Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker tweeted last week:
&#8220;Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What&#8217;s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals.&#8221;
Before responding to Pinker&#8217;s remarkably ignorant tweet, I want to praise him. He is one of the few professors in America to call out the left&#8217;s destruction of our universities. Most human beings lack courage, but no group is more cowardly than academics. This has been true for 100 years. From the German universities to today, professors have almost never taken a position that required courage. Indeed, one might say that when you send your child to college, your child is taught to be a coward by the cowardly.
Two years ago, Pinker wrote:
&#8220;Universities are becoming laughing stocks of intolerance, with non-leftist speakers drowned out by jeering mobs, professors subjected to Stalinesque investigations for unorthodox opinions, risible guidelines on &#8216;microaggressions&#8217; (such as saying &#8216;I believe the most qualified person should get the job&#8217;), students mobbing and cursing a professor who invited them to discuss Halloween costumes, and much else. These incidents have drawn worldwide ridicule, and damage the credibility of university scientists and scholars when they weigh on critical matters, such as climate change.&#8221;
It takes courage for a professor to write that our universities are &#8220;laughing stocks of intolerance,&#8221; that they engage in &#8220;Stalinesque investigations&#8221; and draw &#8220;worldwide ridicule.&#8221;
Having praised Pinker, let me now respond to his tweet.
First, &#8220;Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion &#8230; &#8221;
I am not a Christian, evangelical or otherwise. I am a religious Jew who has written and lectured extensively on the afterlife. My belief in the afterlife is based entirely on a logical argument: If there is a just God, it is axiomatic there is an afterlife. There is little justice and fairness in this life, so if there is a just God, there has to be an afterlife. There is only one honest atheist response to this: &#8220;There is no God, so there is no afterlife. But if there is a God, you are right that there must be an afterlife.&#8221;
So, belief in an afterlife is no more a &#8220;delusion&#8221; than belief in God. But it takes an unsophisticated arrogance to dismiss belief that the world has a designer and that intelligence must be created by intelligence as a &#8220;delusion.&#8221; I was disappointed in Pinker, who I respect for his courageous comments and with whom I have dialogued on my radio show. His tweet reveals a truly shallow atheism.
In fact, I would argue that it is atheism that is a &#8220;malignant delusion.&#8221;
Regarding the delusion part, I asked one of America&#8217;s leading thinkers of the last half-century, the late Charles Krauthammer, a secular agnostic, what he thought of atheism. To my surprise, he responded:
&#8220;I believe atheism is the least plausible of all the theologies. It is clearly so contrary to what is possible. The idea that all this universe always existed, created itself? I mean, talk about the violation of human rationality.&#8221;
And as regards the &#8220;malignant&#8221; charge, while there are, obviously, good individuals who are atheist, atheism is morally worthless. It makes no moral demands, whereas Judaism and Christianity posit a God who demands people obey, for example, the Ten Commandments. Atheism demands nothing; it only destroys the Judeo-Christian bases of morality in Western civilization, the civilization that gave the world democracy, liberty, women&#8217;s equality and an end to slavery.
In fact, evangelical Christians are the greatest defenders of Western civilization, while Pinker&#8217;s atheist colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere are the most active opponents of Western civilization. How does Pinker explain that? Which exactly is the &#8220;malignant delusion&#8221;?
Finally, evangelical Christians and other religious opponents of the continuing lockdown do not oppose continuation of the irrational, fear-driven, life-destroying lockdown — projected to result in more deaths worldwide and even in parts of America than the coronavirus itself — because of our belief in the afterlife. This is both stupid and a smear. It shows how even a Steven Pinker can be rendered foolish by atheism.
No one who actually knows evangelicals believes they oppose continuation of the lockdown because they value life less than secular proponents of continuing this lockdown.
Do evangelicals love their children and grandchildren less than atheists? Do evangelicals not do everything possible to save lives? There are evangelical hospitals and doctors serving in the poorest countries in the world. Where are the atheist hospitals?
Evangelicals oppose the continuing of the lockdown because they, more than any other large community in America, continue to believe in freedom. Without the evangelical community, we will no longer have liberty. From before the birth of America, liberty has been the cornerstone belief because it was a cornerstone Christian value. The founders engraved a liberty-affirming verse from the Bible (Leviticus 25:10) in the Liberty Bell. At the same time, from Lenin to Soros and today&#8217;s Democratic Party, liberty has never been a left-wing value.
To Pinker and his colleagues, Patrick Henry&#8217;s famous plea, &#8220;Give me liberty, or give me death,&#8221; the foundational principle of our republic, must sound truly foolish. It must have been the product of a malignant delusion.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Bible

PRAGER: The Lockdown, Evangelicals And The Afterlife: A Response To Steven Pinker

Christianity

Coronavirus

COVID-19

evangelical

lockdown

Steven Pinker

In a recent &#8220;Fireside Chat,&#8221; my weekly talk show on the PragerU platform, I commented on society&#8217;s increasing fixation on being &#8220;safe.&#8221; The following is a condensed version of what I said:
We have a meme up at PragerU: &#8220;&#8216;Until it&#8217;s safe&#8217; means &#8216;never.'&#8221;
The pursuit of &#8220;safe&#8221; over virtually all other considerations is life-suppressing. This is true for your own individual life, and it is true for the life of a society.
I always give the following example: I have been taking visitors to Israel for decades, and for all those decades, people have called my radio show to say, &#8220;Dennis, I would so love to visit Israel, but I&#8217;m just going to wait until it&#8217;s safe.&#8221; And I&#8217;ve always told these people, &#8220;Then you&#8217;ll never go.&#8221; And sure enough, I&#8217;ve gone there over 20 times, and they never went.
I have never led my life on the basis of &#8220;until it&#8217;s safe.&#8221; I do not take ridiculous risks. I wear a seatbelt whenever I&#8217;m in a car because the chances are overwhelming that in a bad accident, a seatbelt can save my life. But I get into the car, which is not 100% safe.
You are not on earth to be safe. You are on earth to lead a full life. I don&#8217;t want my epitaph to be, &#8220;He led a safe life.&#8221; It&#8217;s like another epitaph I don&#8217;t want: &#8220;He experienced as little pain as possible.&#8221;
The nature of this world is such that if you aim for 100% safety and no pain, you don&#8217;t live. I have visited 130 countries, some of which were not particularly safe. Safe, as in &#8220;no risk,&#8221; doesn&#8217;t exist. Accepting there are degrees of safety and balancing risk with reward are part of the reason I&#8217;ve led a rich life.
I&#8217;ll give a personal example. I started teaching myself to conduct an orchestra when I was in my teens. I have conducted orchestras periodically for much of my adult life. As a guest conductor, I raise funds for orchestras, as I did two years ago at the Disney Concert Hall, where I conducted a Haydn symphony with the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra.
Now, I rarely get nervous. But the first time I conducted, I was so nervous I was actually dripping sweat onto the score — and it was only a rehearsal.
What I did was not play it safe. Playing it safe would have meant I wouldn&#8217;t have accepted the invitation to conduct.
All of life confronts you with this question: Are you going to take risks or play it safe? If you play it safe, you don&#8217;t get married. If you play it safe, you don&#8217;t have kids. There are real risks in getting married; there are real risks in having children.
Take the issue of the word &#8220;safe&#8221; on campuses. &#8220;Safe&#8221; is used to suppress freedom of thought: &#8220;If we have a conservative speaker on campus, we need a &#8216;safe space&#8217; where we can avoid feeling discomfort from exposure to ideas we don&#8217;t like.&#8221; A conservative speaker comes to campus and some students go to a &#8220;safe space&#8221; where they&#8217;re given Play-Doh, hot chocolate and stuffed animals. I&#8217;m not joking. That&#8217;s what they do at some colleges — for people who are 18 and older.
That&#8217;s why Adam Carolla and I named our movie about free speech &#8220;No Safe Spaces&#8221; (which you can and should watch at <a href="http://NoSafeSpaces.com">NoSafeSpaces.com</a>).
&#8220;Safe&#8221; has become a dirty word. I rarely use it in the context of living life. It&#8217;s one of the reasons I&#8217;m a happy person and have led a full life. I&#8217;m thinking of a trivial example, but life is filled with trivial examples. Most of life is not major moments. If I am at a restaurant and my fork or knife falls, I pick it up and use it. They rush over to give me a new one, like I am flirting with death if I take the fork from the floor. My view is there&#8217;s no reason to come over. The fork fell on the floor. What did it pick up — diphtheria? Am I going to get pancreatic cancer from a fork that fell? I&#8217;m not troubled by these things.
&#8220;Safe&#8221; is going to suppress your joy of life.
When I was 21 years old, I was sent to the Soviet Union to smuggle in religious items for Soviet Jews and to smuggle out names of Jews who wanted to escape the Soviet Union.
It wasn&#8217;t safe. I was in a totalitarian state, smuggling things in and out. But it was one of the most important things I&#8217;ve done in my life. Not to mention a life-transforming experience.
Before I went, I told my father about my plans. We both knew it wasn&#8217;t safe. I&#8217;ll never forget what my father said: &#8220;Dennis, I spent two and a half years on a Navy ship in World War II, fighting in the Pacific. So, you can take risks for a month.&#8221;
Yes, he was worried. But this was a man who, despite having a wife and child, enlisted in the U.S. Navy to fight in World War II. He was an officer on a troop transport ship, a prime target of the Japanese. He wasn&#8217;t safe. The World War II generation has been dubbed &#8220;the greatest generation.&#8221; Part of what made them great was the last thing they would ever ask was, &#8220;Is it safe?&#8221;
If you want to lead a good and full life, you cannot keep asking, &#8220;Is it safe?&#8221; Those at college promoting &#8220;safe spaces&#8221; are afraid of life, and they want to make you afraid of life.
We&#8217;re going crazy on the safe issue. It is making police states. That&#8217;s my worry: In the name of safety, many Americans are dropping all other considerations.
&#8220;Is it safe?&#8221; shouldn&#8217;t be the overarching element in your life. Pick the fork up. Wipe it off. And use it.
Postscript: Some left-wing media cited the remarks about picking up a fork (transcribed above word-for-word) in order to smear me and the message. The Daily Beast led with this mendacious headline: &#8220;Dennis Prager Licks Dirty Forks To Show COVID Who&#8217;s Boss.&#8221; And the Daily Mail offered its attack with this headline: &#8220;Right-Wing Radio Host Dennis Prager Boasts About Using Dirty Forks From Restaurant Floors in His Latest Rambling Message Downplaying Dangers of Coronavirus That Has Now Killed 88,000 Americans.&#8221; As is obvious, my talk was about &#8220;being safe,&#8221; not the coronavirus. Please read my last column about truth and the left.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Egg in boxes

