Dennis Prager's Blog

I never imagined I would think, let alone write, that the Democratic Party’s victory in 2020 was a blessing. But for those of us — meaning, it is now clear, a majority of us — who regard the Left as an entirely destructive force in America as it is everywhere else in the world, 2020 may well have turned out to be a blessing.

Why?

For two reasons.

The first reason is that, thanks to the Left being in power for the last four years, Americans got a chance to see what it — and therefore the Democratic Party, which has become a left-wing, rather than a liberal, party — stands for.

— Most Americans now know that the Left and the Democrats could not care less about the average American. For example, Democrats and the rest of the Left still maintain that Americans have been fooled into thinking that inflation is devastating. This is understandable given that the Democratic Party and its defenders represent the wealthy — people who neither know nor care about the price of food and other everyday necessities.

— Most Americans now know that the Left is morally and psychologically sick. Unlike the Left, the vast majority of Americans do not believe that men give birth; that boys’ bathrooms in high schools should have tampon dispensers; that men who say they are women should be allowed to compete against women in women’s sports or be placed in women’s shelters and women’s prisons; that schools should not inform parents when their 10-year-old daughter says she is a boy and adopts a boy’s name at school; or that young women, not to mention teenage girls, should have their breasts surgically removed if they tell a psychologist — usually after a few hours of consultation — they think they are a boy.

— Most Americans now know that the Left holds America in contempt and breeds that contempt among young Americans. Most Americans do not believe, as the Left does, that America was founded in 1619, when the first black slaves were brought to America; they believe it was founded in 1776. Most Americans think Washington, Jefferson and the other Founders were great men, not racist and genocidal.

— Most Americans now know that the Left breeds chaos not only in America but around the world. About a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I asked one of the greatest living historians, Niall Ferguson of Harvard and Stanford, if he thought Vladimir Putin would have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump had been president at the time. Without a moment’s hesitation, he gave a one-word answer: “No.”

That attack took place less than a year after the Biden administration, with the full backing of the Democratic Party, precipitously and chaotically abandoned Afghanistan for no good reason, causing the unnecessary deaths of 13 U.S. servicemembers (the deadliest day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since 2012) and wounds to another 45 servicemembers, leaving the Afghan people to the Taliban monsters, and leaving behind $7 billion in military equipment.

It is also unlikely that if Trump had been president, Hamas would have attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, rendering it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and plunging the Middle East into war. Trump left a peaceful Middle East on the brink of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states recognizing Israel’s right to exist.

Trump placed sanctions on Iran, greatly weakening that regime economically. The Biden administration reversed course and gave Iran access to $16 billion, which it promptly used to spread death and chaos in the region.

Thanks to the Left being in power for nearly four years, the American people learned not only these things about the Left; perhaps even more importantly, the American people also learned that virtually every elite, meaning left-wing, institution is deeply corrupt.

They learned that:

— The country’s most elite universities — virtually all of which are left-wing institutions — are moral wastelands.

— The only Americans who still trust The New York Times, The Washington Post (or any major newspaper in any major city) — or CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, NPR, The Associated Press and the rest of what was until now known as the “mainstream media” — are those who share those organizations’ left-wing politics. Over these past few years, among myriad examples of left-wing bias, all these media labeled as “racist” any American who said that COVID-19 likely began in a Chinese lab, and participated in the Trump-campaign-colluded-with-Russia lie. The Times is so woke, it refuses to print “Latinos”; instead, it uses the idiotic term “Latinx.”

— They cannot trust scientific institutions. Thanks to these years of Democratic Party and left-wing power, most Americans no longer trust almost any scientific body. The American Medical Association has come out against listing a newborn’s sex on its birth certificate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration are regarded as pawns of the major pharmaceutical companies. Most Americans know that they were misled regarding the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy and safety, social distancing, masking and most especially lockdowns, which served only to damage millions of children and destroy innumerable small businesses. The oldest science journal in America, Scientific American, is correctly regarded as just another woke, i.e., left-wing, media enterprise. It had never endorsed a political candidate in its 175-year history until it endorsed Joe Biden.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

It may be impossible to overstate the damage done to morality by the Democrats and other leftists calling Donald Trump a fascist and a Nazi and declaring him “Hitler.”

Asked by Anderson Cooper on CNN if she believes Trump is a “fascist,” Kamala Harris said, “Yes, I do.”

