History Channel documentaries, BookTV on C-SPAN2, recorded lectures from The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, and constant reading, she has led a first-class intellectual life while shuttling kids, folding laundry and making family dinners." 

Dennis tells Adam Carolla Feb. 25, 2012: "One of the kicks that I get out of life is at night if I'm at a stop light and women with nice legs are crossing the street and my headlights are there to illuminate their lovely limbs. 

"So we were in Florida visiting my son and grandson. There were some young women walking into the hotel where I was pulling up. In their skirts. And just as they passed the headlights, a big gust of wind came. And I looked at my wife and said, 'Sue, I just won the lottery.'"

On Hugh Hewitt's show for three hours on May 9, 2012, Dennis said Sue has been a vegetarian since age 14.

On Feb. 28, 2013, Dennis said to Adam Carolla: "I will walk into the bedroom, and my wife will be laughing and I know she's reading your book."

Adam: "You should probably get dressed next time before you walk into the bedroom."

Dec. 21, 2012, Dennis tried to compliment a 17 year old (probably not Jewish) female caller by saying that if he was 17, he would try to be her boyfriend. She gave a strained chuckle, leaving Dennis asking if she took what he said as a compliment. 

On the same hour, Dennis said the "Christian American" was his favorite group of people.

Mar. 11, 2013, Dennis said to his guest, Amity Shlaes: "You look terrific on camera. I don't think we have ever met in person and I did not know how you would come across but you come across terrific. You look great."

Amity: "Thank you."

Dennis: "You're like eye candy."

Amity: "Thank you. I'll tell my kids. I'll tell my spouse. Whoa!",p>Dennis: "Well, tell your spouse. Your husband will be happy to know that a red-blooded American male said that."

May 8, 2013, Dennis said: "The only arguments my wife and I have are in the car about my driving. There are no other arguments. To say backseat driver about my wife is to not even begin to describe what happens."

Producer Allen Estrin sided with Sue reminded Dennis about the time in Denver in 2012 he stopped on the freeway for cars to go by so he could get on the exit ramp he wanted rather than to drive on and get off on the next exit.

In a Mar. 14, 2012 column, Dennis Prager outlined the characteristics of happy people:

People who control themselves.
People who are given little and earn what they have.
People who do not see themselves or their group as victims.
People who rarely complain.
People who have close friends.
People who are in a good marriage.
People who act happy.
People who aren't envious.
People who have few expectations.
People who are grateful.

Francine Prager died February 4, 2014. From her online obituary:
Prager, Francine (Flentje), 66, passed away on February 4, 2014, near her home in Thousand Oaks, California. Her children, Anya Wayne and Aaron Prager and close friends, Deanna Bayer and Shula Bryski were at her bedside.

Francine grew up and attended public schools in Bluff City, Kansas and later studied vocal music at Bethany College in Lindsborg and the University of Kansas. She was an accomplished musician and was crowned Miss Kakeland in 1967. She later moved to Chicago and established a successful acting career, appearing in television commercials and movies and becoming a member of the Screen Actors Guild. She recently taught piano and voice lessons in Thousand Oaks and is being recognized for her contributions in founding the Conejo Jewish Day School.

Fran is survived by daughter, Anya (Larry) Wayne of Oakland, California; son, Aaron Prager of Thousand Oaks; brother, Ed (Marla) Flentje of Wichita; sister, Deborah Flentje of Colorado Springs; and close friends, Deanna and Kenny Bayer of Thousand Oaks. Memorials may be sent to Chabad of Thousand Oaks.

Fran's daughter Anya posted: "Love you always, Momma. You were brave, compassionate and never stopped growing, never turned your head away from life even to your last hours. Bereft at your loss, we come together today to honor and remember you. And to send you off to the next world with a cheer for your seven decades of vivacious life."

Recession 2007-2009

A capitalist, Dennis Prager is skeptical of big business.
He wrote March 17, 2009: “So, too, the current economic decline was brought about in large measure by people in the financial sector widely regarded as “brilliant.” Of course, it turns out that many of them were either dummies, amoral, incompetent, or all three.”
“The reason we have too few solutions to the problems that confront people — in their personal lives as well as in the political realm — is almost entirely due to a lack of common sense, psychological impediments to clear thinking, a perverse value system, to a lack of self-control, or all four.”
On March 10, 2009, Dennis Prager wrote: “The adulation of extremely wealthy Wall Street “wizards” has ended. Most of those people produced nothing of worth and believed in economic nonsense.”

Staying Fit

On April 9, 2010, Dennis Prager got a question about how he stays fit while traveling so much.
“I am surprised at the energy level and how healthy I stay,” said Dennis. “It’s an immense amount of travel. It’s unbelievable. And the work. Every day, a show. A column every week. A second column every other week for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. A book that I’m writing. The lectures. That’s pretty hefty.
“There are a few answers. One, is luck. I am very fortunate. I was given blessed with tremendous energy. Two, my attitude is so upbeat, I am convinced that with all the endorphins that I secrete, it helps my health tremendously. I really maximize the joys of my life… When I stopped off yesterday after my show at 3 p.m. Atlanta time and went to a cigar place, I only had two hours, because at 6 p.m. I had to be at the Cobb Energy Center for the evening with Bill Bennett and Congressman Price, I knew I had to maximize my pleasure in the midst of all this work. Three, I take supplements. I do believe in them… I don’t get enough sleep. Sometimes I get to take a nap for 20 minutes in the day, that’s a big help. Small portions are the secret to weight. I should do a show on the clean plate club, having to eat it all. Better advice is whatever is on your plate, leave half of it.”

Dennis said he's only caught food poisoning twice and those occasions were in Western countries. (April 27, 2012)
Dennis said in 2004 in his lecture on Deuteronomy 25, “I don’t have a lot of time. I have a show to do tomorrow morning so when I get home, I have to read a lot. I do all my reading at night. I go to bed about 2 and get up about an hour before the show and hope that nothing happened at night. The second I wake up, I call Allen [Estrin] and ask, ‘Allen, anything happen while I was sleeping?’”
In a column Nov. 21, 2006, Dennis wrote: “My father is 88 years old and has been smoking a few cigars a day… He not only taught me the joys of cigars. He also taught me the importance of thinking for myself and how to lead an honorable life that includes as much joy as possible.”
Dennis wrote July 15, 2003: “I smoke a pipe and cigar, and I am amazed at the certitude and chutzpah in the 5-year-olds who have visited my home who confidently walked over to me to tell me I shouldn’t smoke! Had they seen me drinking alcohol, as children regularly see adults do, it would never occur to them to say such a thing.”

The Case For America

For about as long as Dennis Prager has been speaking publicly, he’s been talking about the greatness of the United States.
In a column July 3, 2007, Dennis wrote: “But someone — or many someones — must come up with a July Fourth Seder. A generation of Americans with little American identity — emanating from little American memory — has already grown into adulthood. The nation whose founders regarded itself as the Second Israel must now learn how to survive from the First.”
In 2009, Dennis Prager decided to devote his fifth book to making the case for America: Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. Harper Collins releases the book April 24, 2012.
On Saturday, January 30, 2010, Dennis Prager addressed Congressional Republicans:

I would like show you some of the large themes involved in your present work.
First theme: It is harder to sell truths than to sell falsehoods. It is very easy to say, “Vote for us and we will give you, we will give you, we will give you.” It is much harder to advocate what is right and to say “Vote for us, but no, we won’t give you” — even though that is the more moral and the more American position. So you have the far more difficult task.
John Rosemond, who wrote books on child rearing, says that the most important vitamin you can give to a child is Vitamin N, his term for the word “No.” You have given America Vitamin N.
America needs it terribly because of another way in which God has stacked the deck against the fight for goodness in human history: Every change for good must be constantly renewed, but changes for the worse are often permanent. Goodness must be fought for every day, over and over. That is why every American generation has to be inculcated with American values. But once the change for bad is made, it is close to irreversible. The Democratic attempt to vastly expand the state’s power would likely be a permanent change for the worse in American life. When they’re candid, they admit that the health-care bill is their way to get to single-payer medicine and, more important, to a government takeover of another sixth of the American economy.
…And finally, theme four: I have a motto that I offer to you because this is the ultimate moral case for us: “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.”
…The bigger the government, the less I do for myself, for my family, and for my community. That is why we Americans give more charity and devote more time to volunteering than Europeans do. The European knows: the government, the state, will take care of me, my children, my parents, my neighbors, and my community. I don’t have to do anything. The bigger question in many Europeans’ lives is, “How much vacation time will I have and where will I spend that vacation?”
That is what happens when the state gets bigger — you become smaller. The dream of America was that the individual was to be a giant. The state stays small so as to enable each of us to be as big as we can be. We are each created in God’s image. The state is not in God’s image, but it is vying to be that. This is the battle you’re fighting. You are fighting a cosmic battle, because this is the most important society ever devised, the United States of America.
You can easily forget the big picture — how could you not? You’re there every day, battling. You are in dense jungle — excuse me, a rainforest — you are in a jungle rainforest, fighting; and I am, because of the nature of my work, in a little helicopter above the jungle telling you what it is you are fighting. America really is the last, best hope of mankind.
Apr. 7, 2010, Dennis said: “I have a theory that there are essentially four competing ideologies on earth today for humanity. They are the American central value system with the free market, liberty and basic Judeo-Christian principles, the leftist system, Islam and China.”
Prager’s guest that hour was Stefan Halper, Senior Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His new book was The Beijing Consensus: How Chinese Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the 21st Century.
Stefan: “The greatest challenge to China is American ideas… India, in many respects, reflects American pluralism, multiparty democracy and the market. The problem is that the United States has not stepped up to the line and told its story. It has not revitalized the American story.”
Dennis: “We are kindred spirits. That’s my whole thing… We haven’t even taught Americanism to Americans, let alone to the Chinese.”
On May 23, 2010, Dennis Prager spoke on a panel at the University of Denver with Sarah Palin and Hugh Hewitt. He stated America's greatest problem, and it just so happened to be the thing he felt most qualified to fix, just as 35 years earlier, the Jews' greatest problem just so happened to be the thing he felt most qualified to fix.

Here’s a selective transcript of this video:
Former U.S. Senator from Colorado, Bill Armstrong, asks Dennis: “If you had to identify a single threat to the future of our country, what would it be?”
Some in the conservative crowd yell out “Obama!”
Dennis: “No, it’s not Obama. If, God forbid, President Obama came down with an illness, nothing would change. Nothing! I believe the greatest threat facing the United States of America, and I have believed this my entire adult life, is that we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation.
“A society does not survive if it does not have a reason to survive. That’s true for individuals. Where there is a why, there is a how. Nietzsche. We have lost the why. The Greatest Generation did not teach my generation what Americanism is. It’s not its fault. It wasn’t taught.
“This goes back 100 years to John Dewey, to the importation of European professors, to our universities… The average American who deeply loves this country and even has conservative values can not articulate what those values are.
“When we understand this American trinity of ‘In God We Trust’, Liberty, and E Pluribus Unum, that is uniquely American. It is not European. The French preferred liberte, fraternite, and egalite. We don’t. We believe in equality of birth, not in equality of result.
“When it is understood what America stands for, when it is understood that there is a moral dimension to a smaller government, it is not an economic question, it is a moral question.
“We give far more charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government, the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off? Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions.
“So the goodness of America is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for.”
“This is the most important [mid-term] election in modern American history. This November is a referendum of what we want America to be. There is one party that stands for American values. If we do not change both houses, we lose. That is how important it is.”
“I hope this invigorates you for the greatest fight in American history.”
May 25, 2010, Dennis Prager said:
I’ve had this terrible sciatica recur. It’s very bad right now. It’s where you have a disc from your spine bulging out and touching nerves, the sciatic nerve goes down the back of your leg to your ankle. There’s nothing you can do about the pain because nerves are nerves. I’ll probably end up with surgery (his first time in a hospital since his birth, according to Dennis 6/20/13). It’s a routine surgery. Don’t send me all the solutions. I’ve tried most of them and they worked for most of the time but now it is too much of a disc bulge, it is nine millimeters. It’s huge.
I should be rolling across airports. When I went to Denver this past weekend to speak with Sarah Palin and Hugh Hewitt, I was wheeled around in a wheelchair. I could walk but not far. It was too painful.
I was in a wheelchair and I had never been in a wheelchair before. It’s a different way of looking at the world.
When you encounter someone in a wheelchair in an elevator, who’s the one to break the ice?
I decided that when I was wheeled around, I would act as I act when I walk around. I found that people reacted the same way. I am very sensitive to human reaction. Once the wheelchair person did the everything is OK, everything is normal, everyone is happy. I kidded around with kids, with adults. Same reaction.
Maybe it is the handicapped who need to put the non-handicapped at ease as much as the non-handicapped need to put the handicapped at ease. We are such a pity-based compassion-based culture that we don’t make any demands on people upon whom we have compassion — the poor, the minority, the handicapped. We hurt these people.
To say that society must do all the work is terrible advice.
I say to the handicapped, you are as responsible for how you are perceived as the non-handicapped.
The minority is as responsible for making the majority feel comfortable as vice-versa.
You act like you are persecuted, you’ll feel persecuted. You act normal, you’ll be treated normal.
On Nov. 2, 2010, the Republicans won more than 60 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and came close to taking control of the U.S. Senate.
That evening, Dennis served as the MC for Republican senate candidate Carly Fiorina’s election party in Orange County. She lost badly to Barbara Boxer.
Nov. 3, 2010, Dennis said: “It was a great night. I had put all of my eggs in the basket. I said it was referendum day [on Barack Obama and the left]. I said it was the most important election since the Civil War.”
“This was a peaceful revolution.”
Jun. 23, 2011, Dennis Prager did his first Fourth of July ritual declaration (with a bunch of friends’ kids).
All of the calls to the show were negative about the ritual. Concluded Dennis: “It’s easy to criticize and hard to build.”

Dennis wrote July 2, 2011
Four years ago, I wrote a column titled “America Needs a July Fourth Seder.” In it, I explained that “national memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies.” Many readers and listeners to my radio show responded by creating their own rituals to make the day far more meaningful than watching fireworks and eating hot dogs. I now present a simple 10-minute ceremony that every American can easily use on July Fourth. It is a product of the Internet-based Prager University that I founded nearly two years ago. We call it the Fourth of July Declaration…

During a public dialogue with Adam Carolla Feb. 25, 2012, a man said it would be great if Adam Carolla would "narrarate Dennis's new book and add some colorful language to punctuate the points."

Adam: "We call it punching it up in the business."

Dennis: "Where I would have, 'Soviet leader Brezhnev,' you would add, 'that piece of s***.' That's great. An x-rated version of my book."

It was the only time I've heard Dennis use the s*** word.

Dec. 12, 2011, Dennis Prager said: "As a white person, may I say that most conservative whites believe that a great majority of blacks think this country is a racist cesspool. If they don't, then everyone who speaks on their behalf is a liar who's not representative of blacks, and I don't believe that. I don't believe that blacks walk around grateful to be in America and how unracist it is."

Caller: "Most blacks think America hasn't dealt with its race problems and there is still a great amount of racism."

Dennis: "White liberals believe that."

Caller: "You here on all sorts of right-wing talk radio show that if black people only understood that conservatives have their best interest at heart, they wouldn't vote 90% for the Democrats. They're not smart enough to figure out that conservatives truly make their lives better but they keep voting Democrat because they're taken in by race huxsters."

Dennis: "I believe that. It's not racism. I believe that about my fellow Jews. They're not smart enough to realize that the left is their enemy. They're stupid. They're naive."

Caller: "So black people are stupid?"

Dennis: "On this issue, sir. Obviously, Jews are not known for being stupid. On the issue of who their friends are and who their enemies are, Jews are stupid and blacks are stupid."

Caller: "How can they just be stupid in one narrow area of their life?"

Dennis: "Are you kidding?"

Caller: "How does this happen?"

Dennis: "Because their emotions overtake their intellect."

Caller: "So they're emotional and stupid?"

Dennis: "Yes. The emotions make you stupid. It's true for all of us. When I don't think rationally, I become stupid."

"Blacks are blinded by anger at whites. That's what I believe. If you want me to lie and then patronize blacks... That's what you want. Mr. Prager, don't say what you actually think. Say what will make blacks feel good. I take blacks more seriously than you do."

Caller: "You are racist. Blacks are not capable of having clear political thought."

Dennis: "I said that about my fellow Jews. Am I anti-Semitic?"

Caller: "No. There's a difference between anti-Semitism and racism."

Dennis: "Here's the rule, folks. Say a critical word about blacks and you're a racist. That's what that entire segment was about. You can criticize Jews, whites, any group, but if you criticize blacks, you're a racist. My view is that if you can't criticize blacks, you're a racist.">

April 11, 2012, Dennis said: "There's a new phenomenon now of kids, very often inner city, as a mob going into stores and robbing them. The latest is in Portland, Oregon. I expect this to happen more. The rhetoric of the left is that the reason they are not richer is that the rich are rich. This is what the president has been saying. Close the gap and the economy will improve. The economy will improve if the rich get poorer."

"Kids are now taught that it is unfair that there are those with so much more money than they have. What is the difference between robbing from the rich and taxing the rich at a certain rate? The moral difference? Both are at gunpoint. If you don't give me your money, I put you in jail. Is there any percent in which there is no difference between robbery and taxation? Come up with a figure at which taxation is thievery."

Oct. 29, 2013, Dennis said he was a six on a 1-10 scale about his optimism for America (10 being most optimistic).

John Casey wrote about "The Revival of Tory Philosophy" in the March 17, 2007 edition of The Spectator:

Edward Norman (then Dean of Peterhouse) had attempted to mount a Christian argument for nuclear weapons. The discussion moved on to 'Western values'. Mrs Thatcher said (in effect) that Norman had shown that the Bomb was necessary for the defence of our values. Powell: 'No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.' Thatcher (it was just before the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands): ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.' 'No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed.' Mrs Thatcher looked utterly baffled. She had just been presented with the difference between Toryism and American Republicanism.

Divisive

Dennis Prager is often accused by liberals of being divisive. Susan, a self-described liberal Jew, phoned Prager's show with that complaint on May 16, 2012.

"Clarity can not possibly do a disservice," said Dennis. "Conservatives never think it is a disservice when you clarify liberal-conservative differences. Only folks on the left. Maybe there's a reason for that? Maybe with clarity, conservatives win?"

Susan: "My dad thinks your way 99% of the time and he's never voted for a Republican."

Dennis: "There's one thing the left is successful at -- demonizing the right."

On Oct. 29, 2013, Dennis Prager wrote that Barack Obama is "the president who has done the most damage."

Among presidents in modern American history, he has also been a uniquely divisive force. It began with his forcing Obamacare through Congress -- the only major legislation in American history to be passed with no votes from the opposition party.

Though he has had a unique opportunity to do so, he has not only not helped heal racial tensions, he has exacerbated them. His intrusions into the Trayvon Martin affair ("If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon") and into the confrontation between a white police officer and a black Harvard professor (the police "acted stupidly") were unwarranted, irresponsible, demagogic and, most of all, divisive.

He should have been reassuring black Americans that America is in fact the least racist country in the world -- something he should know as well anybody, having been raised only by whites and being the first black elected the leader of a white-majority nation. Instead, he echoed the inflammatory speech of professional race-baiters such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

On Nov. 26, 2013, Dennis said he can't think of anything positive Obama has done (killing Osama Bin Laden was an easy decision that any president would have taken).

Vietnam

Dennis Prager wrote Feb. 15, 2011:
It was difficult to control my emotions — specifically, my anger — during my visit to Vietnam last week. The more I came to admire the Vietnamese people — their intelligence, love of life, dignity and hard work — the more rage I felt for the communists who brought them (and, of course, us Americans) so much suffering in the second half of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, communists still rule the country. Yet, Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for? I would like to ask one of the communist bosses who run Vietnam that question. “Comrade, you have disowned everything your Communist party stood for: communal property, collectivized agriculture, central planning and militarism, among other things. Looking back, then, for what precisely did your beloved Ho Chi Minh and your party sacrifice millions of your fellow Vietnamese?”
Diet

Dennis has usually been on the chubby side and to combat this he's tried many different diets. During the 1980s, he'd impart such dietary wisdom as "only fat makes you fat." In 1995, he encountered Dr. Barry Sears and had him on his show for three straight hours. Dennis went on the Zone diet, was pleased with the results, and stuck with it. In 2006, Dennis spent an hour of show with psychologist Seth Roberts, the author of The Shangri-La Diet: The No Hunger Eat Anything Weight Loss Plan. The book jacket ended up quoting Dennis: "In fact, it might benefit a few billion."
Mar. 24, 2014, Dennis said: "I'm very very interested in nutrition. I'd say 15 years ago at least, I started speaking about carbs rather than fats being the problem. I kept saying fat doesn't make you fat. That was my motto."

2009

Dennis spent his 61st birthday (Aug. 2, 2009) with friends (two gay men) and their baby. (Dec. 11, 2009)
“I have a gay niece,” Dennis said Feb. 10, 2010. “I adore her. I adore her partner.”
“We regard her partner as part of our family.” (June 22, 2010)
“My niece..had a religious commitment ceremony. The family all attended but with the provision that it was not called a marriage and the blessings were not identical to those of a marriage. And then the family went to the commitment ceremony. My belief is that for family you do pretty much anything.” (Aug. 13, 2010)
Aug. 11, 2009, Dennis said: “I am the recipient of a lot of love and I am very appreciative of it, but that’s not what I seek. I am touched by it but that is not what I seek, and, ironically, I think that’s why I get a lot of it. If you don’t seek it, you are more likely to get it. You can’t go into your [work] day and say, how can I be loved today?”
Said Dennis July 9, 2010: “My extended family is almost all to the left of me and I love every one of them.”
Said Dennis April 18, 2013: "Both of my boys are conservative but my extended family is overwhelmingly liberal. I have to tell you. I was back in New Jersey. I love my family. That's my example of our need to understand there are good people on both sides. I just have to think of my extended family. My niece's son is 11. He's one of these kids who thinks a lot. He's also guileless. He's completely non-jaded and completely open with what he's feeling. He walks over to me, 'Uncle Dennis, did you vote for Mitt Romney?' I said yes. 'Are you an extreme Republican?' I said, 'Well, maybe so. I am Republican and extremely committed to being Republican.' And then he says in front of his poor dad who I adore, 'My dad said that Romney would ruin the country.'
"So you can see the poor kid's wheels turning. He loves Uncle Dennis. He obviously loves his dad. It was a terrific lesson for him. His parents were completely supportive as I was that his parents and Uncle Dennis differ on politics but we're all good people. I believe this means he will end up conservative. If, from an early age, you believe that Republicans can be nice people, half the reason for being a Democrat is removed. Oh, you can be nice and a Republican? That means I'll listen to arguments and not just dismiss Republicans as bad. You've got to get your nieces and nephews to believe you're a nice person and half the battle is won."
"My most touching, no, the most dramatic example of this was the Jewish woman [Tamara Shayne Kagel] I had on the show because I write a column for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and this woman was writing at the time a column, an attractive 28 year old I think she was, she wrote about her nightmare because I had her on the show after her article, and she wrote that my nightmare has been fulfilled, I'm in love with a Republican. It was very honest of her. She said I was taught to regard Republicans as heartless and I meet this man and he's kind and loving and sweet and a Republican. It shattered my whole liberal upbringing. She's still a liberal by the way. I just sent her an email a year later -- how are things going? She's still dating. They're still seriously involved. She hasn't moved politically. He hasn't moved religiously. She says, if we have children, they'll be both Democrats and Republicans. That means they'll be Republicans. I don't want to hurt her but as soon as there is any chink in the liberal armor, it means it's over... But she was very disturbed and I loved her for her honesty."