PRAGER: Some Thoughts About Being Safe

Safety

The idea that the worldwide lockdown of virtually every country other than Sweden may have been an enormous mistake strikes many — including world leaders; most scientists, especially health officials, doctors and epidemiologists; those who work in major news media; opinion writers in those media; and the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who put their faith in these people — as so preposterous as to be immoral. Timothy Egan of The New York Times described Republicans who wish to enable their states to open up as &#8220;the party of death.&#8221;
That&#8217;s the way it is today on planet Earth, where deceit, cowardice and immaturity now dominate almost all societies because the elites are deceitful, cowardly and immature.
But for those open to reading thoughts they may differ with, here is the case for why the worldwide lockdown is not only a mistake but also, possibly, the worst mistake the world has ever made. And for those intellectually challenged by the English language and/or logic, &#8220;mistake&#8221; and &#8220;evil&#8221; are not synonyms. The lockdown is a mistake; the Holocaust, slavery, communism, fascism, etc., were evils. Massive mistakes are made by arrogant fools; massive evils are committed by evil people.
The forcible prevention of Americans from doing anything except what politicians deem &#8220;essential&#8221; has led to the worst economy in American history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe. And the consequences in much of the world will be more horrible than in America.
The United Nations World Food Programme, or the WFP, states that by the end of the year, more than 260 million people will face starvation — double last year&#8217;s figures. According to WFP director David Beasley on April 21: &#8220;We could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries. &#8230; There is also a real danger that more people could potentially die from the economic impact of COVID-19 than from the virus itself&#8221; (italics added).
That would be enough to characterize the worldwide lockdown as a deathly error. But there is much more. If global GDP declines by 5%, another 147 million people could be plunged into extreme poverty, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Foreign Policy magazine reports that, according to the International Monetary Fund, the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, marking the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, and the U.S., the eurozone and Japan will contract by 5.9%, 7.5% and 5.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, across South Asia, as of a month ago, tens of millions were already &#8220;struggling to put food on the table.&#8221; Again, all because of the lockdowns, not the virus.
In one particularly incomprehensible act, the government of India, a poor country of 1.3 billion people, locked down its people. As Quartz India reported on April 22, &#8220;Coronavirus has killed only around 700 Indians &#8230; a small number still compared to the 450,000 TB and 10,000-odd malaria deaths recorded every year.&#8221;
One of the thousands of unpaid garment workers protesting the lockdown in Bangladesh understands the situation better than almost any health official in the world: &#8220;We are starving. If we don&#8217;t have food in our stomach, what&#8217;s the use of observing this lockdown?&#8221; But concern for that Bangladeshi worker among the world&#8217;s elites seems nonexistent.
The lockdown is &#8220;possibly even more catastrophic (than the virus) in its outcome: the collapse of global food-supply systems and widespread human starvation&#8221; (italics added). That was published in the left-wing The Nation, which, nevertheless, enthusiastically supports lockdowns. But the American left cares as much about the millions of non-Americans reduced to hunger and starvation because of the lockdown as it does about the people of upstate New York who have no incomes, despite the minuscule number of coronavirus deaths there. Or about the citizens of Oregon, whose governor has just announced the state will remain locked down until July 6. As of this writing, a total of 109 people have died of the coronavirus in Oregon.
An example of how disinterested the left is in worldwide suffering is made abundantly clear in a front-page &#8220;prayer&#8221; by a left-wing Christian in the current issue of The Nation: &#8220;May we who are merely inconvenienced remember those whose lives are at stake.&#8221;
&#8220;Merely inconvenienced&#8221; is how the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a Protestant minister and president of the North Carolina NAACP, describes the tens of millions of Americans rendered destitute, not to mention the hundreds of millions around the world rendered not only penniless but hungry. The truth is, like most of the elites, it is Barber who is &#8220;merely inconvenienced.&#8221; Indeed, the American battle today is between the merely inconvenienced and the rest of America.
Michael Levitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford Medical School and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, recently stated, &#8220;There is no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.&#8221;
To the left, anyone who questions the lockdown is driven by preference for money over lives. Typical of the left&#8217;s moral shallowness is this headline on Salon this week:
&#8220;It&#8217;s Time To Reject the Gods of Commerce: America Is a Society, Not an &#8216;Economy,'&#8221; with the subhead reading, &#8220;America Is About People, Not Profit Margins.&#8221;
And, of course, to smug editors and writers of The Atlantic, in article after repetitive article, the fault lies not with the lockdown but with President Donald Trump. The most popular article in The Atlantic this week is titled &#8220;The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump.&#8221; The elites can afford to laugh at whatever they want. Meanwhile, the less fortunate — that is, most people — are crying.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Empty Times Square

PRAGER: The Worldwide Lockdown May Be The Greatest Mistake In History

All my life, I have dismissed paranoids on the right (&#8220;America is headed to communism&#8221;) and the left (&#8220;It can happen here&#8221; — referring to fascism). It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;ve ever believed liberty was guaranteed. Being familiar with history and a pessimist regarding the human condition, I never believed that.
But the ease with which police state tactics have been employed and the equal ease with which most Americans have accepted them have been breathtaking.
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.
&#8220;Police state&#8221; does not mean totalitarian state. America is not a totalitarian state; we still have many freedoms. In a totalitarian state, this article could not be legally published, and if it were illegally published, I would be imprisoned and/or executed.
But we are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state:
No. 1: Draconian laws depriving citizens of elementary civil rights.
The federal, state, county and city governments are now restricting almost every freedom except those of travel and speech. Americans have been banned from going to work (and thereby earning a living), meeting in groups (both indoors and outdoors), meeting in their cars in church parking lots to pray and entering state-owned properties such as beaches and parks — among many other prohibitions.
No. 2: A mass media supportive of the state&#8217;s messaging and deprivation of rights.
The New York Times, CNN and every other mainstream mass medium — except Fox News, The Wall Street Journal (editorial and opinion pages only) and talk radio — have served the cause of state control over individual Americans&#8217; lives just as Pravda served the Soviet government. In fact, there is almost no more dissent in The New York Times than there was in Pravda. And the Big Tech platforms are removing posts about the virus and potential treatments they deem &#8220;misinformation.&#8221;
No. 3: Use of police.
Police departments throughout America have agreed to enforce these laws and edicts with what can only be described as frightening alacrity. After hearing me describe police giving summonses to, or even arresting, people for playing baseball with their children on a beach, jogging alone without a mask, or worshipping on Easter while sitting isolated in their cars in a church parking lot, a police officer called my show. He explained that the police have no choice. They must respond to every dispatch they receive.
&#8220;And why are they dispatched to a person jogging on a beach or sitting alone in a park?&#8221; I asked.
Because the department was informed about these lawbreakers.
&#8220;And who told the police about these lawbreakers?&#8221; I asked.
His answer brings us to the fourth characteristic of a police state:
No. 4: Snitches.
How do the police dispatchers learn of lawbreakers such as families playing softball in a public park, lone joggers without face masks, etc.? From their fellow citizens snitching on them.
The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, set up a &#8220;snitch line,&#8221; whereby New Yorkers were told to send authorities photos of fellow New Yorkers violating any of the quarantine laws. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti similarly encouraged snitching, unabashedly using the term.
It is said that about 1 in every 100 East German citizens were informers for the Stasi, the East German secret police, as superbly portrayed in the film &#8220;The Lives of Others.&#8221; It would be interesting, and, I think, important, to know what percentage of New Yorkers informed on their fellow citizens. Now, again, you may think such a comparison is not morally valid, that de Blasio&#8217;s call to New Yorkers to serve a Stasi-like role was morally justified given the coronavirus pandemic. But you cannot deny it is Stasi-like or that, other than identifying spies during World War II, this is unprecedented in American history at anywhere near this level.
This past Friday night, I gathered with six others for a Shabbat dinner with friends in Santa Monica, California. On my Friday radio show, I announced I would be doing that, and if I was arrested, it would be worth it. In my most pessimistic dreams, I never imagined that in America, having dinner at a friend&#8217;s house would be an act of civil disobedience, perhaps even a criminal act. But that is precisely what happens in a police state.
The reason I believe this is a dress rehearsal is that too many Americans appear untroubled by it; the dominant force in America, the left, supports it, and one of the two major political parties has been taken over by the left. Democrats and their supporters have, in effect, announced they will use state power to enforce any law they can to combat the even greater &#8220;existential&#8221; crisis of global warming.
On the CNN website this weekend, in one of the most frightening and fanatical articles in an era of fanaticism, Bill Weir, CNN chief climate correspondent, wrote an open letter to his newborn son. In it, he wrote of his idealized future for America: &#8220;completely new forms of power, food, construction, transportation, economics and politics.&#8221;
You cannot get there without a police state.
If you love liberty, you must see that it is jeopardized more than at any time since America&#8217;s founding. And that means, among other things, that at this time, a vote for any Democrat is a vote to end liberty.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Police officer

PRAGER: Our Dress Rehearsal For A Police State

Bill de Blasio

Eric Garcetti

Police state

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area.
(The New York metropolitan area is generally regarded as consisting of the five boroughs of New York City, the five New York State counties surrounding New York City — Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Orange — and the populous parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.)
That means that more than half (52%) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New York metropolitan area.
What makes this statistic particularly noteworthy is that the entire death toll for 41 of the other 47 states is 7,661. In other words, while New York has 52% of all COVID-19 deaths in America, 41 states put together have only 21% of the COVID-19 deaths. And all the 47 states other than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have less than half (48%).
Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina — two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people — had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).
Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as &#8220;flyover&#8221; country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?
It is, of course, possible. But I suspect that anyone with an open mind assumes that New Yorkers would not put up with ruining their economic and social lives and putting tens of millions of people out of work because of coronavirus deaths in North Carolina and Georgia, let alone Montana and Idaho (and, for the record, I would have agreed with them).
Even more telling, the media, which controls American public opinion more than any other institution, including the presidency and Congress — but not churches and synagogues, which is why they loathe evangelicals, traditional Catholics, faithful Mormons and Orthodox Jews — would not be as fixated on closing down the country if it were killing far more people in some Southern, Midwestern, Mountain or Western states than in New York City.
The media is New York-based and New York-centered. New York is America. The rest of the country, with the partial exception of Los Angeles (also a media center) and Silicon Valley, is an afterthought.
Having grown up and attended college and graduate school in New York, and having lived in three of the city&#8217;s five boroughs, I know how accurate the most famous New Yorker magazine cover ever published was. The cover&#8217;s illustration depicted a New Yorker&#8217;s map of America: New York City, the George Washington Bridge and then San Francisco. The rest of the country essentially didn&#8217;t exist.
One would have to visit people who had never left their rural village in a developing country to find people more insular than New York liberals, which is what nearly all New Yorkers are.
One of the turning points of my life occurred when I was 24 years old and went to give a talk in Nashville, Tennessee. My assumption, having lived all my life in New York, was that I would be meeting and talking to what essentially amounted to country bumpkins. Not only were they not New Yorkers; they were Southerners.
What I found instead was a beautiful city with kind and highly sophisticated people. No one I met was as cynical as most New Yorkers, who confuse cynicism with sophistication. It was on that trip that I decided to leave New York. When I moved to California two years later, my friends, and every other New Yorker I spoke to on visits back to New York, asked why I left and when I was coming back. To most New Yorkers, to leave New York is to leave the center of the world; it is leaving relevance for irrelevance.
In his latest column, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman inadvertently revealed how New York-centric his view of America is. Friedman, like virtually all his colleagues at The New York Times, opposes opening up any state in America at this time. He writes: &#8220;Every person will be playing Russian roulette every minute of every day: Do I get on this crowded bus to go to work or not? What if I get on the subway and the person next to me is not wearing gloves and a mask?&#8221;
Only a New Yorker would write those two sentences. In the 40 years I have lived in the second-largest city in America, I have never ridden on the subway or any other intraurban train or bus. In fact, it is common for New Yorkers to look at Los Angeles with disdain for our &#8220;car culture.&#8221; Like the vast majority of Americans everywhere outside of New York City, in Los Angeles, most of us get to work, visit family and friends, and go to social and cultural events by car — currently the life-saving way to travel — not by bus or subway, the New Yorker way of getting around.
But Friedman is a New Yorker, and because his fellow New Yorkers walk past one another on crowded streets and travel in crammed buses and subway cars, South Dakotans should be denied the ability to make a living.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

PRAGER: If Half The Country’s Deaths Were In Montana, Would New York Shut Down?

