As long ago as the 1970s, I came to a major realization. While watching fellow students at Columbia University demonstrate not just against the war in Vietnam but against America — &#8220;Amerika,&#8221; as many spelled it, the &#8220;imperialist,&#8221; &#8220;colonialist,&#8221; &#8220;mass-murdering&#8221; country — I kept wondering what made these people so hostile to the freest country in human history.
Then, one day, as a result of my having attended a yeshiva (an Orthodox Jewish day school) through high school, the reason became clear. Half of each school day was devoted to religious studies in Hebrew, and the other half was devoted to secular studies in English. This meant that I had been immersed in a religious worldview until college.
Though it was Jewish, this worldview could also be called &#8220;Judeo-Christian.&#8221; Students at traditionally Christian schools were immersed in essentially the same worldview. We were all taught that the most important battle we need to wage in life was with our own nature. Jews and Christians learned from the same Scripture that &#8220;the will of man&#8217;s heart is evil from his youth&#8221; (Genesis 8:21).
Therefore, being a good person involved a constant battle with our flawed human nature: our urges, appetites and innate weaknesses. This battle was also the only real route to a better world. Every individual had to work on him or herself to be decent, strong, courageous and self-controlled, and every parent had to work, first and foremost, on raising such people.
One day, I came to realize that this was not how the vast majority of my fellow students were raised. They were raised to believe that the great battle in life was not with one&#8217;s nature but with outside forces — with parents, in many cases, but most of all with society, i.e., America.
All of us, whatever our political outlook, have to confront personal failure, loss, disappointment and unhappiness. When confronted with these challenges, religious Jews and Christians are taught to look inward for both the primary source of their problems and the primary solutions to those problems: What have I done wrong? What can I change in my life to solve my problems?
Of course, some nonreligious liberals and conservatives also have this attitude. But most of them likely inherited it from religious parents or, at the very least, from parents who were raised in a religious home or a home that retained the remnants of such an upbringing, which was common in pre-1960s America. (It is therefore questionable how many secular parents will succeed in passing this attitude on to their children.)
The Left, which proudly rejects Judeo-Christian values, has adopted the opposite of the Judeo-Christian view regarding pain in life. Leftists (as opposed to liberals) hold outside forces responsible for their pain. That is the reason for the litany of left-wing enemies: capitalism, patriarchy, misogyny, systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, sexism, xenophobia.
So, then, if you are an unhappy American woman, you can work on yourself and your nature, or you can blame sexism and patriarchy, i.e., men, for your pained state.
If you are an unhappy gay American, you can work on yourself, or you can blame society&#8217;s homophobia for your unhappiness.
And, most significantly, if you are an unhappy black American, you can work on yourself and your life, or you can blame systemic racism and whites for your anger and unfulfilled life.
All this explains why the Left encourages every group except for white, Christian, heterosexual males to regard themselves as oppressed. The more oppressed women, gays, blacks, etc., see themselves, the more they are alienated from America and its values, and the more they gravitate Left. In light of this, I came up with a riddle:
Q: What do you call a happy black person?
A: A Republican.
Without an exception I can recall, over the course of decades, I have guessed the political affiliation of every black caller to my radio show within a minute of talking to them. If they sounded happy, I knew they were a Republican; if they were angry, I knew they were a Democrat. This has held true for male and female callers.
America has been a great country because it was built on the belief that we must all fight against our natures (and fight for our country). It is difficult to overstate the damage the Left is doing to this country by abandoning the fundamental Judeo-Christian teaching that we must fight our natures in order to lead a more decent and happy life and replacing it with the belief that we must battle America instead. This replacement inevitably leads to a population of unhappy, ungrateful and mean-spirited human beings — precisely the type of individuals you see rioting and looting, the type of elected officials who do nothing to stop rioters and looters, the columnists and academics who devote their lives to spewing hate-filled lies about America, and the Twitter mobs who comprise the toxic cancel culture.
It will lead to what the Left acknowledges it seeks: the end of America as we have known it.
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; will be released to home entertainment nationwide on September 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Bible

PRAGER: Leftists Blame America. Decent People Blame Themselves.

Judeo-Christian Values

Leftism

Four months ago, I wrote a column titled &#8220;The Worldwide Lockdown May Be the Greatest Mistake in History.&#8221; I explained that &#8220;&#8216;mistake&#8217; and &#8216;evil&#8217; 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.&#8221;
Regarding the economic catastrophe in America and around the world — especially among the world&#8217;s poor who are dependent upon America and other first-world countries for their income through exports and tourism — I wrote, &#8220;It is panic and hysteria, not the coronavirus, that created this catastrophe.&#8221;
Unfortunately, I was right.
The world should have followed Sweden&#8217;s example. That country never locked down and has even kept children under 16 in school the entire time. As Reuters reported on July 15, the number of Swedish children between 1 and 19 years of age who have died of COVID-19 is zero. And the percentage of children who contracted the illness was the exact same in Sweden as it was in Finland, which locked down its schools.
As regards teachers, Sweden&#8217;s Public Health Agency reported that &#8220;a comparison of the incidence of COVID-19 in different professions suggested no increased risk for teachers.&#8221; Nevertheless, with few exceptions, teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere refuse to enter a classroom that has students in it. Their disdain for their profession has been superseded only by that of the Los Angeles teachers union, which announced that teachers will not resume teaching until the police are defunded.
People who defend lockdowns and closing schools point out that Sweden has the eighth-highest death rate per million in the Western world. But, needless to say, this has no bearing at all on the issue of whether Sweden was right to keep schools open or whether our country was wrong to close them, let alone keep them closed now. The overwhelming majority of deaths from COVID-19 in Sweden were among people over 70 years of age, and most of those were people over 80 and with compromised immune systems.
Reuters reported that three separate studies, including one by UNICEF, &#8220;showed that Swedish children fared better than children in other countries during the pandemic, both in terms of education and mental health.&#8221;
For more than a month, Sweden has had almost no deaths from COVID-19 while the entire society remains open and almost no one wears masks. (In Holland, too, almost no one wears masks.) For all intents and purposes, the virus is over in Sweden.
I live in California, a state governed by that most dangerous of leaders: a fool with unlimited power. Despite the fact that California ranks 28th among the 50 states in deaths per million, Gov. Gavin Newsom has destroyed and continues to destroy tens of thousands of small businesses and untold numbers of livelihoods. His continuing to forbid — a half-year after the onset of the pandemic — indoor dining in restaurants is leading to a projected permanent closure of approximately 1 in every 3 restaurants in the state. The same catastrophic destruction will likely affect retail businesses and services such as hair and nail salons. But all this human tragedy — not to mention increased depression and suicides among the young and increased abuse of children and partners — means nothing to Newsom, to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti or to the Los Angeles Times, whose editors and columnists continue to advocate for the lockdown while they receive their salaries.
Why can people eat with no mask in an airplane — inches, not six feet, from strangers — but cannot eat in a California restaurant, which is so much bigger than the inside of an airplane, while sitting six feet from others? Because Newsom ordered it, the Los Angeles Times supports it and, like sheep, Californians have accepted it.
According to the California Association of Museums, &#8220;Museums are losing over $22 million a day due to the statewide quarantine. As of August 1, 2020, California museums have lost more than $2.9 billion in revenue. Museums have a $6.55 billion financial impact on California&#8217;s economy, support 80,722 jobs, and generated $492 million in tax revenues for the State of California in 2017 and over $1 billion in federal taxes.&#8221;
And the American Alliance of Museums issued results from a survey on July 22, 2020, that warned 1 out of every 3 museums may shutter forever as funding sources and financial reserves run dry.
On Aug. 3, The Wall Street Journal wrote, &#8220;In March &#8230; There was broad public support for the prudent goals of preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed and buying scientists time to develop therapies.&#8221; But the Left — the media and Democratic governors and mayors — immediately moved the goal posts to &#8220;bending the curve&#8221; and &#8220;saving one life,&#8221; enabling them to get away with destroying lives and livelihoods.
I conclude with the words of a Swedish medical doctor, Sebastian Rushworth:
&#8220;Covid is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more. I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won&#8217;t have been any point in shutting down in the first place &#8230; Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.&#8221;
The lockdown is a crime. But even more upsetting is that it is supported by so many Americans. This country is unrecognizable to those of us who lived through the 1968-1970 pandemic, which killed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 100,000 Americans — the 2020 equivalent of 170,000 Americans. Nothing shut down. Not one mask was worn.
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; will be released to home entertainment nationwide on Sept. 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