Hilda Prager 1919 - 2009

“I gave a high holiday lecture on honor your father and mother [on the first night of Rosh Hashanah] on the night that I knew my mom wouldn’t be with us long. She in fact died that night.” (Dec. 21, 2010)
Dennis Prager’s mother Hilda died at home surrounded by loved ones on Rosh Hashanah, Sept. 19, 2009. In his column about her death, Dennis wrote: “From my late teens onward, the relationship between my mother and me improved steadily. As the years progressed, I enjoyed her more and, yes, loved her more. Unless either an adult child or a parent has serious psychological issues, I am convinced that what I experienced is quite common. There is an enormous amount of luck — good and bad — in life; and one of the greatest pieces of good luck for a parent (and child, for that matter) is for parents and children to have the time to work things out.”
From the DennisPrager.com blog Sept. 22, 2009:
Dennis’s mother, Hilda, passed away this weekend. Blessed with good health her entire life, she had been struggling with health issues for the past few months. Recently, things took a turn for the worse and the end came quickly.
Many of you might have heard the hour last year when Dennis interviewed his mother on her birthday. If you did, you know that she was a charming, vibrant woman who was very proud of her son. She will be deeply missed by all who knew her.
Dennis will be observing the traditional seven day Jewish mourning period. That means he won’t be on the air this week. When he returns a week from Tuesday, he’ll be full of thoughts about his mother, about life and death and, of course, about world events.
If you’d like to express your condolences, the best way is to email Dennis at DennisPrager.com. For anyone who you might wish to send flowers, the family requests that you instead make a contribution to your favorite charity in the name of Hilda Prager.
On September 29, 2009, Dennis devoted his weekly column to the death of his mom:
No matter how I felt at any given time, I always abided by the commandment to “Honor your father and mother.” Not only was it good for me and for my parents in life, it is particularly good now after my mother’s death. Because I was a good son, I have no guilt to work through. There are many reasons to honor one’s parents, and how one will deal with a parent’s death is one of the most compelling.
…I knew I would observe the age-old Jewish practice of sitting “shiva” (“Shiva” is Hebrew for seven) — i.e., mourning for seven days. But I had no idea if I would come to value or loathe it. I found it invaluable. I took a week out of my life to do nothing but receive visitors — at my brother’s home in New Jersey and in my home in California — and mourn my mother. She deserved it, and I needed it.
…Over 300 people came to my mother’s funeral in Englewood, N.J.
…My mother was universally adored — even her pharmacists and hair stylist paid a call during “Shiva” — for three reasons, as I learned from everyone to whom I spoke: She was always happy; she treated everyone as if they were the most special person in her life; she carried herself with class and dignity. If you want to be widely loved, there’s the recipe.
Mar. 26, 2010, Dennis said he had been urging his father to get a cat. His dad refused.
May 7, 2010, Dennis said it was eery to contemplate mother’s day without a mother. “I feel like I have nothing to do.”
“My mother got a lot of pleasure from me. I have to say. Allen [Estrin] is nodding. Why wouldn’t she? I was a good son. I’m fun. I’m even somewhat famous, which brought her immense pleasure, I have to admit. I’d call her up before I’d go on national TV. It was like a ritual. I’d say, ‘Ma, I’ll be on CNN in five minutes.’ Or, ‘I’ll be on Fox’, or I’ll be on whatever. She just went nuts. She went crazy. She loved it. Till the end of her life.
“I’ve literally given over 2,000 lectures. To the end, she would ask, where are you? Because I’m always on the road. I’d say wherever I am. What are you doing? I gave a speech. The next question — did they applaud? Till the last day, she was just tickled pink that they applauded her son. I would always answer, ‘No, they booed, ma.’ We had these rituals. I don’t think she ever heard me.
“I moved out of my parent’s house at 21 and [every conversation] she would always ask me if I needed anything. That too became a joke in our lives. She meant it seriously. And I’d say, ‘Yeah, ma, I need cue tips.’ But she never sent them. I don’t think she heard me.”
Said Dennis: “They lived for each other. I remember as an adult being so grateful that their happiness did not depend on me. It’s true that if you walked into my mother’s house, it looked like a shrine to Dennis. The largest picture ever taken of me takes up the wall of a whole room. It’s almost embarrassing because that’s the room I slept in when I visited her. I would wake up and see me. It was a little much, but I knew they were happy with each other.”
“It’s the first time I’ve seen my father cry.”
Said Dennis in an October 2009 lecture on “The Moral Case for Conservatism”: “The purpose of family is to learn to relate to people you can’t stand.”
“You didn’t choose family. So how could you like all of them?
“I’ve asked audiences of a thousand — how many of you would choose a relative if you had to choose someone [of the same sex] to spend a month on an island with, not a spouse?
“I asked my brother. I was recently back in New Jersey to sit shiva for my brother. I haven’t spoken to my brother this much since we were children living in my parent’s home.
“I knew it wasn’t me. I wasn’t hurt.”
On Nov. 27, 2013, Dennis said: "I never tell my relatives, 'Did you hear my show?' If they listen, that's great, and if they don't listen, it's probably greater [because almost all of them are on the left]."
On October 22, 2013, Dennis said: "My dad is 95. His brain is as sharp as ever, as philosophical as ever... My brother and I say, 'My father has led a life walking between the raindrops.' He's been blessed in every arena -- health, a marriage of 69 years that was like it was made in heaven, two wonderful kids... Happy. Never a rich man, but comfortable. Loved life. Traveled.
"Now as a result of a surgery that went awry two years ago, he's paralyzed from the waist down. He said to me, 'I had it so good that God wants me in these ending years of my life to know what it is like to suffer.' He makes zero complaint."

Chabad

Though not a Lubavitcher, Dennis has a close relationship with the Chabad movement. Dennis is on the board of directors of Chabad’s Conejo Valley Jewish day school. I’ve met Chabad rabbis who boasted about having Dennis’s phone number on their speed dial.
At a Chabad banquet in June 2011, Dennis said: “My first encounter with Chabad took place here in California. Not in Brooklyn where I grew up. And on my first encounter, I was very suspicious. Orthodox Jews who don’t judge you on your halachic observance? Come on. I was raised in the typical yeshiva world where that was exactly how you judge. It was quantitative Judaism. As if you really know. It is easy to know if a guy drives on Shabbos but how do you know if a guy honors his parents? Who are we to judge?”
“It took some major Jewish figure (the Rebbe Menachem Schneerson) to say — don’t judge your fellow Jew. This alone would set Chabad and the rebbe’s message as a seminal event changing Jewish history.”
(Relayed by Dennis at COTV Chabad Banquet Gala 2011, uploaded to YouTube June 25, 2011)
Dennis wrote Aug. 4, 2009:

Years ago driving home from synagogue, both my sons and I were wearing yarmulkes, or skull caps. A convertible car filled with young boys sped past me and yelled into the car “F— you” and called my wife a “b—ch.”
I then said to my family, “I have finally experienced anti-Semitism in America.”
I decided to follow the car and, to my shock, they screamed the same obscenities at other cars, none of whose occupants were discernibly Jewish.
It turned out that the event was not what I was certain, and had every reason to believe, was an example of anti-Semitism, but just an example of young thugs acting thuggish.

After a speech to Chabad of Conejo Valley on Jan. 13, 2009, Dennis was asked about anti-Israel demonstrations on Wilshire Blvd that gathered ten times as many people as the counter pro-Israel demonstrations.
Dennis said: “Most people who have a life don’t demonstrate… I started my public life at Soviet Jewry demonstrations, so I know their importance, but it is harder to gather people who have a constructive life than people who have destructive lives. Everybody here probably has a family to take care of and most of you are gainfully employed and are involved in community life. Do you think people shouting ‘Death to Israel’ are involved in anything constructive? They go from here to the Salvation Army?”
Dennis was asked for his assessment of the first four hours of the new season [meaning the seventh season] of 24.
He replies: “Are you including the two hours in Africa?”
Man: “Sure.”
Dennis: “I don’t see it live because I can’t sit through the commercials without going to the bathroom. I get that nervous. He has picked a weak spot in my life — 24. If you don’t know what it is, do not ask anyone. Do not watch it. Do not read about it. The thing is so damn addicting that I regret having watched a second. I don’t even watch TV and I’m addicted. It’s well acted and you get involved with the people. You care about them. But my favorite thing is — there is a guy, the hero of these episodes, who fights evil for a living.”

On May 1, 2012, Dennis said: "I have a dream. I take it from two groups I know well -- Mormons and Chabad Hasidim. To go out into the world with your young people and take your message. Imagine if we were to send out two million young people a year to go out into the world and speak about liberty, y pluribus unum and 'In God We Trust'."

Three Back Surgeries

Dennis has suffered from sciatica since he was 21. He was due for back surgery in 2007, but found a controversial drug (Bextra) that enabled him to delay the operation.
“Bextra is now illegal [since 2005],” said Dennis March 25, 2010. “I can’t get it anywhere on earth. I would risk the heart attack to get rid of my sciatica pain because otherwise I have to take steroids, which is a helluva lot worse. You can’t take that for long. Of course you can get surgery, but that’s my last desire in this matter.”
For the first six months of 2010, Dennis was forced to give all of his speeches sitting down. He frequently (more than a dozen times) alluded to his sciatica on his radio show.
On June 11, 2010, he had surgery to fix the problem.
“As I’m lying as the devices are being placed in me, someone walks over to me and says, ‘Dennis Prager! I love your show!’ I’m just about to enter an anesthetic slumber.”
“I’m not complaining. I thought it was adorable. When you have a public persona, that is what happens and no circumstance changes that.” (Mar. 8, 2011)
June 14, 2010, Dennis said: “The last six months I have been in agony. At the age of 21, I played volleyball and fell terribly on my back. It was on concrete. When I went up to spike the ball at the net. So I’ve had a disc coming out of my spinal cord between the vertebrate touching a nerve, which gives you terrible pain down the sciatic nerve which runs down the back of your legs. I’ve had it on and off my whole life. I’ve played racquetball much of my life, tennis, functioned fine, but it would recur about every ten years and get worse each time. This time it came back six months ago and got worse and worse to the point where I was wheelchaired through airports. I say with some pride that I didn’t miss one speech.
“I have been functionally unable to walk any distance because the pain was so severe. Those of you who were on the cruise with me knew that I had to give talks sitting down.
“I have a lot of interesting things to say about the problem of pain. I learned a great deal about it. I didn’t talk about it at all on the radio. We adjusted seats here. You have no idea. The only thing I did on my own was to go to the men’s room. Everything else, I was helped.”
“You try everything before surgery. I was getting emails from me urging me to try different things before surgery… People have theories on everything and they get beliefs that are very strong. I don’t. I have strong beliefs about moral values and smaller government and goodness and confronting evil, but when it comes to practical things in life, I believe that before you get cut up, you try other things. But folks, what this man did for me on Friday, I wish I had done six months earlier.”
“The disc that was out of my vertebrate was stuck. It could not go back in. It was calcified. It was cemented in place. I could’ve hung upside down for the rest of my life and it would not go back in.”
On June 25, 2010, Dennis said he may need more surgery. His sciatica problem has shifted to his other leg. In July (?), Dennis had further back surgery.
On May 9, 2011, Dennis had spinal fusion surgery at USC Medical Center.
The anesthesiologist said to Dennis before putting him under: “I have to pull aside your vocal chords. You don’t make a living with your voice, do you?”
Dennis: “They may have been the worst words I’ve heard in my life. The last words I remember saying before going under were, ‘Well, in fact, I do.’” (Relayed by Dennis at COTV Chabad Banquet Gala 2011)

On April 11, 2013, Dennis said: "I had a surgery that was very serious on my upper back that was totally successful. The surgeon told me that after six hours, it was so difficult, the bones in my upper spine, I wanted to give up, but I didn't."

On May 15, 2011, Dennis posted to Facebook:

Hello Everybody!
I finally have the strength to personally write about my situation.
In 28 years of broadcasting I think I missed more than two consecutive days due to illness only once. So for me to miss a week or more is a huge deal. But the truth is I have been through a huge deal – considerably bigger than I realized in advance.
I don’t want to bore you – but on the other hand, I assume anyone following me on Facebook has more than a passing interest in my life. So here goes in brief detail.
Last year I had two surgeries to remove the parts of two discs from my lower back that were protruding onto nerves and causing terrible pain in my sciatic nerve, the nerve running from the spine to the foot. Those surgeries allowed me to leave the hospital the same day and go back to work two days later.
But both before and after the sciatica problem, I had pain in my upper back and lower neck. As it went away about a year and half ago after a serious stretching regimen, I was hopeful that it be might gone forever. But it returned a few months ago worse than before, and a month ago I ceased being able to lift my left arm from the shoulder. It became obvious that without surgery, I could permanently damage nerves to that shoulder and never be able to raise that arm (preventing me, for example from ever conducting again – not to mention do daily things like shampooing with both hands). The MRI, meanwhile, showed degenerated discs in my upper back, which along with growths on the vertebrae, were contributing to compression on my nerves. I even learned that I was born with a narrow spinal canal. That made the other factors much more likely to cause pain, immobility, and nerve damage, resulting in the need for surgery.
So my excellent neurosurgeon at the excellent USC University Hospital explained to me that my only choice was to operate immediately (because of the likely nerve damage) and to remove three disks from vertebrae in my upper back and fuse those three levels with titanium to hold the vertebrae in place. They fuse, incidentally, with specially processed human bone – here I have benefited from something I have long advocated — registering as an organ donor in case of fatal accident.
The surgery lasted seven hours and was performed – to my initial surprise — through the front of my body. Access to the spinal column is much easier through the front but it comes with a price – the patient’s esophagus, vocal cords, and trachea are all pulled aside for the length of the operation. They are likely to become inflamed, and in fact did become inflamed — my vocal cords as well, making normal speech, not to mention the especially energetic three hours of talk radio speech, impossible at this time.
You could say that I feel beaten up. I am. My body devotes all its efforts to healing.
So that is the briefest I can be to explain why I am not returning on Monday. Wednesday is the earliest, and I will keep you up date.
My general attitude is quite upbeat. I am doing well, all things considered. And I never assumed I would live a life free from pain – whether emotional or physical—so this is not a shock to my emotions or psyche. It is a shock to my body, however. But I remain as grateful as ever for all my blessings.
Those blessings include living in a time and a place where such sophisticated healing is available, the love and support of my family and friends and, not least, your support, which I read with immense gratitude.
Dennis has a rod up the back of his neck. (Mar. 10, 2012)

Sleep Apnea

Dennis Prager found himself wanting to close his eyes while driving. He took a sleep test and found he was waking up 71 times an hour to gasp for breath. So he got an Auto Titration CPAP machine recommended by Dr. Avi Ishaaya.

From the radio show April 18, 2012:
Dennis: "Dr Avi Avishaaya has had an impact on my life so extraordinary that I asked him to come on."

"People laugh at it [sleep apnea]. Oh, so I snore... The issue is that you are affected by the oxygen that goes to your brain. You wake up constantly."

"I realized something was happening when I, who have a massive amount of energy, my eyes were starting to shut while I was driving. I realized something was awry here. I knew it had something to do with this." 

"I took Dr. Avishaaya's test at home. I'd already done it at some other place. They gave me a CPAP machine. I thought I was being water-boarded. I took the machine off and left the place at 4 a.m. I said I'd rather have sleep apnea than this torture device." 

"This man has invented a device that is effortless. The moment I put it on, I felt terrific because it [Auto Titration CPAP machine] works according to your own breathing. And now I sleep like a baby." 

"I'd gasp for air 71 times an hour. The test is at home. This is another genius thing this man has invented."

"Wherever I go in the world, a few weeks ago I went to Australia, and I did it on the airplane. I plugged it in."

"I never yawn now and I only get five-and-a-half hours to six hours sleep."

"I kept waking up at night but now I never wake up."

"I don't easily get scared. This is worth worrying about. I can't use a regular CPAP machine. I was even thinking of jaw surgery."

"The quality of your life changes. People wake up so often because they can't breathe right."

"I use this thing every night. The first night I had this thing on my nose, I was so quiet, my wife got up in the middle of the night... and she bent over to see if I was living. Happily, she would sleep through my breathing obstructions and snoring, but if she got up, she heard it." 

"Dr, what causes this?"

Dr Avishaaya: "About 70-80% of patients with sleep apnea are obese."

"Your airway get constricted so that your throat gets constricted as you gain weight."

Dennis: "My bad luck. I'm not obese and I still got it."

"It didn't affect my work but it did affect times of non-work and when I started to see my eyes closing while driving, obviously nothing happened, I would catch myself, luckily I knew of this man, I took the home test, and he solved it in one night."

Role In Popular Culture

Dennis Prager’s teachings helped inspire the 1990 movie Ghost. It was directed by Prager’s friend Jerry Zucker.
Dennis Prager wondered on air in 2010 if his ideas about dating for same-sex friends inspired the movie I Love You, Man.
Prager provided the inspiration for the voice of a bumbling character on South Park. According to the book by the same title, "Officer Barbrady (voiced by Trey Parker) is a South Park city police officer who is extremely incompetent... Parker's voice for Officer Barbrady was inspired by Dennis Prager...who Parker and Stone liked to make fun of  for his 'big, bombastic and stupid voice.'"

Trey Parker directed For Goodness Sake 2 for Dennis in 1996. 

Dennis wrote March 31, 2009 about a Broadway play:

Aside from my lifelong interest in altruism and especially in understanding the motivations of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, I had an unwitting role in the making of “Irena’s Vow.” According to the playwright, [Dan] Gordon, the play came about because he heard Opdyke on my radio show 20 years ago. He immediately contacted her, they became friends, and the rest is history.

We never know all the good (or bad) we have done. So Gordon’s attribution of the genesis of his play to me is very gratifying. If there was a dry eye on opening night this past Sunday when I attended, it surely wasn’t near my seat.