New York

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?
The reason given is that we must lock down virtually all human social and economic activity in order to prevent millions of people from dying of the coronavirus and overwhelming hospitals.
But is it true? Was this lockdown necessary?
In order to answer these questions, we need to know how many people would have died from COVID-19 if we hadn&#8217;t ruined the world&#8217;s economic life.
The truth is we don&#8217;t know. And the truth is we never knew. A large swath of the &#8220;expert&#8221; community cloaked itself with unscientific certitude, beginning, on March 16, with a model from the Imperial College London — the source governments relied upon for the decision to ruin their economies — which projected about 2.2 million Americans and half a million Brits would die.
Almost every national leader, politician and media outlet in the world believed that model. As I explained in my last column, modern men and women have substituted &#8220;experts&#8221; for prophets and priests. Science is the secular religion, and &#8220;experts&#8221; are its prophets and priests. In fact, they have greater authority among the secular, especially those left of center, than the pope of the Catholic Church has among Catholics. Whereas popes have invoked the doctrine of &#8220;infallibility&#8221; twice in the history of the Catholic Church, &#8220;experts&#8221; invoke it every day among the secular faithful.
But on what grounds are we to believe that millions would die without ruining the American — and the world&#8217;s — economy? Without our being told by an omniscient God, there is no way to know the definitive answer.
But here are some data that cast doubt on those assumptions, based entirely on the only metric that matters: deaths per 1 million. The number of confirmed infected people is meaningless, since so few people anywhere have been tested for the virus, and we don&#8217;t know how many people already had the virus and never knew it. (Moreover, asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic carriers of the virus constitute the majority of those infected.)
As of yesterday, according to the Worldometer website, the United States ranked 12th, with 71 deaths per 1 million people. (I have not included San Marino and St. Martin because they have such small populations.)
France&#8217;s death rate is 229 per 1 million, three times greater than that of the United States, and it went on national lockdown March 17. America didn&#8217;t go on national lockdown because that decision is the responsibility of states. So, let&#8217;s take California, the most populous American state (and therefore nearest to France&#8217;s population). California went on statewide lockdown March 19, two days after France. The death rate from coronavirus in California is 2 per 100,000. Two. Deux.
That means France, which went on lockdown only two days prior to California, has more than 10 times the death rate.
And Nebraska, one of the few U.S. states that has not locked down — to the intense anger of the state&#8217;s Democrats at its Republican governor — has a death rate of less than 1 per 100,000 (according to the Washington Post&#8217;s daily listing of U.S. coronavirus deaths).
What do these statistics say about the efficacy and indispensability of a lockdown?
To give you an idea of how unreliable much &#8220;expert&#8221; thinking is, the Los Angeles Times published an article on April 10 titled &#8220;California&#8217;s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Way Below New York&#8217;s. Here&#8217;s Why.&#8221;
In it, the authors, needless to say unquestioningly, reported that Nicholas Jewell, identified as &#8220;a UC Berkeley biostatistician,&#8221; explained why California had so many fewer deaths than New York:
&#8220;Just putting those controls in place a single day earlier makes a huge, huge difference in the growth rates,&#8221; Jewell said, referring to California Gov. Gavin Newsom&#8217;s March 19 lockdown order, whereas New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo waited three more days to lock down New York state. That, according to the expert from UC Berkeley and the Los Angeles Times, explains the &#8220;huge, huge difference in the growth rates&#8221; between the two states.
Then the article added a line that undermined its entire thesis:
&#8220;Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis didn&#8217;t impose a stay-at-home order until April 1.&#8221; Apparently, it never occurred to the Los Angeles Times authors to even look up Florida&#8217;s death rates. The nonconservative media have been largely worthless during this crisis — intellectually vapid, and, along with &#8220;experts,&#8221; the primary stokers of panic.
If a few days&#8217; delay in ordering the lockdown of a state (or country) makes a &#8220;huge, huge difference&#8221; in death rates, Florida should have had a worse death rate than New York, let alone California. Yet Florida&#8217;s death rate is among the lowest in the country: 24 per 1 million — despite the fact that Florida, along with Maine, has the largest percentage of elderly people (those 65 and over) in any American state.
And then there is Sweden, the one industrialized Western democracy that did not shut down — engendering intense anger from scientists and other &#8220;experts,&#8221; as well as left-wing media (i.e., virtually all major media) across the world. Sweden, which still has its restaurants and businesses open, is far below Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Switzerland and Luxembourg — all of which have national lockdowns — in deaths per 1 million. Yes, Sweden&#8217;s death rate per 1 million is higher than its Scandinavian neighbors, Norway and Denmark, which did lock down their economic life. But as of the latest report, in the past two days, Sweden, which has almost exactly the same number of people as Denmark and Norway combined, lost 20 of its citizens to the coronavirus, while its neighbors lost 18.
The left blames President Donald Trump for our crisis (as if only America is undergoing economic ruin and loss of life).
If they were honest, they would blame reliance on &#8220;experts&#8221; and &#8220;modeling.&#8221; But they hate Trump more than they love Americans — or truth.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

PRAGER: Has The Lockdown Worked?

A statement widely attributed to the great British thinker G. K. Chesterton describes the modern period as perfectly as any single idea can: &#8220;When people stop believing in God, they don&#8217;t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.&#8221;
One of these substitute gods has been nature.
Indeed, of all the false gods, nature is probably the most natural for people to worship. Every religion prior to the Bible had nature-gods — the sun, the moon, the sea, gods of fertility, gods of rain and so on.
That is why the farther Western society gets from biblical, i.e., Judeo-Christian, religions, the more nature is worshipped.
Everyone on the left and right cares about the environment. But caring about the environment is not the same as environmentalism. Environmentalism, for most of its adherents, is a secular religion. These people, many of whom refer to, and truly regard, the Earth as a goddess (Gaia, the name of the ancient Greek Earth goddess) worship the environment.
The man who, more than any other, started the modern environmentalist religion was James Lovelock, who developed the &#8220;Gaia hypothesis&#8221; in the 1970s. Almost 50 years later, in 2014, Lovelock told The Guardian, &#8220;Environmentalism has become a religion.&#8221;
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described the 2009 James Cameron blockbuster film, &#8220;Avatar,&#8221; as &#8220;Cameron&#8217;s long apologia for pantheism, a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.&#8221; That equation of God with nature was a major reason for the film&#8217;s popularity.
Douthat, one of the only religious (as in believing in and practicing a religion) columnists at The New York Times, added, &#8220;The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs: a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of &#8216;thou shalt nots,&#8217; and a piping-hot apocalypse.&#8221;
When you ask atheists, as I have for decades, what they believe in, the most common answer is &#8220;science.&#8221; There was a young man, an atheist, at the gym where I work out, who responded, &#8220;Science!&#8221; (in place of &#8220;God bless you&#8221;) whenever someone sneezed. There is nothing higher than science for an atheist because the natural world is all there is. So, worship of the Earth, the environment or nature is almost inevitable in a secular world.
The Bible takes an entirely different view. As explained at length in my Bible commentary, &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; the first verse of the Bible — &#8220;In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth&#8221; — contains the most radical idea in history. It stated, for the first time in history, that God created nature and is not part of nature. It is one of the reasons I believe the first five books, the Torah, are God-given. No human beings 3,000 years ago in the late Bronze Age would have come up with an idea so opposed to the way the human mind naturally works — to regard gods as part of nature.
From the point of view of the secular, Gaia-worshipping world, Genesis gets even worse when, 27 verses later, God tells human beings to, &#8220;Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.&#8221;
Both instructions infuriate Earth-worshippers. Regarding being fruitful, they oppose people having more than one child, and many advocate having no children so as to have minimal human impact on Mother Earth. But the second part — ruling over nature — is what really angers them.
Maybe the coronavirus will awaken young people, who have been taught by nature-worshipping teachers and raised by nature-worshipping parents, to the idiocy of worshipping nature rather than subduing it. Nature, it turns out, is not our friend, let alone a god. If it were up to nature, we&#8217;d all be dead: Animals would eat us; weather would freeze us to death; disease would wipe out the rest of us. If we don&#8217;t subdue nature, nature will subdue us. It&#8217;s that simple.
Nature is beautiful and awe-inspiring. It&#8217;s also brutal and merciless. &#8220;Nature, red in tooth and claw,&#8221; as Alfred Tennyson aptly describes it. Nature follows no moral rules and shows no compassion. The basic law of all biological life is &#8220;survival of the fittest,&#8221; while the basic law of Judaism and Christianity is the opposite: the survival of the weakest with the help of the fittest. Nature wants the weakest eaten by the strongest. Hospitals are as anti-natural an entity as exists.
Only human beings make hospitals. We do so not by worshipping nature but by subduing it.
If the COVID-19 virus destroys the foolish veneration of nature and leads more people, especially the young, to a new respect for the Judeo-Christian worldview, it might be the one silver lining in this catastrophe.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Thunderstorm

PRAGER: Maybe Nature Shouldn’t Be Worshipped After All

Environmentalism

Judeo-Christian Values

Nature

If there is one thing on which you&#8217;d think left and right could agree, it would be the proper response to the present coronavirus. After all, COVID-19 doesn&#8217;t distinguish between left and right: Conservatives and liberals are just as likely to contract and even die from it.
Yet, it&#8217;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&#8217;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 &#8220;Our Fears About Coronavirus Are Overblown.&#8221;
March 16: The Hoover Institution published a piece by Richard A. Epstein whose thesis was: &#8220;I believe that the current dire models radically overestimate the ultimate death toll.&#8221;
March 16: City Journal published conservative thinker Victor Davis Hanson&#8217;s piece whose thesis was: &#8220;Our response could prove as harmful as the virus itself.&#8221;
March 17: My column titled &#8220;Why the Remedy May Be Worse Than the Disease&#8221; appeared on many conservative sites.
March 19: The lead Wall Street Journal editorial was titled &#8220;Rethinking the Coronavirus Shutdown.&#8221;
March 19: A column titled &#8220;Will the Costs of a Great Depression Outweigh the Risks of Coronavirus?&#8221; appeared on The Federalist&#8217;s website.
March 24: The Wall Street Journal published a column by two Stanford professors of medicine titled &#8220;Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?&#8221;
Meanwhile, the liberal and left-wing media published hundreds of articles warning us of millions of deaths if we don&#8217;t shut down the American economy.
Or take the example of President Donald Trump&#8217;s announcement at a press conference on March 19 that hydroxychloroquine had &#8220;shown really good promise&#8221; in helping to cure COVID-19.
Virtually every left-wing news medium mocked him for making that claim.
March 21: &#8220;AP FACT CHECK: Trump&#8217;s Breathless Takes on Drugs for Virus.&#8221;
They implicitly or explicitly blamed the president for the death of an Arizona man who ingested a fish tank cleaner because it contained chloroquine phosphate (because the name sounds similar to hydroxychloroquine).
March 24: CBS News published a story headlined &#8220;Arizona Man Dies, Wife Ill After Taking Drug Touted as Virus Treatment: &#8216;Trump Kept Saying It Was Basically Pretty Much a Cure.'&#8221;
March 24: The left-wing site BuzzFeed simply lied about that story in order to blame the president: &#8220;A Man Died After Self-Medicating With a Form of a Drug That Trump Promoted as a Potential Treatment for the Coronavirus.&#8221;
March 24: The left-wing St. Louis Post-Dispatch did the same in its headline: &#8220;Man Dies After Taking Chloroquine Phosphate, Additive in Drug Touted by Trump as COVID-19 Treatment.&#8221;
March 24: The Democratic governor of Nevada, Steve Sisolak, issued an order that, in the words of the Nevada Health Response, &#8220;prohibits (the) prescribing and dispensing chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for a COVID-19 diagnosis.&#8221;
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: &#8220;Radio host Dennis Prager bemoaned our unwillingness to sacrifice lives as we did during World War II, saying &#8216;that attitude leads to appeasement&#8217; and &#8216;cowardice.&#8217; The United States lost 418,500 people in World War II &#8230; 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.&#8221;
On my radio show and in my weekly PragerU &#8220;Fireside Chat,&#8221; I criticized New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the way he defended shutting down his state: &#8220;I want to be able to say to the people of New York: I did everything we could do. &#8230; And if everything we do saves just one life, I&#8217;ll be happy.&#8221;
It is hard to imagine a more morally absurd sentiment. Anyone who thinks rationally knows it is not worth depriving millions of people of their incomes, forcing thousands of companies to go out of business, causing recovering addicts to lapse back into addiction and much more economic and social damage to &#8220;save one life.&#8221;
As we are fighting a &#8220;war&#8221; against the virus, I used a war analogy to make my point. I noted that if we had fought World War II with the attitude that we cannot lose one life, we would never have fought the Nazis or the Japanese. I further noted that we do not make any social policy based on saving one life. For example, every time we raise the speed limit, we know thousands more people will die.
But the left went nuts. Max Boot in The Washington Post is only one example.
So, then, why this left-right gulf?
One reason, as I have written previously, is that 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&#8217;s debunk its usefulness.
A third reason is leftists are afraid — of life and of death. Fear of life is why they build &#8220;safe spaces&#8221; 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&#8217;s famous cry, &#8220;Give me liberty, or give me death!&#8221; incomprehensible, if not downright foolish.
Even COVID-19 has brought no cease-fire in the ongoing American civil war.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