With regard to calling Trump “Hitler,” Newsweek’s fact-checker concluded: “Harris didn’t directly call Trump ‘Hitler.’ However, many will think she came very close to it: she confirmed that she believes Trump is a fascist, quoted (retired four-star General, and one of Donald Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, John] Kelly’s unfavorable comments (Kelly said Trump ‘wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had’) and suggested Trump would ‘invoke’ Hitler.”

Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, compared the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden to the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.

Many Hitler historians have done similarly. In a 2017 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ron Rosenbaum, author of a New York Times bestselling biography of Adolf Hitler, “Explaining Hitler,” compared Trump to Hitler:

“(The views of) Trump and his minions … come out of a playbook written in German. … The playbook is ‘Mein Kampf.’

“What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought. It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media.

“Alan Bullock (the first major Hitler biographer) … had initially argued (that) it was likely (Hitler) had believed in nothing and just used the Jew-hatred to advance his cause with the nitwit thug segment of the German people. Just as Trump appealed to his nitwit thug racist, anti-Semite followers. … This is the comparison I’d been seeking.”

In April, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece, “Trump turns his trials into a soapbox. Does he know he’s channeling Hitler?” It was written by another Hitler scholar, Timothy W. Ryback — a former lecturer at Harvard (surprise!) — whose most recent book is “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power.” His conclusion: “The alarm-clanging couplet of Hitler’s and Trump’s courtroom appearances, two demagogues — separated by a century — exploiting their constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech and due process in an effort to undermine democratic processes and structures, should serve as a sobering warning as we approach an election to determine who will be running the next government of the United States.”

The abuse of language is a fundamental characteristic of the Left. Leftists have done this not only to “Hitler,” “Nazi” and “fascist” but to “genocide,” “apartheid,” “racist” and virtually every other term connoting evil. It started with Stalin calling Trotsky a fascist and it continues to this day.

The harm, as I wrote above, cannot be overstated.

Calling Trump “Hitler” and “Nazi” utterly trivializes Hitler and Nazism. Young people, the recipients of a largely worthless education in American schools — especially regarding history — know little, if anything, about Hitler and Nazism. For most of them, therefore, if Trump is Hitler, then Hitler was Trump. Hitler was nothing worse than a German version of Trump — not the instigator of World War II and the creator of the Holocaust; just a German Donald Trump.

It is beyond belief that American Jewish organizations and American veterans groups have not greeted the labeling of Trump “Hitler” with howls of protest. It is difficult to know if Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust will ever again evoke the horror that these words have heretofore evoked.

That Jewish groups have not vigorously protested labeling Trump “Hitler” and “Nazi” only shows how deep the left-wing influence has been on most American Jewish organizations, especially the Anti-Defamation League, the organization founded to protect American Jews and combat antisemitism.

Likewise, it beggars belief that veterans organizations haven’t vociferously condemned the trivialization of Hitler and Nazism. Did hundreds of thousands of Americans die fighting a German Trump? Was the D-Day invasion of Normandy about fighting Trump supporters?

If Trump represents the same embodiment of evil as Hitler and the Nazis, the word no longer has meaning.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

I have never accepted irrational religious beliefs. If something in my — or any — religion doesn’t make sense, I don’t accept it. That’s why my five-volume commentary on the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) is titled “The Rational Bible.”

This strikes more than a few religious people as problematic, since many religious people thrive on irrational beliefs. There is a famous Latin phrase, Credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd,” which has long been attributed to the Church theologian Tertullian (early third century). Tertullian did not in fact say that. But he said something somewhat analogous: “The Son of God died; it is credible, because it is (foolish, absurd, unfitting); and he was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible.”

I do not mention this desire to believe in the irrational as a criticism. Reason may be my road to God and religion, but I respect the fact that it is not everyone’s.

I mention it solely to explain my religiosity. Because reason is my road to faith, I am religious. It is, for example, far more rational to believe in a Creator than to believe that everything came about by itself.

Which brings me to secularism.

The moral and logical absurdities the secular world advocates help sustain my faith.

I have come to understand the truth in the statement attributed to the British thinker G.K. Chesterton but probably said by someone else: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

It is, overwhelmingly, secular people who say that “men give birth.” Not all secular people say this, but just about everyone who does is secular. And I don’t know any religious Jews or Christians who say it.