Misc

* "I may have been the last holdout [to say 'nigger' on the radio] but then I got a directive [to say instead 'the n-word']." (Dec. 23, 2013)
* Until the 1990s, Dennis supported a higher minimum wage. (Apr. 17, 2014)
* When Dennis visits friends, family and relatives, he prefers to stay in a hotel. "I can't imagine sleeping at my son's house. But when they come to me, I'm happy for them to stay with me."
"When I visited my parents, until ten years ago, I stayed with them. Then I realized I had a choice. A hotel was more comfortable." (Dec. 23, 2013)
* Into his early '90s, Max Prager did Dennis's taxes.
* “There’s nothing like clarity in life… I feel that about everything, even my hobbies. The clearer the photo, the better I like it. The clearer my music, the better I like it. But I especially love it in the realm of ideas and ideals.” (Apr. 6, 2011)
* "Out of 100 things that bother me, air quality in Los Angeles is number 100." (Nov. 17, 2011)
* “I love High Noon and The Magnificent Seven. I love movies of moral clarity and I love that the bad guys are shot.” (May 5, 2011)
* For decades, Dennis has been the most booked speaker for Jewish organizations along with Elie Wiesel and a couple of other people, said Dennis Jan. 21, 2011.
* “I have as much energy as I had at 20.” (Jan. 21, 2011)
* Feb. 25, 2011, Dennis said: “I don’t recall in my life having been offended… I am sure I have but my mindset was never such as to be easily or routinely let alone regularly offended.”
* On July 8, 2011, Dennis said: “Ninety nine point nine nine percent of the time when I have guests, I do not speak to them before the interview, during the interview [commercial breaks] or after the interview. I don’t want a personal relationship in any way to form with these people. I want to be able to conduct the interview as dispassionately and honestly as possible. Also, if I talk to them, some of their best lines will be given to me during the break and then they won’t repeat them on air.”
“The same thing holds true when I am on television shows. We don’t talk during the breaks.”
” The longer I live, the more I like country music. I was listening to some today on my way in to work.” (Mar. 25, 2011)
* “Rav Kook could be my Jewish theological hero of the 20th Century.” (1995 lecture on Exodus 13)
* “I do not believe in the Documentary Hypothesis. I do believe there is a unified structure to the Torah.” (Last lecture on Exodus, circa 1998)
* “Torah Hebrew is almost as comfortable to me as English. I’ve been studying it since I was five years old and I know a great deal of it by heart.” (Exodus 34: 1-7 in 1998)
* “I have published a million words in my lifetime and you can’t find anything that is SIXHRB (Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Racist, Bigoted).” (Nov. 15, 2010)
* “When they heckle during a lecture of mine, I stop the lecture and point out, ‘I just want to point out that this is not done by my side when their side lectures, so when I say the left has a totalitarian streak, you are seeing it now. Then they start booing these people because they realize what a threat to freedom.” (Apr. 15, 2011)
* “I have a file called morons. It is my cathartic way of doing things without sending hatemail back. I drag the letter with a mouse to the morons file. On the other hand, not everyone who sends me an angry letter is totally off the wall. I do care. I don’t go into my show thinking, do people like me? But I never go into thinking, I don’t care what people think.” (Lecture on Numbers 31-33, circa 2003)
* “I have a particularly small small number of awards. I think that’s indicative of something.” (Dec. 13, 2010)
* “People say I’m addicted to cigars. I just came back from two-and-a-half weeks away [on vacation]. I did not smoke one cigar. Didn’t miss it.” (Feb. 22, 2011)
* Dennis enjoys cigars with his brother, Kenneth Prager, a pulmonologist. (Dec. 17, 2013)
* "I've never been in a 12-step program. I've been blessed to not be addicted to anything. I've known so many people who have been in these programs and gained wisdom. I wish everyone would be in a 12-step program." (April 2, 2012)
* "I don't love my laugh. I try to control it." (Dec. 13, 2013)
* “Every year I go to the pipe show in Los Angeles.” (Feb. 28, 2011)
* “I’ll buy $200 pipes. Rarely.” (Aug. 23, 2011)
* “We need heroes… We have torn down so many. Because of media knowledge, the ability of the smaller to tear down the bigger is great.”
“I don’t [want to be thought well of in the mainstream media]. If the New York Times wrote something positive about me, I would rethink my position.” (Nov. 17, 2010)
* “I would love for God to destroy the worst 1% of humanity… That’s 60 million people. It would leave the Middle East empty. Who would pump oil?” (Lecture on Korach found at the end of Prager’s sixth lecture on Leviticus.)
* “Tone is very important. The thing that I am told the most by people who listen to this show is the tone. Just not yelling at people was a major advantage of this program.” (Nov. 18, 2010)
* “I have never lost a friend,” said Dennis on his show Oct. 1, 2010.
* “There is only one thing that people can say to me that hurts me, that angers me, and that is, ‘Prager didn’t tell the truth.’” (March 24, 2011)
* “In my extended family, most are liberals and I love them.” (Oct. 31, 2010)
* “A girl I grew up with just died of breast cancer. She was as close as I’ve had to a sister.” (Nov. 2, 2010)
* “I have been to 98 countries. I have been abroad every single year since I was 21.” (Oct. 18, 2010)
* “I beat myself up for my lack of self-discipline regularly but my free-spirit comes with that price.” (Oct. 22, 2010)
* “I have a coffee every day. I have a latte every day… I just like the taste. And it fills me up.” (Nov. 11, 2010)
* "The amount of time I have spent in the kitchen in my life would not add up to a day. I can make [scrambled eggs with cheese]. The last time was in college." (Nov. 26, 2013)
* “I have never gone into a book store without buying something. I just do it to keep them [in business].” (Dec. 16, 2010)
* Dennis tells Ann Coulter that she is “one of my favorite writers in the country… You are under-rated as a thinker.” (June 15, 2011)
* “I own about 4,500 books. I love everything about the book… I even love the smell of a new book. I check the paper on new books. In my own contract with Harper Collins who will be publishing my next book on the great conflict for the future of humanity between America, socialism and Islam, I have it in my contract that I want a say in the paper they use. I don’t like cheap paper in books. It’s disrespectful to the reader and the author.” (Mar. 8, 2011)
* “I wear a size fifteen shoe.” (Mar. 8, 2011)
* Sept. 8, 2010, Dennis Prager tired of the theme song from Julie & Julia running long. “All right, we can dispense with the music. Tell the band to take a break. OK, you know what, let me do the show, guys. That was a tantrum. I just threw a tantrum. That’s as close as I get to a tantrum, as those who work with me can verify.”
* I’ve attended many a Dennis Prager lecture or listened to a Dennis Prager radio show and over the course of a couple of hours heard not a new thought. He repeats himself over and over, which diminishes enthusiasm for his work among those of us who listened to him carefully the first 25 times he made the point. I’ve found that when I buy a Dennis Prager lecture, I’m lucky if 25% of the content is new (and most of that 25% is not unique to Dennis Prager as he is at least as much a synthesizer and popularizer of other people’s ideas rather as an original thinker).
In a lecture on Deut. 12 (circa 2004), Dennis said: “He [Moshe] is simply repeating himself. He’s a teacher. Repetition is the mother of pedagogy.
“I feel that if I repeat a point on the radio or in a lecture, that I am cheating the audience. There’s a voice in me that says, ‘Dennis, every time you open your mouth, you have to make a new point. They’ve already heard this one.’ May I say to you that is about the stupidest voice in my life and it took me many years to realize that.
“You can make the most profound point since Confucius set foot on earth, and within 20 minutes, 99% of people who heard it will forget it… I’ll never effect anybody if I continually bring new points every time I talk.”
“Any of you who are parents, how many times did you say to your children? There’s no doubt that if you are a decent parent, it is in the many thousands. I am sure I have said it more than 10,000 times.”
* Dennis Prager bowled frequently with his youngest son Aaron. “I’m the only Leviticus teacher who owns his own bowling ball,” said Dennis in a 2007 lecture on Leviticus 1.
* “I cease to function under heat,” said Dennis as he began teaching the book of Deuteronomy in 2003. “It’s my only idiosyncrasy.”
Dennis keeps his radio studio much cooler than most people would like.
* “I am the only male I know of who’s transfixed by the different types of shampoos,” said Dennis Jan. 12, 2010.
On Mar. 22, 2013, a caller told Dennis, "Your hair is always so flawlessly beautiful."
Dennis replied, "I'm blessed with my mother's hair. It's not a factor of shampoo. My mother had a beautiful full-head of white hair until she left us at 89 and I inherited that."
* "Having not drunk a sugared beverage since childhood, I think any overweight person who drinks regular soda is making a big mistake. But I would prefer to live in a country of obese citizens who are free than in a country of thin citizens who are not." (Jun. 27, 2012)
"Can you think of anything made in Germany that is not a good product?" (Jun. 18, 2012).

* Dennis Prager enjoys getting his teeth cleaned (April 2, 2010).

* Dennis is almost libertarian on how society should regulate sex. Mar. 29, 2012, Dennis said: "I said 15 years ago that here should be a part of the internet that [porn] exists in but it should have a different name at the end. It's not a dot com. It's a dot xxx. Like a red light district on the internet."

* According to his official biography at Townhall.com (retrieved April 6, 2010): “Dennis Prager periodically conducts orchestras, and has introduced hundreds of thousands of people to classical music.”

* In a 2013 speech to the NRB, Dennis said: "I'm very involved in classical music. I thought of majoring in Music. I am convinced that the death of God has been the death of classical music. Nearly all 20th Century post -Schoenberg music is junk. Certainly all of the atonal except Berg's violin concerto. Leonard Bernstein said that atonal music is an oxymoron." >

* On his Feb. 8, 2010, Dennis said: “If the environmentalist could run society, you saw your future in that ad [by Audi mocking green rules]. They are as committed to environmentalism as the Iranian regime is to their version of Islam and they would arrest people for exactly those things — ‘Are you using styrofoam cups sir? Please step out of the car’. ‘Could we come in and check the temperature in your house? We’re coming in.’
“They’ve already passed these sorts of things where they want to monitor the temperature in people’s homes. In California, no new house can have a fire place. That’s reason 84436 not to move to this state. I say it even though it hurts me because my real estate value will decline if you don’t move here.”
Dennis Prager bought his home in the Glendale area around 2005, the peak of the real estate market. Since then, the value of his home has plunged.
Dennis: “I can not think of a good reason, given what the left has done to California, for you to move here. I have a dear friend who would love to move here but he won’t because of the taxes compared to the state he now lives in. You can’t build a house with a fire place? Is that sick?
“Maybe that will increase the value of my place because I have a lot of fireplaces.”
In a speech for Chabad of Beach Cities Jan. 22, 2009, Dennis said: “I was one of the responsible citizens who got hurt because I did put 20% down [on his purchase of a home around Glendale circa 2006] and I didn’t take more than I could pay in mortgage payments. I got clobbered because I bought during the height and lost everything I put plus more. I’m not standing before you lamenting life. I’m as happy as I was before.”
“I stay in California because this is where the people I am closest to live.”
* Dennis said that sometimes universities provide him with bodyguards and sometimes they do not. (June 15, 2010)
* Dennis said that he has never experienced anti-Semitism in America. “I have said that my whole adult life. I have never heard racial slurs in my life. All of the race-based rhetoric has come from the left in my lifetime. They lie about their opponents because they can not fight our ideas and so they reduce it to we are evil.” (April 29, 2010)
* On Jan. 17, 2011, Martin Luther King day, Dennis said: “I got a texting ticket at a red light. If there’s a ticket, I’ve gotten it. It was for about $25. I thought I would get a notice in the mail. Sure enough, I did after a month. For not showing up in court, your bill is $850. And there’s a warrant out for my arrest. There may be a letter from LA County jail from Dennis Prager.”
* Dennis Prager's favorite question is "Why?". (April 24, 2012)
* “I don’t have any airs,” said Dennis Aug. 10, 2010. “I don’t have them on the show. I don’t have them off the show. I don’t think of myself as a celebrity.”
On Sept. 1, 2010, Dennis Prager said he was not high maintenance.
Ralph called from Manhattan: “Dennis, I would think it would be impossible for you to not be high maintenance because of what you do for a living. You’re seeking the approval of others.”
Dennis: “That’s not true. I don’t. I seek the respect of others and that’s a very big difference.”
Ralph: “I’m an actor and I know that I’m high maintenance.”
Dennis: “Well, actors do seek approval. You seek applause. I don’t. That is a big difference. It’s something I’ve thought through very carefully.”
Ralph: “If you didn’t get that constant reinforcement from listeners who often open their calls with saying you’re wonderful. I listen to you every day.”
Dennis: “It was not that way. I’ve been on for 28 years. That began to happen after perhaps 15 or 20 [years]. I am deeply appreciative of that but it is not what sustains me.
“What sustains me in terms of listeners is — you changed my thinking. You changed the way I raise my kids. You changed my marriage. You made it better. I think differently now in political and social issues. That does give me a kick. Not in ego, but because I have a real sense of mission.”

* June 10, 2014, Dennis said: "I've never owned a black car before. I always used to think that people chose black to make a statement and I've never liked to make a statement. I've never gotten initials on my clothing. My third car was a burgundy Puegot. My first two cars were Saabs. Then a Buick. And then an Oldsmobile."

* Pompous. “That’s the last thing I am or want to be.” (Aug. 15, 2011)
* Here are some of the famous people Dennis Prager has described as friends: Richard Riordan, Natan Sharansky.
* In a 2010 lecture on Leviticus 25, Dennis said: “My son David has a very fine mind for ideas. He’s in finance. Leave it to a Prager to go into finance in the worst recession since the Great Depression. I told him he’ll be the first wealthy Prager in the history of the Prager family.
“He loves this idea [of the Sabbatical and Jubilee years] because it tells everyone that no matter how well you are doing, know economically there will be a depression. So plan for it. You can’t do anything with the land the seventh year. You have to save.”
* I wonder why Dennis is not wealthy. He’s been earning close to a million dollars a year in 2010 dollars since around 1990 (when he was making around $5,000 a speech, went up to $8,000 a speech in 1994, up to $15,000 a speech in 1998, etc).
* "Goodness is rewarded [by happiness]. I don't believe that if you give to charity, God will give you your money back... Good people are happier. When you're at your happiest, you're at your goodest." (May 11, 2012)
* “I have never related to that notion, that I want to be known for having X or Y label for something. I wouldn’t want to wear jeans with a name. There is one exception. It would look funny if I showed up at a speech in a superduper cheap automobile. People expect people of a certain status in life to drive an automobile commensurate with that.” (Aug. 23, 2011)
* “I was invited once. It was not George Burns. Another household name superstar of the 20th Century invited me to his home. I have no great desire to be with superstars. I have no minimal desire. I’d rather be with friends. I’d rather be alone. When God gave out the desire to be with the famous, I was in another line.
“He was so superstarish, it was simply curiosity. He invited me to his home because he liked hearing me on the radio. He’s no longer with us. The entire evening, he only talked about himself. I sat there. It was a phenomenon. I had never encountered this in my life.” (2003 lecture on Deut. 8:11 – 9:7)

* Dennis sometimes uses the awkward "his or her" construction rather than the traditional male pronoun for both sexes: "What parent wouldn't be proud of such achievements by his or her children?"

* On the radio in the 1980s and early 1990s, Dennis said he was agnostic about a second shooter in JFK's assassination, aside from Lee Harvey Oswald. After reading and interviewing Gerald Posner (in 1993?) and Vincent Bugliosi in 2007, Prager concluded the president was killed by Oswald acting alone. On Nov. 18, 2013, Dennis said: "I've believed [that Oswald acted alone] since high school."

* Jan. 15, 2011, Dennis said: “I don’t recommend you abolish TV in your home. I recommend you have real limitations on quantity and quality.

“When my son David was at summer camp, this kid came over to him and was clearly hostile. The kid explained to my son, ‘It’s not your fault, but I want you to know that your father is responsible for us not having any television in our house.’
“My son, who’s the best raconteur I know, said to the kid, ‘We have satellite TV and three video screens.’”

* Dec. 7, 2012, Dennis said: "I write notes [with a fountain pen] for my every speech on the back of a business card and then after the speech, I throw the card away because I want every speech to be fresh."

Top Rabbis

Dennis wrote in the Jewish Journal March 28, 2013:

The [annual Newsweek list of America's top rabbis] actually accomplishes something very rare: it has no redeeming values, yet does great damage. It weakens an already somewhat fragile institution: the rabbinate. And it applies Hollywood values to a profession that least needs them — religion. Rabbis should not be regarded as stars.

This is no reflection on the rabbis who made the list. On the contrary, my beloved friend since high school, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, with whom I wrote my first two books, was on the list five times. And I am honored to count some of the Los Angeles rabbis in the top tier as friends for decades. Rabbi David Wolpe was one of the few non-family members in my home 20 years ago for my second son’s bris. I delight in his well-deserved success. So, too, I have often worked with Rabbi Marvin Hier since he came to Los Angeles; and I’ve known his colleague on the list, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, since we were both children in Brooklyn. As a member of a boys choir that sang at my parents’ Orthodox synagogue on the High Holy Days, he slept in our home on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

But as much as some of the rabbis on the list deserve being so honored, the list is degrading to the rabbinate. It is nothing more than a function of the contemporary preoccupation with celebrity over substance, of fame over significance.


For President

Contrary to Prager's claims about having no interest in achieving political power, at age 15, Dennis was talking to his best friend Joseph Telushkin about what he would do in the U.S. Senate one day, long before he had a plausible political platform. Contrary to his claim of having no desire for the spotlight, Dennis will fly across the country for 90 seconds on the Sean Hannity Show.
How else am I so sure that Dennis lusted for power from a young age? Because that's the way to get girls and Dennis from an early age was all about getting girls. An article entitled, "Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature," said in 2007: "Men strive to attain political power, consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. Reproductive access to women is the goal, political office but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it."

By the mid 1970s, Dennis Prager was getting asked when he was going to run for political office. In 1983, he filed papers to run for the Democratic nomination for Congress but dropped out. Since then, Dennis has usually said that he would only run for president.
July 31, 2009, Dennis was asked why he didn’t run for president. He replied: “Number one, I have no personal desire to run for public office. I have however an idealistic desire because…I am certain that I can articulate conservative values better than almost anyone in the Republican party… It is very distressing to me that the finest values do not have the finest spokesmen. That is what draws me to the idea of running for any public office.
“However, in the United States at this time, for example, US Senate in California, entails a minimum of $40 million. I could raise $40 million if Democrats and some Republicans did not sign a bill limiting the amount of money people could give. Now all you can do is spend all your life, unless you’re a multi-billionaire, is to raise money from tens of thousands of people and I would not have my job to live on.”
Dec. 14, 2009, Dennis said: “When I see some of these people on TV, there’s no doubt in my mind, I’m sorry if this sounds self-serving, that I would have a more entertaining, let alone more intelligent TV show, than the vast majority of those who have them today, but I don’t come with the correct perspective.”
On Prager’s radio show, Dec. 21, 2009, a man calls. “I’m the one who always pulls you aside and tells you you should be president of the United States.”
Dennis: “I agree with you right now. It’s the first time. I don’t know what I’ve said in the past, but I agree with you, only because the Republicans don’t have somebody who can articulate American values well enough right now, or at least I don’t know who he is. It’s something I’ll talk to my listeners about. It’s been in my mind.”
Jan. 15, 2010, Dennis said: “If I went to Iowa and just started saying these things, and I love people, and I love shaking hands with a lot of people, I like meeting people, I like saying over and over what I believe in, in that sense I’ve given it thought.”
Mar. 23, 2010, Dennis said: “Leaders don’t make America, Americans make America… I don’t want leaders to shape America.”
“God was entirely opposed to having a king. The Israelites asked for a king. Instead, He just wanted the prophets to tell people what is right and wrong and let them lead their own lives.”
“I don’t want leaders. I have a leader — God. Every single religious person in a denomination with any traditional values has the same view. Do I want somebody to collect the garbage on time? Yes, I do. Do I want somebody to make sure that what the government spends is spent honesty, I sure do. But to lead me? No, thank you. We lead ourselves in America. The very notion that leaders will lead us is left-wing.”
In his fifth lecture on Deuteronomy (in 2003), Dennis said: “Why anybody would go into public life when he is happy in what he is doing puzzles me entirely. Moses is a classic example of a guy who had it good and then became a leader.”
In his 13th lecture on Deuteronomy (in 2003), Dennis said: “Any success I’ve had in my field is because I’ve always tried to ask myself, what does God want me to do? If I lost that, I think that I would fail in my profession overnight. That is entirely what gives me the strength to do what I do every day.
“God gave me the ability to speak. What did I do for it? I took one speech course in college. I got a C. She said, you speak well but you’re a lousy listener. That’s because I fell asleep. I couldn’t fake it. I’ve got ADD for boring people.
“My father is a CPA. He had his office in the house as well as in Manhattan.
“A fascinating thing happened when I was a sophomore in high school, 14 years of age. His clients would come on Sundays an hour early to talk to me. I thought, this is ridiculous. These people are 40, 50 years old. Why are they scheduling an appointment with me? I didn’t understand.
“When I was a camper, counselors gathered around when I talked.”
On May 27, 2011, Dennis said: “The ideal candidate would have at least two things — a conservative aka American-values-based system. Understands that small government is a moral good, not just an economic good. Two. Be able to articulate it with great clarity.”
“Three. The person has to have gravitas. President Obama has gravitas. He exudes seriousness of purpose. I don’t want politicians to decide to be just like the people when they talk to the people.”
“When you’re a candidate, you already look less presidential than the president of the United States.”
On Jun. 21, 2011, Dennis Prager said: “If I ran for president, and if I had the money, I would, I would be attacked as a kook. Right-wing nut case.
“The dismissal is in direct proportion to how much one understands the injurious nature of the left.”
“Michelle Bachman threatens the left. She’s an attractive, bright, knowledgeable woman. She knows exactly why this country is in danger — it is in danger because of the left. Anyone who believes that is attacked as a kook. Barry Goldwater [in 1964] was called mentally ill by 1,000 psychiatrists, who should have all been removed from the practice of medicine.”
In a 2010 appearance at Stephen S. Wise temple, Dennis said to interviewer David Woznica: “When God gave out urges, the urge to power was not given to me. I have zero desire to have any power over anybody. You know this is a fact because even on the tiny tiny scale of my running Brandeis-Bardin, all I wanted was terrific other people and to share power. I just wanted to make sure that the values were what I thought the values should be.”
“The only reason I thought of running for senate was would it give me a bigger forum to offer the values I care about. I ultimately concluded that to get a bigger forum than a national radio show, you have to be president of the United States. I thought of that too. I have thought about running in the primaries starting in Iowa. I would not expect to win.”
“I would like to be in those debates… I can’t run because I don’t have the money to run… Because of campaign finance reform, only rich people can run for office… There are many rich people who would support. One of the heads of Best Buy said he listened to my show every day and any way I can help you. But he can’t help me. He can only give me $4,000.”
By force of his personality and intellect, Dennis Prager has largely set the terms for how the world relates to him. He towers above his challengers physically and intellectually and most of them look bad when they take him on. The major journalistic profiles of him have echoed his understanding of himself as a moralist with a mission to teach humanity. Eventually some writer with chops will come along and challenges this paradigm, but if Prager does not run for president, it may not happen while he is alive.
Feb. 1, 2012, Dennis Prager said: "Republicans are looking for a serious person with the right ideas who understands what is at stake in November of 2012. The reason Mitch Daniels is not running for president is family related. He does not want the damage the media will do to candidates, especially Republican candidates. I don't blame him.

"Many people are willing to die for this country but are not willing to have their name ruined for this country."

"There is only one answer. The private lives of major people in the media must be revealed. Those who have money to spare in Republican life might want to consider starting a fund with millions of dollars to have muckrakers publish the life and sexual habits of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, etc...

"If your claim is that we need to know everything of a public figure because of the influence they wield, then because of the influence you wield, we need to know this much about you."

Sept. 19, 2012, Dennis said: "I may regret saying this... If Mitt Romney loses, I'm running for president...."

On Sept. 24, 2012, Dennis said about Barack Obama's appearance on 60 Minutes: "What struck me more than anything was how much Barack Obama has aged in four years. Not only the grey hair but the lines on the face. It really does show that aggravation, tension, have a physical effect. I guess I haven't had my share of aggravation in life. I think he has more lines than I do and I'm older than him. It was really dramatic because of the clarity of the picture on my HD screen. He almost seemed a bit weary."

For six months prior to the Nov. 6, 2012 election, Dennis predicted a Mitt Romney victory. With the exception of Frank Luntz, his guests (such as Dick Morris, Michael Barone, William Kristol, Jonah Goldberg) predicted a Mitt Romney victory. When Mitt Romney lost, it came as a shock to Dennis. He called it a "catastrophe" and "a bad day" and "a dark moment" for the United States. 

Nov. 8, 2012, Dennis said that immigration was the one message the Republicans have to change as opposed to messenging. Dennis appeared to support Republicans getting behind a path to citizenship for people who are in the United States illegally (so that Republicans could win a higher percentage of Latino votes) and that Republicans need to present themselves as the pro-immigrant party.

"Ours is more complex. You have to answer demagoguery much more... Republicans don't have to change. Those who didn't vote for us have to change. Hispanics? You made a bad choice for you and for America. Blacks? You made a bad choice for you and for America... And here's why."

On November 14, 2012, Dennis said: "I wake up worrying about America."

"If we fail, it is over. Where will hope come from? Russia? China? Western Europe?"

Returning home from a two week cruise, Dennis said Jan. 21, 2013: "It was the first trip in my lifetime where I thought that places are doing better than America in some important arenas. It's a sad little thought. I didn't share with anybody. I'm worried about America."

"This was my first return in 42 years, every year I've gone abroad at least once, that I didn't come back thinking, wow, how fortunate I am because it is so different. America is deteriorating because it is becoming like other countries. The left wants us to become like other countries. The left has been in power for the last four years and now four more years. How could it not be more like other countries? The number of Americans who are given money and benefits from the state who should not be getting money and benefits from the state are entering European levels."