COVID closure sign

PRAGER: The Lockdown Has Gone From A Mistake To A Crime

California

Coronavirus

COVID-19

lockdown

On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, I announced on my national radio show that, &#8220;While I did not vote for Barack Obama, he is my president, and I wish him well.&#8221; I added that I was delighted a black man had been elected president of the United States, that perhaps this would not only help black-white relations get even better than they were but also help put to rest the notion of a racist America.
As it turned out, neither hope was achieved. In fact, in large measure due to Obama, race relations deteriorated during his presidency. Obama turned out to be Black Lives Matter Light. As Politico wrote in 2014, Al Sharpton, perhaps the most consistent race-baiter of the last half-century, &#8220;became Obama&#8217;s go-to man on race.&#8221; According to The Washington Post, Sharpton visited the Obama White House 72 times.
Obama is idolized by liberals and leftists because he was an activist liberal whose goal, in his own words, right before he was first elected, was &#8220;fundamentally transforming the United States of America.&#8221; And because they love his cool, even-tempered, regal style.
That style masks a demagoguery that far surpasses our current president. It was on display last week when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
Obama: &#8220;I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care. But he never did. &#8230; Donald Trump hasn&#8217;t grown into the job because he can&#8217;t.&#8221;
These ad hominem attacks by a previous president on his successor are unique in my lifetime. Perhaps they are unique in modern American history. George W. Bush, for example, never said a critical word of Barack Obama, despite the latter&#8217;s frequent attacks on Bush&#8217;s presidency.
Obama: &#8220;And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone.&#8221;
America ranks tenth in deaths per million. Are the greater proportion of deaths per million in countries such as Belgium, Spain, the U.K., Italy and Sweden the result of corrupt and/or inept leaders? Was President Donald Trump responsible, for example, for the decision made by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to order nursing homes to accept COVID-19 cases, causing the virus to sweep through the elderly in those facilities, resulting in at least 6,000 deaths (and likely many more that New York is hiding from the official count)?
Regarding &#8220;millions of jobs gone,&#8221; they are gone overwhelmingly because of the lockdowns ordered by state governors and mayors, not the virus. Lockdowns, we were told, would last two weeks to &#8220;flatten the curve,&#8221; but they continue six months later in many Democratically controlled cities and states.
Obama: &#8220;And our democratic institutions threatened like never before.&#8221;
Obama offers not one example of this or of his many other attacks on Trump. There is a reason. Obama has always attacked straw men. During his presidency, I analyzed about 20 of his speeches. They and his off-the-cuff comments were always characterized by straw-men arguments.
Even The New York Times, in 2009, when it still published occasional articles that deviated from the Left, featured an article by Helene Cooper (who is black), its then-White House correspondent, titled &#8220;Some Obama Enemies Are Made Totally of Straw.&#8221; In it, Cooper cited example after example of statements ostensibly made by others, but actually made up by Obama — which he then proceeded to shoot down. This characterized his approach to discourse throughout his presidency and continued with last week&#8217;s speech at the DNC.
Obama: &#8220;Joe and Kamala will restore our standing in the world — and as we&#8217;ve learned from this pandemic, that matters.&#8221;
Obama, like all on the Left, equate America&#8217;s &#8220;standing in the world&#8221; with its president&#8217;s standing with the Left. Nonleftists do not. Last year, when the courageous Hong Kong demonstrators waved a flag representing liberty, they waved the flag of the United States of America. Apparently, America&#8217;s standing with them is pretty high.
Obama: &#8220;(Joe and Kamala) believe that in a democracy, the right to vote is sacred.&#8221;
Another straw man. Who doesn&#8217;t believe &#8220;the right to vote is sacred&#8221; — those who insist on people having an ID when they vote, as voters do in virtually every other country? Or is it those who don&#8217;t believe in sending tens of millions of ballots to people who never signed up to receive an absentee ballot?
Obama: &#8220;I understand why a new immigrant might look around this country and wonder whether there&#8217;s still a place for him here.&#8221;
Really? What new legal immigrant thinks that way? Or is Obama dishonestly conflating legal with illegal immigrants? The answer is, of course, he is (though even illegal immigrants apparently believe there&#8217;s a place for them here; isn&#8217;t that, after all, why they come?).
Obama: &#8220;This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that&#8217;s what it takes to win.&#8221;
How has this administration shown that? Why didn&#8217;t Obama provide a single example to sustain this extraordinary charge? Anyway, it seems to many Americans that those who lie to the country for two years about Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, impeach a president solely for political reasons, dedicate all news reporting to the removal of a president, smear and lie about a decent man nominated for the Supreme Court, corrupt the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act system for political ends, and politicize the CIA and FBI are the ones who &#8220;will tear our democracy down if that&#8217;s what it takes to win.&#8221;
Obama&#8217;s speech offered very little of substance about the man it was directed against, but it said much about the man who delivered it.
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; will be released to home entertainment nationwide on September 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe"> member</a>.