In a previous column, “Who’s more irrational — the religious or the irreligious?” I provided a long list of absurd, and dangerous, beliefs held almost exclusively by secular people. So, I will only list a few here.

It is, overwhelmingly, secular people who believe that males who say they are females should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

It is, overwhelmingly, secular people who believe that a young girl who says she is a boy or a young boy who says he is a girl should be given puberty-blocking hormones.

Who was more likely to support keeping children out of schools for two years; forcibly masking 2-year-olds on airplanes; and firing unvaccinated police officers, airplane pilots and members of the military — secular or religious Americans?

How many Western supporters of Josef Stalin — the tyrant who murdered about 30 million people — were irreligious, and how many were religious?

I will add here that secularism not only breeds foolish and dangerous positions, it also breeds foolish and dangerous behavior.

It is widely believed that the primary reason people in the West are choosing not to have children is affluence. That is demonstrably incorrect. Affluence is a factor, but it is a small one compared to a much bigger factor: secularism. Affluent religious people have many children — far more than affluent secular people. If you meet a couple that has four or more children, whether you are religious or secular, you will immediately assume that the couple is either Catholic, Evangelical (Protestant), Mormon or Orthodox Jewish.

The same holds true for marriage. The marriage rate in America is the lowest it has ever been. There are more Americans 40 years of age who have never been married than ever in American history.

This, too, is related to religion. Yes, most secular people still get married — though that number is in decline — but virtually all religious people get married.

Religious people are also happier than secular people.

All these secular beliefs and behaviors argue strongly for a Judeo-Christian worldview. If doctrine A produces far more nonsense, unhappiness and support for evil than does doctrine B, the only rational response is to adopt doctrine B.

And perhaps the greatest argument for Bible-based religion and against secularism is the university. The most foolish institutions in America happen to be the most secular institutions in America — the universities. In fact, there are no wise secular institutions. There are wise secular individuals and there are foolish religious individuals, but there are no wise secular institutions. Our schools, starting in kindergarten, are radically secular and mostly teach nonsense.

It is no wonder that there is more support for Hamas than for Israel at most universities. The secular moral compass is broken.

These are all strong arguments for taking religion seriously, or, as in my case, remaining religious. I want wisdom, a community, happiness, a family life and, most important, to know the difference between men and women and between good and evil.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

It is a truism that the West was formed by Athens and Jerusalem — meaning the rational thinking introduced by Greece and the moral and religious thought introduced by Israel.

Of the two, Jerusalem’s contribution was the more enduring. Relatively few Westerners read Aristotle and Plato. Virtually every citizen of the West — even the illiterate — until the last generation or two, was familiar with the Bible. Europe was Westernized by the Catholic Church in the name of the Bible, not Homer.

Were it not for the Jews and their Bible, there would be no Christianity — and therefore no Western civilization. The abolition of slavery was led by Bible-believing Christians. The Bible, not Aristotle, was their moral inspiration.

With regard to America, its Founders, even the less religious ones, were rooted in biblical morality. Two of the least religious, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, designed a Great Seal of the United States that depicted the Jews leaving Egypt. The only inscription on the symbol of American Liberty, the Liberty Bell, is a verse from the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). The insignia of Yale University is in Hebrew, and it, too, is taken from the Torah. The Princeton University seal features an open Bible. Until about 1800, students at Yale, Harvard and other universities were required to study Hebrew.

Many American Founders described America as a “Second Israel.” In the words of Eran Shalev, a Fulbright scholar who became a professor of history at Haifa University:

“So prevalent was the Old Testament in the early culture of the United States that for decades after the start of the nineteenth century it was, in the words of Perry Miller (a Harvard professor regarded as the cofounder of the field of American studies) as ‘omnipresent … as … the air that people breathed.'”

The American Founders’ attitude toward the Jews is summed up in these words of John Adams, second president of the United States:

“I will insist the Hebrews have (contributed) more to civilize men than any other nation. If I was an atheist and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. … The Romans and their empire were but a bubble in comparison to the Jews. They have given religion to three-quarters of the globe and have influenced the affairs of mankind more, and more happily, than any other nation, ancient or modern.”

As Israel once made the West, now it is saving the West. This was eloquently stated a few weeks ago by Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker in a column titled, “Israel Defends Itself — and May Save Western Civilization”:

“How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel? What the Jewish state has done in the past year — for its own defense, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us — will rank among the most important contributions to the defense of Western civilization in the past three-quarters of a century.

“Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world. It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades.

“Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them, whatever the risk to our own lives and resources. The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us — its nominal allies, especially in the U.S. — are ‘thank you’ and ‘how can we help?’

“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain.

“We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.”

Baker is not alone in understanding that Israel’s war is a war for the West. On the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres, Brendan O’Neill, former editor of the British libertarian magazine Spiked, wrote:

“The West’s moral failures in the aftermath of 7 October were of an entirely new order. They exceeded even my grim fears. They shone a harsh, inescapable light on the retreat from reason and abandonment of Enlightenment many of us have warned of for years. … The delirium of our post-civilizational era emerged into broad daylight. It was undeniable now: The West is in the stranglehold of a profound moral crisis. … The sympathy for Hamas on our campuses and streets is fundamentally an extension of the West’s own crisis of meaning, of our denial of our own insights, of our betrayal of our history.

“A war for the soul of humanity must now be fought. On two fronts. On the physical front of Israel’s borders … (a)nd on the intellectual front here at home. … Only a full-throated defense of the virtues and wonders of Western civilisation might see off the moral derangement of our times and the Jew hatred it has nurtured.”

If you care about Western civilization, you need to care about ancient Israel and Israel today.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

I realized something very important about the human condition when I was in high school.

I realized that people tend to hate those who fight evil far more than they hate those engaged in doing evil.

What made me come to this conclusion was the way in which many people reacted to communism and to anti-communism.

To my amazement, a great many people — specifically, all leftists and many, though not all, liberals — hated anti-communists far more than they hated communism.

Because of my early preoccupation with good and evil, already in high school, I hated communism. How could one not, I wondered. Along with Nazism, it was the great evil of the 20th century. Needless to say, as a Jew and as a human, I hated Nazism. But as I was born after Nazism was vanquished, the great evil of my time was communism.

Communists murdered about 100 million people — all noncombatants and all innocent. Stalin murdered about 30 million people, including 5 million Ukrainians by starvation (in just two years: 1932-33). Mao killed about 60 million people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) killed about 3 million people, one in every four Cambodians, between 1975 and 1979. The North Korean communist regime killed between 2 million and 3 million people, not including another million killed in the Korean War started by the North Korean communists.

For every one of the 100 million killed by communists, add at least a dozen more people — family and friends — who were terribly and permanently affected by the death of their family member or friend. Then add another billion whose lives were ruined by having to live in a communist totalitarian state: their poverty, their loss of fundamental human rights, and their loss of dignity.

You would think that anyone with a functioning conscience and with any degree of compassion would hate communism. But that was not the case. Indeed, there were many people throughout the non-communist world who supported communism. And there was an even larger number of people who hated anti-communists, dismissing them as “Cold Warriors,” “warmongers,” “red-baiters,” etc.

At the present time, we are again witnessing this phenomenon — hatred of those who oppose evil rather than of those who do evil — with regard to Israel and its enemies. And on a far greater level. Israel is hated by individuals and governments throughout the world. Israel is the most reviled country at the United Nations as well as in Western media and, of course, in universities.

Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary, independent opposition press, and equal rights for women, gays and its Arab population (20% of the Israeli population). Its enemies — the Iranian regime, Hamas and Hezbollah — allow no such freedoms to those under their control. More relevantly, their primary goal — indeed, their stated reason for being — is to wipe out Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Hamas and Hezbollah have built nothing, absolutely nothing, in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. They exist solely to commit genocide against Israel and its Jews.

Why did so many people hate anti-communists more than communism? And why do even more people hate Israel more than Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah?

The general reason is that it is emotionally and psychologically difficult for most people to stare evil in the face. Evil is widely described as “dark.” But it is not dark; it is easy to look into the dark. What is far harder to look at is blinding bright light. Perhaps that is why Lucifer, the original name of the Christian devil, comes from the word “light.”

Why this is so — why people will not call evil “evil” — is probably related to a lack of courage. Once one declares something evil, one is morally bound to resist it, and people fear resisting evil. The fools who mock Christianity — whether through a work of “art” like “Piss Christ” (a crucifix in a jar of urine), or the Paris Olympics opening ceremony that mocked the Last Supper, or the Los Angeles Dodgers honoring the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” (men in drag dressed as nuns) — would never mock Islam. They fear Muslim wrath; they do not fear Christian wrath. Yet Islamic wrath has done and is doing far more evil in our time than Christian wrath.

