Dennis Prager Challenges Today’s Youth – From Patriot Academy, Part 2: Are we seeing the repercussions of the death of Christianity and patriotism in America? Do you know why communism should be a dirty word? How do we fight cancel culture? How should we handle big tech? Could we make a difference in our culture by being selective about where we spend our money? Tune in to hear the answers to these questions and more in this important interview!

Air Date: 09/30/20120

Guest: Dennis Prager

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders Live. Thanks for joining us today, where we talk about today’s hot topics on policy, faith, the culture, all kinds of things that are happening out there, but we always look at it from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective.

And normally, I’m doing that with David Barton, he’s America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders, and also Tim Barton, national speaker, and pastor and president of WallBuilders. My name by the way is Rick Green, I’m a former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach.

But today, we’re doing something unique, actually, the rest of this week doing something very unique. Yesterday, we started this with Dennis Prager. Now, at Patriot Academy, we have a lot of great speakers. Patriot Academy is a Youth Leadership Program. We also train military veterans, on how to get involved in local politics, and citizens on how to be Constitution coaches and all kinds of ways for citizens to get engaged.

But part of that process of Patriot Academy is the opportunity to hear from people that are engaged in the culture leading on the front lines. Folks like Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, Allie Stuckey, Dinesh D’souza, of course, David and Tim Barton, all kinds of other folks. Dennis Prager was one of our speakers this summer at Patriot Academy, just a few weeks ago. And yesterday, we brought you the first half of his presentation to the students at Patriot Academy. Today, we’re going to get the conclusion.

We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back from the break, we’re going to dive right back in with Dennis Prager. Hope you enjoy this? Stay with us, folks, you’re listening to WallBuilders?

Patriot Academy

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Our core program is still for young leaders 16 to 25 years old, but we also now have a citizen track for adult, so visit the website today to learn more. Help us fill the void of leadership in America. Join us in training champions to change the world at patriotacademy.com

Dennis:

So now you are seeing the repercussions of the death of Christianity in America. With Portland, and Chicago, and New York and Austin, you are now seeing the repercussions: a generation that needs a substitute to fill in for the death of Christianity and the death of patriotism. It’s no more of God and country. It is now antiracism, just as communism was built on antifascism, but they created their own fascism, they just called it communism.

This fascism is called antiracism. That’s the world you’re inheriting. Sorry to bring you the bad news. You have a choice to get unhappy or to fight. But I choose to fight, you need to as well.

Liberty is Not an Instinct

Rick:

Oh, so much, so much good stuff, and so many good questions in the chat. I’m going to try to combine a few of these for you, Dennis. And by the way, students, I’ll put a link to the Fireside Chat on “Liberty as a value, not an instinct.” So Dennis has actually, I think it’s about 15-20 minutes on there, and it’s Episode 135. So look in your chat for the link to that. Let’s start with Marxism.

You know, it seems like what’s happening in the streets is a shock to some people, but a lot of us like you have been warning against this for years. You had actually Jordan Peterson a couple of years ago did a video for you on PragerU about who’s teaching in schools. You had Kengor do a one on Karl Marx, but I mean, this was two years ago.

So you are already sounding this alarm, most people today though, not a clue about Marxism. Our families do it in our book, ‘The Naked Communist’ by Skousen right now, I’m just shocked at how much of this is happening now was laid out in the game plan 50 years ago, but we have not heeded the warning. How do we change that? How do we get people to once again understand the dangers of communism since we haven’t been teaching in our schools for really 50 years?

Dennis:

Right. Well, it begins with, is it a dirty word? It’s not a dirty word anymore. People vaguely know what Nazis did because of the Holocaust. And I say vaguely, because I believe that the great majority of the members of your generation, I’m speaking obviously to the students here, could not identify the word, ‘Auschwitz’, which is incredible because in my generation, everyone knows what the word is.

People Don’t Know History

But no one in your generations, I don’t mean no one literally, but virtually, no one knows what the Gulag archipelago is. You say Gulag, people don’t know what you’re talking about, let alone the killing fields of Cambodia. Communists killed about over 100 million people, civilians, not war, not soldiers, over 100 million people. But a Stalin said one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. It doesn’t mean anything to people if you say 100 million people.

Mao Stalin, Pol Pot, it’s like a nonissue. Communism is the great evil along with Nazism. I have a video with PragerU, and I have no problem with your being paid to watch PragerU videos. I don’t care why you watch them. I don’t care if there is a gun to your head. I just care that you watch them.

And I only do 10% of the videos. So the 450 videos, I’ve done 45. 400 are done by other people and of course, deliberately. And I have a video, why don’t people hate communism as much as they hate Nazis? You should see it. People don’t know.