Barack Obama

PRAGER: A Demagogue Named Barack Obama: His DNC Speech

Democratic National Convention

Donald Trump

More than two years ago, I wrote a column titled &#8220;Whatever the Left Touches It Ruins.&#8221; I listed eight examples:
— The universities.
— The arts: music, art and architecture.
— Sports.
— Mainstream Judaism, Protestantism and Catholicism.
— Race relations.
— Women&#8217;s happiness.
— Children&#8217;s innocence.
— And, perhaps most disturbingly, America&#8217;s commitment to free speech.
One should now add the sciences.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hastened the Left’s ruining of science. This had already begun with the Left’s attacks on &#8220;objectivity,&#8221; the most essential value in science — the very thing that makes science possible. The Left declares objectivity, which it now puts in quotation marks, a characteristic of white supremacy.
One example is that science departments in universities throughout America have declared their intention to hire physicists, biologists and other scientists based on gender and race, not scientific expertise. A few years ago, all five candidates on the shortlist of applicants to the physics department of the University of California at San Diego were females, &#8220;leading one male candidate with a specialty in extragalactic physics,&#8221; reported Heather Mac Donald, &#8220;to wonder why the school had even solicited applications from Asian and white men.&#8221;
Mac Donald updated her findings in a piece published this week: &#8220;The dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, pronounced himself &#8216;absolutely dedicated&#8217; to turning the engineering school into an &#8216;anti-racist organization.'&#8221;
A recent example was the declaration by more than 1,000 doctors and other health care providers that despite all their previous warnings against public gatherings as health risks: &#8220;As public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings (mass protests against racism) as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health.&#8221;
Yet another example of leftism overwhelming medical science is the medical profession&#8217;s denial of the benefits of hydroxychloroquine and zinc in the early days of a COVID-19 infection. That physicians, including the Food and Drug Administration, would label a drug dangerous that has been used safely for more than half a century, and by many thousands (such as those with rheumatoid arthritis or lupus) every day for decades, is a medical and moral scandal. The medical profession has placed politics not only ahead of science but also ahead of saving lives. The medical profession, the FDA and the CDC have lost the faith of half of the American people and, over time, will lose the faith of the majority of Americans. It is difficult to envision the medical profession regaining its credibility in this generation.
One of the world&#8217;s most prestigious medical and scientific journals, The Lancet in the U.K., withdrew an article it had published that dismissed the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 patients. The article contained made-up data. As The New York Times reported, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor in chief of The Lancet, called the paper retracted by his journal a &#8220;fabrication&#8221; and &#8220;a monumental fraud.&#8221;
The journal published the fraudulent study about the alleged dangers of hydroxychloroquine because of pressure from pharmaceutical companies, which have nothing to gain financially from widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, a cheap, generic drug, and because the journal loathes President Donald Trump, who, when the first reports of successful treatment with hydroxychloroquine surfaced, had announced use of the drug could save lives. Horton had labelled Trump&#8217;s withdrawal of U.S. funding of the World Health Organization &#8220;a crime against humanity&#8221; after the WHO&#8217;s politicization of the coronavirus, including behaving as a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party when it condemned Trump&#8217;s Jan. 31 ban on travel from China.
The number of Americans killed by the medical boards, the pharmaceutical boards, the FDA and the CDC for not allowing doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine in the early days following a patient&#8217;s diagnosis with COVID-19 and outside of a hospital setting, and the number killed by the doctors who could but would not prescribe hydroxychloroquine, is likely in the tens of thousands. On my radio show, Yale University epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch said, &#8220;Because we were blocked from using it (hydroxychloroquine) in the United States to the present point, probably at least 100,000 people have died.&#8221;
Based on the retracted study in The Lancet, The Washington Post headlined &#8220;Hydroxychloroquine Drug Promoted by Trump as Coronavirus &#8216;Game-Changer&#8217; Increasingly Linked to Deaths.&#8221; And social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter immediately remove any citation of a scientist who promotes hydroxychloroquine.
A fourth example is the American Psychological Association, or the APA, choosing leftism over psychology in declaring, &#8220;40 years of research (show that) traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.&#8221;
The one good thing to come out of the APA&#8217;s pathologizing masculinity is that people searching for a competent psychotherapist for themselves or their child now have an easy method by which to identify the incompetent: Simply ask the prospective therapist if he or she agrees with the APA statement. If they do, or if they merely hesitate to distance themselves from it, you know you want another therapist.
Forthcoming columns will deal with more areas of life ruined by the Left, including, most troubling of all, America itself.
As seen in their treatment of the statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the Left can tear down, but it cannot build.
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; will be released to home entertainment nationwide on Sept. 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Person in lab

PRAGER: Everything The Left Touches It Ruins. Now Add Science.

Science

Americans have long been proud of the fact that, unlike European countries, America never went the route of totalitarianism as embodied in communism, fascism and Nazism.
This achievement may be coming to an end.
In order to understand why, it is first necessary to understand why European countries embraced — or fell victim to — totalitarian doctrines.
Until World War I, the primary beliefs that gave life meaning, both on a national and personal level, were Judeo-Christian religions and patriotism (love of one&#8217;s nation). What gave people moral guidance were Judeo-Christian values.
For most Europeans of the younger generation, World War I, with its seemingly senseless slaughter of millions, ended belief in Christianity and, in many cases, ended the people&#8217;s faith in their nations. God was deemed absent; religion was deemed unnecessary; and national identity was widely seen as a cause of the war.
That left a void that was almost immediately filled by communism, fascism and Nazism.
In Russia, World War I led directly to the Russian Revolution. Even before the war ended, in 1917, the czar was overthrown, and later that year, the Bolsheviks (the Russian communists) took over. As awful as the czar was, there was far more freedom under him than there was in the Soviet Union until the fall of communism 72 years later, not to mention the murder of more people — 20 to 40 million — under the Soviet regime.
In Italy, the rise of fascism followed World War I. And in Germany, the Nazis came to power just 15 years after the end of the Great War. Nazism conquered most of the European continent during WWII, and after Germany&#8217;s defeat in 1945, the Soviets imposed communism over all of Eastern Europe.
Though there were communists, communist fellow travelers, Nazi sympathizers, racists and anti-Semites in the United States, neither communism nor fascism nor Nazism took root here. The primary reason was that, unlike most Europeans, Americans did not lose their faith in Judeo-Christian religions and values or in America after World War I. America remained so religious that, in 1954, the words &#8220;under God&#8221; were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance recited daily in American schools.
However, by the 1950s, faith in America, Christianity and what we call bourgeois middle-class values was largely limited to older Americans. The post-World War II baby-boomer generation was already being indoctrinated in secularism and anti-Americanism. As early as 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that school prayer was unconstitutional.
By the late 1960s, vast numbers of baby boomers were attending demonstrations that were as much against America — routinely characterized as an imperialist and colonialist aggressor country with an evil military — as they were against the war in Vietnam. It was not uncommon to see America spelled &#8220;Amerikkka&#8221; or &#8220;Amerika&#8221; at protests and in graffiti.
When I was in graduate school at Columbia University in the early 1970s, I was taught that men and women are not inherently different from one another and that the Cold War was between two superpowers (equally at fault), not between freedom and tyranny.
Another generation has passed, and the post-Christian, left-wing baby boomers have come close to achieving complete success. The mainstream print and electronic media, universities, high schools and elementary schools, the arts and now sports have all been conquered by the Left. Except for sports, from the beginning of the 20th century, they were almost all liberal, but now they are Left.
We now have the answer to the question: What will happen to America if Americans lose faith in God and country as the Europeans did after World War I? What will happen to America when Christianity dies as it did in Europe after World War I?
The way things now look, America may have its bout with some totalitarian doctrine — almost surely some form of leftism. Liberty has never been a left-wing value. From Lenin on, wherever the Left has come to power, it has suppressed liberty, beginning with free speech. Already, despite a Republican president and a Republican Senate, America has less free speech than at any time in its history. Exactly one year ago, I testified before a Senate subcommittee and wrote an op-ed piece for The Wall Street Journal about YouTube (owned by Google) placing more than 100 Prager University, or PragerU, videos on its restricted list.
And things have gotten much worse. Last week, PragerU was locked out of its Twitter account for retweeting a press conference of eight physicians in Washington, D.C., which had already received 17 million views, and Facebook has just informed us that if we even cite studies that show possible benefits of hydroxychloroquine (with zinc) in the early stages of a patient with COVID-19, we will lose our Facebook account.
And then there is the &#8220;cancel culture&#8221; — which is merely a euphemism for leftist suppression of dissent. People are booted from internet platforms, fired from their jobs or have their reputations smeared and their businesses ruined for differing with the Left — on anything.
We are also undergoing a nonviolent (as of now) version of Mao Zedong&#8217;s Cultural Revolution, with individuals forced to issue humiliating public recantations of their beliefs and attend reeducation sessions (we don&#8217;t yet have reeducation camps, but they should not be ruled out as a possibility if the Left is in control).
Another communist norm taking root in America is the rewriting of the American past. We are living a famous Soviet dissident joke: &#8220;In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it is the past that is always changing.&#8221;
On almost all social issues and many economic ones, the American Left is more radical than the Left in Europe. Europeans across the political spectrum are more wary of ideological fanaticism because of the vast scale of death and suffering that resulted from communism, fascism and Nazism.
One might say that Europe was inoculated against fanaticism. Europeans are more preoccupied with working less, traveling more and being taken care of than with ideological movements. But America, which has not suffered under fanatical, irrational, liberty-depriving ideologies, has not been inoculated.
Without such a vaccination, what replaced Christianity in Europe may well do the same in America.
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; will be released to home entertainment nationwide on September 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