And there is one additional reason for hating Israel — one that is specific to Israel — rather than those who seek to exterminate Israel: Jew-hatred, better known as antisemitism. The people who introduced a judging God and gave the world the Ten Commandments have been hated for thousands of years. Not those who systematically violate those commandments.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

Julie Hartman, a 24-year-old woman with whom I do a weekly podcast (“Dennis & Julie”), described the anti-Israel world perfectly: A vast number of people suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome.

The description is, of course, based on the widely cited “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party deride as nonsense. Though I voted for former President Donald Trump and thought he was a very good, at times excellent, president, I never used that term during the four years of the Trump presidency. I did not regard opposition to Trump as necessarily an expression of psychological pathology.

Eventually, however, I changed my mind. I came to believe that much Trump hatred was rooted in psychology, not moral reasoning. This was particularly so regarding conservatives who became “Never Trumpers.” Given that the Left had taken over the once largely liberal Democratic Party, and given that the Left is the greatest threat to freedom and the entire American experiment since the Civil War, the only explanation for why a conservative would vote for a leftist rather than for Trump had to be a psychological one.

Whether or not one subscribes to the existence of a Trump Derangement Syndrome, “derangement syndrome” perfectly explains support for Hamas and the Palestinians (at this time, the two are largely the same, just as “Nazis” and “Germans” were largely the same, and therefore used interchangeably, during World War II).

On Sept. 21, The New York Times provided a perfect example of Israel Derangement Syndrome in a column written by Michael Walzer, a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, titled “Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War.”

As is well known, last week, pagers used by Hezbollah terrorists exploded, killing a handful of them and wounding hundreds more. Amazingly accurate, the exploding pagers killed very few noncombatants.

Hezbollah is the Shiite and Lebanese equivalent of the Gaza-based Sunni Hamas. Like Hamas, Hezbollah has one purpose: to kill as many Israelis as possible and eradicate the Jewish state. Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel in an attempt to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. Tens of thousands of Israelis have fled their homes in northern Israel and have not returned in nearly a year.

That Israel is being attacked for killing Hezbollah terrorists is proof that, according to the vast array of Israel-haters — the political, media and academic left, and Muslims in the Western world — Israel is not allowed to defend itself. It should now be obvious that the current hatred of Israel is not a result of Israel’s bombing of Gaza. When Israel targets Hezbollah terrorists — and only Hezbollah terrorists — it is equally condemned.

Which brings me to the Times column by Walzer.

Walzer writes: “The explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.

“Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But the attacks … came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. … It is important for friends of Israel to say: This was not right.”

According to Professor Walzer, terrorists can only be killed when they are “operating,” “mobilized” or “militarily engaged.” If they are not doing so, it is a “war crime” to kill them. Furthermore, the mere fact that these members of Hezbollah had those pagers — devices the professor admits “probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes” — means these terrorists were “operating.” That’s why they had them: to plan and carry out operations against Israel.

That, dear reader, is derangement.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

Last week, The New York Times featured an article titled: “How the Last Eight Years Made Young Women More Liberal.”

According to every poll, since 2016 there has been an unprecedented political/social gender gap between young American women and men.

Here is how the Times reported it:

“In 2001, young men and women had similar political ideologies. … Then, around 2016, something shifted, a new analysis shows. Women ages 18 to 29 became significantly more liberal than the previous generation of young women. Today, around 40 percent identify as liberal, compared with just 19 percent who say they’re conservative. The views of young men — who are more likely to be conservative than liberal — have changed little. …”

“Sixty-seven percent of women 18 to 29 supported Vice President Kamala Harris in a New York Times/Siena College poll in six swing states last month, compared with 40 percent of young men. Fifty-three percent of young men in those states backed Donald J. Trump, compared with 29 percent of young women.”

And why did this massive leftward shift of young women occur?

“(Because) the race became in part a referendum on gender — Mrs. Clinton running to be the first female president, Mr. Trump calling her a ‘nasty woman’ and bragging about sexual assault on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape … Seeing someone like yourself in office can spur political involvement, political scientists have found, especially for young women.”