Mar. 8, 2013, Dennis said: "The Republican leadership lives in as much as a hermetically sealed bubble as the Democractic leadership. This is a catastrophe for the country. We have two parties -- the damaging and the stupid, and I am a member of the stupid party. Why Republican candidates who don't tap into those of us in talk radio who make the arguments for a living or we have to get another job is one of the great riddles that would stump the sphinx of Egypt.

"New York and Washington are bubbles. We are there to provide money and votes. Ideas come from New York and Washington. That's why they are so lousy... The Republican leadership astonishes me."

"I know Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney knows me. I was at a fundraiser for him at a private home two months before the election. Someone even said, 'Dennis Prager is here. Why don't you have him write some speeches?' And Mitt smiled and made some sweet comment about me but he might as well have suggested that he learn Sanskrit before the election. It was a non-ideological battle. I wrote about that. I couldn't be too severe because I wanted him to win. Jobs, jobs, jobs. It's all about jobs. That's what the brilliant advisors to Mitt Romney decided, that you're Mr. Fix It, and you can fix the economy better than Barack Obama. Remember how I said that Barack Obama is not the issue, [it is leftism]. The issue is ideas. Left-wing ideas ruin a country. Let's say that. At least you'll have clarity. Most Americans don't understand that it is leftism vs Americanism."

On Oct. 25, 2013, Dennis said: "I would love a TV show and I don't quite fully, well, the biggest reason I don't have one is that I live on the West Coast and not in New York or Washington..."

On May 30, 2013, Dennis said: "He [Obama] is irrelevant to me. He is of no interest to me. He is simply the president. Leftism is destroying the country, not Obama. Biden would destroy the country and Hillary would destroy the country and a whole bunch of senators on the left, the editors of the New York Times would destroy the country... I don't care about Obama... Obama is nothing. He's a leftist with power. The day he is out of power, he will be of total irrelevance to this society. Leftism is ruining America. Obama is a leftist. That is all that is significant about Obama."

"I don't think about Obama more than five minutes a day. I think about leftism constantly -- what it does to the arts, what it does to children, what it does to families, what it does to education."

A Lawrence Auster reader wrote July 3, 2012:

Conservative talk radio seems to have a similar theme throughout today. Each host I’ve listened to wonders where our patriotism has gone. This is interesting, considering that these so-called conservatives are in step with the liberal zeitgeist: they believe multiculturalism and diversity is a great thing which makes our country stronger.

Amazing that these hosts can tout the strength of such nation-destroying policies, while wondering why we aren’t as patriotic as we previously were. It’s as if they don’t understand that under our liberal belief system the less patriotic you actually are, the more American you are. Today, a patriot is one who is a recent immigrant who wants all traditional American edifices destroyed and believes equality is the founding principle of the nation. The patriots of yesteryear are bigots, meaning they are the anti-patriots.

Auster replied:

You have well described the schizophrenia that characterizes essentially ALL mainstream conservatives. Like Dennis Prager, they want to America to keep receiving all peoples as immigrants including Muslims, and they want American “Judeo-Christian” traditions to be protected and enforced. Like Norman Podhoretz, they redefine America as an abstract Proposition Nation equally open to all races and cultures on earth, and they complain about how Americans have “lost their voices,” their ability to stand up against multiculturalism.

The mainstream conservatives have two utterly contradictory values—the nondiscriminatory inclusion in America of everyone in the world, and the preservation of America as a special country and culture. They cannot see the contradiction or extricate themselves from it, because both these values are sacred to them. For them to recognize that their belief in non-discriminatory openness dooms the nation and must be abandoned, would be to lose what is the “highest” to them, it would be to lose themselves, so they can’t even conceive of it.

Auster wrote Nov. 20, 2012: "Victor Hanson keeps evoking race blindness as the true American ideal, not recognizing that the race blindness to which he is unquestioningly devoted produced the immigration policies which gave decisive political power in this country to race-conscious nonwhites and thus assured the doom of his own race-blind ideals."

A reader replied:

Back in the 1990s, Dennis Prager made a comment on his show one day that is so engraved in my memory I can quote it, I believe, verbatim, even after all these years: “When I see millions of Mexicans coming to this country, I don’t feel concerned. I feel complimented.” Prager believed that Mexicans, by the very act of coming here, were symbolically taking some sort of vow that they renounced The Mexican Way (including its native tribalism) and were now eager to embrace his superior European-American values and culture with open arms. Some years later, when three million illegal aliens poured into the streets of Los Angeles waving Mexican flags and signs that declared things like, “Go back to Europe. This is our territory now,” Prager came on the air and in this whiny, disillusioned voice lamented, “Couldn’t there be just ONE sign that said, “Thank you Americans, for allowing us into your great country?”
Another reader wrote:
Prager is also baffled that Christians do not have telethons and raise private armies to fight the persecution of brother Christians across the globe, in contrast to Jews’ rallying support of Soviet Jewry, Ethiopians, and whatnot. I am baffled that Prager, a member of a race that calls itself “The Tribe,” is outright blind to the difference between the religions: Judaism is rooted in blood, Christianity in hearts and minds. Obviously, the tribal ties are bound tighter.
An Auster reader wrote in 2006:
...Dennis Prager who rhapsodize about the mild manners and superior spirituality of Mestizo Mexicans should realize that, to date, these trespassers have enjoyed unremitting success in achieving what must be beyond even their own wildest dreams: the subversion of the laws, occupation of the territory, and displacement of the culture of the mighty U.S., with almost no resistance from the populace or government. But what will occur if/when these smiling, good-hearted migrants are ever denied, or even frustrated, in seizing the bounty they have come to believe is theirs for the taking may be something other than peaceful. As one American of Mexican descent who supports border control warned on a local L.A. blog recently, “You Anglos have no idea the s**t that is heading our way if we try to stop these people from coming. As for myself, I’m buying ammunition.”

Apr. 18, 2014, Dennis said: "I have reluctantly concluded that for me the political ship has sailed... I'm torn... My dream is not to be president, but to have the audience the president has."

Banging On

Much of Dennis Prager's radio show engenders rage against the left for cheating (in the war of ideas and in elections), and much of that rage is unfounded because it relies on shaky sources such as the New York Post. 

* "Every nightmare I've had about the left taking over the country is actually happening," said Dennis Nov. 25, 2013 after Obama's deal with Iran over nukes.

In a 2014 essay, John Measheimer pointed out: "Nor is it clear that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons. The consensus opinion in the American intelligence community is that it is not. But even if that judgment proves wrong and Iran acquires a nuclear arsenal, it could not use that capability to dominate the Persian Gulf. Nuclear weapons provide states with little offensive capability and thus are ill suited for spreading Iran’s influence in its neighborhood. Furthermore, both Israel and the United States have nuclear weapons and would never tolerate Iran achieving regional hegemony. Nor would Saudi Arabia or any other Arab state, which means Iran would face a formidable balancing coalition if it tried to rule the Gulf."

Reading the Drudgereport.com most mornings, I can usually predict much of what Dennis will talk about on his show. He finds irresistible the stories about MSM bias and left-wing corruption. 

* On Nov. 20, 2013, Dennis said: "According to a New York Post writer, if I had to bet, I would bet this New York Post writer is correct, 'Census Faked 2012 Election Jobs Report.'

"...If you are on the left and you were forced to bet all of your savings, would you bet the numbers were accurate or manipulated on behalf of the Obama administration? I know that the answer is that all of you would bet that they were manipulated."

"The use of the government to defraud, to lie, the [Obama] administration, I tell you, these are new frontiers."

"It's [hate] all one-way. Not that there aren't right-wing nuts, but it's acceptable from that [left] side and it  is led by the [left] elite... The left is sickening. It's never been different... Leftism, that religion, in its DNA is totalitarian and wishes to shut down everyone who is different, and nothing is more angry and totalitarian than the gay left."

This Slate article rebuts the Post report.

As someone who has since 1989 largely sided with Prager's way of viewing the world, I find that the primary emotion his show elicits in me (and I suspect in most listeners) is anger at the Dems and the media and the elites. Like most successful talk radio hosts, Prager excels at infuriating people. When you enrage in radio, you engage and you rate. Despite his happiness book and  happiness hour, Prager, like other nationally syndicated talk show hosts (sports talk radio is the same way) depends upon making his audience unhappy to keep his job. A show that gives people a nuanced understanding of current events from both sides of the aisle apparently has no business model in talk radio (the last big one like this, I think, was Michael Jackson on KABC). 

Aug. 26, 2014, Dennis said in his second hour: "If you didn't hear the first hour, I really got angry. The story out of Vermont. It's a good reason for you to hear all three hours and the best way is through Pragertopia.com. The taking down of the bacon ad in Vermont and then the dishonesty in addressing it, we're in trouble. Not because of the woman who made the request but because they honored the request."

In 2008, Dan Shelley, former news director and assistant program director at Milwaukee’s WTM radio, wrote for Milwaukee Magazine:

The Lund Talk Radio Stylebook

...talk show hosts...are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and even victimized by the media. These people believe the media are predominantly staffed by and consistently reflect the views of social liberals. This view is by now so long-held and deep-rooted, it has evolved into part of virtually every conservative’s DNA.

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners. 

The enemy can be a politician -- either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a "RINO" (a "Republican In Name Only," who is deemed not conservative enough. It can be the cold cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the "mainstream media..."  

In the talk radio business, this concept, which must be mastered to be successful, is called “differentiating” yourself from the rest of the media. It is a brilliant marketing tactic that has also helped Fox News Channel thrive. “We report, you decide” and “Fair and Balanced” are more than just savvy slogans. They are code words signaling that only Fox will report the news in a way conservatives see as objective and truthful.

Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host's opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don't attract large audiences.

One entire group that rarely gets on the air are the elderly callers – unless they have something extraordinary to say. Sadly, that doesn’t happen often. The theory is that old-sounding callers help produce old-skewing audiences. The target demo is 25 to 54, not 65 and older…

Talk show fans are not stupid. They will detect an obvious phony. The best hosts sincerely believe everything they say. Their passion is real. Their arguments have been carefully crafted in a manner they know will be meaningful to the audience, and that validates the views these folks were already thinking.

A smart talk show host will, from time to time, disagree publicly with a Republican president, the Republican Party, or some conservative doctrine. (President Bush’s disastrous choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was one such example.) But these disagreements are strategically chosen to prove the host is an independent thinker, without appreciably harming the president or party. This is not to suggest that hosts don’t genuinely disagree with the conservative line at times. They do, more often than you might think. But they usually keep it to themselves.

If you lack compelling arguments in favor of your candidate or point of view, attack the other side. These attacks often rely on two key rhetorical devices, which I call You Know What Would Happen If and The Preemptive Strike.

Using the first strategy, a host will describe something a liberal has said or done that conservatives disagree with, but for which the liberal has not been widely criticized, and then say, “You know what would happen if a conservative had said (or done) that? He (or she) would have been filleted by the ‘liberal media.’ ” This is particularly effective because it’s a two-fer, simultaneously reinforcing the notion that conservatives are victims and that “liberals” are the enemy.

The second strategy, The Preemptive Strike, is used when a host knows that news reflecting poorly on conservative dogma is about to break or become more widespread. When news of the alleged massacre at Haditha first trickled out in the summer of 2006, not even Iraq War chest-thumper Charlie Sykes would defend the U.S. Marines accused of killing innocent civilians in the Iraqi village. So he spent lots of air time criticizing how the “mainstream media” was sure to sensationalize the story in the coming weeks. Charlie would kill the messengers before any message had even been delivered.

Good talk show hosts can get their listeners so lathered up that they truly can change public policy. They can inspire like-minded folks to flood the phone lines and e-mail inboxes of aldermen, county supervisors, legislators and federal lawmakers. They can inspire their followers to vote for candidates the hosts prefer. How? By pounding away on an issue or candidate, hour after hour, day after day. Hosts will extol the virtues of the favored candidate or, more likely, exploit whatever Achilles heel the other candidate might have. Influencing elections is more likely to occur at the local rather than national level, but that still gives talk radio power.

By the way, here’s a way to prognosticate elections just by listening to talk shows: Except in presidential elections, when they will always carry water for the Republican nominee, conservative hosts won’t hurt their credibility by backing candidates they think can’t win. So if they’re uncharacteristically tepid, or even silent, about a particular race, that means the Democrat has a good chance of winning. Nor will hosts spend their credibility on an issue where they know they disagree with listeners.

...This brings us to perhaps the most ironic thing about most talk show hosts. Though they may savage politicians and others they oppose, they fear criticism or critiques of any kind. They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.

...But the key reason talk radio succeeds is because its hosts can exploit the fears and perceived victimization of a large swath of conservative-leaning listeners. And they feel victimized because many liberals and moderates have ignored or trivialized their concerns and have stereotyped these Americans as uncaring curmudgeons.

Because of that, there will always be listeners who believe that [they]are the only members of the media who truly care about them.

Political scientist James Joyner wrote Feb. 21, 2021 about Prager's chosen medium:
[Rush] Limbaugh’s schtick ultimately transformed the conservative movement in destructive ways because it showed how lucrative playing to the predudices of an aggrieved base can be... ...[A] business model that depends on keeping people riled up and feeding their belief system will inevitably become mean-spirited and dishonest. Discussions of nuanced differences of emphasis—which is where politics in a democracy should naturally gravitate—aren’t enough to get millions to tune in for three hours a day, every day. No, the opposition must be monsters out to destroy all that the Good People hold dear.
Unless Dennis Prager makes his audience mad, he doesn't have an audience. If he enrages, however, he engages, and he gets fame, fortune, power and popularity at the price of increasing unhappiness in the world.
Like most talk show hosts, Dennis Prager spends a lot of time talking about things he knows little about. Here are some more examples:

* Mar. 24, 2014, Dennis said about e-cigarettes "all they are is water vapor." 

The New York Times reported Mar. 23, 2014:
Selling a Poison by the Barrel: Liquid Nicotine for E-Cigarettes

A dangerous new form of a powerful stimulant is hitting markets nationwide, for sale by the vial, the gallon and even the barrel.

The drug is nicotine, in its potent, liquid form — extracted from tobacco and tinctured with a cocktail of flavorings, colorings and assorted chemicals to feed the fast-growing electronic cigarette industry.

These “e-liquids,” the key ingredients in e-cigarettes, are powerful neurotoxins. Tiny amounts, whether ingested or absorbed through the skin, can cause vomiting and seizures and even be lethal. A teaspoon of even highly diluted e-liquid can kill a small child. 

* In the run-up to and the aftermath of Republican Ken Cuccinelli's loss in the Virginia governor's race in November of 2013, Dennis Prager spent about an hour of his show over various days bemoaning the Libertarian candidate (Robert Sarvis) taking votes away from Cuccinelli. Dennis said Nov. 6, 2013: "There were two big reasons Terry Mcauliffe won -- the Libertarian candidate and an utterly lying deceitful ad in Spanish to the Latino community in northern Virginia."

As John Fund told Prager on air Nov. 6, 2013,  and Michael Barone told him Nov. 7 and as the Washington Post reported Nov. 7, Sarvis did not cost Cuccinelli the election. Prager talks as though libertarians are right-wing and naturally belong in the Republican party because they are for small government when in truth, libertarians are no more right-wing than left-wing and they are no more naturally Republicans than they are Democrats.

* Latinos vote Democrat with or without lying ads, and it is doubtful that ads had much to do with their voting in this race. 

* On May 1, 2013, Dennis asked: "Do you couples need 'space'? If so, how much space is too much? Or, this whole 'space' issue really a cover for not wanting to spend time together?"

Dennis displayed no understanding of attachment styles and how the avoidant style, which about 20% of the population has, seeks distance and independence, while the anxious and secure styles seek closeness. 

* On May 8, 2013, Prager's topic was: "Who wants to argue with their spouse? So what do couples argue about? Topics that come up are: in-laws, money, and children."

Dennis showed no awareness in the hour that arguments with loved ones are not usually about the ostensible topic but are ways of checking to see if the person still cares about you, is available to you, and will come help you if needed. The topics of arguments between spouses has much less significance than their underlying meaning, which is always, "Is my attachment to you secure? Can I count on you to be there for me?"

* On Nov. 19, 2013, Dennis wrote: "Millions of Africans have died of malaria because of the environmentalist-induced bans on DDT." Most scientists in this area would dispute the claim.

* Jan. 6, 2014, Dennis said: "The United States has decided under the Obama administration to leave the Middle East. The only thing they are engaged in is to try to force Israel into an agreement with the Palestinians. I don't know if the world will survive...the injury the Obama administration has done."

"The problem is not American intervention. It's America leaving. The right has to take ownership of the invasion of Iraq (along with the Democrats who voted for it) and the left has to take ownership of America leaving."

"To leave Afghanistan is to say that the people who jumped out of the World Trade Center are forgotten."

While Dennis describes President Obama as the most left-wing president ever (with the possible exception of FDR), elite political scientists conclude in late 2013: "We find that President Obama is the most ideologically moderate Democratic president in the post-war period..."

Chris Cilizza, an objective reporter at the Washington Post, writes Nov. 25, 2013: "Looking back then at his near-decade in federal office, the numbers would suggest that Obama is slightly more liberal than his former Senate colleagues but less liberal than many of his Democratic predecessors in the White House."

On Aug. 27, 2013, Dennis wrote a point he's made a thousand times that is not in fact true: "The essence of the American right, after all, is less government..." Dennis never provides evidence for this assertion.

We have abundant evidence of what happens when the right comes to power (such as presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes), in the US and elsewhere, and it no more tends to smaller government than does the left. The right talks about smaller government more than the left does but it rarely does anything more about it. The right prefers to spend on the military and the left prefers to spend on welfare, but spend they both like to do equally. And how do you define smaller government? As a percentage of GNP? As state power over federal power? As reduced intervention overseas? The left generally prefers less US intervention overseas while the right usually favors more.

Report: "Government spending at the start of the 20th century was less than 7 percent of GDP. It vaulted to almost 30 percent of GDP by the end of World War I, and then settled down to 10 percent of GDP in the 1920s. In the 1930s spending doubled to 20 percent of GDP. Defense spending in World War II drove overall government spending over 50 percent of GDP before declining to 22 percent of GDP in the late 1940s. The 1950s began a steady spending increase to about 36 percent of GDP by 1982. In the 1990s and 2000s government spending stayed about constant at 33-35 percent of GDP, but in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 spending has jogged up to 40 percent of GDP."

This massive increase in government spending as a percentage of the GNP over 100 years has been little affected by the right or left orientation of the party in power.

Since the rise of the Tea Party in 2009, however, the Republican party has shifted towards diminishing federal spending while Democrats push for more such spending. 

Malcolm Gladwell

Dennis saw Gladwell as a kindred spirit. They met on the air Feb. 18, 2014, when Malcolm was promoting his new book -- David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

Dennis: "Your mind, I have a certain identification with it. You look at something and you find patterns. That's the way my mind works."

Malcolm: "I think that people in the position we're in, doing the job we're doing, that's our value, right? Most people are information rich and theory poor. They don't have the time or the inclination to make sense of [life], to put patterns together."

Dennis: "But without patterns, you don't understand life."

Malcolm: "Yeah."

Dennis: "It's something you can train yourself to do, but it is also a gift. They asked Schubert, how did you come up with all these melodies? And he said, 'They just come into my brain.'"

"Thanks to you, I got to love the [story of] David and Goliath even more. It gives tremendous substance to the story in the Bible. All these little details, you make sense of."

"Just for that story alone, you have to read [his book] David and Goliath. It begins with a brilliant analysis of why the story is so telling in its details."

Malcolm: "Why are we so constantly fooled by things that don't matter?"

Dennis: "That's why I resonate to this theme of yours. At a very early age, I came to a conclusion I have never wavered from -- the staggering exaggerated importance given to brains and raw intelligence. I realized in high school that the ones with the finest brains were often the most confused, the least capable of dealing with life kids in the grade. I have learned from my listeners, who come from all walks of life, more than I learned from my professors at Columbia."

Malcolm: "Yeah. That does not surprise me. You talk to people in the business world, I'm always curious about hiring, and the good ones, that's all they talk about. They hire character."

Dennis: "I'm getting the chills. I raised my kids with that theme. I told them, 'I don't care about your grades. I care about your character.' And they got crappy grades. Character is king."

"I feel like a kindred spirit with you."

"Malcolm Gladwell teaches what isn't taught. He has an original mind. It is a joy to read him."<

John Gray wrote Nov. 21, 2013 in The New Republic about Gladwell's latest book:

There is nothing remotely challenging, for most of Gladwell’s readers, in this story; it is the sort of uplift in which they already believe. The dominant narrative for the last three centuries has been one in which the power of elites and rulers is progressively overcome by the moral force of the common man and woman who sticks up for what is right. Far from being a forbidden truth, this is what everyone thinks. Here we can glimpse one of the secrets of Gladwell’s success. Pretending to present daringly counterintuitive views to his readers, he actually strengthens the hold on them of a view of things that they have long taken for granted. This is, perhaps, the essence of the genre that Gladwell has pioneered: while reinforcing beliefs that everyone avows, he evokes in the reader a satisfying sensation of intellectual non-conformity...

Speaking to a time that prides itself on optimism and secretly suspects that nothing works, his books are analgesics for those who seek temporary relief from abiding anxiety. There is more of reality and wisdom in a Chinese fortune cookie than can be found anywhere in Gladwell’s pages. But then, it is not reality or wisdom that his readers are looking for.

Here are some Steve Sailer posts showing how you can't trust Malcolm Gladwell: Here Here Here Here Here Here

The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen

In reaction to Barack Obama's massive expansion of the federal government, Dennis Prager in 2009 developed the saying, "The Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen." He wrote Sept. 1, 2009:
Those of us who oppose a massive increase in the role the national government plays in health care ("ObamaCare") do so because we fear the immense and unsustainable national debt it would incur and because we are certain that medical care in America would deteriorate. But there is a bigger reason most of us oppose it: We believe that the bigger the government becomes, the smaller the individual citizen becomes.

...Not only does bigger government teach people not to take care of themselves, it teaches them not to take of others. Smaller government is the primary reason Americans give more charity and volunteer more time per capita than do Europeans living in welfare states. Why take care of your fellow citizen, or even your family, when the government will do it for you?