American flag

PRAGER: Why America Is In Real Danger

Communism

What are the two most hated countries in the world?
America and Israel.
Who hates both America and Israel?
The left (and Islamists).
And why is that? Why does the left (not liberals, the left) hate America and Israel?
In &#8220;Why the Jews; The Reason for Antisemitism,&#8221; a book I co-authored with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin in 1983 (the latest edition was published in 2016), we compared hatred of America with hatred of Jews.
This is what we wrote. It precisely explains what is happening in America today.
&#8220;Perhaps the best way to understand the admiration and resentment elicited by the quality of Jewish life is to compare the reactions of the world to America&#8217;s quality of life. No other country has so many people seeking to move there. At the same time, no country, with the exception of Israel, is the target of so many hateful and false attacks.
&#8220;The United States, because of its success and its ideals, challenges many people throughout the world. How did America, a nation composed largely of those rejected by other societies (&#8216;The wretched refuse of your teeming shore&#8217; declare the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty), become the most affluent, freest, most powerful, and most influential society in the world? Americans generally attribute this success to the values of America&#8217;s founding generations (such as individual liberty, religious tolerance, Judeo-Christian morality, and secular government), to a work ethic, and to the subsequent waves of immigrants who embraced these values. Enemies of America attribute it to the country&#8217;s natural resources, just as many people attribute Jewish success to their natural resource, alleged greater innate intelligence. Others claim that through capitalist exploitation, America cheated poorer countries, paralleling charges that Jewish success has been attained through economic &#8216;bloodsucking.&#8217; Still others develop an imperialist version of America&#8217;s past and present, similar to the anti-Jewish charge of a world Jewish conspiracy.
&#8220;But the United States is hardly the only society with great natural resources, and it has been the least imperialistic of the world&#8217;s powers. America&#8217;s values, not unfair resource distribution or world exploitation, have made the United States better, just as Judaism and its values, not genetic advantage or economic conspiracies, account for the quality of life led by Jews. The two people&#8217;s quality of life has provoked similar reactions — many admire them, and many resent them.&#8221;
Just like the Jews, America is hated because it is successful. For over a century, it has been the most successful country in the world — in virtually every way. If having had slavery was a real issue in the left&#8217;s anti-Americanism, the left would hate the Arab world and Latin American countries such as Brazil more than it hates the United States. While The New York Times and other left-wing institutions are preoccupied with slavery in America, they ignore — out of ideological nonconcern or out of sheer ignorance — the vastly larger number of Africans enslaved by Muslim and South American nations.
Of the more than 12 million African slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere, only about 3% — between 306,000 and 380,000 — were sent to the United States. The other 97% were sent to the Caribbean and Brazil. And the slaves in the U.S. South lived longer and made larger families than the slaves of Latin America. Yet, the U.S. is singled out for hatred. Why? Because the left doesn&#8217;t resent Brazil. Brazil is not an object of envy.
Likewise, there is no left-wing hatred of the Arab world, which enslaved far more blacks than the North and South Americas combined did. The internationally recognized expert on African history, Senegalese anthropologist Tidiane N&#8217;Diaye, wrote: &#8220;Most people still have the so-called Transatlantic (slave) trade by Europeans into the New World in mind. But in reality the Arab-Muslim slavery was much greater. &#8230; The Arab Muslims were the most murderous of all those involved in the slave trade.&#8221; Part of that murderous treatment of African slaves involved castrating the males so they could not reproduce. And the women and girls were traded as sex slaves.
Where is the leftist anger at the Arab and Muslim world? There is, of course, none. On the contrary, the left protects the Muslim and Arab world against moral criticism.
The left hates America for its success and influence on the world, just as anti-Semites hated Jews for their success and influence on the world.
The left doesn&#8217;t hate America because it is bad. It hates America because it is good. If the left hated evil, it would love America and hate its enemies.
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

PRAGER: Anti-Americanism: The New Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism

United States

If you take black and white left-wing rhetoric seriously, blacks are not human beings like members of other races. They are first and foremost black; they are human beings defined before anything else by their color — not their humanity, their personality, their character, their mind or their heart. So much so that, according to white and black leftists, if you dissent from this racist view, you are now labelled racist.
The idiocy and inhumanity (literally) of this, the &#8220;progressive&#8221; view of black people, is easily demonstrated. Do any blacks see themselves first as black? When a black man, let&#8217;s call him James, looks into the mirror, does he first see a black person, or does he see James? When a white woman, let&#8217;s call her Karen (I&#8217;m playing with the left here), looks into the mirror, does she first see a white person, or does she see Karen? Does any human being first see his or her color?
Of course not. Yet, we are supposed to believe that the most important thing about a black individual is that he or she is black. And if we do not honor that fact — if we aim to be &#8220;colorblind&#8221; — then we are labelled racist.
This dehumanizing nonsense goes for racial truth these days. Thus, for example, we who are not black are supposed to acknowledge that we cannot possibly see the world the way a black person sees the world; we cannot possibly understand what it is like to be black. This is part of the dogma the left imposes on society through the media, through cancel culture (say that you are colorblind and you might lose your job and your reputation), and through racial sensitivity training seminars at colleges and in the workplace.
But all this does is promulgate the view that blacks are inherently different from all other people. As a result, the only way the left&#8217;s view of blacks differs from that of white supremacists is that the latter believe blacks are inherently inferior, whereas the left believes blacks are inherently different. But both the left and the white supremacists agree that race contains immutable characteristics.
Aside from its inherent racism, the progressive view of blacks is pablum. No one can see the world through another&#8217;s eyes. No one can fully understand what it is like to be any other human being. Do all whites understand how other whites see the world? One of the ongoing jokes in the public dialogues I have with Adam Carolla around the country is how much we think alike despite the fact that our backgrounds could hardly be more different.
Other than being white and male, we have essentially nothing in common. He is an atheist; I am a religious believer. He is Italian; I&#8217;m a Jew. He grew up poor and on food stamps in Los Angeles; I grew up in a solid middle-class home in Brooklyn. He had little formal education and never went to college; I grew up in a house of intellectuals and went to an Ivy League graduate school. Even though I cannot &#8220;relate&#8221; to his experience or he to mine, we are nevertheless very close because, in addition to that intangible thing that creates friendships, we have the same values.
On the other hand, I am a Jew, and George Soros is a Jew. Other than the same ethnic ancestry, we have absolutely nothing in common. I have far more in common with the black conservative intellectual Larry Elder. The notion that race or ethnicity bonds people is both stupid and racist.
The prominent black conservative John McWhorter, a Columbia professor, just wrote a review of &#8220;White Fragility,&#8221; the book the left most frequently recommends to explain America&#8217;s alleged systemic racism. The title? &#8220;The Dehumanizing Condescension of &#8216;White Fragility.'&#8221;
McWhorter writes:
&#8220;One of America&#8217;s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract.&#8221;
&#8220;The book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us.&#8221;
(I suspect it was The Atlantic&#8217;s choice to capitalize &#8220;black&#8221;; the syndicators of my own column once changed &#8220;black&#8221; to &#8220;Black&#8221; because they follow the Associated Press&#8217; rules for English.)
&#8220;&#8216;White Fragility&#8217; is the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult.&#8221;
&#8220;A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people.&#8221;
&#8220;Few books about race have more openly infantilized Black people than this supposedly authoritative tome. Or simply dehumanized us.&#8221;
&#8220;Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people. The sad truth is that anyone falling under the sway of this blinkered, self-satisfied, punitive stunt of a primer has been taught, by a well-intentioned but tragically misguided pastor, how to be racist in a whole new way.&#8221;
McWhorter understands that to see blacks the way the white and black left want people to see them is to dehumanize blacks. If blacks are black before they are human — if no nonblacks can relate to blacks, disagree with blacks or want to see past color to the person&#8217;s heart — black-nonblack relations will have been set back a half-century.
Incredibly, beginning this coming year, thanks to progressive teachers, there will be mandatory reading of racist tracts like &#8220;White Fragility&#8221; to dehumanize blacks. That any black would see this as progress is worthy of tears.
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 in the fall of 2019. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