N95 mask

PRAGER: Even On COVID-19, Left And Right Are Divided

Democrats

Republicans

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic is not the only epidemic spreading through our country. There’s been another one spreading over the last several years with consequences that threaten Americans’ fundamental ideals of free speech and open inquiry as much as the coronavirus threatens Americans’ lives.
This attack on free speech and suppression of ideas has become so commonplace that, along with the brilliant comedian Adam Carolla, I have made a film, No Safe Spaces, documenting this alarming trend.
To continue the analogy, the college campus has become our Wuhan — the epicenter of idea-suppression. Once a marketplace of ideas, American colleges and universities have become infected with the idea that ‘If I don’t like what you say, you do not have the right to say it.’
This attitude has “gone viral,” spreading as rapidly and as widely as the coronavirus — to the arts, entertainment, news media, and tech industries, all of which have become carriers of the disease. Throughout America, people are silenced, punished, or “cancelled” if they say something that is deemed objectionable to the left — not to liberals, it should be stressed. Liberals have a long history of protecting free speech, but they are now so intimidated by the left, they have abandoned their historic commitment to free speech.
I’ve personally experienced this with my Prager University videos, as we continue to fight a legal battle with Google-owned YouTube over its suppression of our video content online. YouTube has placed about a hundred of our videos on its Restricted List, a parent/school/public library-activated option to filter what videos their child can access, as if they feature violence or pornography. Among those who present PragerU videos are four Pulitzer Prize-winners, three former prime ministers, members of European parliaments, professors from MIT, Harvard, and Princeton, and some of the most eminent thinkers of our time.
No Safe Spaces explores the state of free speech in America, featuring prominent figures on the on the left as well as on the right — progressives such as Van Jones, Cornel West, Barack Obama, and Bret Weinstein. After its successful theatrical run, as we prepared for the home entertainment release, a funny thing happened on the way to the living rooms of America: Mainstream Hollywood decided it didn&#8217;t want Americans to see the film.
When I agreed to be in the film, the producers assured me there would be no resistance to the film from distributors — because distributors’ only concern is whether the film was a success. And it was. No Safe Spaces was the #1 political documentary of 2019 at the box office, and it earned the highest audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.com of any film released in 2019 — 99%.
Distributors, of course, have the right to decide what content to place on their platforms — that’s free market capitalism. But when a movie is as successful as No Safe Spaces — in addition to being the number one political documentary of the year, it grossed $1.3 million at the box office — under normal circumstances, distributors would jump at the opportunity to offer such a film to the public. But they didn’t. This is an important thing for Americans to understand: Hollywood’s bottom line no longer drives their decisions; ideological purity is more important to them than money.
Take Netflix, for example. The streaming giant passed on No Safe Spaces months after it paid ten million dollars to acquire Knock Down This House, another political documentary which had not done any business at all at the box office. But that documentary features Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
So, then, a movie with no track record was given piles of cash because it is acceptable to the left while a movie that reaches the top was passed over because it appeals to conservatives and liberals, but not to the left.
In most cases, distributors passed on No Safe Spaces without giving any reason for doing so. But one did. I won’t name them because I appreciate their honesty, but here’s an excerpt from their email to the film’s producers:
<blockquote>“If the film is as provocative in the marketplace as it was in our sales projection meeting, you&#8217;ve got a hit on your hands. That said, in the course of our discussions we discovered a line the majority of the team won&#8217;t cross and that is supporting anything that puts a spotlight on Dennis Prager. The essential message of the film, protecting free speech, is embraced here, but supporting free speech only compels us to permit it, not to spend our time and money promoting a film whose ‘hero’ is someone with some very troubling ideas.&#8221;</blockquote>
Not one of my “troubling ideas” was cited. I suspect they could not find any. I am as mainstream a conservative as there is. If I am “troubling,” what conservative isn’t? So the game is rigged, and it’s important for Americans to know this. The content studios and streaming services offer to viewers has been pre-vetted by people who disdain the most fundamental of American values — people who claim to support free speech while rejecting a film about free speech!
We have therefore looked elsewhere. Salem Media (which owns my radio program) has agreed to make No Safe Spaces available to home viewers on their streaming platform at <a href="http://www.nosafespaces.com/">www.NoSafeSpaces.com</a>. We are also working with another distributor that does value free speech to release No Safe Spaces on other home entertainment platforms later this summer.
Beyond (and predating) our current crisis caused by the coronavirus, we’re in the midst of an epic battle to preserve what is good and unique about America. On that front, good people are divided into three groups: those who fight, those who support the fighters, and those who do nothing. Unfortunately, the largest number of good people fall into the third category. However, those who support the fighters are just as important as the fighters themselves. That’s what conservatives (and liberals true to the liberal commitment to free speech) need to do: support the fighters by seeing No Safe Spaces. It’s as simple as that.
As you sit home during these difficult times, visit NoSafeSpaces.com, download and watch the movie. Buy downloads for all the young people in your life and share it with them. Aside from its critically important message, it is a powerful and entertaining film.
The coronavirus pandemic will pass. But the anti-speech epidemic will remain. No Safe Spaces is an effective vaccine.

Free speech

PRAGER: The Anti-Speech Pandemic

Adam Carolla

Free Speech

Netflix

Since we are all stuck at home for weeks, here are some suggestions to help you and help America.
Watch less news. Interview and opinion shows on TV and talk radio shows that add to one&#8217;s understanding of the situation can be valuable. But watching depressing, panic-inducing news about COVID-19 24/7 will only make you jittery, anxious and depressed. It&#8217;s good for the news networks&#8217; ratings, but it&#8217;s bad for your mental health.
Instead, you can read, talk to friends, watch movies, learn a language, listen to music, start a journal, walk outside, garden or engage in hobbies. Do that project you&#8217;ve never had time to get to. In short, don&#8217;t preoccupy yourself with the virus. My wife and I watched a James Bond movie a few nights ago, and I loved the total escape it provided. And I&#8217;m getting more work done on the third volume of my Torah commentary (&#8220;The Rational Bible&#8221;) than I could have under normal circumstances.
Make sure to stay in touch via phone or video with anyone you know to be alone. For such people, social isolation is close to being in solitary confinement. After two weeks of you and them remaining asymptomatic, I would also suggest visiting such people or having them visit you. Being alone for weeks is likely to be much more hazardous to a person&#8217;s health than the relatively small possibility of contracting, let alone dying from, the new coronavirus.
Decide to be happy. As Lincoln said, &#8220;We are as happy as we decide to be.&#8221; You owe it to those living under house arrest with you — in fact, you are morally obligated — to be as easy to live with as possible during this miserable time. Calibrating your mood now, when it&#8217;s tough, will set a great example for your family that could pay big dividends in the future. I could imagine your kids saying decades hence, &#8220;Remember how our parent(s) stayed upbeat during the coronavirus scare?&#8221; What a wonderful legacy that would be.
If you have kids at home — from as early as fifth grade through graduate school — watch PragerU videos with them. They are all just five minutes long, highly educational and very entertaining. Professors from major universities of the Western world, four Pulitzer Prize winners, three former prime ministers and some of the finest minds in the world offer these courses. There are 400 such videos. They will engender spirited discussion and take your mind off the virus and quarantine. They are all free, so I have no hesitation recommending something I am affiliated with.
Order as many meals as possible from local restaurants. Most Americans will get their food from supermarkets. If you can afford it — and I suspect most readers of this column can — try to get most of your meals from a local restaurant through takeout orders. We need to do everything possible to keep local restaurants in business.
Order online items. During this quarantine, Americans are purchasing more and more items through the internet. Try to order from vendors other than Amazon as much as possible. The purpose is not to hurt Amazon; Amazon is a remarkable company. The purpose is to keep as many internet vendors in business as possible. It takes only an additional minute or two to order from another site.
Don&#8217;t look to food for too much comfort. As it is, most people will be moving around far less than normally. When that is added to a lot of junk food, the results will not be pretty. It&#8217;s been reported that sales of cookies and chips have gone up significantly in the last few weeks. The last thing you want to do now is weaken your immune system. Eat as healthy as you can. Getting some exercise is also important. Going for a walk every day is a good place to start.
King Solomon, the story goes, asked his wise men (in the ancient world, they emphasized wisdom; people today emphasize knowledge) to make him a magic ring. This ring would lift up his spirits if he got depressed and bring him back down to earth if he got euphoric. The wise men returned with a ring in which the Hebrew words &#8220;gam zu ya&#8217;avor&#8221; were inscribed: &#8220;This, too, shall pass.&#8221; Keep in mind that this awful period will pass. The human psyche is programmed to think that whatever is happening now — happy or sad — will go on indefinitely.
Nothing does.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Coronavirus volunteer