If these reasons for young women moving to the left beginning in 2016 are correct (abortion is not mentioned; this was six years before Roe v. Wade was overturned), America has a generation of many unimpressive young women.

Let’s analyze the three big reasons:

1. “Seeing someone like yourself” — meaning women seeing a woman running for president and then seeing her defeated.

It is hard to imagine a more primitive reason to support a candidate for president (or any other office) than the importance of their looking like oneself. Yet this is one of the most frequently offered left-wing arguments for the need to elect more women and blacks.

To begin with, it is simply dishonest. Does any woman on the left prefer a woman with conservative views to man with left-wing views? Does any black person on the left prefer a black with conservative views to a white with left-wing views?

So, then, if values and positions are far more important to women and blacks than whether a person is a man or woman, a white or a black, what does it all mean?

It means nothing. All it means is that emotions dictate left-wing women’s and left-wing blacks’ votes. It means that the left-wing argument for having people in political — or corporate board or any other — positions who “look like America” is pure emotion.

Is “looking like America” important in sports? Do white fans care whether the players on their favorite basketball or football team look like them? Have we seen any diminution in fan support for the NFL, given that more than half of NFL players are black and only a quarter are white? Have we seen any diminution in fan support of NBA teams given that three quarters of NBA players are black, and only 17% are white?

Is it important in movies? Are blacks more likely to watch a film with a black lead actor, or whites more likely to watch a film with a white lead actor? Or do both groups want to see stars — whether it’s a white Tom Hanks or a black Denzel Washington? In fact, according to YouGov, three of the five “most popular all-time actors/actresses” are black: Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson and Denzel Washington. Do whites care?

Is it important in medicine? How many patients needing surgery ask for a surgeon of their own sex or race?

There is one other fact of life worth noting. Having more of your own group — blacks or women — in politically powerful positions has no positive effect whatsoever on your group. None of the black governors, senators, representatives or mayors have done anything that has specifically benefited black Americans. And the same holds for women in power with regard to helping women. Meanwhile, Asian Americans have become the most successful ethnic group in America with virtually no Asian Americans in positions of power.

2. Mr. Trump called (Hillary Clinton) a “nasty woman.”

That this is one of the three major reasons for the 2016 left-wing shift of young American women is truly pathetic. It is further proof of the title of a column I wrote two years ago, “Feminism Has Weakened Women.”

One suspects that women of my mother’s — pre-feminism — generation would have been able to handle a male politician calling a female opponent a “nasty woman” far better than the current generation of young women, the products of three generations of feminism. They were also less traumatized by men’s boorish sexist comments. There’s a wild inconsistency here as well: The whole point of feminism, according to feminists, is to have society treat men and women as equals, and equally. Yet feminists simultaneously insist that men treat women with a dose of chivalry or they’re “sexist.”

That same year, 2016, Trump called Florida Sen. Marco Rubio “Little Marco.” Did any short men become leftists as a result? Apparently, short men are considerably stronger than feminized women. For that matter, who isn’t?

3. Trump “bragging about sexual assault on the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.”

The third reason given for young women’s embracing leftism in 2016 was a recording made in 2005 that came out in 2016. In a private conversation with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood,” Trump said, “When you’re a star … you can do anything. Grab ’em by the p**sy. You can do anything.”

Those comments were made 11 years earlier and in a private conversation with one person. Trump did not say them publicly.

Here is a moral rule of life: You cannot judge a person by comments made in private. We are to judge people by comments made in public, and by actions, whether done in private or public. Virtually every person has said awful things in private. It doesn’t matter. One purpose of private conversations is to let off steam.

It is a testament to the lack of wisdom of our age that we think we can know people — let alone judge them — by what they say in private.

And it is a testament to the lack of wisdom among a majority of America’s young women that these three foolish reasons propelled them to vote for the ideology that is destroying our country.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

A great many Americans claim that they cannot vote for former President Donald Trump because they loathe him.

That was also their argument in 2016 and 2020.

That argument was childish in 2016 and 2020, and it remains childish in 2024.

I say “childish” because mature people don’t vote on the basis of whom they like. They vote on the basis of which candidate is best for their country. As I asked both eight years ago and four years ago, other than friends and a spouse, whom do you choose based on how much you like a person? Do you choose your surgeon on that basis? If you or a loved one had cancer and were presented with a choice of two surgeons, one known to be an honorable man and loyal husband, the other known for his abrasive personality and for being a womanizer but also known as one of the best cancer surgeons in the country, which would you choose?