Broken glass

PRAGER: The Dehumanization Of Blacks

African American community

White Fragility

The left-wing charge that America is a racist country is the greatest national libel since the Blood Libel against the Jews. America is, in fact, the least racist multiracial, multiethnic country in world history.
Neither the claim that America is a racist society nor the claim that it is the least racist country can be empirically proven. Both are assessments. But honest people do need to provide arguments for their position. I have found every argument that America is racist, let alone &#8220;systemically&#8221; racist, wanting. For example, the police almost never kill unarmed blacks, and on the rare occasions they do (about 15 times a year), there is almost always a valid reason (as in the infamous 2014 case in Ferguson, Missouri); police kill more unarmed whites than blacks; the reason there are proportionately so many more blacks in prison is that blacks disproportionately commit violent crimes; and so on.
There are very powerful arguments against the charge that America is a racist society.
I offered one in my column last week:
No. 1: If there is so much racism in America, why are there so many false claims of racism and outright race hoaxes?
I offered 15 recent examples. Moreover, there were probably no racist hoaxes when America really was racist, just as there were no anti-Semitic hoaxes in 1930s Germany, when there was rampant anti-Semitism. You need hoaxes when the real thing is hard to find.
No. 2: The constant references to slavery.
If there were a great deal of racism in America today, there would be no reason to constantly invoke slavery and the Confederacy. The very fact that The New York Times, the leader in racist dishonesty, felt it necessary to issue its &#8220;1619 Project,&#8221; which seeks to replace 1776 as the founding of America with 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in America, is a perfect illustration of the point. The fact that &#8220;The 1619 Project&#8221; was labeled false by the leading American historians of that era (all of whom are liberals and at least one of whom led a campaign to impeach President Donald Trump) adds fuel to the argument. Even regarding the past, the promoters of the &#8220;America is racist&#8221; libel need to lie to paint America as bad as possible.
No. 3: The reliance on lies.
&#8220;The 1619 Project,&#8221; which will now be taught in thousands of American schools, is based on lies. All Americans who care about America and/or truth should inquire if their children&#8217;s school will teach this and, if so, place their child in a school that does not.
Two of the biggest lies are that preserving slavery was the real cause of the American Revolution and that slavery is what made America rich.
Even the charge of endemic racist police brutality is a lie. There are undoubtedly racist police, but racism does not characterize police interactions with blacks.
No. 4: The large African immigration to the United States.
Nearly 2 million black Africans and more than 1 million blacks from the Caribbean have emigrated to the United States in just the last 20 years. Why would so many blacks voluntarily move to a country that is &#8220;systemically racist,&#8221; a country, according to the promoters of the &#8220;America is racist&#8221; libel, in which every single white is a racist? Are all these blacks dumb? Are they ignorant? And what about the millions more who would move here if they were allowed to? How does one explain the fact that Nigerians, for example, are among the most successful immigrant communities?
No. 5: The preoccupation with &#8220;microaggressions.&#8221;
According to the University of California&#8217;s list of racist &#8220;microaggressions,&#8221; saying, &#8220;There is only one race, the human race,&#8221; is a &#8220;racist microaggression.&#8221; This is, of course, Orwellian doublespeak. Anyone who believes there is only one race is not, by definition, a racist. If everyone in the past had believed there was one race, the human race, there would never have been racism, let alone a slave trade based on racism.
The very fact that the left came up with the intellectual farce known as &#8220;microaggressions,&#8221; like the race hoaxes, proves how little racism there is in America — because the entire thesis is based on the fact that there are so few real, or &#8220;macro,&#8221; aggressions.
The race riots, the ruining of people&#8217;s careers and lives over something said or done at any time in their lives, the ruining of professional sports (especially basketball and football), the tearing down of America and its history, the smearing of moral giants like Abraham Lincoln — all of this is being done because of a lie.
As I wrote in a column three years ago: &#8220;The Jews survived the Blood Libel. But America may not survive the American Libel. While the first Libel led to the death of many Jews, the present Libel may lead to the death of a civilization. Indeed, the least oppressive ever created.&#8221;
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.
The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe">member</a>.

PRAGER: 5 Arguments Against ‘America Is A Racist Country’