PRAGER: Suggestions For This Difficult Time

As of this writing, 6,400 people all over the world have died from the coronavirus. In the United States, 68 people have died.
Some perspective:
Chinese deaths (3,217) account for half of the worldwide total. If you add Italy (1,441) and Iran (724), two countries where many Chinese were allowed in until recently, that totals another 2,165. In other words, outside of China, Italy and Iran — with 5,382 deaths collectively — 1,018 people have died. There are 7.8 billion people in the world.
Regarding Italy, the Jerusalem Post of March 16 reported that according to Nobel Prize-winning chemist Michael Levitt, &#8220;Italy&#8217;s higher death rate was likely due to the fact that elderly people make up a greater percentage of the population than they do in other countries such as China or France.&#8221; As former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson further explained: &#8220;Italy has the oldest population in Europe and more elderly per capita than the U.S. Most of the Italian deaths are in patients in their 80s and 90s. In addition, Italy has a great number of direct China contacts. Italy was the first to join China&#8217;s &#8216;silk road&#8217; economic partnership project &#8230; (Italy&#8217;s) deaths are out of a population of 60 million people.&#8221;
Regarding Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 11:
&#8220;Iranian officials trace the origins of the country&#8217;s coronavirus epidemic to the holy city of Qom, home to &#8230; a number of Chinese-backed infrastructure projects built by scores of workers and technicians from China &#8230; &#8216;(China has) turned into a very toxic bomb,&#8217; said Sanam Vakil, deputy Middle East director at Chatham House, a think tank in London.&#8221;
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump announced a ban on flights from China on Jan. 31 — for which he was denounced by leading Democrats and throughout the left. The very next day, presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden declared, &#8220;This is no time for Donald Trump&#8217;s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering.&#8221; On Feb. 2, the American Civil Liberties Union announced, &#8220;These measures are extraordinary incursions on liberty and fly in the face of considerable evidence that travel bans and quarantines can do more harm than good.&#8221;
The current consensus favors near total social isolation, or &#8220;social distancing,&#8221; as it is now called. The thinking is that we must shut down the Western world to prevent the exponential growth of the virus. If we don&#8217;t, our hospital systems will be overwhelmed. Many thousands, maybe more, would die, as doctors have to make grisly triage decisions as to who gets care and who doesn&#8217;t. This latter scenario is reported to have already happened in Italy.
Though there is no longer an exponential growth in the United States, they may otherwise be right.
Is this thinking correct? The truth is we don&#8217;t know.
We have no idea how many people carry the COVID-19 coronavirus. Therefore, the rates of either critical illness or death are completely unknown. Perhaps millions of people have the virus and nothing serious develops, in which case we would have rates of death similar to (or even below) the flu virus. On the other hand, perhaps not many people carry the virus, but the rates of illness demanding intensive care and of death are much greater than those of the flu.
We can only be certain that shutting down virtually every part of society will result in a large number of people economically ruined, life savings depleted, decades of work building a restaurant or some other small business destroyed. As if that were not bad enough, the ancillary effects would include increased depression and divorce and other personal tragedies. The effects of closing schools for weeks or months will include family chaos, vast numbers of bored young people, health care providers who will have to stay home and more. Yet young people are the least likely people to become ill from the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released this statement regarding closing schools:
&#8220;Available modeling data indicate &#8230; that other mitigation efforts (e.g., handwashing, home isolation) have more impact on both spread of disease and health care measures. In other countries, those places who (sic) closed school (e.g., Hong Kong) have not had more success in reducing spread than those that did not (e.g., Singapore).&#8221;
But the longer-term ripple effects are potentially far worse. Economic disasters rarely remain only economic disasters. To give a particularly dramatic example, the Nazis came to power because of economics more than any other single reason, including Germany&#8217;s defeat in World War I, the Versailles Treaty or anti-Semitism. Nazi success at the polls was almost entirely related to the Weimar economy. Communist parties don&#8217;t fare well in robust economies, but they&#8217;re very tempting when people are in dire economic straits. Only God knows what economic dislocation the shutting down of American and other Western economies will lead to. I am not predicting a Nazi or communist ascendancy, but economic and political disaster may be as likely, or even more likely, than a health disaster.
But here is a prediction: 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 &#8220;existential threat&#8221; to human life posed by global warming.
The dam has been broken. Maybe it was necessary. But when dams break, flooding follows.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Quarantined person

PRAGER: Why The Remedy May Be Worse Than The Disease

Economy

We go from hysteria to hysteria.
And even that&#8217;s not quite accurate. 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.
Many international and domestic business conferences have been canceled, including:
—The Google News Initiative Summit in late April in Sunnyvale, California.
—The Microsoft MVP Global Summit March 15-20 in Bellevue and Redmond, Washington (now to be an online-only event).
—The Facebook Global Marketing Summit, March 9-12 in San Francisco.
—The MWC (Mobile World Congress) Barcelona, billed as &#8220;the largest mobile event in the world.&#8221;
Amazon has asked its 798,000 employees to stop all nonessential travel, both domestic and international, immediately.
Meanwhile, according to Time, &#8220;U.S. stocks lost nearly 12% and $3.5 trillion was erased for U.S.-listed stocks. It was the worst week for stocks since the financial crisis in October of 2008.&#8221;
And the &#8220;yield on the 10-year Treasury note hit a record intraday low [last] Tuesday as coronavirus rocked risk markets and investors flooded into safe-havens,&#8221; according to Markets Insider.
If these trends continue, the world economy is likely to enter a recession, if not a depression.
Unless the coronavirus becomes a worldwide mass killer, it will be fair to say that the hysteria over coronavirus will cause much more suffering than the virus.
All this leads to three questions:
1. Why aren&#8217;t we seeing a sober, measured reaction to the virus?
2. What has caused this hysteria?
3. Why are so many people in panic mode?
Answer to question 1: Because people have lost all perspective.
This flu, like SARS and swine flu before it, has been given a name. Every year tens of thousands of people die of that season&#8217;s generic flu. In the 2017-2018 flu season, in America alone, according to the CDC, about 61,000 people died of the flu. But because that flu didn&#8217;t have a special name, no one other than individuals close to those who died from the flu knows or cares about any no-name flu.
In 2003, there was hysteria over SARS, which also originated in China, and which killed a total of 774 people in 29 countries.
In 2009, the World Health Organization, which should be renamed the World Hysteria Organization, raised the worldwide pandemic alert level of the swine flu (a variant of the H1N1 virus) to Phase 6, the highest alert level.
According to the CDC, the swine flu infected approximately 61 million Americans, of whom 12,269 died. To put that into perspective, also according to the CDC, the next season&#8217;s flu, that of 2010-2011, killed about 37,000 Americans; in 2012-2013, 43,000 died of the flu; and as noted, in 2017-2018, 61,000 died (the CDC&#8217;s upper figure was 95,000).
Answer to question 2: Overwhelmingly because of the news media. The news media have been breathlessly reporting virtually every new diagnosis of the coronavirus 24/7. Typical of media reporting is this from Canada&#8217;s most widely read newspaper, The Globe and Mail: &#8220;COVID-19 spreads so rapidly that one Harvard researcher has warned that 40 to 70 per cent of the world&#8217;s adults will be infected.&#8221; But they never bother to tell you that being &#8220;infected&#8221; is, for almost everyone, not remotely life-threatening.
Answer to question 3: This one is perplexing.
I am not certain why people panic so easily. Perhaps it is built into human nature. Perhaps it is the power of the media to influence people. Perhaps it is because life is so easy in the modern world that people have come to expect a life without deadly illness or premature death from any cause. Perhaps it is because of the lack of perspective noted above.
There are things about which people should be panicked. For example, the contempt for America and capitalism taught to a generation of young Americans from elementary school through college is worthy of panic. The extreme levels of economy-collapsing debt we are irresponsibly piling onto the backs of future generations to maintain &#8220;entitlements&#8221; is worthy of panic. So is the premature sexualization of children — encouraging them to choose their own gender and taking 5-year-olds to public libraries for &#8220;drag queen story hour.&#8221; But such things hardly register with most Americans.
I feel awful for kids today. They are relentlessly told that global warming poses an &#8220;existential threat&#8221; to life on earth. They are relentlessly told that President Donald Trump poses an &#8220;existential threat to America&#8221; — the words used, for example, a few weeks ago by Frank Rich in New York Magazine, and used by the &#8220;moderate&#8221; Michael Bloomberg repeatedly in his speeches. And now they are told their families had better stock up on toilet paper because only God knows when they will be unable to leave their homes.
It was a Democratic president who told Americans, during World War II no less, that &#8220;we have nothing to fear but fear itself.&#8221; He is a liberal idol, in part for saying that.
That is more or less exactly what Trump has been saying. Yet he&#8217;s an &#8220;existential threat&#8221; to our country.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Screaming

PRAGER: We Go From Hysteria To Hysteria

SARS

A few weeks ago, I devoted my column to an article about me published in Newsweek under the headline &#8220;Conservative Radio Host Ridicules Anne Frank.&#8221; As the full context of my comments in the video made clear, it was a lie.
To its credit, after its editor was notified of this fact, Newsweek changed the headline and made revisions to the article and issued a correction.
Since then, two more smears have been spread about me, one by an official at Purdue University and the other by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the major source of news in Canada.
The Jan. 21, 2020, issue of The Exponent, the Purdue University student newspaper, published the following in a story about John Gates, Purdue&#8217;s newly appointed vice provost for diversity and inclusion: &#8220;John Gates has seen quite distinct viewpoints at Purdue, even in his first week at Purdue in early 2019. When he attended a Turning Point event that Dennis Prager spoke at, he noted that he was one of three black people in the room.”
&#8220;&#8216;His central thesis was as follows: Diversity is bad. Every dollar spent on diversity is a dollar wasted,&#8217; Gates said. &#8216;He said slavery was not bad. In fact, every civilized nation was founded in slavery, and that blacks should just be happy to be in this country. And he got a rousing ovation.'&#8221;
Needless to say, I never said anything remotely like that.
After mentioning this on my radio show, some of my listeners wrote to Gates, which prompted him to write to me — not with a retraction or an apology but an invitation to have a chat.
I wrote vice provost Gates a letter, which began: &#8220;Dr. Gates:
&#8220;I am attaching eight video files of my speech at Purdue. See if you can find where I said, implied or hinted that slavery is not bad.”
&#8220;Allow me to react to your invitation to chat over the phone. Had I, as a Jew, written in some publication that you said, &#8216;the Holocaust wasn&#8217;t bad,&#8217; and then invited you to have a chat, would you agree to do so? Or would you first demand that I retract such a vile smear of you?”
&#8220;When you unequivocally retract in The Exponent what you said and apologize for saying it, I will be happy to chat with you. In fact, I will even invite you on to my national radio show.&#8221;
I never received a response from Gates.
Then, about a week ago, on my radio show, I discussed the issue of private speech versus public speech, and the issue of character, using former President Harry Truman as an example of a good man who used foul language privately, specifically using &#8220;kike&#8221; when writing or talking about Jews, and the N-word when talking about blacks. A listener called to ask me why I could say &#8220;kike&#8221; but not the N-word. I told him that the left had rendered the N-word the only word unutterable in the English language, even when merely discussing it, as I was with regard to Truman. And, of course, I added that to ever refer to a black using the N-word is &#8220;despicable.&#8221;
On Sunday, the CBC published an article headlined &#8220;It&#8217;s &#8216;idiotic you can&#8217;t say the N-word,&#8217; says radio host Dennis Prager, soon to speak at Calgary conference.&#8221;
The headline was an echo of the Newsweek headline, using an entirely out-of-context quote to make it sound as if I want to use the N-word in referring to blacks.
Now, why would the CBC bother writing about an American talk-show host, and how did it come up with this smear?
The answer to the first question is that the CBC, described to me by former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a PragerU event as &#8220;to the left of MSNBC,&#8221; wants to charge Canadian conservative organization The Manning Centre with inviting racist speakers. (I will be speaking in Ottawa at the Centre&#8217;s annual conference next month.)
And how did the CBC come up with the phony headline and story? The author himself wrote how in his piece: from Media Matters for America, a left-wing site that each day distorts or lies about what conservatives say. The author never bothered to listen to my broadcast. He took what Media Matters wrote and recycled it.
So, then, why do left-wing media do this?
There are two major reasons.
First, truth is not a left-wing value. As I have said and written ever since studying communism and the left in graduate school at the Columbia University Russian Institute, truth is a liberal value and a conservative value, but it is not a left-wing value. However, destroying opponents by destroying their reputations is a left-wing value — whether it&#8217;s charging Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with multiple rapes, preoccupying the country with the fake charge that Donald Trump&#8217;s presidential campaign colluded with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election, or the charges such as those made against me.
Second, smearing opponents is not only a left-wing value; it is the left&#8217;s modus operandi. And the reason for that is: The left does not win through argument. It wins through smear. If you differ with the left, you are, by definition, sexist, racist, bigoted, intolerant, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, fascist and/or a hater. The proof? You cannot name a single opponent of the left who has not been so labeled.
Readers can fight back by contacting the president of Purdue, Mitch Daniels, at president@purdue.edu. Contacts from Purdue alumni would be particularly helpful. And readers can contact the CBC through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or an email to its ombudsman:
Facebook.com/cbccalgary
Twitter.com/cbccalgary
Instagram.com/cbccalgary
ombud@cbc.ca
The CBC needs to change its headline and issue a correction, as Newsweek did. My email to the author of the article, in which I asked for these changes and explained the entire context, did not receive a reply. You can read the letter on my website and send it or link it to the CBC.
If good liberals and conservatives don&#8217;t fight the left, truth loses. If truth loses, all is lost.
It&#8217;s that simple.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Megaphone