We all know the answer. So, why would you choose a president based on marital fidelity or personality traits?

Though they always mention Trump “the liar” (as far as truth-telling is concerned, Trump is Abe Lincoln compared to President Joe Biden), Trump “the adulterer,” Trump “the mean,” and now Trump “the felon” (although no one can tell you what he was charged with), Trump haters would respond that those are not the only reasons why they would never vote for Trump. He is, they constantly tell us, a threat to democracy.

Trump haters have to say that — because they know that merely listing his alleged and actual obnoxious personal traits makes them look foolish. The problem, however, is that the claim that Trump would end democracy in America is baseless. He was already president for four years, and he in no way threatened democracy. Of course, Trump haters will point to Jan. 6 — and only to Jan. 6, because they have no other example from all four years of the Trump presidency of Trump allegedly threatening democracy.

But Jan. 6 is a phony example. That day, Trump explicitly told his supporters to go peacefully to the Capitol. And it was Trump who, on Jan. 4, explicitly requested and authorized 10,000 National Guard troops to guard the capital and the Capitol. It was Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington, D.C., who refused his request.

Then there are Trump’s repeated claims that the 2020 election was “stolen.” That claim, according to Trump haters, constitutes a “threat to democracy.” But Hillary Clinton repeatedly said that she was “robbed” of a victory, that the 2016 election was “stolen.” But not one Trump hater ever characterized her claim as “a threat to democracy.” Nor, for that matter, did any Republicans. Because that claim doesn’t constitute a threat to democracy.

The charge is made solely because Trump haters … hate Trump.

Furthermore, and most important, there has been, and is, a real threat to democracy. But it is coming entirely from the Democrats.

For the first time in American history, under Joseph Biden, the Department of Justice has been weaponized against political opponents.

For the first time in American history, this country has political prisoners. Steven Bannon and Peter Navarro are just two examples. Jan. 6 prisoners have been wildly overcharged and placed in solitary confinement over minor infractions.

For the first time in American history, a former president and the nominee of one of the two major political parties has been arrested and put on trial — on nonsensical charges, moreover.

For the first time in American history, an administration has colluded with Big Tech to suppress political speech they consider unfriendly.

For the first time in American history, one major party has attempted to remove the presidential nominee of the other major party from multiple state ballots.

And the intelligence agencies have been likewise politicized. Fifty-one current and former heads of intelligence agencies lied on behalf of the Democratic presidential nominee when they signed a statement right before the 2020 election declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop story was the product of Russian disinformation.

This country has a deep state that is dedicated to serving the Democratic Party.

Compared to all that, Trump’s alleged one-night stand with a porn star and his hush-money payment to her is of no consequence. Indeed, when it comes to marital fidelity, compared to three of the Democrats’ heroes — President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and President Bill Clinton — Donald Trump is a holy man.

And things will get much worse if Vice President Kamala Harris is elected. Government censorship of political opponents will increase. Arrests of political opponents will increase. And government control of industries — like setting food prices — has already been promised.

We know how bad things will get because we know what the Biden-Harris administration has already done to the country. Because we know what Harris and her fellow California Democrats have done to California. And because we know what Gov. Tim Walz has done to Minnesota.

To vote for the Democrats because one hates Trump is not merely childish. When how one feels about Donald Trump is more important than the future of the country, we are dealing with something far more serious than childishness.

We are dealing with destructive narcissism.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

This is the headline of an article published Aug. 26 in The New York Times: “Fare Evasion Surges on N.Y.C. Buses, Where 48% of Riders Fail to Pay.”

The article begins: “Every weekday in New York City, close to one million bus riders — roughly one out of every two passengers — board without paying.

“Fare evasion has led to startling financial losses for the M.T.A. (Metropolitan Transit Authority), the state agency that runs the city transit system. In 2022, the authority lost $315 million because of bus fare evasion and $285 million as a result of subway fare beaters, according to a 2023 report commissioned by the M.T.A.”

This report encapsulates the foolishness — and therefore the destructiveness — of progressive ideas.

To understand why, let’s go back five years.

On April 13, 2019, the Times ran this headline: “1 in 5 Bus Riders in New York City Evades the Fare, Far Worse Than Elsewhere.”