So Rick, that’s the number one reason. People don’t even know what communism did. Oh, that’s not so bad. Why is it a dirty word? If you don’t know why communism is a dirty word, it’s a statement about how awful your education is.

Rick:

But do a little bit about the difference in responses of the Jewish people after World War II and I mean, nearly half the population across the planet being wiped out versus other communities and specifically right now the claim by the black community that the white man is keeping them down, Candace Owens speaks to this, other black leader speak to this. You speak to it from a little bit different perspective, obviously, especially when you talk about Viktor Frankl.

Jews and the Holocaust

And I want to share the book club conversation you had with Michael on that as well in the chat, people really need to watch that. But that he influenced your way of thinking. We did that book as another family book club thing. But why did the Jewish community respond so much?

I’ve never heard I’ve never heard a Jewish person blamed the holocaust on their station in life today. But yet I hear other white, I hear blacks or Hispanics, other communities blame circumstances around them, what made it so different?

Dennis:

So as a Jew, let me tell you, one is written two books on Judaism and maybe the synagogue and a Jewish Day School been very involved in Jewish life. And I taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College as I mentioned. So Jews lead thoroughly conservative lives, and they advocate leftism.

As I tell my left-wing relatives, or more actually, they’re more liberal than I don’t have left wing, I have a very few left wing… Most of my relatives think about my sons are liberal and they’re wonderful people. And you know, when I tell them if you love this, I said, why don’t you preach what you practice?

Jews practice conservatism and preach liberalism, and leftism. Jews knew that if they spent their lives going, whoa, we’re victims, woe unto to us, they’ll get nowhere in life. But to any one of those Jews that say, well, why don’t you say this to the black community that if you walk around woe unto to me, you’re going to get nowhere in life? Oh, no, hey, hey, that’s racist. Why is it an anti-Semitic then to say would you go and blame?

Viktor Frankl

The Viktor Frankl thing you’re alluding to is stupendous. Viktor Frankl lost his wife, she was murdered in a Nazi camp. Much of his family was murdered. He went through the Nazi hell of the concentration camp, miraculously survived.

And he was a psychoanalyst, and he was asked after the war, it’s in his great book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. “So do you hate the German race?” That’s how the question was phrased. And he said, no, they’re only two races. The decent and the indecent which is the motto of my life. That’s why I can’t be a racist. If you’re white or black, it means nothing to me. It’s as insignificant to me as your shoe size. I care if you’re decent or indecent.

And that’s what Jews adopted as their motto. By the way, that comes from the Torah, from the first five books of the Bible, as Jews call it the Torah. It’s an amazing law, Deuteronomy. It is an amazing, amazing law, I think it’s an Exodus too.

And that is you shall not hate the Egyptian. This is right after 400 years of slavery, and during which there was a period of throwing the Jewish male babies into the Nile and drowning them. Remember, baby Moses is saved by Pharaoh’s daughter. And there’s the law in the Torah, you cannot hate Egyptians. Wish there was a lot today, you cannot hate whites: be a lot healthier for America, for blacks and for whites.

Fighting Cancel Culture

Rick:

Yeah. Wow. Tell me a little bit about the Cancel culture, and we probably got 10 questions on this and I’m going to combine these two, cancel culture and big tech because you’re right in the convergence of that with what’s happened to PragerU. They’re trying to cancel you.

Just give us a little bit about how you’re fighting that. But also how do we fight Cancel culture without, I guess, I support sometimes obviously voting with your dollars, choosing not to go somewhere that’s funding leftism and those kind of things. But where’s the balance in that? Well, we don’t participate in Cancel culture, but we are smart about where we spend our money.

Dennis:

I’ve been broadcasting 35 years, I started quite young, and it’s been a great career. And I have been saying my whole life on the radio, that I buy Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Ben and Jerry are leftist morons and that’s redundant, but they’re truly more morons. But I buy their ice cream, I said, because I believe in capitalism. If they make good ice cream, I don’t care if the people who make it are fools with even destructive ideas.

However, I have changed my mind. Because this is their weapon, I have no choice but to fight back and I will not buy Nike products. Nike is a troublemaker. Nike supports those who hate America. I love America. Why would I buy a Nike product?

Voting With Your Dollar

So while I am very judicious about whom I won’t buy from, I see no reason, not because they take particularly anti-American, positions. But I’ve asked my listeners, if when you buy on the internet, which we all do, whenever possible, I mean, not for a cheap item, get toilet paper, I don’t care where you get it from, but if you buy an item for anything over, I don’t know, $25, $50, why not buy it from somebody other than Amazon just to enable other places to stay in business?