This preoccupation with self includes foreign policy: Why care about, let alone risk dying for, another country's liberty? That is the view of the world's left. That is why conservative governments are far more supportive of the war efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan than left-wing governments of the same country. The moment the socialists won in Spain, they withdrew all their forces from Iraq. The new center-left government in Japan has promised to stop helping the war effort in Afghanistan.

Republican politicians such as John Boehner, speaker of the House, and Congressman David Dreier took up the phrase.
On July 25, 2011, Boehner responded to President Obama's nationwide speech on the budget deficit: "You know, I’ve always believed, the bigger government, the smaller the people. And right now, we have a government so big and so expensive it’s sapping the drive of our people and keeping our economy from running at full capacity."
In a May 14, 2012 three hour show with Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt said: "At the Baltimore retreat of the National Republican Congressional Committee [in 2009], Dennis gave this big speech. I had to follow him. I’ve now learned go before Dennis, don’t follow Dennis. And so he gave this big speech, standing ovation, he had turned around like Beethoven, couldn’t see that they were standing, I had to poke him and say turn around and look at the audience. And what brought them to their feet was the saying the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen..."
"I saw grown men…now the hardest-bitten, the most cynical, the toughest to reach audience in the world is an audience of radio program directors and general managers. They are absolutely cynical about talk show hosts, because that’s all they ever deal with. And most of them, not Dennis or me, are prima donnas, and they are very difficult to deal with. And so when you get a whole bunch of them, a hundred of them in a room, it’s a tough audience. It may be the toughest audience, because they’ve heard every shtick, they’ve seen us for years, there’s nothing we can do or say to get them to actually listen to us. They’re just ah, it’s Prager, it’s Hewitt, it’s Bennett, it’s Gallagher, it’s Medved. They just turn us…it’s Pastore, whatever. However, the last time we were together at a Salem general managers meeting, reduced to tears by my friend Dennis Prager, because he talked about why he is so much a fan of this radio network and of Christians..."
On Prager's show May 17, 2012, Arthur Brooks, head of the American Enterprise Institute, said to Dennis: "Do you know how much good you are doing for America?"
Dennis: "No, I don't. All I think about is how much I'm failing."
"When I look at elections, I think, did I have any impact?"
Mar. 28, 2014, Dennis said: "I will not have achieved my major goals."
"I desire to be president of the United States but I do not expect it."
June 28, 2012, Dennis Prager said:
In [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts, we have someone who was more concerned in this decision with the reputation of the Court than with doing the right thing.

To have gone against the obvious understanding to uphold something [Obamacare] he acknowledges as unconstitutional as written, so he will understand it as something else [a tax], there must be another concern. And there is -- the reputation of the court.

Once you worry about your reputation, you will be liberal. That is a rule of American life. If you worry about your reputation, you will vote liberal, you will talk liberal and if you are a judge, you will rule liberal, because the Left wrote contemporary history.

One day in an autobiographical mood, I will tell you how it is has affected me and a decision I made early on, that if I wanted to say what I believed, I would have to withstand the opinions of entire communities that I was affiliated with.
July 6, 2012, Dennis said: "This president will say or do anything he can get away with to retain the presidency."

Baseball, Dennis & the French (2011)

From BaseballDennisandtheFrench.com:

Baseball, Dennis & the French tells the true story of Paul Croshaw, longtime liberal activist and connoisseur of French films, who amazed his family, friends and himself by becoming a churchgoing, conservative Christian after years of listening to nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager.

The film's background story is a miracle on a baseball field when Paul was 12. Through archival film footage, photos, home movies and re-enactments, this unique feature documentary recreates Paul's story as a dramatic counterpoint to Dennis's forceful, on-camera words giving the rational arguments for a God and the consequences to America if we become a secularized Country.

The film traces Dennis' influence on Paul's journey from the ball field to his career as a liberal activist and skeptic, then to belief in God and in a Judeo-Christian America, and finally to faith in a personal God. The final act portrays the logical end of Paul's quest as he parts with Dennis to discover, on his own, the culmination of the Bible's plan of salvation. And Dennis, "thrilled that this Jew has helped Paul find his Christian faith," steps aside with his most poignant observation: "Only in America!"

Max Prager 1918-2014

Dennis's dad died Aug. 16, 2014. When he returned to the air Aug. 20, Dennis devoted three hours of his show to Max.
Dennis: "Until my mother died [near] 90, he was unbelievably energetic and independent. Two and a half years after that, my father had surgery and came out of the surgery paralyzed from the waist down. He said to his sons, 'I have lived a blessed life. Now God wants me to experience what the rest of the world experiences'."
"There was a strong ethical component to his life. He was a CPA to many businesses. He was the accountant to some nursing homes. They told him to fudge figures and he told them to shove it. And those executives stayed out of prison because of him."
"He was an Orthodox Jew and very worldly. He was a very free spirit in the sexual realm."
"My father decided it was time to die. The last time I had him on, July 18, he said in very matter of fact tones in the middle of the interview, and it shocked me that he said it on radio, that he wanted to die... All of us in the family respected him saying that. I visited him with my wife and younger son and step-son last Wednesday to New Jersey and he died on Saturday. There are some in the family who are adamant that that gave him permission to go. It was understood to be a goodbye. He had the stroke two days later. He signalled to my brother with his hand up to Heaven, I want to go up now. Why would one not honor a person's wish? He kept saying to me last Wednesday, 'I've had such a great life, Dennis.'"
"My father smoked cigars up to four months from dying. He gave me my first cigar in my teens. He loved Scotch. He drank Scotch with the ease that most mortals drink orange juice. He was never inebriated."
"He said that in the Navy, you had two choices -- alcohol or prostitutes. He was married so he chose alcohol.
"He always had a view. If he had a radio show, he would have been off the air within three days for berating callers."
Dennis used much of his speaking opportunity at his father's funeral to instruct:
If there is a God, there is an afterlife... I wrote about this in high school. Before you two [brother Kenny and his wife] were reading my essays on the afterlife...
We speak a great deal about naches from children. It is strange we never talk about naches from parents. You can make a case that bad behavior by parents has a more destructive effect than bad behavior by children... I have always had naches from my parents. I was always proud to introduce them at my speeches and to my friends...
Sometime before 1976, after he gave a speech, I was in my apartment and my phone rang and to my shock it was my father calling. He never called me before that call and he never called me since. He said he was calling to ask me a question: "Dennis, I saw you speak today and I was wondering, where did you get all of that self-confidence from? Not from mom and me." And he was right.
Aaron is not here. He had every intention of coming today. We had a family vote it was unanimous that he stay home. He is working very hard to get work. He had an interview today...
I would always ask what would my father do and say. He played this [role] in Aaron's life...
Thank you for your complete support during my two divorces.
By contrast with Dennis, Kenny's eulogy for Max is more traditional, more orthodox, and more in Hebrew.

Prager University

The Daily Signal Nov. 4, 2015:

Radio host Dennis Prager and his business partner Allen Estrin had a big problem on their hands.

It was October, 2013. Several years earlier, the duo—friends for decades—co-founded PragerU, a small digital university for conservatives with a modest audience. Now, a stranger was suing them.

The man, a photographer in Ireland, alleged through a Houston lawyer that PragerU had used one of his photographs in an online educational video without his consent.

Estrin, a former Hollywood screenwriter with little experience navigating the intricacies of digital copyright issues, calls the episode “traumatic.”

“We had a visual style that used photographs, and someone really almost out of nowhere sued us for the use of a photo,” Estrin recalls in an interview with The Daily Signal. “As a result of being sued, we did a lot of investigation into [how you can] use photos on the Internet, and the copyright ramifications of photos, and what to do going forward.”

What Estrin and Prager did was overhaul their entire visual video aesthetic to a streamlined, animation-based model, abandoning four years of work and 80 educational videos.

“And in one of those things that doesn’t happen very much in life but I’m happy to say I’ve experienced, this very traumatic experience was the best thing that could have possibly happened to us,” Estrin says.

“This year we will have more than 50 million views as confirmed by YouTube and Facebook,” Prager says in an email to The Daily Signal, adding that “the largest single demographic of our videos are people under 35 years of age.”

Evan Halper wrote for the Los Angeles Times August 23, 2019:
WASHINGTON — Earlier this summer, as Donald Trump assembled online activists at the White House to thank them for their role in getting him to the Oval Office and – Trump predicted – keeping him there, one guest didn’t rush to claim credit.

Los Angeles-based Prager University, a registered charity, is legally prohibited from politicking. It isn’t truly a university and doesn’t have a campus. But the digital empire created by Dennis Prager, a 71-year-old conservative radio host and erstwhile Never Trumper, is having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.

The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times, according to the group’s own count. Independent analysis done for The Times by Tubular Labs, a video measurement company, largely backs up that claim. PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups. It ranks among the top 10 biggest political spenders on the platform...

“It is a sophisticated campaign to indoctrinate young people,” said Tara McGowan, chief executive of Acronym, a nonprofit that advises progressives on digital campaigning. “The amount of money they are putting behind it is alarming and significant. They seem to have created a savvy way to push an ideology onto an audience and get a tax break in the process.”

Prager himself has limited affection for Trump. He compares his support for the president to the alliance President Franklin D. Roosevelt brokered with Joseph Stalin in World War II –- a move born of necessity in the face of what he sees as a bigger evil (in this case, the left).

The Southern Poverty Law Center warns that several PragerU videos, such as one arguing black Americans are coddled by society, “function as dog whistles to the extreme right.” The Weather Channel branded PragerU’s challenges to global warming “a course in climate misinformation.” After watching a few PragerU videos, Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse tweeted that they were “utterly wrong on the facts.”

“The YouTube and Facebook algorithms like what they produce,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at UCLA whose upcoming book “Beyond the Valley” focuses on the relationships between technology and politics. “They predict it will capture people’s attention. It is not surprising they have grown to the extent they have.”

The polarizing nature of PragerU’s messages, along with the large social media followings of the presenters, take full advantage of the business model of the platforms, Srinivasan said.

“It is much more effective than the version of this content available on the liberal side,” he said, citing as an example the short presentations posted online by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, which are popular among liberals but aren’t complemented by an array of other voices and content similar to what PragerU offers.

To amplify that content, the group has an annual budget of nearly $23 million, fueled in part by donations from religious conservatives, including $800,000 last year from Texan Lee Roy Mitchell, owner of a global movie theater chain and ally of the conservative Koch brothers. Other big donors include GOP medagonor Sheldon Adelson’s Maccabee Task Force, and the foundation of Adelson’s top deputy, Michael Leven.

Most of the seed money for PragerU came from Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire brothers from east Texas who made their fortune from fracking and run a church called the Assembly of Yahweh. Farris Wilks preaches at the church. In his sermons, he has compared homosexuality to bestiality and declared climate change the will of God.

While the group relies on big-dollar conservative donors, however, 40% of its budget comes from almost 130,000 online donors. PragerU has more donors than some prominent Democrats running for president...

The site’s growth has been lucrative for Prager, who last year started collecting fees for his work with the charity. Tax filings show $237,500 went to Dennis Prager’s consulting firm. An additional $155,700 went to Prager’s son for help with fundraising.

Forbes reported March 30, 2020: "Prager U's continued focus on attractive short videos is paying huge dividends. While their closest competitors are not growing, PragerU continues to expand its following on Facebook and Twitter. They rank first in all categories except web traffic, as most are attracted to their videos through Google or YouTube searches rather than going through their website. Except for LinkedIn, PragerU scores better than think tanks in all categories."

Obamacare

Mar. 22, 2010, Dennis said: “For the last year, I expected this… There was no time when I thought this wouldn’t pass…
“This is the Left. The Left will get this done. I know the Left better than almost every American. I don’t say that to boast, I say that to cry…
“Psychologically, I am preparing myself to battle the rest of my life to keep America American. I don’t want a heart attack. I want to be strong for the next 30 years to help lead this battle. If I just get angry, it will eat me up and it will accomplish nothing. I don’t believe in catharsis. I believe in effectiveness.”
“The distinction between American values and left-wing values, that is what my mission will be until this is repealed or I leave this planet.”
“On the day after the darkest day in my lifetime. Obviously 9/11 was so dark in pure human tragedy, but it didn’t weaken America. In terms of weakening America, yesterday was by far the darkest day as we retreat from the American ideal of a smaller government and a freer citizen.
“I actually feel a little different today. When it passed, I started feeling a little more European… I felt it. I’ve lived in Europe. I just came back again from Europe a couple of weeks ago. There’s a deadening element because as the state gets bigger in your life, you get less excited about life. What is there to get excited about in Europe? You can’t really make more money. The government tells you when you open your shop and when you close it. You can’t educate your own children if you want [home schooling is banned in Germany for instance]. The state does everything for you… You exist to make love. They are apparently quite good at that in Europe. There’s more focus on cuisine and on sex, the only areas where government hasn’t intruded. It inevitably makes the human more of a hedonist. There’s nothing noble to do in Europe. The government has taken over noble works.”
Said Dennis July 15, 2010: “I’ve earned the self-esteem that enables me to sit here for 28 years. I worked my tail off. I didn’t have high self-esteem as a kid. That’s part of the reason I worked so hard because I knew I better work my tail off because nothing will come to me. If I don’t work very hard, I’ll be a nothing.”

Paul Gottfried said January 28, 2020: “I think [Prager's] an intellectual vulgarian of a kind I have rarely encountered in this world. He has said such ridiculous things about history, fascism, democracy and so forth that it has hard for me to bestow any respect on his intellectual accomplishments.”

The New York Times reported Jan. 4, 2020:

Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.

The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.

...Dan and Farris Wilks, hydraulic-fracturing billionaires from Texas, came in with donations. The conservative-leaning Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation joined, too — their goal in funding education is, in part, to “promote the teaching of American exceptionalism.”

PragerU started to spend on marketing on Facebook and YouTube.

“We just kept throwing more coal into the furnace,” Mr. Estrin said. “And we realized that we had created a distribution platform.”

In 2019, PragerU raised $22 million; next year, it estimates it will raise $25 million. Its budget comes almost entirely from donor contributions.

...Former fans of Mr. Prager’s work say they are confused by his Trumpist turn.

“In terms of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ of watching people become more Trumpian, these moral icons becoming shills, he is way up there,” said Charlie Sykes, the author of “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” and a former radio host who used to occasionally substitute on Mr. Prager’s show. “Now you have to put PragerU in the category of other very successful meme machines and low-rent conservative grifting.”

Mr. Prager’s desk is stacked with items including a refrigerated lunchbox, open and showing a slice of lemon cake, but he cannot eat it. He often fasts 20 hours a day. His back is bad, and he is in considerable physical pain as he moves through the world.

As he prepared to leave, he unzipped a large rolling suitcase. It was almost entirely full of old newspapers. He added the day’s Wall Street Journal and headed to the airport. He does not want to do an interview in person. He wants to email, and so he does. His answers are long and lucid and full of biblical references.

Christians United For Israel

From a speech Dennis Prager gave April 25, 2010 in Minneapolis to CUFI:
A minute into his talk, Dennis puts on his yarmulke to say a shehecheyanu. “I always get choked up when I do this. I make a little prayer to God that I will not cry at CUFI event.”
“The shehecheyanu prayer is — Blessed are you God, King of the universe, who has kept us alive and brought us to this moment.”
Finishing the blessing in Hebrew, Dennis removes his yarmulke and puts it in his pocket. “It’s a powerful prayer. Jews say it only on special occasions.
“Nothing is as powerful as Jews and Christians working together.
“It’s thousands of years late, but it’s here.”
“I was asked to speak many years ago by an Israeli group in Los Angeles. I remember taking the evening because I wanted to practice my Hebrew. They interviewed me in Hebrew. They asked me what do you consider yourself first — a Jew or an American? “I said, I have two fathers — Abraham and George Washington. I am twice blessed.”
“This will help you understand why there is resistance in Jewish life to your magnificent outreach to the Jewish community. Jews don’t trust anybody. I do but most Jews don’t. There’s a voice in most Jews when they meet a Christian — if there were another Holocaust, would this person be a persecutor, a bystander or a rescuer?
“They don’t tell you this. They won’t tell you this. It sounds sick. It’s not sick.
“Whenever I’m in your company, I believe I’m with rescuers.”

As historian Peter Novick wrote in his 1999 book, The Holocaust in American Life:
…From the 1970s on, the growth sector in the Jewish organizational world consisted of old and new “schrei gevalt” agencies, while those with other agendas, like the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress, declined. The Anti-Defamation League, together with the enormously successful Simon Wiesenthal Center, bombarded Jews with mailings announcing new anti-Semitic threats. (The ADL was especially assiduous in giving wide circulation to anti-Semitic remarks by obscure black hustlers and demagogues, thus vastly increasing their audiences.) Of the dozens of local Jewish newspapers in the United States, all but a handful were organs of local Jewish Federations, whose success in fundraising was directly proportional to the level of anxiety among potential contributors.

...Once the Holocaust became centered in Jewish consciousness, and to the extent that it became centered, it provided a language and framework that deepened anxiety about American anti-Semitism, and a spiraling interaction came into play. Once one starts using imagery from that most extreme of events, it becomes impossible to say anything moderate, balanced or nuanced; the very language carries you along to hyperbole. A journalist who supported black community control of schools was told by Norman Podhoretz in 1969 that he was one of those who wanted to “shove the Jewish people back into the gas ovens.” “The ovens” recurred again and again. In Brooklyn, a militant protester against busing for school integration insisted that “we wouldn’t be led to the ovens this time.”

...As the Holocaust moved from history to myth, it became the bearer of “eternal truths” not bound by historical circumstances. Among other things, the Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism: first stop, an anti-Semitic joke; last stop, Treblinka. Every loudmouthed Farrakhan acolyte was the opening act in the Julius Streicher show.

...In the late sixties and early seventies, at the same time that the arrival of the “new anti-Semitism” was announced, American Jewish organizations were changing their priorities and their posture, a change that has so far proved permanent. It is probably best described as an inward turn — a shift away from the previously dominant “integrationist” perspective and toward an emphasis on the defense of distinctive Jewish interests, a kind of circling of the wagons…

The qualifications for certification as a Righteous Gentile [by Yad Vashem] had little connection with the everyday meaning of "righteousness": following accepted moral norms and doing what people could reasonably be expected to do. The criteria were to have risked one's life, and often the lives of the members of one's family as well, to save another; to have displayed self-sacrificing heroism of the highest and rarest order. At Yad Vashem nominees for Righteous Gentiles are carefully screened. Often the process takes many years, and the most rigorous standards are applied. (Thus fishermen who transported Danish Jews to Sweden in 1943 are not eligible because they were paid.)

The intention of most commemoration of the "righteous minority" has been to damn the vast "unrighteous majority." The article "Righteous among the Nations," in The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, stresses that "the acts of those few show that aid and rescue were possible...had there been more high-minded people." The director of Yad Vashem's Department of the Righteous explained that "spicing" the history of the Holocaust with stories of rescuers were indispensable in showing the delinquency of European Christians "against the background of the righteous." In the United States, the head of the Anti-Defamation League discussed a book by the director of the ADL's Foundation for Christian Rescuers. He insisted that "what is important about the book is that the reader comes away understanding that rescue of Jews was a rare phenomenon. [The fact is] that 700 million people lived in Nazi-occupied Europe; to date 11,000 have been honored by Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews. The ratio of unrighteous to righteous gentiles -- thousands to one -- is repeatedly underlined by commentators. "For every righteous person," said Benjamin Meed, "there were thousands upon thousands who collaborated...or who, at best, stood idly by and did nothing."

Those who have written or spoken about gentile rescuers, for purposes other than underlining their rarity, report that they often receive a hostile reception from Jewish audiences.

...But the institutional use of the commemoration of Righteous Gentiles as "the exceptions that prove the rule" has usually been in the service of shoring up that mentality -- promoting a wary suspicion of gentiles... "When I move to a new town," writes a university teacher, "I give great thought to whom, among my gentile friends, I might entrust my children, should that ever become necessary." A prominent Jewish feminist: "Every conscious Jew longs to ask her or his non-Jewish friends, 'Would you hide me?' -- and suppresses the question for fear of hearing the sounds of silence." A professor of psychology:

"Many Jews report that the unspoken question they ask themselves when interacting with a non-Jew is, 'Would she or he have saved me from the Nazis?' I have asked myself this question innumerable times: sometimes I surprise myself by answering, 'I don't know,' when asking this question of a non-Jewish friend I had otherwise assumed was close to me. The answer is the ultimate standard by which to measure trust in a non-Jewish person."

Hovering over all of this is the absurd maxim In extremis veritas -- that it is imagining the most desperate circumstances that one gains insight into what gentiles really think of Jews. To be preoccupied with the question of whether one could be sure that one would be saved by gentile friends if a holocaust came to America is to actively solicit anxiety and doubt, because who could ever be sure of such a thing? The asking of this pointless question seems to have become culturally approved, a sign that one has learned "the lesson of the Holocaust."

In a column published May 8, 2013, Dennis compared Jews and Christians:

1. The most obvious and perhaps most important difference concerns how an individual attains what Christianity refers to as salvation, or what Judaism calls the rewards of the hereafter. Judaism believes that the only way to achieve heavenly reward is through good works...

2. Judaism allows for divorce much more readily than either Catholicism — which never does — or traditional Protestantism, which rarely does.

3. Christians tend to place greater emphasis on sins of thought than does Judaism.

4. Many Protestant Christians believe that all sins are equal in God’s eyes.

5. Many Catholic and Protestant Christians — whether traditional or liberal in their theology and politics — believe that it is their Christian duty to forgive all sinners of all sins whether or not the sinner repents and no matter who the sinner hurts.

6. Most believing Christians have a more personal relationship with God/Jesus than most religious Jews have with God.

7. With regard to prayer, Jews almost exclusively rely on reciting prayers written for them, and Christians rely more on spontaneous prayer.

8. Christians tend to accept suffering with fewer complaints in general and fewer complaints against God. Christians tend to view their suffering as little compared to the suffering of Christ, or even as being Christ-like. Jews tend to regard suffering as a flaw in God’s order that must be alleviated.
The Arab Spring

Almost alone in the media, Dennis Prager was pessimistic about the Arab Spring. He wrote Mar. 1, 2011:
From the moment the Tahrir Square demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak began, optimism has dominated American reporting and commentary on what is being called the Egyptian revolution.

I fervently hope I am wrong, but I find it hard to share this dominant view, even as I identify with all those Egyptians and other Arabs who yearn for freedom.