Racism

As I wrote nearly three years ago: &#8220;Perhaps the second greatest libel — and certainly the most widespread — is that America is a racist country that oppresses its minorities and women. We can call it the American Libel.&#8221; (The greatest libel was the infamous blood libel, the fabricated charge spread in Europe for hundreds of years by Christian anti-Semites that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood to bake matzos — unleavened bread — for Passover.)
But if America is so racist, why are there so many race hoaxes? Virtually every time we read about a swastika painted on a door, or a noose hanging from a tree to taunt blacks, it turns out to be either a false alarm or, more frequently, a hoax.
Here are a dozen examples:
No. 1: The Duke lacrosse team (2006): Three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team were falsely accused by Crystal Mangum, a black student at North Carolina Central University, with having raped her. The charges were all fabricated, but the American media and Duke University faculty rushed to judgment and devoted months to smearing the three lacrosse players and Duke University itself as racist.
No. 2: UC San Diego library noose (2010): &#8220;Student apologizes for noose in UC San Diego library&#8221; (Los Angeles Times). A &#8220;minority student&#8221; was responsible for placing the noose in the university library. Previously, the Associated Press had reported, &#8220;Anger boiled over on the University of California San Diego campus today, where students took over the chancellor&#8217;s office to protest the hanging of a noose in a campus library.&#8221;
No. 3: Truck at Oakland&#8217;s Corporation Yard (2014): &#8220;A reported &#8216;noose&#8217; tied to the back of a city truck in August, which stirred already simmering racial tensions at Oakland&#8217;s Corporation Yard, was not an intended act of racial harassment, a city-commissioned report has found&#8221; (Mercury News).
No. 4: University of Delaware (2015): &#8220;&#8216;Nooses&#8217; Found Hanging on University of Delaware Campus Were Lanterns&#8221; (NBC).
University President Nancy Targett had earlier announced, &#8220;We are both saddened and disturbed that this deplorable act has taken place on our campus.&#8221;
No. 5: The LSU noose (2015): It was widely reported that a noose was sighted at Louisiana State University leading to protests against racism there. It was later reported, &#8220;LSU said a picture of what appeared to be a noose hanging from a campus tree Thursday was not what it appeared to be&#8221; (WBRZ).
No. 6: University at Albany (2016): &#8220;A state appeals court has upheld the University at Albany&#8217;s expulsion of a woman who along with two friends falsely claimed to be the victim of a racially motivated attack on a CDTA bus in January 2016&#8221; (Times-Union). The three black women had attacked a white woman and then claimed they had been racially attacked.
No. 7: Bowling Green State University (2016): &#8220;Bowling Green police say student lied about politically driven attack&#8221; (ABC).
&#8220;The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University — about 90 miles west of Oberlin — said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story&#8221; (City Journal).
No. 8: Dreadlock cutting hoax (2019): &#8220;A black student at a Christian school in Virginia who accused three white sixth grade boys of cutting her dreadlocks and calling her ugly now says she was lying about the attack&#8221; (NBC).
No. 9: Jussie Smollett (2019): In one of the most notorious hoaxes, actor Jussie Smollett claimed he was attacked by white racists in Chicago on a freezing night. The story was a hoax. The &#8220;noose&#8221; was a rope his two co-conspirators had purchased for staging the &#8220;attack.&#8221;
No. 10: Oakland&#8217;s Lake Merritt (2020): After the city of Oakland launched a hate crime investigation regarding a noose hanging from park trees, Victor Anari Sengbe, a black man, tweeted: &#8220;It&#8217;s not a noose, this guy climbed the tree and put up the rope for a swing months ago, folks used it to exercise&#8230; ITS NOT A NOOSE.&#8221;
Nevertheless, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf then tweeted, &#8220;Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate crimes.&#8221;
No. 11: NASCAR (2020): A &#8220;noose&#8221; was found in the Talladega, Alabama, racetrack garage assigned to black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace. FBI investigators determined it to be one of several such ropes placed sometime the year before in Talladega garages as door pulls, long before that garage was ever assigned to Wallace. But Wallace continued to maintain it was, in fact, a noose.
No. 12: University of La Verne (2020): &#8220;Racist Threats and Attacks that Rattled a California University Campus Were Faked, Police Say&#8221; (Newsweek).
There is not enough space in a column to cite all the hoaxes and mistaken charges of racism in recent decades. Interested readers can also look up: a hoax perpetrated by Fynn Arthur, a black student at Goucher College in 2018; Samantha Wells, a black student activist, who was responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car at St. Olaf College in 2017; and the hoax perpetrated by three black Oberlin students, Jonathan Aladin, Endia Lawrence and Cecelia Whettstone, who claimed racial profiling at Gibson&#8217;s Bakery, which, after serving Oberlin for over 100 years, was nearly put out of business by the false claims.
Here&#8217;s why this is so important. If there were a lot of racism, there would be no need for hoaxes. No Jew in Germany in the 1930s made up an anti-Semitic hoax. No Jewish shop owner ever made up a charge that a Nazi hurled a rock through his store window. The reason? None was needed. Nazi hatred against Jews was real. It didn&#8217;t have to be faked. To convince people that America is racist, you have to fake it.
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.

Sticky note question mark

PRAGER: If America Is So Racist, Why Are There So Many Race Hoaxes?

Bubba Wallace

Jussie Smollett

According to the make-believe world of the left, we are experiencing a great moment in American racial history. For the first time, the story goes, more whites than ever are coming to realize how racist America is, how racist cops are and how systemically racist everything in America is. Only now do many Americans understand just how racist Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, Ulysses Grant, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, &#8220;whitening&#8221; agents, meritocracy, Western culture, Christianity, jailing Blacks and the NFL are. The bestselling book in America is about alleged &#8220;white fragility&#8221; — the term for any rational response to the irrational charge that all whites are racist.
All this is supposed to be good for America&#8217;s Blacks.
But none of it is. In fact, it is all destructive.
Take the movement to defund police departments and the incessant charges of &#8220;police brutality&#8221; and &#8220;racist police.&#8221; Only those who don&#8217;t care about Blacks other than using them to advance their power — Democrats and the rest of the left, both Black and white — argue this war against the police is good for Blacks. Already the increase in the number of Blacks murdered, not to mention injured, is reaching levels unseen in decades. And there is every reason to assume, as police pull back from high-crime areas, it will get worse.
Take the left-wing mantra that all whites are racist. If I wanted to obstruct Black progress, and especially damage Black children, I couldn&#8217;t come up with a more effective idea. To believe from early childhood that you walk through life held in contempt by all of your fellow citizens who are white is to walk through life with much more than a chip on your shoulder. It is more like a heavy boulder.
It means that you will walk through life with two paralyzing burdens: anger and victimhood. Either one is enough to ruin your life. Combined they&#8217;re devastating. It gives one an idea of how cynical the left is that it would want to cultivate both of these life-ruining emotions in as many Blacks as possible.
Anger and victimhood not only ruin the individual&#8217;s life but also destroy one&#8217;s relationships with others. Everyone who has an angry individual in their family knows not only how unhappy that person is but also how much havoc they wreak on the rest of the family. The same holds true for the relative who sees him or herself as a perpetual victim. Such people are both miserable and miserable to be around. And since victimhood is a major cause of evil — people who see themselves as victims usually think they are not nearly as bound by moral rules as others are — they are more likely to hurt others.
The &#8220;protesters&#8221; who destroy and loot think their victim status allows them to destroy and loot. The man identified as the president of the greater New York Black Lives Matter, Hawk Newsome, recently told Fox News: &#8220;If this country doesn&#8217;t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking &#8230; figuratively. I could be speaking literally. It&#8217;s a matter of interpretation.&#8221;
In a report yesterday on a police shooting of a robber who resisted arrest and reached for an object in his waistband, the San Diego Union-Tribune quoted a protest organizer: &#8220;If this young man was robbing, that means his state and his government failed to provide him with the resources he needs.&#8221; When you feel you are a victim, you are allowed to rob.
Take the constant, often absurd, charges of racism at the most benign comments. If you say, for example, that you see nothing wrong with the picture of Uncle Ben on a box of rice, you will be accused of racism. As a result, most whites understand they can no longer speak truthfully or from the heart in the presence of a Black American. It is hard to imagine a worse recipe for genuine relationships between the races. Whereas the great majority of whites, and even most Blacks, thought white-Black relations were good and improving when Barack Obama assumed office, a minority of both groups think so today.
Take the assault on merit-based advancement in the name of racial equality. Will this help or hinder Blacks? It will obviously help some Blacks in the short run. But over the long term, telling any group they needn&#8217;t meet a universal standard of excellence can only harm that group — not to mention harm the way their success will be viewed by others. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine a more condescending view of a group than to argue that standards must be lowered for them to succeed.
The damage the left is doing to America may be mortal. When it is widely deemed OK to destroy statues of Abraham Lincoln, society is experiencing a moral earthquake which may eventually destroy it. But the damage the left is doing to so many Blacks — to their moral compass, to their happiness and to their relations with their white fellow citizens — is not in the realm of &#8220;may do.&#8221; It is done.
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.