I mean, spending money is a vote. As you put it, that’s exactly correct. You must look at your expenditures as votes. You want to vote for Nike? Do you want to vote for the NBA, or the major league baseball or the NFL, or I’m sorry to say, with the Dallas Stars taking the knee? You want to vote for hockey? And I’m a hockey fan. I was sure there was one sport that wouldn’t be politicized. But the motto of my life, the left ruins everything it touches and the latest victim is sports.

Can you imagine if somebody wanted to have a message on the back of their uniform in the NFL prolife? Can you imagine that? Or Jesus saves? Guy would be regarded as intolerable and it would say sorry, no messages. But that’s like the old the scientists who said oh, you can’t congregate, but if you demonstrate against racism, that’s healthy. They actually said that, thousands of scientists, because the left is corrupted science now as well.

They Hypocrisy of the Left

Rick:

How is the hypocrisy not called out? I always thought that with the technology, it would be so easy to show people being hypocritical or show the…

Dennis:

Well, it is easy. We are showing it. I mean, the number of spectacular conservative sites that tell more truth in the New York Times is at least in the double digits. There’s no question.

But who’s going to call out the hypocrisy of The Washington Post, The New York Times? Who’s going to call out The New York Times, The Washington Post, the TA Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch? No, they’re all interchangeable. And there’s no calling out on this.

And they attacked this black doctor, the black African American, literally African American, I use the term black and the whole, I never used African American, I use black. But and now, black is, I was ahead of the curve by 25 years. But anyway, this woman is from Africa, from Cameroon in West Africa.

And she was among the doctors who testified at this open news conference, the most viral video in six hours in history. 18 million people in a few hours until YouTube and Twitter and Facebook took it down incredibly. Doctors, they took down doctors.

Anyway, they have mocked this black woman mercilessly. Can you imagine if conservatives mocked a black woman who was on the Left? They would all lose their jobs and to be declared racist. You talk hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a gentle word for the Left.

The Naked Communist

Rick:

I didn’t realize until reading the naked communist, for them, end justifies the means. I mean, they’re literally encouraged to lie, encouraged to do the exact opposite.

Dennis:

The name, I studied Russian, I know Russian and I studied Russian, because incredibly, because so few people went into it even then, my field of study in graduate school of Columbia was communist affairs. That was the name of my subject. And I learned Russian solely in order to read Pravda, the Soviet communist newspaper. Pravda means truth. Lenin named it truth, because on the Left, truth is what the Left says it is. There is no objective truth on the Left.

Rick:

That’s why Orwell called it the Ministry of truth.

Dennis:

That’s right. That’s correct. That’s right.

Courage Vs. Fear

Rick:

Yeah. So courage versus fear. This is a nation that expanded to the west and we did all these things and now we cower so quickly. A couple of people have asked, do you think that the SpaceX launches and some of these things will help to both give us a little bit of pride back as a nation, but also kind of get us out of that fear mongering?

We actually watched Reagan’s speech when, I think was the Challenger disaster, his five minute speech after that, which was one of Noonan’s best that she wrote for him, the whole slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God, which I forget the point they got that from.

But anyway, all that to say, when we watched that speech, he talked about the fact that we know there’s a chance of dying, but it doesn’t keep us from taking action and expanding and exploring. That is not our attitude as a nation right now. Also, but do you think SpaceX and some of these things will help us to come back to that?

Dennis:

No, I don’t think it’ll have any effect unfortunately. Let me just tell it again the young people here. 1968-69, 100,000 Americans died of what was called the Hong Kong flu. That was the time when you could actually name of flu where it originated.

We can’t call this the Wuhan flu, you’re called anti-Chinese, which is somewhat of a joke, just that the Taiwanese don’t call it COVID, they call it the Wuhan flu. And they’re Chinese.

The Hong Kong Flu

But anyway, in 1968-69, the Hong Kong flu killed 100,000 Americans. That would be equivalent to exactly what we have today to about 160,000 Americans. The same number. No lockdown. Not one store closed.

Not one restaurant closed. Americans believe tragedies happen, you go on with life. No longer, the left has made us weaker, our character is weaker. The ‘afraid American’ has substituted, the land of the free and the home of the brave is no longer America.

It is the land of the egalitarian, not the freedom lover, and it is not of the brave. It is the better safe than sorry crowd. That’s what we have come to.

Cuomo, the governor of New York said in the beginning when he locked down New York State if everything I am doing will save one life, it is worth it. That is bizarre. If I am putting tens of thousands of people out of business, if I am wrecking the economy and I am helping starve millions abroad…

Do you know how many people are now hungry because there’s no economy in the third world? And does it doesn’t matter. Oh, we save one life?

A teacher just wrote an article, it was a USA Today, I believe it was. If I could save, if it’s one life, we have to keep the schools closed. Well, they didn’t have that attitude in 1969.