PRAGER: Why the Left Calls Good People Racist

Dennis Prager

John Gates

Leftism

In the latest edition of &#8220;The Rubin Report&#8221; podcast, two people I adore, Dave Rubin and Heather Mac Donald, dialogue about some of the great issues facing America. Interestingly, though both are secular, Dave opened the interview asking Heather about God and religion.
She began by saying that she is not conservative because of religion but because of her commitment to empirical truth. It is empirical truth that leads her to affirm, for example, &#8220;the necessity of the two-parent family&#8221; and &#8220;most traditional values.&#8221;
Heather is right that one cannot be committed to empirical truth and be a leftist (though one can be a conservative or a liberal). Left-wing assertions that men give birth; that America was founded in 1619 (when the first enslaved black was brought to the American colonies); that people can be lifted from poverty on a mass scale without capitalism; that there are no innate differences between men and women; that America is a racist nation; that women are paid less than men for the same type and amount of work because they are women; and innumerable other leftist assertions are all false.
But while a secular conservative may be committed to the two-parent family because of empirical truth, marriage and family are not &#8220;empirical truths&#8221; nearly as much as they are religious values. Few secular arguments to get married and/or have children are as compelling as religious ones. That&#8217;s why religious people are so much more likely to get married and have children.
Mac Donald said: &#8220;(P)eople who I respect enormously &#8230; whether it&#8217;s Dennis Prager or Michael Medved &#8230; are making the argument that you cannot have a moral society without a foundation of religious belief.&#8221;
That is precisely the argument nearly every founder of America made. Not all were Christ-centered Christians, but virtually every one believed that inalienable rights come from the Creator, and only from the Creator. And none (except perhaps Thomas Paine) believed that America could endure if it were to become a godless society.
Mac Donald: &#8220;Part of my resistance to this is simply I don&#8217;t find claims of petitionary prayer and the idea of a personal loving God consistent with what I see — what I call the daily massacre of the innocents. To me it&#8217;s a very hard claim to make that I should expect God to pay attention to my well-being when He&#8217;s willing to allow horrific things to happen to people far more deserving and innocent than I am. So, for me, it&#8217;s partly just a truth value. I cannot stomach what appears to me to be a patently false claim about a personal loving God.&#8221;
I agree with Heather&#8217;s premises but not with her conclusion. I have never believed that God has any reason to pay more attention to me than to any other innocent human being. And I, too, &#8220;cannot stomach&#8221; the &#8220;daily massacre of the innocents&#8221; — so much so that I have written how I find the commandment to love God the hardest commandment in the Bible.
But what I also cannot stomach is the thought of a universe in which the horrible suffering of innocents is never compensated by a good and just God: The good and the evil all die; the former receive no reward and the latter no punishment.
The problem of unjust suffering troubles every thinking believer. But the Jewish theologian Milton Steinberg offered a powerful response: &#8220;The believer in God has to account for unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else.&#8221; Between the two, I would argue that the atheist&#8217;s burden is infinitely greater. And insurmountable.
Mac Donald: &#8220;(T)he idea of what started the universe — we can&#8217;t really answer that. I think to say, &#8216;God&#8217; — that&#8217;s just a placeholder for ignorance. That doesn&#8217;t help.&#8221;
Maybe we really can&#8217;t answer what started the universe. But, as Charles Krauthammer, a great secular conservative, said, &#8220;The idea that this universe always existed, that it created itself ex nihilo — I mean, talk about the violation of human rationality. That, to me, is off the charts.&#8221; God, therefore, is not &#8220;just a placeholder for ignorance.&#8221; Since science can never and will never answer the question &#8220;Why is there anything?&#8221; attributing the origins of the universe to an intelligent force (which we call &#8220;God&#8221;) strikes me as the most rational explanation.
Rubin: &#8220;I might have to get you in here with Prager.&#8221;
Mac Donald: &#8220;I&#8217;d love to.&#8221;
I&#8217;d love to, too.
Mac Donald: &#8220;Where are we all headed? What is the meaning of life? To me, anybody who claims &#8230; he doesn&#8217;t find meaning in life when there is Mozart and Haydn — to invoke a Dennis Prager favorite — or Beethoven or John Milton or Aeschylus or Anthony Trollope —&#8221;
Rubin: &#8220;Or just waking up with purpose for whatever you do.&#8221;
Mac Donald: &#8220;Exactly &#8230; trying to do the best you can do. I don&#8217;t find life meaningless for one second.&#8221;
Haydn began every manuscript with the Latin words &#8220;in nomine Domini,&#8221; &#8220;in the name of the Lord,&#8221; and ended his manuscripts with the words &#8220;Lauds Deo,&#8221; &#8220;Praise be to God.&#8221; I would ask Heather and other secular conservatives: Do you or don&#8217;t you identify the steep deterioration of the arts with the death of God and religion? Is a secular society capable of achieving artistic achievement equal to that which was accomplished in tribute to God?
As for meaning, you — and I — may find meaning every day in trying to do the best we can do, or in great works of art. But, as I know you will agree, that does not mean life has any ultimate meaning. If there is no God, we are nothing more than self-conscious stellar dust. And stellar dust has no meaning.
We really need to continue this dialogue. In the meantime, for what it&#8217;s worth, I want to say to both of you, who do so much for our country, God bless you.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Microphone

PRAGER: A Response To 2 Secular Conservatives I Adore

Dave Rubin

Heather Mac Donald

Religion

Secular conservative

If you want to understand a human being or the human condition, what is the single most important question you should ask?
Most religious people would probably ask, &#8220;Do you believe in God?&#8221;
The most important question most secular people, especially progressives, could imagine asking is probably a policy question. Today it would be &#8220;Do you support Donald Trump?&#8221; Otherwise it might be &#8220;Do you support abortion rights?&#8221; or &#8220;Do you support gay marriage?&#8221;
As important as all of these questions are, in attempting to understand human beings, especially large groups of human beings — i.e., their society — the most important question to ask is &#8220;What in life gives you the most meaning?&#8221;
The answer does not explain everything, of course, but it explains the human condition better than any other question.
The reason is this: After food, the greatest human need and human desire is meaning. Even more so than the ability to reason or even to speak, this is the great divide between human and animal. We share all other needs with the higher animal species and share many needs with some of the lower animal species. Like them, we need food, shelter and companionship. But, while human beings seek and need meaning more than anything except food (and companionship — but for human beings, companionship usually provides some meaning, and sometimes enough), no animal needs or seeks meaning. As an aside, this is one of the reasons I believe in God, the Creator. There is no evolutionary explanation for the need for meaning. Meaning is not a biological need.
Given its unique importance, that is why what gives us meaning must be deemed the most important question.
The problem, however, is that just as the need for food has no inherent moral quality, the need for meaning has no inherent moral quality. Meaning can be found in evil just as it can be found in good. Nazism provided millions of Germans with as much meaning as helping the dying in Calcutta provided Mother Teresa. Slaughtering infidels gives radical Islamic terrorists as much meaning as feeding the poor gives those who work for the Salvation Army. Killing the &#8220;Christ-killer&#8221; Jews gave some medieval Christians as much meaning as saving Jews gave some European Christians during the Holocaust.
For most Americans until the last generation, the need for meaning was filled by family, religion, community and patriotism (i.e., love of America and belief in America as Abraham Lincoln put it: as &#8220;the last best hope of earth.&#8221;)
All, or nearly all, of those sources of meaning are being lost. In fact, the present generation of Americans has few or none of those meaning providers.
As regards family, Americans are marrying at a later age than ever before. Fewer Americans are marrying than ever before. And fewer are having children than ever before.
With regard to religion, more than a third of millennials — by far the largest percentage of any generation in American history — do not identify with any religion.
As for community, a vast number of Americans — of every age — have lost ties to any community. This is a major reason for the epidemic of loneliness that afflicts so many Americans (and so many others) at the present time. For example, The New York Times reported in 2018 that in Britain, &#8220;more than nine million people in the country often or always feel lonely, according to a 2017 report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness.&#8221; Then-Prime Minister Theresa May actually appointed a minister of loneliness.
And regarding America, what is there to believe in? For more than a generation, young Americans have been taught contempt for this country: Its past is essentially racist, genocidal and imperialist. So much for patriotism.
So, then, what is to give meaning to Americans who have lost all or most of the above? Something has to, because the need for meaning is as built in and as universal as the need for food.
The answer is self-evident: Whatever it is, it must provide meaning without being dependent on family, community, religion or patriotism.
And what is that? Leftism.
All of leftism (not liberalism, which affirms all the traditional meaning providers) consists of meaning providers that replace community, religion, America and even family (single women are a major, even dominant, demographic of the left).
For leftists, feminism, environmentalism, socialism and trans rights provide meaning. The life-filling meaning of leftism is most evident in the constant leftist use of the term &#8220;existential threat.&#8221; President Donald Trump &#8220;is posing an existential threat to America,&#8221; wrote leftist Frank Rich in the latest issue of New York Magazine. &#8220;Bloomberg, in Campaign Event, Calls Trump an &#8216;Existential Threat,'&#8221; ABC News headlined two months ago. A Mother Jones headline two weeks ago read, &#8220;Trump Is an &#8216;Existential&#8217; Threat: Ilana Glazer, Eric Holder, and 2020.&#8221; A ThinkProgress headline last July read, &#8220;The Existential Threat Trump Poses to the World Political Order Is a 2020 Campaign Issue.&#8221; The Sioux City Journal headlined last week, &#8220;Biden: Trump Represents &#8216;an Existential Threat to the Future of Our Country.'&#8221;
Fighting President Trump means fighting for the very existence of the world&#8217;s order and for democracy in America. What could possibly give those devoid of meaning more meaning than that?
Well, there is one other thing: fighting for the very existence of the world itself. That is the animating impulse of the left&#8217;s obsession with global warming. &#8220;(T)he world is going to end in 12 years if we don&#8217;t address climate change,&#8221; says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a recent CNN town hall that the &#8220;climate crisis&#8221; is an &#8220;existential threat to the planet.&#8221; There are as many assertions of fossil fuels posing an existential threat to Earth&#8217;s survival as there are leftists (and the many liberals who fear the left).
The proof that this alleged saving of democracy and the world from extinction are nothing more than left-wing meaning givers is this: The only communities who don&#8217;t believe this continue to possess all the traditional meaning givers. We don&#8217;t need the left&#8217;s substitutes.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Street lights.