Fist in the air

PRAGER: The Present Moment Has Set Blacks Back A Half-Century

Black Lives Matter

If you are a Jew or Christian in America, the seriousness of your Judaism or Christianity is now being tested.
People look back in time and wonder how religious people, especially religious leaders — specifically, the clergy — could have failed in times of moral crisis. The failure of most rabbis, priests and pastors to speak out today — when the risk to personal safety is so much less than it was in communist and fascist countries — should provide the answer: Religion doesn&#8217;t have all that much impact on most religious people. During comfortable times, it provides two essentials to a happy and fulfilled life — community and meaning — but when tested, it often fails like an umbrella that fails to expand just as it starts to rain.
America is being taken over by violent mobs; a vast amount of destruction and stealing has taken place (with little police intervention and the apathy of our political leaders). Why aren&#8217;t all clergy delivering thundering sermons about the Seventh Commandment, &#8220;Thou shalt not steal&#8221;? Does it now come with an asterisk?
A central part of a major American city has been seized and occupied by people who hate America and its values, including its Judeo-Christian values. Heard any clergy (aside from some evangelical Christians) speaking out against it?
And most ominous by far, for the first time in American history, free speech — the mother of all freedoms — is being widely suppressed, not by the government but by the press, the universities, the high schools, the elementary schools, all the giant internet media, Hollywood and virtually every major business in America. Christians and Jews place repentance at the center of their theologies, yet there is no place for repentance if you did or said one insensitive thing — real or alleged — even if it was 20 or more years ago. Yet all we get from American religious leaders on this matter is &#8230; silence.
The freest, least racist, most opportunity-providing country in history — &#8220;the last best hope of earth,&#8221; in Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s words — is smeared as &#8220;systemically racist&#8221;; all white people are declared &#8220;racist&#8221;; and the statues of the greatest Americans, including George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln, are toppled and/or defaced. And all we get from most American religious leaders is either agreement or silence.
It leads this religious American to ask the question the anti-religious ask: Of what use is religion?
Take the claim that being &#8220;colorblind&#8221; is racist.
If you are a religious Jew or Christian — let alone a rabbi, priest or minister — do you believe that? Do you believe that the human ideal is not to be colorblind? Do you believe that the ideal is to see every person, first and foremost, as a member of a race? Is that what you learned at seminary? Is that what you have taught from your pulpit all of your life?
I doubt it. I assume that, until as recently as a year or even six months ago, you have always believed and preached that we are, in Martin Luther King Jr.&#8217;s words, to measure people not by &#8220;the color of their skin but by the content of their character.&#8221;
Isn&#8217;t it fundamental to all Bible-based religions that we are all created in God&#8217;s image, that God has no race and that Adam and Eve, from whom we all descend, had no race? If you are a Christian, do you see Christians of other races first as fellow Christians or first as members of their race? If you are a Jew, do you see Jews of other races as anything other than fellow Jews? Does God?
So, why the silence? Why aren&#8217;t all rabbis, priests and pastors telling their congregations and telling America — in tweets, on Facebook, in letters to the editor, on television and radio, in opinion pieces — that there is one race, the human race, and that the only antidote to racism is to deny that race determines our worth, not to affirm its significance?
Does an ideology that affirms the significance of race have an honorable pedigree? Has it ever led to anything good? Isn&#8217;t that exactly what Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan advocated?
So, how are we to explain this tragic failure of religious Jews and Christians — and their clergy — to speak up against looting (aka stealing) and for freedom, for America, for Western civilization and for being colorblind?
The answer to this question also goes to the core of what it means to be religious. At the center of our two religions is the notion of fear of God: &#8220;Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man&#8221; (Ecclesiastes 12:13). But what is now apparent is that most Jews and Christians fear the left, fear The New York Times, fear being shunned by &#8220;friends&#8221; on Facebook and mobbed on Twitter more than they fear God.
That&#8217;s what this moment comes down to. Jews and Christians who fail this test will not only lose their freedom, lose the great American hope for mankind and lose the West; they will have also lost their souls.
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.

Prayer

PRAGER: America’s Jews And Christians Are Failing The Test Of Their Lives

Christianity

Free Speech

Judaism

&#8220;Do not follow the majority to do evil.&#8221; — Exodus 23:2.
When I went to yeshiva day schools, America was celebrated. America was regarded, in the description of Menachem Schneerson (the Lubavitcher rebbe), the most influential rabbi of the 20th century, as a &#8220;medina shel chesed&#8221; — &#8220;a country of kindness.&#8221;
He knew, as all American Jews knew, that there were many anti-Semites in America, that America should have done more for the Jews of Europe, that universities like Harvard limited the number of Jewish students, that prestigious law firms and country clubs barred Jews, etc. So, then, why did he describe America as a country of kindness? Why did my yeshiva in Brooklyn put on plays honoring George Washington? Why did my Orthodox Jewish day school utilize texts not only celebrating America but affirming America as a &#8220;melting pot&#8221;? Why did a Jew, Irving Berlin, write &#8220;God bless America&#8221;?
The primary reason was that these Jews knew what the rest of the world was like. They had the wisdom to compare America with other countries, not, as the foolish, nihilistic left does, to utopia. Compared with the rest of the world, America was — and remains — a medina shel chesed.
Was it such a country for every one of its citizens? Of course not. At the time Rabbi Schneerson described America as a &#8220;country of kindness,&#8221; the southern half of America enforced immoral and degrading Jim Crow laws, and racism was common in the North as well. I have noted the anti-Semitism in American life at that time. And gays were often ostracized and degraded.
But the Torah teaches us that we are not to compare the past with the present. That is why Noah, the man God saves from the Flood, is described in Genesis as righteous &#8220;in his generations.&#8221; If Noah were to be compared with people in later generations, he would be found wanting. Abraham, the man chosen by God to be the father of His People, had a concubine and lied about his wife to save his own life. But only fools — like all those who want to tear down monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — would dismiss Abraham&#8217;s greatness. Jacob, the man God renamed &#8220;Israel,&#8221; owned slaves. Should Jews cease calling themselves the &#8220;children of Israel&#8221;? Should the State of Israel change its name?
That is what Jewish — and all religious — schools should be teaching when discussing Washington or Jefferson having slaves. If we are to dismiss the greatness of two of the founders of the freest country in human history — not to mention the best non-Jewish country Jews have ever lived in — then we should do likewise to the Jewish patriarchs. Moses had a fellow Israelite executed for publicly violating the Sabbath. Should his sculpture be removed from the Supreme Court? Will Jewish day schools start dismissing the greatness of all our ancestors? If they start doing this to Washington and Jefferson, they should be consistent.
Or should they do what the Torah does? While never ignoring the flaws of giants, remember why they were giants.
Will Jewish and Christian schools — there is no hope for wisdom in secular schools — teach that every society in world history, including African, Native American and Arab societies, all practiced slavery? If not, why not? Isn&#8217;t it morally and factually dishonest to teach only about slavery in America?
What should be taught is that America&#8217;s and the Western world&#8217;s uniqueness did not lie in having slaves. Slavery was universal. Therefore, the morally serious person asks who abolished slavery, not who practiced it. But the left — as opposed to liberals and conservatives — is not now, nor ever has been, morally serious.
When you ask the only morally significant question — who abolished slavery? — the answer is America and some other Western countries. And then you should teach the reason: because of Western values rooted in the Bible. One would think that fact would be central to the curriculum of every Jewish and Christian school that takes their religion seriously. But much of contemporary Christianity and Judaism — including Jewish and Christian schools — has been influenced more by the left than by Christianity or Judaism.
If your school cares about truth, it should try to teach all the facts while acknowledging the history of racism and including the history of police racism. One such fact is that in August 2019, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded there is &#8220;no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police.&#8221;
A Jewish school might also wish to note that, according to a 2016 Anti-Defamation League survey, &#8220;&#8216;anti-Semitic views&#8217; among black respondents were materially more common than among whites.&#8221; The Washington Post reported two years earlier, &#8220;&#8216;entrenched anti-Semitic views&#8217; are far more common among African Americans and Latinos than among others.&#8221;
Indeed, in 1991, black attacks on Jews in Crown Heights, New York City, were so violent that former Mayor Ed Koch, New York Times&#8217; executive editor A.M. Rosenthal and others called it a &#8220;pogrom.&#8221; Brandeis University historian Edward S. Shapiro wrote it was &#8220;the most serious anti-Semitic incident in American history.&#8221; Will Jewish schools smear American society as &#8220;systemically&#8221; racist while making believe blacks are the only victims?
One reason this is important is so students will understand that &#8220;all whites are racist&#8221; is as vile a charge as &#8220;all blacks are anti-Semitic.&#8221;
Finally, will Jewish and Christian schools teach the central teaching of both faiths — that Adam had no race? As the sages put it: &#8220;Why was only a single specimen of man created first? To teach us that &#8230; no race or class may claim a nobler ancestry, saying, &#8216;Our father was born first.'&#8221; In other words, the Bible&#8217;s demand is that we be colorblind.
&#8220;There are only two races,&#8221; Viktor Frankl wrote, &#8220;the race of the decent and the race of the indecent.&#8221;
No Jewish or Christian parent should send their child to a Jewish or Christian school that teaches otherwise.
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.