I offer eight good reasons for my pessimism:

1. Countries almost never go straight from dictatorship to liberty...

2. When pro-American dictators are overthrown, far more repressive anti-American tyrants usually replace them...

3. Islamists have a near-monopoly on passion in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.

In politics, passion matters. That is why small impassioned groups can dominate a more passive majority of a country. And in Egypt, no group or cause has nearly the passion that the Islamists have.

4. Neither liberty nor tolerance has roots in the Arab world...

5. People have been trained to depend on the state...
Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (2012)

Dennis wrote: "There are three ideologies [Leftism, Islamism, Americanism] competing for the allegiance of mankind. This competition shapes much of the present world, and the outcome will shape humanity’s future."

Conservative Paul Gottfried wrote in 2007: "This claim to be for 'values'...has taken the place of standing for real historical groups [such as WASPs]."

Nicholas Stix wrote in 2011: "America was created by whites with a strong racial identity, but over the past 40-odd years they have lost that identity and have persuaded themselves they have no collective racial interests."

James Kirkpatrick added in 2013:
...no nation, even one with a relatively progressive record like the United States, can possibly compete with an absolute dream that “all men are created equal.” The vision of perfect equality will defeat the national reality every time. After all, whatever the fantasies of contemporary “colorblind” conservatives, America was created by an ethnic core of White Anglo Saxon Protestant settlers—who did it, in the words of the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble, for “ourselves and our posterity.”

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. Conservatives (or their children) can only believe America is an exemplar for universal liberty and equality if they remain ignorant about our actual history... This shallow view can't stand up to a college education.

But if all conservatives can claim are “values” that drift Leftward at a slightly slower pace than the larger culture, they can hardly stop the process. They have essentially disarmed before the battle has even begun by accepting the Left's premise about America as a universal nation based in Enlightenment ideas. A real defense would mean explicitly describing the United States of America as a real country, founded by a real people, with a real history...

As Pat Buchanan wrote in State of Emergency: "If America is an ideological nation grounded no deeper than in the sandy soil of abstract ideas, she will not survive the storms of this century any more than the Soviet Union survived the storms of the last."

Nor will families. After all, a nation, like a race, is in the end simply an extended family.

As with many of Dennis Prager's books and presentations, Still the Best Hope makes you wince at times with its pomposity. The inside front flap read: "In this visionary book, Dennis Prager, one of America's most original thinkers..." The inside back flap read: "Dennis Prager is one of the most listened to and respected media personalities in America." A few sentences later, Dennis is called a "true Renaissance man."  

Throughout Still the Best Hope, the word "predicated" is used as a pretentious substitute for the simpler words "based" or "required" or "depends".  A clumsy sentence on page 35 reads, "It is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them."

The most disappointing part of the book to me was not its occasional pomposity, but its repetition of his radio shows. 

May 2, 2012, Dennis Prager said: "Some of you might think that because you hear me regularly, the book is not new or different. I promise you that it is the culmination of a life's thought that can not be condensed into a show. The book is not a repetition or a summation of my shows."

It's not a 100% repetition, but it's about an 80% repetition of his radio shows.

On May 14, 2012, Dennis appeared on Hugh Hewitt's radio show for three hours. Dennis said: "It was so overwhelming an undertaking that I thought you know what, maybe my next book should be on men and women, because I do an hour a week, and I have for years, and I’ve written and lectured, and I think I’ve helped a lot of marriages, partially because of my own travails in the marital arena. I’ve learned a great deal, and now I am extremely happily married, but it was… And so I have learned a lot, and I have tried to offer insights there. So I thought maybe I’d write on that. Maybe I’ll write another book on happiness. The first one was a bestseller. And then I thought wait a minute, let’s say, though this is a little dark, but let’s say I died. What would I want my last thing to have been? And I thought well, if I don’t make the case, and I think I can make it particularly well, for the best system ever made to make a good world, I will kick myself on the way to the grave."

"I write with no fat. Do you know that I also write with no adjectives? There are almost no adjectives in the book. The reader fills in adjectives. I don’t. Here are the data. Here is why the left believes what it believes. Here is why it is successful. Here is its moral record. Here is the Islamist moral record. Here is the American moral record. Compare them. Compare the systems. And I believe it’s pretty powerful."

"I always say there are tree people and forest people. And I’m a forest person. I don’t deal with the trees. I deal with the forest. Most people deal with trees. It’s not a negation. If your doctor does not deal with the minutiae of your body, you will die. But I am not a doctor. I am here for the large picture. The large picture is that America has a unique value system."

A December 5, 2021 search of Google Scholar reveals that this Dennis Prager book has 20 citations, none significant.

F. Roger Devlin reviewed Byron M. Roth's 2010 book, The Perils of Diversity:
Such debate on immigration as occurs in the mainstream press, the author notes, is usually framed as a contest between assimilation and multiculturalism. One side argues that today’s ethnic problems will be solved through “the magic of assimilation,” in which persons of all races and religions are gradually transformed into Americans (or Europeans) just by living and working among us. The other side argues that we have no right to impose our way of life on newcomers, and should instead let them live among us while retaining their own beliefs and practices. Multiculturalists see no reason why this cannot be accomplished peacefully, and ascribe current frictions to the failure of the host population to do enough to accommodate immigrants.

Prof. Roth points out, however, that both assimilationists and multiculturalists make false assumptions about human nature. Assimilationists believe all races are capable of taking on the behavior patterns necessary to maintain Western civilization; multiculturalists believe radically different groups can live together harmoniously. Both positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific and historical evidence. The false terms framing public debate therefore require the suppression of information, and the academy, the legal profession, and philanthropic foundations are among the most energetic censors. Mainstream science has now, for the most part, accepted the evidence that genes influence individual behavior, but it continues to resist genetic explanations for group differences. Terrible pressure is brought to bear on scientists who explore group differences.

...continuing Third-World immigration can be expected to lower the average American IQ from 98 to 95 by mid-century. This small drop will have drastic effects at the upper end of the bell curve. The percentage of Americans with an IQ of at least 120 — necessary for doctors, research scientists and other demanding jobs — will fall from 7.1 to 4.8...These changes will profoundly affect America’s place in the world. Over the next 40 years, the number of well-trained Chinese with IQs over 120 will soar. By mid-century, they will outnumber their American counterparts by about eight to one. “The upshot,” writes Prof. Roth, “is that the gap in the potential for innovation and economic growth between China and the US will grow enormously and begin to have its effects in the very near future.”

Prof. Roth also predicts an American fiscal disaster that will produce high inflation and an inability to fund social programs. This will lead to a political showdown between the productive, mostly white part of the population threatened by inflation, and the less productive, mostly non-white part threatened by the loss of handouts. The sooner such a showdown takes place the better, since the balance of forces is leaning ever more strongly in favor of the less productive. Internationally, the United States will no longer be able to maintain dominance. Again, the sooner our rulers accept this loss of status and curb their ambitions, the less jarring our decline will be.

After the Boston marathon bombing, Dennis wrote April 23, 2013:
Just as in previous acts of Islamist terror, the left in general, and university professors in particular, continue to argue that it is wrong -- actually bigoted -- to associate these terrorists' religious beliefs with their terrorism...

Professor Brian Levin -- director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino (formerly associate director of the Southern Poverty Law Center) -- to Bill Maher: "Look, it's not like people who are Muslim who do wacky things have a monopoly on it. We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian who say they're out for God and end up doing not so nice things."

Bill Maher's response: "That's liberal bullshit."

And that's what our children are routinely taught.

Same-Sex Marriage

When President Obama came out for same-sex marriage, Dennis Prager responded May 10, 2012 in National Review:

1. Nothing as radical as redefining marriage to include members of the same sex has ever been publicly supported by a president of the United States.

2. This reaffirms my conviction that Mr. Obama is by far the most left-wing person to ever hold the office of the American presidency... 

4. The “inevitability” of same-sex marriage is activist propaganda — but only if Americans learn how to make the case for retaining the man-woman definition. 

The Ten Commandments: Still The Best Moral Code (2015)

The back cover of Dennis Prager's book reads: "The Ten Commandments video series garnered over 6 million views on YouTube in its first three months, making it the most widely viewed biblical commentary in the world." Looking at the YouTube analytics of those videos, it is clear that most of the views were bought, violating YouTube's Terms of Service. The back cover also includes this quote from Jordan R.: "The work you do is an oasis in the midst of a desert of deceptions and lies over the internet."

A Day In The Life

Oct. 31, 2014, Dennis Prager said: "I get up perilously close the show time [which is 9 am, so Dennis Prager probably gets up about 8 am]. I do all my work at night, all my preparation for the show. After the show [which ends at noon], I will record ads. I used to play Hearts. I play Hearts at home now... I'll be home within an hour and a half of the show and then I will probably smoke a cigar and check mail, say hi to my wonderful wife, and then have lunch. That's my big meal about 3 or 4 o'clock. Then it's almost always with my wife. And then I will return for the evenings, writing and checking out. There's so much of interest on the internet. I am interested in so many subjects. I'll download some classical CDs. I have thousands. It is more fun of a day than it sounds."

Donald Trump

On May 3, 2011, Dennis Prager wrote in his weekly column:
The following comments were made in a public speech last week by a man considering running for president of the United States.

On gas prices: “We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, ‘You’re not going to raise that f***ing price.’”

On what he would say as president to China: “Listen, you mother f***ers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”

On Iraq: “We build a school, we build a road, they blow up the school, we build another school, we build another road, they blow them up, we build again. In the meantime we can’t get a f***ing school in Brooklyn.”

The man is Donald Trump. And the words render him unfit to be a presidential candidate, let alone president. They also evidence a need for some Republican-party soul-searching as to how a group of Republican women could laugh and cheer at such language coming from a would-be presidential candidate.

As Trump rose to become the Republican frontrunner during 2015, Dennis could not understand it. Nobody he knew supported Trump.

Dennis: "We have terrific people [running for the Republican nomination] and all this attention is being given to a man who has no Republican background, no conservative principles, and somehow has sucked out all the wind out of the Republican process. It's mind-boggling and very depressing. A very powerful piece on this by John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, one of the leading Conservative magazines."

Trump: The Case for Despairing About America by John Podhoretz

No sense pretending: Donald Trump is the only news of the 2016 race, and this fact says something very troubling about the Republican party, the conservative electorate, the mass media culture, and the United States in general. Sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not. Really it’s not.

Ted Cruz goes to war with the GOP Senate leadership; Hillary Clinton proposes the highest tax rates in 70 years; Marco Rubio goes after John Kerry on the Iran deal in a Senate hearing. Well, big deal. Phffft. They’ve all been crowded out by the Trump noise. There will be the first Republican debate in ten days. It’s the most important political event of the year thus far. And it will be all about Trump. He will see to that; the reporters will see to that, and the minor candidates looking to move up will see to it by trying to pick fights with him and best him.

It’s not enough to say that there are matters of deathly serious to be discussed, from Iran to ISIS to the possible collapse of the Euro and the Chinese economy to the harvesting of fetal organs, because there are always serious matters to be discussed as elections approach. The issue with Trump is that his approach can only be called “the politics of unseriousness.” He engages with no issue, merely offers a hostile and pithy soundbite bromide about it. He yammers. He describes how wonderful things will be when he acts against something or other without explaining how he will act, what he will do, or how it will work.

The Trump view, boiled down: They’re all idiots and I’m very rich and I know how to do things and if you say Word One against me I will say something incredibly nasty about you and who cares about how the Senate works or the House works or international alliances work or how treaties work or how anything works. That stuff is for sissies and losers and disasters. I know how to do it I me me me I me me I I me. And me. And I...

Trump is something different. He is not a politician whose success has turned him into a megalomaniac, but a megalomaniac who has decided to play politician for a while the way he played being a reality television star for a while. He’s free to do this, of course.

The problem is not with him. The problem has to do with his reception. He is garnering support that may actually be real, and may actually change the course of the 2016 election — and, therefore, American history — through nothing more than blowhardism.

Efforts to figure out how to coopt him and his issues on the part of other Republicans are doomed to failure because it’s not the message that people are attracted to; it’s the messenger. Or, if it is the message, it is a message that cannot be coopted because it is little more than a vile expression of open hatred toward Mexicans in a country where people of Mexican descent make up 11 percent of the electorate. For those who want Trump because of it, anything less than his defamation will strike them as the castrated bleating of what they have started to call a “cuckservative.”

Dennis: "Yeah. That's all correct."

On another show in July of 2015, Dennis says: "Let's talk about Donald Trump here. I think I understand what is happening here. I have listened to and read his comments on John McCain. Some of the people I most respect in the world support Donald Trump's alarm-sounding about illegal immigration."

"Does [Trump] know anything about John McCain's story? If John McCain is not a hero, the word should be removed from the English language. He could have left. He was tortured. He revealed nothing and wouldn't allow himself to be released until all his fellow prisoners were and then Donald Trump has the moronic audacity to say that this man is not a hero because he was captured. Is he out of his mind? It's disgusting what he said."

"He is unworthy of being president. If you are not angry by what he said about John McCain, I'm disgusted."

"If you defend Donald Trump, it's Republican-first over morality, over decency. Some things have to elicit anger or it's over. Oh, it doesn't matter that he have this disgusting dismissal of a man who was tortured for years and this buffoon has the audacity not to apologize for it. And people laugh? McCain is entirely right that he owes an apology to the family of every POW. Is this the bushido ethic? Is that the Donald Trump ethic?"

On August 6, 2015, Dennis Prager tweeted: "Donald Trump's unwillingness to pledge not to run as an independent should immediately disqualify him in every Republican's eyes."

In August, after the first Republican debate, Dennis said: "I wonder if Trump has ever been booed by a room full of people before?"

"It's clear that support for Trump is emotional. Virtually every call has taken issue with me on Donald Trump."

"The left is enamored of Donald Trump because the more Donald Trump is in the headlines, the more people who might vote Republican are turned off. The New York Times story is a lie. Donald Trump did not steal the show, but the New York Times wants to promote him."

"Supporting Trump feels good. It doesn't do good. The New York Times is on your side if you support Trump."

"If you want to be intellectually honest, Cruz is your man if you are a Trump supporter."

"I love Rick Perry. He'd be a great president. Of that crew, I thought Carly Fiorina and Bobby Jindahl did best. Santorum did fine."

"Ronald Reagan didn't speak the way Donald Trump does."

"What is [Trump] saying that Ted Cruz is not saying? Where are his novel insights? I don't know that he is a conservative. He has taken a position on almost every issue that is the opposite of what he now has."

"There isn't Donald Trump thinking. There is Donald Trump emoting."

Caller: "Who would you rather have for president? A loony left-winger or Donald Trump?"

Dennis: "Donald Trump."

Caller: "If he gets the nod, will you contact him and offer him your help?"

Dennis: "Yes."

"Democrats are so damaging to this country that even Donald Trump would be better."

Dec. 15, 2015, Dennis tweeted: "Thus far, if I were a Democrat, I would most fear Marco Rubio."

In January of 2016, Dennis said, "To support Donald Trump, you have to say that how a man has lived his entire life is irrelevant."

Dennis Prager wrote Jan. 26, 2015:

National Review's special issue, "Against Trump" was courageous and important.

There is no way to do good in this world without risking making enemies. That National Review was prepared to do that -- among its own readers, no less -- in this day of great financial challenges to newspapers, magazines, and news and opinion websites, was an act of courage.

In opposing Donald Trump for president -- which, it happens, I did in a column I wrote four years ago -- I face the same issue among some in my radio audience. I receive emails from listeners who say they can longer to listen my show because of my opposition to Trump (though I do regularly distinguish between Trump and his supporters).

Interestingly, the two issues -- one being the listeners and readers who will no longer listen to or read anti-Trump Republicans whom they have admired for decades and the other being an important reason Trump is unfit to be president -- are the same.

It is something vitally significant in life -- the concept of the moral bank account.

Every human being has one. The moral bank account is identical to a monetary bank account with the obvious exception that one measures moral activity while the other measures financial activity. We make deposits and withdrawals in each account...

In fact, conservatives who support Trump should do something else -- ask themselves why nearly every conservative they have admired for so long is opposed to Trump.

Finally, the moral bank account concept should also apply to the candidate himself. In terms of conservative values, the man either has no moral bank account or it is in the red. He has made very few conservative deposits, but has made a fair number of significant withdrawals (support for nationalized health care, support for the Clintons, support for partial birth abortion, opposition to free trade, personal defamation and mockery of political opponents, among others). For a Republican candidate, that is saying something.

Nor do I have confidence that he would nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court -- perhaps the most important thing the next president will do. Nevertheless, I will vote for Trump if he is nominated -- because I do not believe he will do nearly as much damage as another Democratic president. But he must not be nominated. Moral bank accounts matter.

By contrast, another Conservative pundit, Tucker Carlson, understood the Trump movement more clearly than did Dennis. On January 28, 2016, Tucker wrote for Politico:

Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal. It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.

On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.

Apart from his line about Mexican rapists early in the campaign, Trump hasn’t said anything especially shocking about immigration. Control the border, deport lawbreakers, try not to admit violent criminals — these are the ravings of a Nazi? This is the “ghost of George Wallace” that a Politico piece described last August? A lot of Republican leaders think so. No wonder their voters are rebelling.

Dennis Prager wrote Mar. 1, 2016:

I have been a radio talk show host for 33 years, nationally syndicated for 18. I have never experienced anything similar to what I am experiencing now. Until recently, the only hate mail I ever received was from a small number people on the left. The major reason for this, I am convinced, is that I don't yell at callers and I treat callers who disagree with respect.

Reading my emails these days is a brand new experience. I receive hate mail, sometimes laced with obscenities, from Republicans. Most come from Donald Trump supporters, even though whenever I explain my opposition to Trump, I also explain that I understand why so many people support him, and even though I ask anti-Trump listeners to respect these Trump supporters.

To show how widespread the hatred among Republicans is, here are excerpts from an email sent by a Ted Cruz supporter in Michigan. He was livid at my having suggested that Cruz consider announcing that he will now back Marco Rubio to give Republicans a unified opposition -- the only chance to stop Trump. I might add that I have said many times that if I could simply appoint a Republican president, it would be Cruz, since he is a true conservative and he doesn't care whether people love him. However, I believe that Rubio -- at least until this weekend and his imitation of Trump's high school level of personal insults -- has been the Republican with the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton.

The listener's email read in part:

"Dennis, I can't tell you how pissed off I am at you for suggesting Cruz drop out in favor of the back stabbing, lying Rubio. You have compromised your own principles. ... Despicable! (people) like you ... lie about 'if I could appoint a president, it would be Cruz.' Screw you and all your Salem colleague's (sic) for pushing the false narrative 'Rubio is more electable.'... I am no longer a faithful listener and have switched back to Rush after many years. You have lied by obfuscation, and tried to manipulate your listeners, and for that, I despise you and the other Salem turncoats. You all can go f---yourselves!"

As noted, I have quite a few emails from Trump supporters who after years, even decades, of listening to my show, have decided that I am no longer worthy of being listened to. If one doesn't support Trump, they believe, one is a traitor to the cause.

It is important to point out that I have said over and over that I would vote for Trump if he were the nominee because it is difficult to conceive of even Trump being worse than four more years of a left-wing president and decades of a left-wing Supreme Court. But to more than a few Trump supporters, that is not enough: If you don't support Trump, you are the enemy.

In a nutshell, the hatred and contempt some of the Republican candidates have shown one another is reflected among rank and file Republicans. I understand why -- most Republicans view this election as the last chance to save America from becoming the opposite of what it was founded to be. The left has been eating away at America's foundational values for nearly a century, and it has been largely successful. Two examples: Seventy percent of college students do not believe in freedom of speech if the speech might hurt someone's feelings, and many young Americans support a democratic socialist for president.

Meanwhile, many Republicans believe that only their candidate can turn things around. Therefore, Republicans who oppose their man are regarded as no different from Democrats -- indeed, perhaps worse.

So this is where we stand today:

Many anti-Rubio Republicans regard Rubio as a traitor on the immigration issue and therefore have contempt for his supporters. Many anti-Cruz Republicans regard Cruz as an extremist conservative who is, moreover, a misanthrope, and therefore have contempt for his supporters. And many anti-Trump Republicans -- perhaps most -- regard Trump as a dangerous fraud, and therefore view his supporters with contempt.

Needless to say, with these attitudes, there is little chance any Republican can win.

After the first debate between Trump and Clinton, Dennis said Oct. 1, 2016 that "Trump came across as more real... He's almost too real."

On November 8, 2016, Dennis Prager wrote:

I wish to address those conservatives and Republicans who have declared themselves Never-Trumpers.

I was one of you in vigorously opposing Trump's nomination -- on my national radio show and in my syndicated column. And I paid a price, as you have, in losing longtime supporters -- in my case any number of listeners who supported Trump from the outset and found my strong opposition to him disappointing and worse.

Unlike you, however, I did say from the beginning that if he were to be the nominee, I would vote for him.

On this Election Day, I am more convinced than ever that this was the right position. I even have to believe that in the wee hours of the night -- when worrying about the current and future state of our beloved country keeps you awake -- many of you have at least wondered whether you have taken the right position.

Most of you are simply too intelligent, too idealistic and too self-questioning not to have at least on occasion had second thoughts. If you understand -- and I cannot believe that most of you don't -- how destructive another four years of any Democrat in the White House, let alone the truly corrupt Hillary Clinton, would be, it is inconceivable that you have never questioned your Never-Trump position. Never-Trump, after all, is not the same as Never-Question.

To prove my point, one of my favorite Never-Trumpers, Jonah Goldberg, wrote in May: "If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I'd probably vote for none other than Donald Trump."

In that moment of exquisite honesty, Jonah acknowledged one of the most important moral arguments to be made for voting for Trump -- the Lesser of Two Evils argument.

To which conservatives who won't vote for Trump often respond: "The lesser of two evils is still evil."

Now, forgive me, but that it is a complete non sequitur, morally and intellectually unworthy of any conservative, religious or secular, who makes it. The only relevant moral lesson here is not that the lesser of two evil is still evil; it is that choosing the lesser of two evils, by definition, increases good. Would you amputate your leg if it might save your life? Or would you say that because losing your life and losing your leg are both evils, you won't amputate your leg because the lesser of two evils is still evil?

Then there is the Never-Trump argument that Donald Trump isn't a conservative. I agree that he hasn't been his whole life, because he probably never gave the subject of the differences between left and right five of minutes of serious thought (nor, if we are to be honest, did Republican presidential nominee John McCain, whom I also worked hard to elect). But Trump and Mike Pence and his top political advisors are well to the right of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote last week, in his plea to Never-Trumpers:

"On the Supreme Court, Obamacare, the debt, rebuilding the military, the Second Amendment, school choice, abortion, reforming the tax code, re-examining regulation, energy exploration and production, illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, and a host of other issues, the Republican ticket is the antithesis of Clinton/Kaine -- and is recognized as such by nearly all progressives."