PRAGER: The Question That Explains Almost Everything

Socialism

I began part one of &#8220;Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy?&#8221; with data showing the apparently unprecedentedly high rate of unhappiness among young people in America (and elsewhere, but I am focusing on America). The rates of suicide, self-injury, depression, mass shootings and loneliness (at all ages) are higher than ever recorded. It seems that Americans may have been happier, and certainly less lonely, during the Great Depression and World War II than today, even with today&#8217;s unprecedentedly high levels of health, longevity, education and material well-being.
There is, of course, no single explanation, and I listed a number of possible explanations: &#8220;Increased use of illicit drugs and prescription drug abuse, and less human interaction because of constant cellphone use are two widely offered, valid explanations. Less valid explanations include competition, grades anxiety, capitalism and income inequality. And then there are young people&#8217;s fears that because of global warming, they have a bleak, and perhaps no, future.&#8221;
But I do believe that a loss of values and meaning are the two greatest sources of unhappiness.
Among the values lost are those of communal associations. As the great foreign observer of early American life Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1831, Americans&#8217; unique strength derived largely from their participation in innumerable nongovernmental associations – professional, social, civil, political, artistic, philanthropic and, of course, religious.
But these have all dwindled as government has become ever larger. Whereas Americans got together and formed bonds of friendship through nongovernmental associations, through what organizations will Americans form friendships today? In a video presentation at its 2012 national convention, the Democratic Party offered its answer: &#8220;Government&#8217;s the only thing that we all belong to,&#8221; the narrator said.
Then there are traditional middle-class values, like getting married first and then having children. Today, a greater percentage of Americans are born to unwed mothers than ever before, and fewer people are marrying than ever before. There are, for the first time in our history, more single Americans than married Americans. While it is certainly possible to feel lonely in a marriage, people are far more likely to feel lonely without a spouse, and increasingly without children, than with a spouse and children.
And now we come to the biggest problem of all: the lack of meaning.
Aside from food, the greatest human need is meaning. I owe this insight to Viktor Frankl and his classic work &#8220;Man&#8217;s Search for Meaning,&#8221; which I first read in high school and which influenced me more than any book other than the Bible. Karl Marx saw man as primarily motivated by economics; Sigmund Freud saw man as primarily driven by the sexual drive; Charles Darwin, or at least his followers, see us as primarily driven by biology.
But Frankl was right.
As regards economics, poor people who have meaning can be happy, but wealthy people who lack meaning cannot be.
As regards sex, people who do not have a sexual life (such as priests, who keep their vow of chastity; many widowed and divorced older people; and others) but have meaning can be happy. Sexually active people who do not have meaning cannot be.
As regards biology, there is no evolutionary explanation for the need for meaning. Every creature except the human being does fine without meaning.
And nothing has given Americans – or any other people, for that matter – as much meaning as religion. But since World War II, God and religion have been relegated to the dustbin of history.
The result?
More than a third of Americans born after 1980 affiliate with no religion. This is unprecedented in American history; until this generation, the vast majority of Americans have been religious.
Maybe, just maybe, the death of religion – the greatest provider of meaning, while certainly not the only – is the single biggest factor in the increasing sadness and loneliness among Americans (and so many others). A 2016 study published in the American Medical Association JAMA Psychiatry journal found that American women who attended a religious service at least once a week were five times less likely to commit suicide. Common sense suggests the same is true of men.
The bottom line: The reason so many young people are depressed, unhappy and angry is the left has told them that God and Judeo-Christian religions are nonsense; their country is largely evil; their past is deplorable; and their future is hopeless.
That seems to be a major reason, if not the reason, for so much unhappiness: not capitalism, not inequality, not patriarchy, sexism, racism, homophobia or xenophobia but rather having no religion, no God, no spouse, no community, no country to believe in and, ultimately, no meaning. That explains much of the unprecedented unhappiness.
And it explains the widespread adoption of that secular substitute for traditional religion: leftism. But unlike Judaism and Christianity, leftism does not bring its adherents happiness.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Sadness.

PRAGER: Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy? Part 2

Judaism

Lonliness

Suicide

youth

Here are some unhappy statistics:
— In America between 1946 and 2006, the suicide rate quadrupled for males ages 15 to 24 and doubled for females the same age.
— In 1950, the suicide rate per 100,000 Americans was 11.4. In 2017, it was 14.
— According to Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, in the 1980s, there were 32 mass public shootings (which he defines as incidents in which four or more people are killed publicly with guns within 24 hours). In the 1990s, there were 42. In the first decade of this century, there were 28. In all the 1950s, when there were fewer controls on guns, there was one. Fifty years before that, in the 1900s, there were none.
— Reuters Health reported in 2019, &#8220;Suicidal thinking, severe depression and rates of self-injury among U.S. college students more than doubled over less than a decade, a nationwide study suggests.&#8221; The study co-author Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, said, &#8220;It suggests that something is seriously wrong in the lives of young people.&#8221;
This data is not only applicable to Americans. As social commentator Kay Hymowitz wrote in City Journal in 2019: &#8220;Loneliness, public-health experts tell us, is killing as many people as obesity and smoking. &#8230; Germans are lonely, the bon vivant French are lonely, and even the Scandinavians — the happiest people in the world, according to the UN&#8217;s World Happiness Report — are lonely, too. British prime minister Theresa May recently appointed a &#8216;Minister of Loneliness.&#8217; &#8230; consider Japan, a country now in the throes of an epidemic of kodokushi, roughly translated as &#8216;lonely deaths.&#8217; Local Japanese papers regularly publish stories about kinless elderly whose deaths go unnoticed until the telltale smell of maggot-eaten flesh alerts neighbors.&#8221;
Though people have more money, better health care, better health, better housing and more education, and live longer than at any time in history, they — especially young people — are unhappier than at any time since data collection began.
Why has this happened?
There are any number of reasons. Increased use of illicit drugs and prescription drug abuse, and less human interaction because of constant cellphone use are two widely offered, valid explanations. Less valid explanations include competition, grades anxiety, capitalism and income inequality. And then there are young people&#8217;s fears that because of global warming, they have a bleak, and perhaps no, future.
But the biggest reason may be the almost-complete loss of values and meaning over the last half-century.
Let&#8217;s begin with values.
America — and much of the rest of the West, but I will confine my discussion to America — was founded on two sets of values: Judeo-Christian and American. This combination created the freest, most opportunity-giving, most affluent country in world history. This is not chauvinism. It is fact. And it was regarded as such throughout the world. That is why France gave America — and only America — the Statue of Liberty. That&#8217;s why people from every country on Earth so wanted to immigrate to America — and still do.
Chief among American values was keeping government as small as possible. This enabled nongovernmental institutions — Kiwanis International, Rotary International and Lions Clubs International; book clubs; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; bowling leagues; music societies; and, of course, churches — to provide Americans with friends and to provide the neediest Americans with help. But as government has gotten ever larger, many of these nongovernmental groups have dwindled in number or simply disappeared.
Another set of values is what is referred to as &#8220;middle-class&#8221; or &#8220;bourgeois&#8221; values. These include getting married before one has a child; making a family; getting a job so as to be self-sustaining and sustain one&#8217;s family; self-discipline; delayed gratification; and patriotism.
All of these have been under attack by America&#8217;s elites, with the following results:
One in 5 young Americans has no contact with his or her father (not including fathers who have died).
In 2011, 72% of black children were born to unmarried mothers. In 1965, it was 24%. In 2012, 29% of white children were born to unmarried women. In 1965, it was 3.1%.
The majority of births to millennials are to unmarried women. Yet, according to a 2018 Cigna study, single parents are generally the loneliest Americans.
Marriage and family are the single greatest sources of happiness for most people. Yet, the percentage of American adults who have never been married is at a historic high. More Americans than ever will not get married, or they will marry so late they will not have children. In 1960, 9% of blacks ages 25 and older had never been married. In 2012, it was nearly 40%.
And I haven&#8217;t even mentioned the biggest problem: the loss of meaning in young people&#8217;s lives. I will discuss that in part two.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Depressed man.

PRAGER: Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy?

In my last column, &#8220;Newsweek Hits a New Low,&#8221; I wrote about Newsweek&#8217;s dishonest description of what I had said on one of my weekly PragerU &#8220;Fireside Chats.&#8221; A viewer had asked me to respond to a statement Anne Frank made in her epic Holocaust diary. Frank said, &#8220;Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.&#8221;
The Newsweek headline, &#8220;Conservative Radio Host Ridicules Anne Frank,&#8221; was simply a lie. In order for readers to appreciate the level of mendacity, I had my entire response transcribed and placed it in the column.
A few days later I received a message from Nancy Cooper, global editor-in-chief of Newsweek. She emailed me her personal cellphone number and asked me to call her. I did, and we had a good conversation. She agreed that what Newsweek published mischaracterized my remarks and corrected both the headline and the article, written by deputy editor Benjamin Fearnow.
She changed the headline to &#8220;Conservative Radio Host Counters Anne Frank&#8217;s View That People Are &#8216;Good at Heart.'&#8221;
In addition, she deleted Fearnow&#8217;s sentence characterizing me as having mocked Anne Frank. And she deleted another Fearnow falsehood: &#8220;He also brings up Nazi comparisons frequently on his radio program, The Dennis Prager Show, to criticize modern Democrats and liberals.&#8221;
I told Cooper that in 37 years of radio, I have never compared Democrats or liberals to Nazis; Fearnow had made that up out of whole cloth.
In its place, she wrote the truth: &#8220;He also brings up Nazi comparisons on his radio program, The Dennis Prager Show, saying the left &#8216;cheapens&#8217; Nazi evil by using the term to dismiss political opponents or that liberals focus on Nazism while failing to acknowledge the horrors wrought by Communism.&#8221;
The following notice now appears at the end of the article: &#8220;Update 1/8, 4:45 p.m. ET: The original headline on this story misrepresented Prager&#8217;s comments; the headline and story have been edited to reflect that Prager did not &#8216;ridicule&#8217; or &#8216;mock&#8217; Anne Frank but took issue with her view.&#8221;
As I wrote to Cooper, &#8220;Your attention to this says a lot about you and your hopes for Newsweek. Thank you.&#8221;
But the story doesn&#8217;t end there.
First, has Newsweek disciplined Fearnow in any way? (I never heard from Fearnow.)
Second, and more important, the original lie about me has taken on a life of its own. It was conveyed on numerous left-wing sites.
Wonkette, under the sarcastic headline &#8220;Dennis Prager Will Not Be Bullied by Anne Frank,&#8221; wrote a deceit-filled article about my comments about Anne Frank. At this writing, the column is followed by 654 reader comments — virtually every one of them repeating the lie started by Newsweek and continued by Wonkette.
There has not been a word on Wonkette about Newsweek&#8217;s correction.
The Daily Dot — &#8220;conceived as the Internet&#8217;s &#8216;hometown newspaper,&#8217; focuses on topics such as streaming entertainment, geek culture, memes, gadgets and social issues, such as LGBT, gender and race,&#8221; as Wikipedia describes — reprinted the original Newsweek charge.
There has not been a word on The Daily Dot about Newsweek&#8217;s correction.
Under the headline &#8220;Dennis Prager on Anne Frank: &#8216;I Don&#8217;t Get My Wisdom from Teenagers,'&#8221; the Patheos website&#8217;s Friendly Atheist page wrote, &#8220;Leave it to right-wing commentator Dennis Prager, founder of a fake online &#8216;university&#8217; &#8230; to dismiss Frank&#8217;s comment &#8230; because she was a child and therefore too dumb to understand anything.&#8221;
There has not been a word on Patheos about Newsweek&#8217;s correction.
Inquisitr, which claims 40 million readers a month, headlined its disparaging article &#8220;Conservative Pundit Dennis Prager Ridicules Anne Frank.&#8221;
There has not been a word on Inquistr about Newsweek&#8217;s correction.
Democratic Undergound&#8217;s headline read, &#8220;Conservative Radio Host Dennis Prager Ridicules Anne Frank.&#8221; It features a tweet from @Kokomothegreat that has 499 retweets.
There has not been a word on Democratic Underground or from Koko about Newsweek&#8217;s correction.
I note all of this to make three points.
First, as I have said for decades: While truth is a conservative value and a liberal value, it has never been a left-wing value.
Second, the left&#8217;s primary response to those with whom it differs is to smear.
Third, smears cannot be undone.
This was brilliantly brought home to me in a famous Jewish story I first heard when I was a student in yeshiva.
The tale is told of a Jew in Eastern Europe who had slandered his rabbi but soon regretted it. So, he went to his rabbi, told him what he had done, sincerely apologized and asked the rabbi&#8217;s forgiveness.
&#8220;Bring me two feather pillows,&#8221; the rabbi responded.
The man did.
&#8220;Am I now forgiven?&#8221; he asked.
&#8220;Now cut open the pillows,&#8221; the rabbi responded.
The man had no idea why the rabbi made these requests, but deeply wanting the rabbi&#8217;s forgiveness, he did as he was told.
&#8220;Am I now forgiven?&#8221; the man asked.
&#8220;Now let the feathers fly away,&#8221; the rabbi responded.
Once again, the man did as the rabbi requested.
&#8220;Am I now forgiven?&#8221; the exasperated man asked.
&#8220;Just do one more thing,&#8221; the rabbi responded. &#8220;Bring back the feathers.&#8221;
Benjamin Fearnow and the left-wing websites cannot bring back the feathers. Nor, apparently, do they want to.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; came to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Feather.