Classroom

PRAGER: Will Jewish And Christian Schools Teach The Truth About America And Racism?

It takes a lot to build a civilization, and though it is much easier to destroy a civilization, it takes a lot to do that, too.
But now we have four roots of evil that are guaranteed to do so.
No. 1: Victimhood.
The first is victimhood. The more people who regard themselves as victims — as individuals or as a group — the more likely they are to commit evil. People who think of themselves as victims feel that, having been victimized, they are no longer bound by normal moral conventions — especially the moral conventions of their alleged or real oppressors.
Everyone knows this is true. But few confront this truth. Every parent, for example, knows that the child who thinks of him or herself as a perpetual victim is the child most likely to cause and get into trouble. And criminologists report that nearly every murderer in prison thinks of himself as a victim.
On a societal scale, the same holds true — and being on such a larger scale, the chances of real evil ensuing are exponentially increased. One of the most obvious examples is Germany after World War I. Most Germans regarded themselves as victims — of the Treaty of Versailles; of a &#8220;stab in the back&#8221; German government; of the British, Americans and French; and, of course, of the Jews. This sense of victimhood was one of the most important factors in the popularity of the Nazis, who promised to restore German dignity.
That millions of black Americans regard themselves as victims — probably more so today than at any time in the past 50 years — can only lead to disaster for America generally and for blacks specifically. While victims generally feel free to lash out at others, they also go through life angry and unhappy.
No. 2: Demonization.
The second of the four ingredients of this civilization-destroying witches&#8217; brew is demonization — demonizing a group as inherently evil.
That is being done now with regard to the white people of America. All — again, all — whites are declared racist. The only difference among them is that some admit it and some deny it. The notion that whites are inherently evil has long been associated with Louis Farrakhan. But it has apparently migrated out from his relatively small following to many blacks, even those who might consider Farrakhan a kook. Former President Barack Obama, hardly a Farrakhan follower, described America as having racism in its DNA. That is as close to inherently and irredeemably evil as it gets; you cannot change your DNA.
In that sense, not only are whites demonized, but America is, too. Unlike traditional liberals, the left regards America as a moral cesspool — not only racist but, according to The New York Times, founded to be so. The New York Times has created a history of America that declares its founding not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first black slaves arrived. The American Revolution was fought, according to this malign narrative, not merely for American independence but in order to preserve slavery, a practice the British would have interfered with. This &#8220;history&#8221; will now be taught in thousands of American schools.
The combination of victimhood and demonization alone is dangerous enough. But there are still two more horsemen galloping toward the looming apocalypse.
No. 3: A Cause To Believe In.
Most Americans throughout American history found great meaning in being American and in being religious — usually Christian. Since World War II, we have lived in a post-Christian, post-nationalist age. Until very recently, Americans would have found the expression &#8220;for God and country&#8221; deeply meaningful; that term today, on the left, is risible and execrable.
But people need something to believe in. The need for meaning is the greatest human need after the need for food. Leftism, with all its offshoots — feminism, environmentalism, Black Lives Matter, antifa — has filled that vacuum. In Europe, communism, fascism and Nazism filled the hole left by the demise of nationalism and Christianity. Here it is leftism and its offshoots.
No. 4: Lies.
The fourth and most important ingredient necessary for evil is lies. Lies are the root of evil. Ironically, slavery itself was made possible only because of the lie that the black was inferior to the white. Nazism was made possible thanks to the lie that Jews were not fully human. And communism was built on lies. Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism, named the Soviet communist newspaper &#8220;Truth&#8221; (&#8220;Pravda&#8221;) because truth was what the Communist Party said it was.
The New York Times, CNN and the rest of the mainstream &#8220;news&#8221; media are becoming our version of Pravda.
Objective truth doesn&#8217;t exist on the left. The universities have already declared &#8220;objective truth&#8221; as essentially an expression of &#8220;white privilege.&#8221; See what happens to a student who says in class, for example, that &#8220;men cannot give birth.&#8221;
The public self-debasement demanded of anyone who differs with the left — like New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees just did when he said not standing for the national anthem desecrated the flag and those who have died for it — happens almost daily. The only difference between this and what dissidents underwent during Mao&#8217;s Cultural Revolution is that the self-debasement here is voluntary — thus far.
Last week, when this Jew saw a store in Santa Monica with a sign reading &#8220;black-owned business&#8221; so as to avoid being destroyed, it evoked chilling memories.
That&#8217;s how bad it is in America today.
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: The Four Horsemen Of America’s Apocalypse

Democratic Party

Media Bias

Riots

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.

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

evangelical

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.

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Dennis Prager

PRAGER: Leftists Blame America. Decent People Blame Themselves.

PRAGER: The Lockdown Has Gone From A Mistake To A Crime

PRAGER: A Demagogue Named Barack Obama: His DNC Speech

PRAGER: Everything The Left Touches It Ruins. Now Add Science.

PRAGER: Why America Is In Real Danger

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PRAGER: The Dehumanization Of Blacks

PRAGER: 5 Arguments Against ‘America Is A Racist Country’

PRAGER: If America Is So Racist, Why Are There So Many Race Hoaxes?

PRAGER: The Present Moment Has Set Blacks Back A Half-Century

PRAGER: America’s Jews And Christians Are Failing The Test Of Their Lives

PRAGER: Will Jewish And Christian Schools Teach The Truth About America And Racism?

PRAGER: The Four Horsemen Of America’s Apocalypse

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

Menu

PRAGER: Leftists Blame America. Decent People Blame Themselves.

PRAGER: The Lockdown Has Gone From A Mistake To A Crime

PRAGER: A Demagogue Named Barack Obama: His DNC Speech

PRAGER: Everything The Left Touches It Ruins. Now Add Science.

PRAGER: Why America Is In Real Danger

PRAGER: Anti-Americanism: The New Anti-Semitism

PRAGER: The Dehumanization Of Blacks

PRAGER: 5 Arguments Against ‘America Is A Racist Country’

PRAGER: If America Is So Racist, Why Are There So Many Race Hoaxes?

PRAGER: The Present Moment Has Set Blacks Back A Half-Century

PRAGER: America’s Jews And Christians Are Failing The Test Of Their Lives

PRAGER: Will Jewish And Christian Schools Teach The Truth About America And Racism?

PRAGER: The Four Horsemen Of America’s Apocalypse

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

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