How Do You Talk to Leftist Friends?

Rick:

Man, I would love to get you to do one more on strategy. A lot of the students have asked, how do I talk to my liberal friends, leftist friends? I want to phrase it this way, though.

How do you distinguish between those who have a chance of influencing and those that are just closed minded so that you spend your time wisely and who you’re trying to influence?

Dennis:

That’s a very important question. I don’t have a perfect answer. I would say it’s an interesting question to ask your friend or relative, do you consider yourself a liberal or a leftist?

And then they’ll say, well, what do you mean? What’s the difference? So then I give six examples in my video. Memorize the six. Do you believe in free speech? That’s the most obvious. If you believe in free speech, then obviously, we have a major shared value.

But if you believe that hate speech as you define it should be shut down, which is of course absurd. Everybody believes that the speech they don’t like is hate speech. You gave the Jews as an example, I’ll give you another one.

Free Speech

In the 1960s, the Nazis decided to march, real Nazis decided to march in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where not only a lot of Jews live, but a lot of holocaust survivors. So you can imagine people who lost most of their family to the Nazis seeing swastikas in the streets of their city.

But Jewish groups defended the rights of the Nazis to march in a Jewish neighborhood because they were liberal then not leftist. And that was real hate speech.

Today, anything a leftist disagrees with is called hate speech. If you say there’s only one race, the human race, that’s called hate speech. If you say you think you should be colorblind, that’s called hate speech.

I thought that was love speech. So that’s the first question to ask, are you a leftist or liberal? And they’ll say, what do you mean say? Well, I’ll give you a couple of examples.

Do you believe in free speech? If they say not for hate speech, then you say, with all respect, then you’re a leftist, not a liberal. Liberals have always, and everyone acknowledges that, liberals have always believed in free speech. They adopted the motto. “I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”

That was a common American motto. That is no longer the American motto. Its now I may disagree with what you say, but if you differ with the left, I will shut you down.

You know that people come over to me in airports. It happened, in fact, yesterday at a restaurant in Southern California, where you’re allowed to dine, if they have an outdoor patio. So my wife and I were at a restaurant and a lot of the people there just walked over, you know, thank me, say hello.

A PragerU Video a Day

And it was amazing how people, one woman and this is common, quietly said, I just want you to know I’m a Republican. I mean, we have gotten to that where you have to whisper you’re a Republican or a conservative or a Trump supporter? That does not bode well for the country and free speech.

Rick:

Dennis Prager, you are an amazing Patriot, brother. I appreciate you. Thanks for doing so much. Thanks for your time. Tell Sue, thank you so much for setting this up. And tell Otto, next time, we want more screen time with him.

Dennis:

He charges, I don’t.

Rick:

Oh, what a blessing brother. Thank you very much.

Dennis:

Thank you. God bless you guys, all of you.

Rick:

Alright, folks, you have been listening to Dennis Prager speaking to the Patriot Academy students just a few weeks back when we held our virtual national Patriot Academy. We had students from all over the nation dialing in and a ton of great speakers that joined us, including Dennis Prager.

Now listen, I want to recommend to you that you not only listen to Dennis Prager’s radio program, but you tune in weekly to his Fireside Chats, they’re fantastic. And then of course watch those PragerU videos. As you heard me talking to Dennis about we encourage our Patriot Academy students to watch one PragerU.

Dennis Prager Challenges Today’s Youth – From Patriot Academy, Part 2

That’s just five minutes, it’s an investment of five minutes each day. And by the end of the year, 365 days of doing that, you will know more than you would learn from any college degree in the country. I’m telling you. Watch those PragerU videos.

But we really do appreciate you listening to WallBuilders Live and getting to enjoy Dennis Prager here, as well as the other speakers that we give you the opportunity to hear from. And we share all of those presentations with you right here on WallBuilders Live. In fact, tomorrow’s we’ve had Dennis Prager so far this week.

We had him yesterday and today if you missed yesterday, by the way, if you were just tuning in and you missed yesterday, be sure and go to wallbuilderslive.com today and you can get that program right there on our website.

Well, tomorrow and the next day, we’ve got Jeremy Boreing, the god king of the Daily Wire. Jeremy’s a great friend of Patriot Academy and of WallBuilders. He always comes and shares at Patriot Academy each summer. And we’re going to share with you his presentation and his very candid conversation with the students this year.

I really enjoyed this talk, because it’s a sober look at where we are as Americans and where we are in our nation and what we can do about it and having a very biblical worldview on that as well. So don’t miss tomorrow and the next day with Jeremy Boreing.

Once again if you missed yesterday, be sure and go to get that on our website, all of it available today at wallbuilderslive.com. Thanks so much for listening. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.