PRAGER: Newsweek Changed Its Article About Me. But …

Media Bias

Newsweek

If decent people working in mainstream American media want to know why many Americans do not trust them and are willing to use the term &#8220;fake news&#8221; to describe the mainstream media, I offer one of the most glaring examples of a lie in my lifetime.
Last week, Newsweek headlined the following: &#8220;Conservative Radio Host Ridicules Anne Frank: &#8216;I Don&#8217;t Get My Wisdom From Teenagers.'&#8221;
Now, imagine how that must have struck any reader not familiar with the &#8220;conservative radio host&#8221; or with what he actually said. &#8220;Ridicule Anne Frank&#8221; — what kind of terrible human being would do that?
Well, it turns out the &#8220;conservative radio host&#8221; was me. Yes, me — a religious Jew who has devoted much of his life to the welfare of the Jewish people, served on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, made the most widely viewed pro-Israel video in the world, written a book on anti-Semitism that is in its third printing, and founded a synagogue and a Jewish day school.
To understand how terrible a lie this is, you need to know what happened: Every week I do a video podcast for PragerU called &#8220;The Fireside Chat.&#8221; In it, I offer thoughts on life and then take questions from around the world (we have received questions from 52 countries). A few weeks ago, I received the following question from Sam in Meridian, Idaho: &#8220;On your most recent Fireside Chat, you said that people are not basically good. We&#8217;ve heard you discuss this topic before. Anne Frank is quoted as saying, &#8216;Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.&#8217; How do you respond to her quote?&#8221;
Here is my response (this is a word-for-word transcription, except for the words in parentheses added for clarity): &#8220;She wrote that in her diary, the most famous Holocaust document. (She was) a teenage girl, a Dutch Jewish girl, who hid with her family until they were betrayed by someone to the Nazis, who then shipped them to death camps. And she died, murdered by the Nazis in the death camps. She was about 16 years old, maybe 15. Her diary is very famous. It gives a face to the horror of the Holocaust.
&#8220;I know she wrote that, and my answer is it doesn&#8217;t matter that she wrote it. I don&#8217;t get my wisdom from teenagers. That she was a wonderful young woman and wrote an unbelievably powerful document that will last forever is beside the point. I don&#8217;t expect 16-year-olds, unless they grew up in a religious Jewish or Christian home (where it is taught as basic religious doctrine that people are not born basically good). She was a secular Jew. Most kids believe that (people are basically good). But it is not true. So, it has never been an issue for me — &#8216;Well, you disagree with Anne Frank.&#8217; So what?
&#8220;And, by the way, to be very serious for a moment, I would be very curious — I&#8217;ve thought about this a lot — if I were to be able to visit Anne Frank while in a concentration camp, would she have still believed that? We don&#8217;t know.&#8221;
Readers can watch the actual video <a href="https://www.prageru.com/video/ep-114-how-to-tackle-new-years-resolutions/">clip</a> (starting at 19:04).
Only someone who deliberately seeks to smear someone would claim that what I said ridicules Anne Frank.
The person who wrote this is Benjamin Fearnow, a deputy editor at Newsweek, who previously worked for the left-wing site Mediaite.
When I looked up Fearnow, I came across this December 2018 tweet from talk show host Mark Levin: &#8220;Newsweek&#8217;s Benjamin Fearnow is a very, very sick person.&#8221;
And Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, one of the most revered Jewish scholars in America — author of such Jewish classics as &#8220;Jewish Literacy&#8221; and &#8220;Biblical Literacy&#8221; — called me to say that Fearnow&#8217;s article saying I ridiculed Anne Frank is &#8220;the most despicable lie I recall reading in a mainstream news source.&#8221;
Yesterday, Newsweek published Fearnow&#8217;s column headlined, &#8220;Top Iranian Presidential Adviser Says Tehran&#8217;s &#8216;Sole Problem Is Trump,&#8217; Not Average American People.&#8221;
Apparently, Fearnow has chosen to serve as a useful idiot for the Iranian regime, which hates America, not only Trump. (Does Fearnow believe that the Iranian chant &#8220;death to Israel&#8221; only means &#8220;death to Netanyahu&#8221;?) The Iranian regime has gathered millions of Iranians to chant &#8220;death to America&#8221; since long before it ever heard of Donald Trump. It has been wishing death on us and killing Americans (not to mention Iranians) since it came into power in 1979. But Fearnow cites the Iranian dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, as having said last February that &#8220;&#8216;Death to America&#8217; means death to Trump, (National Security Adviser) John Bolton, and (Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo,&#8221; as if it were credible.
Meanwhile, multiple left-wing sites have picked up Fearnow&#8217;s and Newsweek&#8217;s lie that I ridiculed Anne Frank.
If Newsweek has any honor, it will remove Fearnow&#8217;s article and apologize to me.
But neither is likely. As I wrote 30 years ago, &#8220;Being on the left means never having to say you&#8217;re sorry.&#8221;
Next time someone challenges you for using the term &#8220;fake news&#8221; to describe mainstream media, just cite Newsweek and Fearnow.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; comes to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Fake news.

PRAGER: Newsweek Hits A New Low

Anne Frank

Fake News

It is not easy to understand what the Left — as opposed to liberals — stands for. If you ask a Christian what to read to learn the basics of Christianity, you will be told the Bible. If you ask a (religious) Jew, you will be told the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. If you ask a Mormon, you will be told the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Ask a Muslim, and you will be told the Quran.
But if you ask a leftist what one or two books you should read to understand leftism, every leftist will give you a different answer — or need some time to think it over. Few, if any, will suggest Marx&#8217;s &#8220;Das Kapital&#8221; because almost no leftists have read it and because you will either not finish the book or reject it as incoherent.
So, then, how is one to understand what leftism stands for?
The truth is it is almost impossible. What leftist in history would have ever imagined that to be a leftist, one would have to believe that men give birth or men have periods, or that it is fair to women to have to compete in sports with biological males who identify as females?
There are two primary reasons it is so difficult, if not impossible, to define leftism. One is that it ultimately stands for chaos:
— Open borders.
— &#8220;Nonbinary&#8221; genders.
— Nonsensical and scatological &#8220;art.&#8221;
— &#8220;Music&#8221; without tonality, melody or harmony.
— Drag Queen Story Hour for 5-year-olds.
— Rejection of the concept of better or worse civilizations.
— Rejection of the concept of better or worse art.
— Removal of Shakespeare&#8217;s picture from a university English department because he was a white male.
— The end of all use of fossil fuels — even in transportation (as per the recent recommendation by the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organization).
— The dismantling of capitalism, the economic engine that has lifted billions of people out of abject poverty.
And much more.
The other major reason it is impossible to define leftism is that it is emotion-based. Leftism consists of causes that give those who otherwise lack meaning something to cling to for meaning.
Two things about Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine&#8217;s 2019 person of the year, embody these explanations.
With regard to chaos, here is what Greta Thunberg wrote at the beginning of the month: &#8220;The climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fuelled it. We need to dismantle them all.&#8221;
Greta Thunberg, like all leftists, seeks to dismantle just about everything. As former President Barack Obama said five days before the 2008 election, &#8220;We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.&#8221;
As regards emotion and meaning, the Guardian reports, this is what Thunberg&#8217;s father just told the BBC: &#8220;Greta Thunberg&#8217;s father has opened up about how activism helped his daughter out of depression &#8230; how activism had changed the outlook of the teenager, who suffered from depression for &#8216;three or four years&#8217; before she began her school strike protest outside the Swedish parliament. She was now &#8216;very happy&#8217;, he said &#8230; &#8216;She stopped talking &#8230; she stopped going to school,&#8217; he said of her illness.&#8221;
The post-Judeo-Christian world the Left has created has left a vast number of the West&#8217;s citizens, especially more and more young people, with no meaning. This Grand-Canyon-sized hole is filled by leftist causes.
The fact is life is better, safer and more affluent, and offers more opportunities for more people, than ever before in history. Just about all emotionally stable, mature people should be walking around the West almost delirious at their good fortune. Americans in particular should feel this way. But leftists (again, as opposed to many liberals) are not usually emotionally stable and are certainly not mature. That is why depression among young Americans (and perhaps Swedes) is at the highest levels ever recorded. So, like Greta, they look to left-wing causes to find meaning and emotional fulfillment. Until she embraced climate crisis activism — a chance, as she sees it, to literally save the world — Greta Thunberg was so depressed &#8220;she stopped talking.&#8221; But thanks to climate activism and other left-wing activism, she is now &#8220;very happy&#8221; (an assessment I suspect many observers find hard to believe).
Feminism and &#8220;fighting patriarchy&#8221; (in an age when American women have more opportunities than ever before and more opportunities than women almost anywhere else in the world), fighting racism (in the least racist multiracial society in history), fighting white supremacy (which has almost disappeared from American life) and fighting on behalf of myriad other leftist causes — in other words, fundamentally transforming society — gives meaning to people with no meaning.
None of that is morally or rationally coherent. But it is very emotionally satisfying. Just ask Greta Thunberg&#8217;s dad.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is &#8220;The Rational Bible,&#8221; a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, &#8220;No Safe Spaces,&#8221; comes to theaters fall 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

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Dennis Prager

PRAGER: The Lockdown, Evangelicals And The Afterlife: A Response To Steven Pinker

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PRAGER: Has The Lockdown Worked?

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PRAGER: Even On COVID-19, Left And Right Are Divided

PRAGER: The Anti-Speech Pandemic

PRAGER: Suggestions For This Difficult Time

PRAGER: Why The Remedy May Be Worse Than The Disease

PRAGER: We Go From Hysteria To Hysteria

PRAGER: Why the Left Calls Good People Racist

PRAGER: A Response To 2 Secular Conservatives I Adore

PRAGER: The Question That Explains Almost Everything

PRAGER: Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy? Part 2

PRAGER: Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy?

PRAGER: Newsweek Changed Its Article About Me. But …

PRAGER: Newsweek Hits A New Low

PRAGER: Greta Thunberg: A Living Explanation Of The Left

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PRAGER: The Lockdown, Evangelicals And The Afterlife: A Response To Steven Pinker

PRAGER: Some Thoughts About Being Safe

PRAGER: The Worldwide Lockdown May Be The Greatest Mistake In History

PRAGER: Our Dress Rehearsal For A Police State

PRAGER: If Half The Country’s Deaths Were In Montana, Would New York Shut Down?

PRAGER: Has The Lockdown Worked?

PRAGER: Maybe Nature Shouldn’t Be Worshipped After All

PRAGER: Even On COVID-19, Left And Right Are Divided

PRAGER: The Anti-Speech Pandemic

PRAGER: Suggestions For This Difficult Time

PRAGER: Why The Remedy May Be Worse Than The Disease

PRAGER: We Go From Hysteria To Hysteria

PRAGER: Why the Left Calls Good People Racist

PRAGER: A Response To 2 Secular Conservatives I Adore

PRAGER: The Question That Explains Almost Everything

PRAGER: Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy? Part 2

PRAGER: Why Are So Many Young People Unhappy?

PRAGER: Newsweek Changed Its Article About Me. But …

PRAGER: Newsweek Hits A New Low

PRAGER: Greta Thunberg: A Living Explanation Of The Left

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