Why isn't all that enough to vote for Trump?

Jan. 26, 2018, Breitbart reported:
Dennis Prager: ‘My Opposition to Donald Trump Was Wrong,’ He Is a ‘Great President’

“My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong,” said Dennis Prager, describing Donald Trump as a “great president” whose political successes are connected to a disregard for the left-wing and partisan Democrat news media narratives.

Prager’s comments came during Thursday’s [/1/25/18] episode of his eponymous radio show. While Prager has said that Trump was his last choice during the Republican primaries, he supported him vigorously in the general election against Hillary Clinton.

“The only way to govern [while advancing] the principles of conservatism,” said Prager, was to disregard left-wing and partisan Democrat agitation pushed across the news media landscape. Prager said:

"I was wrong. My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong, in retrospect. I was wrong. I had friends who supported him, and I didn’t understand them. I said, “Are you not aware of what he said about John McCain? Isn’t that enough to disqualify the guy?” They perceived in him what I did not perceive in him, that these over-the-top statements – as objectionable as the statements themselves may be, and none of them defended the statements – nevertheless, what they perceived was accurate: a man who doesn’t give a damn about what the press says about him. That is the only way to govern. It is the only way to advance the principles of conservatism in the United States is to not give a damn."

“[Donald Trump] is so much better a president than Mitt Romney would’ve made,” said Prager, describing Romney as “tepid” and concerned with appealing to news media outlets such as The New York Times.

A president’s actions are a more important metric of presidential success than a president’s demeanor, said Prager:

"Would I like Donald Trump to have Mitt Romney’s temperament, or for that matter Barack Obama’s temperament? Yeah. So what? I would like a whole host of things. People are packages. What a president does is more important to me than a president’s demeanor. He is so much better a president than Mitt Romney would’ve made. Mitt Romney would’ve awakened every day to read The New York Times editorial page to see how he’s covered. Mitt Romney gave us Romneycare in Massachusetts. I campaigned for Mitt Romney, he would’ve been a better president [than Barack Obama]. Any Republican is better than any Democrat, that’s just the way it is. Having said that, Romney would’ve been a tepid president. Nothing comparably conservative compared to Donald Trump."

Concerns with a president’s demeanor should be secondary to broader analyses of a president’s impact, said Prager.

“He has turned out to be a great president with big communication flaws, in the way he tweets and some of the things he says and his temperament,” said Prager. “My temperament is the opposite. I love dignity. I love understatement. Okay, so be it. So what? I’m not sure I’d be as good a president as he. How do you like that? That’s how good he’s been.”

In April of 2017, Prager invited ostensibly conservative NeverTrump news media figures to celebrate Trump’s presidency. “Do conservatives — or non-leftists, for that matter — appreciate just how terrific Donald Trump has been as president?” he asked. “And how lucky we are that he won the presidency?”

“What I do know is that they ought to be deeply appreciative of him, and deeply grateful for luck or providence, and certainly for Trump himself, that he was elected president,” continued Prager. “First, it is unlikely that any other Republican would have defeated Hillary Clinton. Second, he has not only surpassed many of our expectations but also thus far governed in a manner more consistent with conservative principles than any president since Ronald Reagan, and arguably Calvin Coolidge.”

Why Does Japan Have Such Low Rates Of Crime?

Paul Nachman writes for VDARE Mar. 16, 2017:

Conservative columnist and talk-radio host Dennis Prager has attracted attention here at VDARE.com a number of times. Most recently, I pointed out that Prager—who is Jewish and takes his religion seriously—has said (with dismay), “Of course there’s a war on Christmas!

However, regarding VDARE.com’s central subject of immigration, I’m unaware that Prager has ever shown much interest or concern. In fact, the late, greatly-lamented Terry Anderson, whose Sunday-evening talk-radio program in Los Angeles was laser-focused on illegal immigration, once told me that Prager had declined to meet with him, even though they shared the same “home” station, KRLA-AM.

But Prager looks to be having an awakening, which is much to be welcomed, as he’s a serious person with a substantial following. In his February 28 column, A Nation of Immigrants — Only If They Assimilate, Prager began:

I am writing this column in Japan, a country whose crime rate is the lowest among countries with large populations. I asked my Japanese translator, a middle-aged woman, what she thought.

“Why is there is so little crime in Japan?” I asked.

Without taking a moment to reflect, she responded, “Because we don’t allow immigration.”

Anyone who visits Japan is struck by the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. If you meet a Caucasian, a black or a Hispanic in Japan, you can be all but certain that the person is visiting or studying there, not a citizen.

Likewise in the United States, there is direct correlation between ethnic homogeneity and low levels of violence. According to 2016-2017 data, the four states with the lowest percentages of violence are:

  1. Vermont — where 95 percent of the population is one race (white).
  2. Maine — where 95 percent of the population is one race (white).
  3. Wyoming — where roughly 93 percent of the population is one race (white).
  4. New Hampshire — where roughly 94 percent of the population is one race (white).

Sweden, which for much of its modern history has had among the world’s lowest rates of violent crime, was almost always as homogenous as Japan. Now that it has admitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, it is no longer a homogenous country, and its levels of violence have increased dramatically.

All this leads to a particular rule, which is, in order to maintain a low crime rate and social stability, a country has only two choices: Do not allow immigrants into the country, or allow immigrants into the country, but be certain to assimilate them into the native population as quickly as possible....

If you want to understand the immigration crisis, just know that because the left has undone the second choice, it has made the first choice — Japan’s choice — look tenable to many for the first time in American history.

Legacy

One Sabbath morning in 1996 at Stephen S. Wise temple (Prager’s religious home since 1991), I told Dennis Prager that I wished his ideas were more influential in Jewish life. He replied that it might take a thousand years for his ideas to take hold in Judaism.
Dennis often said on the radio that he wants his shows to be of lasting importance, and to be as interesting for a listener ten years from now as for a listener today.
When I read Dennis Prager or listen to him, I get the sense that he is speaking as much to history as to the present. He believes, as do I, that his teachings will be widely studied for hundreds of years.
Within a couple of years of encountering Dennis Prager in August of 1988, I started telling people that I believe Dennis to be the the most important intellectual of the 20th Century and the most important Jewish thinker since Maimonides.

“I feel quite satisfied [in what I've accomplished],” said Dennis May 14, 2010. “I feel I could do more good if I touched more people. I have that every single day. If I’ve touched X number of lives, why could I not do 5X if I had a vehicle to do so… I’ve been lucky and I’ve worked my tail off.”

May 21, 2010, Dennis said: “The Obama administration is destroying American credibility abroad in the attempt to be liked… If America is liked, it will not be right. That’s your choice…

"All of this compels me to fight harder and not despair... I will have to answer to God one day...for why I didn't fight as hard as possible for goodness during the years that I was given on earth. And if I say, 'Well, the news was bad, God, so I decided to spend more time watching TV or talking to friends,' I will be judged accordingly. 

"Even if there is no God to whom I will have to account for my life, I will have to account to me for my life, and I am not prepared to sit back and to say the left ruined America...

"...The world is getting worse. Every single aspect of the world that I can measure at this time is getting worse and has been getting worse since Barack Obama became president. I want him to live long enough to be rated among the worst presidents in America history. The country and the world are worse as a result."

In a 2005 lecture on Deuteronomy 30, Dennis said: "I have Christian friends who find it incredible that I feel that God is satisfied with me. They're stunned. They walk around with this deep sense of unworthiness. I haven't felt unworthy for ten seconds."

Saying Goodbye

On the happiness hour of his radio show March 26, 2010, Dennis Prager said that when he had to die, he wanted to be at home with friends and family.
“We should all have that opportunity,” said Dennis. “Hospitals. I get depressed when I see the word. I know where I want to go when I go. I was once in a hospital overnight and I snuck out at 6 a.m. I didn’t check out. I just had to get out of there. And I wouldn’t put on the gown. Why? I was just being observed. Why would I wear one of these buttocks-showing gowns? As soon as you put the gown on, you get depressed. I did a whole show about hospital gowns, about how they lower people’s dignity and make people feel sicker. Putting one on says, hello, I’m sick. Wearing normal clothing says, I’m well but I’ve got a problem.”
May 18, 2010, Dennis said: “I bank my psychological/intellectual stability on the existence of an afterlife… I have felt this since I was in high school. Given the amount of unjust suffering in this world, I can only live with this… in the belief that there is ultimate justice after our death. It is one of the only propositions of my life in which I have never wavered, even for a second.”
Said Dennis in a 1996 lecture on Exodus 12: “I’d much rather die at 55 [yo] and have a life in the next world than die at 70 and with no life in the next world.”
Said Dennis in a 1998 lecture on Exodus 22 about the movie Alive: “I did the same flight. They ate their friends to survive. I was stunned that there were commentators who spoke about the moral problem of cannibalism. Baloney! There was no moral problem at all. I hereby announce that should you be in a crash with me and I am the only thing left to eat, you have perfect permission to have me. I am very big. You will have a lot to eat. You should have no compunctions.
“Should I be murdered, I want you executed. I want you to know that I don’t blithely give my body away.”
In a 1998 lecture on Exodus 24, Dennis said: “My primitive concept [of the afterlife] is pretty much disgusting — ever ongoing carnal joy interspersed with great symphony orchestras at your disposal and an endless supply of my favorite fountain pens.”

Dec. 11, 2012, Dennis said: "Everything I stand for is changing people's minds."

Apr. 8, 2014, Dennis said: "Ninety percent of what weighs on me is macro. I'm pre-occupied with my society's problems."

Tom called Dennis Feb. 1, 2013: "Recently I found out that I have an expiration date [cancer] and I got a little depressed and I decided I was really tired of the pain. I was a POW in Vietnam. I am familiar with a little bit of pain. I decided it was time to eliminate the problem. A shotgun was involved. I found myself in Death Valley looking down the barrel when a line you said from Religion on the Line days that I had some worth and it so impressed me and hit me so hard sir, it stuck in my chest like a knife. I came home and gave the shotgun to a friend and went about my life and I was able to watch my grandchildren grow up. I want to thank you. What you say means a lot. I know how carefully you phrase your words. What you said many years ago means something today."

Dennis: "I am aware every day that words that I utter can affect a life in all directions. I'm careful to be both direct and yet only in a positive way because direct is a gamble."

In a public dialogue with Adam Carolla Feb. 25, 2012, Dennis said: "Very very few people can play the violin. Everybody can speak. Yet, there are far more great violinists than great speakers."
Adam: "I think you just made that point with that super boring violin analogy."
"I rode a unicycle on a semi-professional level and I'm not going to sit here and be ridiculed by a man who fell over on a tric."
Dennis: "Our job is to have the listener think this is the easiest job in the world, but it's very hard."
Adam: "It's like sex."
Dennis: "No, it is not."
Adam: "If you're doing it right, it seems very natural."
Dennis: "What does it mean to do it wrong?"
Adam: "There's chafing. Often times there's extra tipping at the end."
"How much of your off-time is consumed with scratching out notes on things?"
Dennis: "Yes. It's frightening."

Mar. 10, 2012, Dennis says: "You think that its inherently so exciting to have a national radio show that of course, there's no challenge to being happy under those circumstances, but you must know that is not true. Among my colleagues is the same exact representation of happy and miserable as among any other job. As among undertakers."

Coronavirus

Dennis Prager was consistently awful with regard to the coronavirus. 

In the Spring of 2020, Dennis had Covid minimalist Michael Fumento on his show five times saying that current concern about Covid was hysterical. Dennis agreed. Pragertopia.com noted for February 25: "Dennis talks to Michael Fumento, investigative reporter and science writer. What is going on with the coronavirus?… The Left fears everything…" March 2: "Dennis talks to Michael Fumento, investigative reporter and science writer. The topic is the coronavirus. Fumento sees no need to change his original prognosis: this is a media-generated panic…" March 10: "Dennis has a hard time understanding why we are panicking about the coronavirus. Why is it so different than the regular flu? Dennis talks to Michael Fumento, investigative journalist and science writer. The virus is now past peak in both China and S Korea."

January 23, 2020, Fumento published an op/ed in the New York Post titled "Don’t buy the media hype over the new China virus". March 8, he published:

Coronavirus going to hit its peak and start falling sooner than you think

A CNN reporter broadcasts from Wuhan, China, on the recent viral outbreak. There is nobody near who could possibly infect him ­— unless the cameraman has Guinness Book of Records coughs and sneezes. So why does he insist on wearing a blue surgical mask while talking?

It’s called “drama,” which is badly needed, because there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan ­virus. It should actually be called the DvV, or Déjà vu Virus, because we have been through these hysterias before. Over and over. Heterosexual AIDS, Ebola repeatedly, the H1N1 swine flu that was actually vastly milder than the regular flu and, especially, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003.

Once you start debunking mass hysteria over outbreaks, it gets easy, because the same patterns repeat themselves.

The best remedy for all epidemic hysteria is perspective. How is this new outbreak different and thus potentially more dangerous from other diseases we have dealt with in the past or are dealing with now?

Wuhan is repeatedly labeled “deadly” — but so is every other ­virus most people know about. But especially deadly? Nearly 600 cases have been confirmed with at least 17 reported deaths.

Pragertopia show notes for 2020 read: February 27: "The world is panicked over the coronavirus which has killed very few people outside of China. Why aren’t we panicked every year by the common flu?" March 2: "The world is consumed by the coronavirus fears. Are people who fear the world will end in 12 years from carbon emissions more likely to fear the virus than those who are skeptical about man-made global warming?" March 5: "Coronavirus panic has reached a fever pitch, even though you are remarkably more likely to die from the flu." March 6: " What if we reacted this way to the regular flu which kills tens of thousands in the US every year?" March 11: "Israel, Italy and soon other countries are shutting down because of coronavirus fears. Many universities and colleges are now shutting, too… Dennis had two speeches cancelled this week… 1000 coronavirus cases confirmed in the USA. That compares to 30 to 40 million annual flu cases…"

March 12: "Dennis compares the swine flu to the coronavirus. The swine flu was much worse, but the world didn’t shut down. Why are we shutting down now? ...Dennis returns to the public health panic of the century." March 13: "The country continues to shut down… Is this the right prescription? Or an over-reaction? Why weren’t we paralyzed during the swine flu in 2009? 60 million got it then. 25K people died." March 17: "There are harmful consequences to shutting down the US economy. Are we allowed to discuss this or is it now forbidden? We don’t know how many people have the virus, so there is no accurate way to measure the death rate… 90 or so people have died in the USA from the coronavirus. Right now, there seems to be no indication of imminent disaster." March 18: "Dennis talks to Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Dennis and Victor remain uneasy with the destruction of individual lives and the general economy over the coronavirus scare. Yes, it’s a serious issue, but what is the price we are paying by shutting down the economy?"

March 3, 2020, Dennis discussed the Corona Virus for the first time in his weekly column:

We Go From Hysteria to Hysteria

We now endure multiple hysterias at once.

The latest, of course, is COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus. In addition to China, where the virus originated, major cities in Italy and Japan are in lockdown mode, and Japan has closed all its schools. In the United States, where, as of this writing, six people — most, if not all, of whom were already ill — have died, the states of Washington (where all six deaths occurred) and Florida and the city of San Francisco have declared states of emergency...

Unless the coronavirus beco

mes a worldwide mass killer, it will be fair to say that the hysteria over coronavirus will cause much more suffering than the virus.

In his column March 17, Prager wrote: "If the government can order society to cease functioning, from restaurants and other businesses to schools, due to a possible health disaster, it is highly likely that a Democratic president and Congress will similarly declare emergency and assert authoritarian rule in order to prevent what they consider the even greater “existential threat” to human life posed by global warming."

Pragertopia show notes for 2020 continue: March 19: "The President announces some good news: a drug therapy that helps those who have the virus… We need to keep perspective. There is no indication this is the Spanish flu of 1918... How can we know what the mortality rate is for the coronavirus when we don’t know how many people have it?… Dennis reiterates that we seem to be making good progress toward a coronavirus treatment. That’s much more important now than a vaccine." March 20: "California and New York are now closed for business. Do the numbers of deaths justify this drastic action? Dennis does not believe so. Neither does the Wall Street Journal." March 23: "Our lives are now dominated by the virus. All of life has cost and benefits. Are we calculating the cost of closing down society? Dennis talks to Aaron Ginn, Silicon Valley technologist. He’s done a deep data dive into virus stats… What price are we willing pay to stop the virus? Isn’t that a fair question?… Why have Italy and Iran been hit so hard? Look to their involvement with China…" March 24: "The President speaks more truth in ten minutes than the NYTimes, CNN et al do in a week… Why are those on the Left much more fearful of the virus than those on the Right? Dennis has theories."

March 25: "An Israeli scientist says Trump is right. This virus will not lead to catastrophic death tolls… The same people who predicted a disaster with the swine flu are the same people predicting disaster for the coronavirus. They were wrong then. Are they wrong now?… Stanford scientists agree with the Israeli scientist re: death toll." March 26: "Sweden has not shut down. So far it’s doing fine… The Imperial College epidemiologist who made dire death predictions changes his mind… Dennis talks to Alex Berenson, former NY Times reporter." March 27: "Dennis has steeped himself in coronavirus research and reports… The Left/Right divide is clear on the corona virus as it is in all issues… Why isn’t everyone who has the virus given hydroxychloroquine? The virus crisis and the shutdown of the economy vindicate the themes of The Happiness Hour. Dennis explains." March 30: "The costs to the world economy and to individuals rises every day… The Left hates the President more than they love the American people… We will get over the coronavirus, but we won’t get over the moral sickness of the Left… Two Dem governors ban the use of hydroxychloroquine in their states… How much will the lonely and the depressed suffer from this shutdown? We will never know…" March 31: "Dennis talks to Thierry Baudet, member of the Dutch parliament and founder of the Forum for Democracy (FvD) party… Is it time for a second or third opinion on whether the cure is worse than the disease?… There is a big price to be paid for social isolation. Who’s thinking about that? Millions are suffering severe economic loss. Who is their enemy? Statistical models or the virus? Why is India in lockdown? The Left loves cities, but cities are where the virus is taking its biggest toll… Should everyone wear a mask?"

What does the evidence say about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine? According to Wikipedia: "Hydroxychloroquine has been studied for an ability to prevent and treat coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19), but clinical trials found it ineffective for this purpose and a possible risk of dangerous side effects."

In his March 31, 2020 column, Prager wrote:

If there is one thing on which you’d think left and right could agree, it would be the proper response to the present coronavirus. After all, COVID-19 doesn’t distinguish between left and right: Conservatives and liberals are just as likely to contract and even die from it.

Yet, it’s amazing how consistently left and right differ on even this issue.

Virtually every opinion piece in The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other mainstream, i.e., left-wing, journal share two characteristics: a sense of foreboding (millions will die) and an unshakeable conviction that to prevent mass death, the world’s economy must be shut down.

Meanwhile, virtually every opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal and on just about every conservative website contains less foreboding and asks more questions about whether the cure may be worse than the disease. To cite some examples:

March 11: Ben Shapiro published a piece titled “Our Fears About Coronavirus Are Overblown.”

March 16: The Hoover Institution published a piece by Richard A. Epstein that’s thesis was: “I believe that the current dire models radically overestimate the ultimate death toll.”

March 16: City Journal published conservative thinker Victor Davis Hanson’s piece that’s thesis was: “Our response could prove as harmful as the virus itself.”

March 17: My column titled “Why the Remedy May Be Worse Than the Disease” appeared on many conservative sites

March 19: The lead Wall Street Journal editorial was titled “Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown.”

March 19: A column titled “Will the Costs of a Great Depression Outweigh the Risks of Coronavirus?” appeared on The Federalist’s website.

March 24: The Wall Street Journal published a column by two Stanford professors of medicine titled “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”

Meanwhile, the liberal and left-wing media published hundreds of articles warning us of millions of deaths if we don’t shut down the American economy.

Or take the example of President Donald Trump’s announcement at a press conference on March 19 that hydroxychloroquine had “shown really good promise” in helping to cure COVID-19.

Virtually every left-wing news medium mocked him for making that claim.

March 21: “AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s Breathless Takes on Drugs for Virus.”

...A particularly egregious example of the left-right divide on the coronavirus response appeared in The Washington Post on March 27. One of its columnists, Max Boot, wrote:

“Radio host Dennis Prager bemoaned our unwillingness to sacrifice lives as we did during World War II, saying ‘that attitude leads to appeasement’ and ‘cowardice.’ The United States lost 418,500 people in World War II … but it would be far worse to lose 2.2 million civilians — the worst-case estimate of the U.S. death toll if we let the novel coronavirus spread unimpeded.”

...hysteria is to the left what oxygen is to biological life. Leftists pride themselves on being rational. But the further left one goes, the more feelings displace reason.

A second reason is hatred of Trump. On the left, damaging Trump is more important than truth and more important than the welfare of the American people. If Trump believes hydroxychloroquine offers hope, let’s debunk its usefulness.

A third reason is leftists are afraid — of life and of death. Fear of life is why they build “safe spaces” on campuses for students who cannot handle a visiting speaker with whom they differ. And they are afraid of death. They undoubtedly find Patrick Henry’s famous cry, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” incomprehensible, if not downright foolish.

Here are more Pragertopia show notes for 2020: April 2: "Dennis has lost some listeners because of his questioning stance on the virus. So be it… We are being ruled by scientists and experts who tell us how we are run society. They tell us what to do. And we do it…" April 3: "We have turned our fate over to experts… Dr. Fauci now says we can return to normal when there are no new cases and no deaths. If he really means it, it will months and months before we can come out of quarantine… The Swedes continue to go their own way. There’s more freedom there than the USA. ...should young people have any contact with older people; if we come to distrust models for the virus, should we distrust models for global warming." April 6: "More and more people (and “experts”) are questioning whether we are employing the right strategy, balancing the fight against the virus and saving the economy… The Left is adamant that we shut down everything… Why is there even a left/right divide on the virus?… FDR said all we have to fear is fear itself. If the President said that today, the media would say he was being irresponsible…"

April 7: "We are losing our liberties in this crisis. It may be necessary in the short term. What happens in the long term? What dangerous precedents are being set? The Left hates the President more than they love the American people. The NYTimes has campaigned against the use of hydroxychloroquine even though many doctors have testified that it works. Why is the NYTimes against it? Because President Trump is for it." April 8: "Why is the Left waging war against hydroxychloroquine? Dennis talks to Pastor Rob McCoy. He recently resigned from the Thousand Oaks, CA city council after he refused to cancel his church service." April 10: "The Left doesn’t want the virus to end soon. Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel, the architect of ObamaCare, says that we need to stay locked down for 18 months or until a cure is a found… why are we so quick to give up our freedoms; how many people die of flu every year; why do we trust experts." April 13: "Why does Florida have so many fewer deaths than New York? They started their lockdown 10 days after New York. Doctors and scientists have no more wisdom than third basemen… The virus panic has brought out the inner tyrant of many politicians. The first among the worst is Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer… When do we start rebelling against politicians who want to tell us how to live?"

April 14: "How do we balance the deaths from Covid-19 with the damage done to the economy, the child and spousal abuse, the suicides? Is that a permissible debate?… What gives governors and mayors the right to close down states and cities?… When can we all go back to work? When it’s safe? What is safe? The Democratic governors are having a field day acting out their authoritarian impulses. They will tell us what we can do and when?… Dennis talks to Dr. Simone Gold, emergency department physician and lawyer. She’s dealing with corona cases every day. Many of our liberties have been taken away during this virus crisis. Have we let them go too easily? Have we lost our love of liberty? Dennis has thoughts."

So who is show guest Dr. Simone Gold? And how credible is she? According to Wikipedia: "Simone Melissa Gold (née Tizes) is an American physician, attorney, author, and the founder of America's Frontline Doctors, an American right-wing political organization known for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. She gained notoriety when a video of an America's Frontline Doctors press conference in front of the US Supreme Court Building went viral in July 2020. She is known for speaking out against the COVID-19 vaccine, stating that "[w]e doctors are pro-vaccine, but this is not a vaccine." On January 5, 2021, Gold spoke at a rally in Washington D.C., telling attendees to refuse to be vaccinated for COVID-19 and the next day took part in the 2021 United States Capitol attack. She spoke from the rotunda of the Capitol and was later arrested for her participation in the storming..."

April 14, 2020, Dennis wrote in his weekly column: "Why are governments the world over rendering hundreds of millions of their citizens jobless, impoverishing at least a billion people, endangering the family life of millions (straining marriages, increasing child and spousal abuse, and further postponing marriage among young people), bankrupting vast numbers of business owners and workers living paycheck to paycheck, and increasing suicides?"

Here are more Pragertopia show notes: April 16: "Conservatives are saying it’s time to get back to work; Democrats, Liberals and Leftists are saying we have to make the quarantine even stronger… Glendale, CA tells its citizens that they must wear a mask to walk their dog… When is the push back going to come from free citizens? Weeks ago the idea was that masks did very little good or might be counter-productive; now they’re essential. What changed?… This is time to be proud to be a conservative…" April 17: "Would the entire country shut down if half the country’s death were in Montana or Iowa? This is a New York phenomenon. But that’s where the news media is… The governor of Michigan says that protestors of her draconian shutdown policies are right-wing radicals."

April 20: "The Mayor Los Angeles sets conditions to open up the city that can’t be met. So we open when?… When does “better safe than sorry” not work anymore?… Dennis talks to science writer and investigative reporter, Michael Fumento. The corona virus is following its predicted pattern." April 21: "Cities are using drones to track their citizens’ corona behavior… Oregon has barely been hit by the virus, but it is still locked down… The Left loves power over people…Science is not infallable. When it’s worshipped, it becomes a false god." April 22: "The suffering that will result from this worldwide economic shutdown will be unprecedented. The Left says they care about children. The children will suffer the most. Millions literally will not have food… The governor of Georgia plans to open up his state. He’s being vilified for it."

April 23: "People are dying because they’re not going to the hospital when they need to. They are more afraid of catching the virus than treating their real illness. Dennis reads about a young person in Israel who died making this tragic mistake… The media has spooked the world with their hysterical statements… Dennis talks to Aryeh Leifert, American-born Israel tour guide from Walking Israel Tours. Israel has been in a severe lockdown for a month. Tourism doesn’t exist. We’ve given up our freedoms and endangered the lives of millions to fight this virus. But there have been more deadly viruses than this one and we didn’t shut down for them. Why not?…Dennis talks to Tyson Langhoffer, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom. Church-goers are being prohibited from meeting even in cities where there have been no deaths."

April 27: "Have we made the biggest mistake in human history by shutting down the economy to stop a virus? Dennis talks to Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education and best-selling author. Time to open up the world. Patrick Henry would be seen as a kook now. Give me a liberty or give me death? Are you nuts, Pat? You mean give me security? Right?… More and more Americans who care about freedom are ignoring “stay-at-home” orders — going to beaches, opening their small businesses."

April 28: "Waiting until its safe means waiting until never… We are living through a dress rehearsal for a police state… Many small businesses will close as a result of the corona panic. Tragic… Do you want to live fully or do you want to be safe? Every day you must choose. It is cruel to not allow a loved one to be with a family member or friend who is dying. This is the situation at all nursing homes across the country… Why are religious people less consumed by the coronavirus hysteria than the non-religious? Dennis has his theories." April 29: "Dennis talks to Dr. Rob Steele, a cardiologist in Michigan, one of the Coronavirus hot spots. Based on his clinical experience and research, he thinks it’s time to end the lockdown and get back to work…"

April 30: "A health minister in Finland recognizes that they may have been shut down the country too early. They have had no chance to build up herd immunity. We are giving up our freedoms, one by one… We know who this disease fatally attacks: the old and infirm. This is true across the world… We are not following the science, we are following scientists… Dennis talks to Dr. Daniel Erikson, Emergency Physician in Bakersfield, CA. Co-Owner Accelerated Urgent Care. His video with his business partner and fellow doctor had 5 million views on YouTube before YouTube blocked it for violating “community guidelines.” We are all guinea pigs. Healthy people are being quarantined. We have no way of knowing if this experiment is working."

April 28, 2020, Dennis wrote: "People will argue that a temporary police state has been justified because of the allegedly unique threat to life posed by the new coronavirus. I do not believe the data will bear that out. Regardless, let us at least agree that we are closer to a police state than ever in American history."

May 5, 2020, Prager wrote: "The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History".

April 28, 2020, Dennis said: "The lockdown is the greatest mistake in the history of humanity."

Not all right-wing pundits were as wrong as Dennis Prager on Covid. For example, on April 21, 2020, The Wrap reported:

Counties where viewers of Fox News’ “Hannity” outnumbered “Tucker Carlson Tonight” were associated with a higher number of COVID-19 deaths in the early stages of the pandemic, according to a new study from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics.

Although the two most-watched cable shows air on the same network, the study’s authors analyzed transcripts from each and concluded that “Carlson warned viewers about the threat posed by the coronavirus from early February, while Hannity originally dismissed the risks associated with the virus before gradually adjusting his position starting late February.”

The study’s authors — Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth and David Yanagizawa-Drott — wrote in the working paper that they were interested in studying the effects of the two most-watched cable news shows in the U.S. to monitor for an effect on viewer behavior and health outcomes.

The researchers surveyed 1,045 Fox News viewers aged 55 and older in April on their changes in behavior — such as with more hand washing, canceling travel plans and social distancing — in response to the virus. The study found that Hannity’s viewers changed their behaviors five days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson’s viewers changed their behaviors three days earlier than other Fox News viewers.

If people turned off Dennis Prager on coronavirus and instead spent five minutes a few times a year with a data driven Steve Sailer essay on the topic, they would have been better served. On March 10, 2020, Sailer devoted his first weekly column to Covid: "Mathematically, as long as R0 is greater than 1, the epidemic spreads. When R0 falls below 1, however, it starts to die out."

March 18, 2020, Sailer wrote that "the pandemic is extremely serious, but the situation is not hopeless. We are at a point where it’s not quite too late to take action."

March 25, 2020, Sailer wrote: "the United States of America in particular, the Anglosphere in general, and the world overall have a very deep bench of talented and trained medical and scientific personnel who can step up and take the initiative even when the official channels get bogged down. The U.S. has invested heavily in genetics and other biomedical sciences in recent decades and is poised to reap some benefits in this crisis. Although we have been lectured incessantly (at least until about a week ago) about the lack of women in computer coding and physics, for the last two generations talented women have tended to flock in large numbers instead to the life sciences, which, at the moment, seems like a very good thing."

April 29, 2020, Sailer wrote:

When faced with a new conundrum with no certain answer, the single most valuable political principle is precisely what many people simply can’t abide at this moment: freedom of speech.

During the novel coronavirus crisis, when nobody has proved infallible, we need, more than ever, an open marketplace of ideas in which opposing strategies are fiercely debated.

...censorship is growing, along with elite enthusiasm for making emergency rules permanent. Susan Wojcicki, CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube and the main force in the firing of James Damore, said that YouTube will be stifling:

"Anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy."

Of course, the World Health Organization has thus far not distinguished themselves for their wisdom.

November 11, 2020, Steve Sailer wrote:
Consider...how the public announcement of the blockbuster result from the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine test was delayed until after Election Day.

The best coronavirus strategy that any president could come up with has always been to be president when vaccines start rolling out. Thus Trump long claimed that a vaccine would succeed real soon now, while Democrats downplayed that idea and spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines.

Back on Nov. 1, The New York Times news section gloated:

Welcome to November. For Trump, the October Surprise Never Came.

Trump’s hope that an economic recovery, a Covid vaccine or a Biden scandal could shake up the race faded with the last light of October.

By Shane Goldmacher and Adam Nagourney

President Trump began the fall campaign rooting for, and trying to orchestrate, a last-minute surprise that would vault him ahead of Joseph R. Biden Jr. A coronavirus vaccine….

I’m not easily shockable, but I found it eyebrow-raising to discover that the November Surprise, Monday’s announcement by the Pfizer-BioNTech team that their new vaccine was spectacularly effective (over 90 percent), likely could have been made a week earlier, which would have given Trump a late October Surprise.

... The firms had their labs stop processing cases and just put the samples in cold storage. They stopped the count. They ran out the election clock.

The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.

Perhaps coincidentally (or perhaps not), last Wednesday was the day after the election. As one cynic suggested: They didn’t choose a sample size for when to report, they chose a date.

So, it appears that Monday’s announcement perhaps could have been made before the election. But the corporations weren’t in the mood to follow their own protocol and Trump’s FDA let them get away with stalling on telling voters and investors what had been achieved.

From a political and financial standpoint, the firms likely made the self-interested right decision to delay. Even giant pharmaceutical companies don’t want to wind up on blacklists for vengeance by Democrats. But from a scientific and ethical perspective, it was highly questionable.

December 16, 2020, Sailer wrote:
It’s only natural to be frightened of getting a needle stuck in your arm loaded with a novel vaccine developed at such a pace that few besides the optimistic President Trump believed it could be rolled out this year.

Likewise, it’s common to be either hypochondriacal about a new infectious disease or dismissive of its dangers. A huge number of Americans assume COVID poses an apocalyptic menace, while others try to loudly reassure themselves that they must be virtually invulnerable.

My view, though, is that it’s time to get the damn pandemic over and done with.

It’s important to note that COVID is a crisis of moderate magnitude, neither “Just the flu, bro” nor the end of the world (as I will demonstrate below). The problem is that it’s been very hard to come up with a measured, moderate response proportionate to the dangers of an infection that spreads exponentially and thus tends to be either growing or shrinking.

As Tyler Cowen has pointed out, it’s very hard to fight coronavirus to a draw. It’s probably beyond our skill set. Instead, at any point in time, the place where you live is either winning over it or losing to it.

Fortunately, with the delivery of the first of several vaccines, we are now finally at the point where victory is in sight, assuming Americans don’t botch the opportunity to put this whole awful experience in our past. But a large enough number of us must choose to win.

The two quite similar vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have proved themselves highly effective.

On October 18, 2021, Dennis said on his show: "I'm broadcasting from my home because I'm not going into the station as I have COVID. I was tested positive last week and I have been steadily improving. At no point was I in danger of hospitalization. I have received monoclonal antibodies, that's Regeneron. I have, of course, for years — a year and a half, not years — been taking hydroxychloroquine from the beginning, with zinc. I've taken z-pack, azithromycin, as the Zelenko protocol would have it. I have taken ivermectin. I have done what a person should do if one is not going to get vaccinated.

"It is infinitely preferable to have natural immunity than vaccine immunity and that is what I have hoped for the entire time. Hence, so, I have engaged with strangers, constantly hugging them, taking photos with them knowing that I was making myself very susceptible to getting COVID, which is, indeed, as bizarre as it sounded, what I wanted, in the hope that I would achieve natural immunity and be taken care of by therapeutics. That is exactly what has happened. It should have happened to the great majority of Americans.

"The number of deaths in this country owing to COVID is a scandal which one day will be clear to Americans. The opposition of therapeutics on the part of the CDC is owing to the corruption of the belief in the value of vaccine and only vaccine. Whether it is because of all the money that goes into the CDC from the pharmaceutical companies or a simple unquestioning faith in vaccines, or both, only God knows. So, I have walked the walk on this matter and here I am."

According to the FDA on September 3, 2021: "The FDA has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19 in humans or animals. Ivermectin is approved for human use to treat infections caused by some parasitic worms and head lice and skin conditions like rosacea. Currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19."

According to a November 1, 2021 news report: "Hasidic doctor Vladimir Zelenko [is] an outspoken critic of the COVID-19 vaccine, and gained notoriety for prescribing Ivermectin to his COVID patients."

How effective is azithromycin for Covid? This study released July 16, 2021 found it had no benefit.

On November 9, 2021, Dennis wrote his weekly column on why natural immunity to Covid is better than vaccine immunity. "Nor does the study warn that getting the vaccine may also induce harmful consequences. To its everlasting shame, that is a taboo subject in America’s medical community despite the fact that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists over 700,000 cases of suspected injury and more than 17,000 otherwise unexpected deaths temporally associated with COVID-19 vaccines."

Anyone can make a report that they had a negative reaction to the Covid vaccine. That's hardly a convincing argument about the dangers of vaccines. And we have no evidence that Covid vaccines have killed anyone. Reuters noted April 2, 2021: "Of the 145 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the United States from Dec. 14, 2020 through March 29, 2021, “VAERS received 2,509 reports of death (0.0017%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.” Having reviewed “available clinical information including death certificates, autopsy, and medical records,” the CDC found “no evidence that vaccination contributed to patient deaths”."

With his love for Bible-based morality, Dennis Prager could have pointed out that social distancing is a tactic endorsed by the Torah. Notes Wikipedia:

Although the term “social distancing” was not introduced until the 21st century,[14] social-distancing measures date back to at least the 5th century BC. The Bible contains one of the earliest known references to the practice in the Book of Leviticus 13:46: “And the leper in whom the plague is… he shall dwell alone; [outside] the camp shall his habitation be.”
So where do public health officials get the right to shut us down? Prager might have learned from Michael Lewis's superb 2021 book, The Premonition: A Pandemic Story: "If there is the faintest possibility of a catastrophic disease, you should treat it as being a lot more likely than it seems. If your differential diagnosis leads to a list of ten possibilities, for instance, and the tenth and least likely thing on the list is Ebola, you should treat the patient as if she has Ebola, because the consequences of not doing so can be calamitous."

The prestigious Nature magazine published February 18, 2021: "The average years of life lost per [Covid] death is 16 years."

Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust wrote April 28, 2020 for Scientific American:
Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges — The former are actual numbers; the latter are inflated statistical estimates

When reports about the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 began circulating earlier this year and questions were being raised about how the illness it causes, COVID-19, compared to the flu, it occurred to me that, in four years of emergency medicine residency and over three and a half years as an attending physician, I had almost never seen anyone die of the flu. I could only remember one tragic pediatric case.

Based on the CDC numbers though, I should have seen many, many more. In 2018, over 46,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. Over 36,500 died in traffic accidents. Nearly 40,000 died from gun violence. I see those deaths all the time. Was I alone in noticing this discrepancy?

I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.

Surgeon David Gorski wrote August 31, 2020 about the nonsense that only 6% of Covid deaths are solely from Covid:
On the death certificate form, there is a space for the immediate cause of death and then several lines for underlying causes. In brief, death certificates are filled out by the medical certifier (who can be the physician who had treated the patient before death), who provides his best medical opinion regarding the cause of death. Part I of the death certificate includes the proximal cause of death, or what directly caused the death, and Part II lists conditions that contributed to the death...

For example, if a patient dies of respiratory failure due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which was the result of pneumonia, which was the result of COVID-19, the proximal cause of death was the respiratory failure, but contributing causes were ARDS and COVID-19, with the one farthest up the chain being the underlying cause of death under Part I. If the patient had hypertension or asthma, that would go under Part II.

What is the true Covid death toll? The Economist magazine, using academic estimates that the true Covid death toll is 3.4x the official death toll, as of November 12, 2021, estimates the true worldwide death toll at 17.2 million.

Decoding the Gurus

In September of 2020, two academics (Matthew Browne and Christopher Kavanaugh) started a podcast called "Decoding the Gurus." Some of their analysis applies to Dennis Prager:

* The most concise definition of a guru is “someone who spouts pseudo-profound bullshit”, with bullshit being speech that is persuasive without any regard for the truth. Thus, all these properties relate to people who produce ersatz wisdom: a corrupt epistemics that creates the appearance of useful knowledge, but has none of the substance.

* Galaxy-brainness is an ironic descriptor of someone who presents ideas that appear to be too profound for an average mind to comprehend, but are in truth reasonably trivial if not nonsensical. Gurus often present themselves as founts of wisdom, and it is an all-encompassing kind of knowledge that tends to span multiple disciplines and topics.

* We’ve noticed that gurus tend to act in a manipulative fashion with their followers and potential allies. This often takes the form of excessive flattery, such as intimations that their followers are more perceptive, more morally worthy, and more interested in the pursuit of truth than outsiders. A guru will often put some effort into signalling a close and personal relationship with their followers — essentially encouraging the development of parasocial ideation. Praise and regard for the guru is usually reciprocated, whilst disagreement or criticism is usually dismissed as coming from an unworthy person who does not truly understand the significance of the guru’s ideas.
A guru may often wish to avoid the appearance of being a controlling leader. It is, after all, inconsistent with the flattery of their followers and the oft-spoken idea of cultivating a community of like-minded and clear-sighted individuals. However, they also do not want their privileged position challenged. Thus, they may often wistfully talk of a desire to engage with ‘good faith’ critics who truly understand their ideas, and lament that they have been unable to receive the robust criticism they desire. Of course, this is a sham, as anything other than fawning praise, or at best the most superficial or minor disagreement, will typically be designated as being low-quality or badly-motivated.

* It is necessary that the orthodoxy, the establishment, the mainstream media, and the expert-consensus are always wrong, or at least blinkered and limited, and are generally incapable of grappling with the real issues. In the rare occasions when they are right, they are described by the gurus as being right for reasons other than they think. Kavanagh has coined the term ‘science-hipsterism’ which captures this tendency quite nicely. A guru can seldom agree with the establishment, because it is crucial to their appeal that they are offering unique insight – a fresh hot take that is not available elsewhere, and may be repressed or taboo. The guru’s popularity will obviously benefit, if this iconoclastic view happens to coincide with their prejudices or intuitions of their lay-followers. Thus, gurus are naturally drawn to topics where there is a split between the expert consensus and public opinion (e.g. climate change, GMOs, vaccinations, lockdowns). After all, if a guru is merely agreeing with an expert consensus on a topic such as COVID, then there is less reason to listen to the guru rather than the relevant experts. Thus, the guru is highly motivated to undertake epistemic sabotage; to disparage authoritative and institutional sources of knowledge. There is a tradeoff where the more the guru’s followers distrust standard sources of knowledge, such as that emanating from universities, the greater the perceived value that the guru provides. 

* Feelings of frustration and oppression, being excluded and disregarded, and deprived of one’s manifest rights and recognitions, represent a potent set of negative emotions. Gurus too, will sometimes rely on narratives of grievance pertaining to themselves and their potential followers in order to drive engagement. After all, a worldview in which all is essentially fair and just is not one that will encourage people to search for alternative ways in which to view the world.

* People without at least some degree of over-confidence and attention-seeking will find the role of guru very uncomfortable and eschew it, even if it is thrust upon them. People who are not narcissistic, but with genuine expertise and insight in a given domain, may find the spotlight an unwelcome distraction. People ‘on the spectrum’ of narcissism, however, will find any attention and regard highly satisfying, and this is the motivating factor for engaging in going beyond whatever talents they may have, to engage in the pseudo-profound bullshitting techniques described here. The lack of self-awareness common among narcissists also seems to explain why gurus seem to ‘believe their own bullshit’. Just as a narcissist loves themselves, they are in love with their own ideas, and may be incapable of seeing the degree to which they are bullshit.

* A heightened sense of how the world is not right, and ought to be fixed, and that they are the persons to do it, is a common feature. Unfortunately, the broader public fails to recognise their genius and heed their advice, and thus the world lurches from calamity to calamity. Combining these features, we will often see that a guru positions themselves as something of a Cassandra – seeing the future and warning of possible calamities, that could be avoided if only they were heeded. The followers also gain a positive role for themselves, in supporting, defending, and promoting the guru, they can help make the world a better place.

* ...they are greatly attracted to claiming that they have developed game-changing and paradigm-shifting intellectual products.

* They are most comfortable in the role of armchair opinionator, the wise man (or woman, but usually man) graciously offering their advice to eager seekers of wisdom.

* To gain real insights, real special knowledge that nobody else can see – that’s hard work. For normal people, even a lifetime of study and research only provides scant few original intellectual contributions. That is not nearly enough for a guru, who needs a steady supply of fresh, original content to supply to their followers and justify their status. To be a guru, they must set themselves up, not only as uniquely insightful, but above and apart from orthodoxies, including established political or ideological groups. Thus, they are encouraged to go beyond standard heterodoxy, contrarianism and scepticism, into the realm of conspiratorial ideation. This is because the expert consensus – though naturally not infallible – but definition, tends to supply the most reasonable and evidence-based view, based on current information. The guru is in the position of needing to provide a strongly contrasting perspective, and then to supply the argumentation that backs up their bold claims in a compelling way. This leads them inexorably down the path of bespoke conspiracy mongering, with an alternative view of events that authoritative sources either can’t or won’t tell you about. Conspiracy theories require a ‘suppressive network’ to explain away the lack of evidential support, and why almost nobody else is willing or able to accept their theories.

Notes On Method

If I cited a date for when Dennis said something but provided no further context, that meant the quote came from his radio show.