In just five years, the percentage of New Yorkers who avoid paying their bus fare — in other words, steal — increased from 20% to 50%, a two-and-a-half times increase.

And why might that be? The answer is the same answer that explains virtually every awful development in American cities: moronic progressive ideas and the Democratic Party, the party that governs all our big cities.

As reported in the 2019 article, “Fare evasion was widespread and the reasons varied. Riders did not have exact change. They knew they would not get in trouble …”

Let’s deal with these reasons.

“Riders did not have exact change.”

Are we to believe that two and a half times more New Yorkers lacked exact change in 2024 than in 2019? The “no exact change” excuse is typical of people who break laws — they don’t blame themselves; in fact, they regard themselves as perfectly innocent. This is precisely what almost all people who engage in criminal behavior — from fare evasion to murder — do: justify their behavior to themselves.

“They knew they would not get in trouble.”

That’s the real reason. And as we shall see, progressives ensure that fare evaders will not get in trouble.

If people believe they will get away with it, many, maybe even most, people will do bad things.

There are three reasons people desist from doing bad things:

Reason 1: They will be punished.

Progressives have done away with this crime prevention tool. In California, for example, progressives decided to make theft of up to $950 a misdemeanor. As a result, there is more theft of retail stores than at any time in modern California history.

The threat of punishment is why there is less fare evasion in London or Paris than in New York. As the 2019 Times article reported, “In London, where riders face fines as high as $1,300, the fare evasion rate on buses is only 1.5 percent.” And in Paris, “the fare evasion rate for buses is 11 percent. … The Paris transit system has 1,200 staff members dedicated to the problem and hands out about one million fines each year.”

In December 2018, The Washington Post reported:

“The D.C. Council gave final approval this week to a measure decriminalizing Metro fare evasion. … Council members and activists (said) decriminalization was an important step toward addressing disproportionate policing of African Americans who use the transit system. … Proponents of the bill, the Metro Fare Evasion Decriminalization Amendment Act of 2018, pointed to a recent report from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs that found between January 2016 and February 2018, 91 percent of Metro Transit Police citations and summons for fare evasion were issued to African Americans.”

Thanks to progressives and D.C. Democrats, the amount of fare evasion increased exponentially in the nation’s capital. And so, a few months ago, D.C. did what New York City is now doing. As reported earlier this year by NBC News in D.C.:

“Enhanced enforcement against Metro fare evasion began in D.C. on Monday, March 18. The new policies are part of the anti-crime legislation approved by the D.C. Council and signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser earlier this month.”

Reason 2: People’s conscience prevents them from doing something bad.

This is true among a minority of people. But for a vast number of people, the conscience is largely useless. The fact that Stalin, Hitler, Mao and the many people who murdered and tortured on their behalf slept well at night should prove how utterly malleable the conscience is. In most people, the conscience is as strong as putty.

Reason 3: People believe God commands them not to engage in certain immoral behaviors.

People who believe in the Ten Commandments — and, importantly, that God is their author — are less likely to steal. This is the case either because they believe they must not steal just because God commands them not to or because they believe God will punish them.

But, of course, progressives have gotten rid of the Ten Commandments. Simply requiring school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments — as Oklahoma and Kentucky are attempting to do — has set off a left-wing panic.

In a nutshell, the Times headline encapsulates one other aspect of modern life: The civil war in America and in the West is not just between the Left and the Right. It is between the Left and civilization.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His commentary on Numbers, the fourth volume of “The Rational Bible,” his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, will be released in November 2024 and is available now for presale on Amazon. He is the co-founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com

This past weekend, two biologically male boxers won gold medals in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics. On Friday, Imane Khelif of Algeria won the gold medal in the women’s welterweight division. On Saturday, Lin Yu-Ting of Taiwan won the gold medal in the women’s featherweight division.

As reported by Boxing News, the oldest boxing publication in the world:

“Khelif has documented male XY chromosomes. Khelif — along with Lin Yu-Ting, of Taiwan — was banned from boxing at the world championships last year, this because of the fact that Khelif, and Yu-Ting, was proven to be biological male.”

Why did the International Olympic Committee allow biological men to box women?

The reason is that the IOC is a woke organization. And given that the Olympics took place in a particularly woke locale — Paris — the games featured almost everything that the word “woke” represents.

— The games opened with a drag queen mockery of Christianity.

— Due to farm animals’ alleged impact on climate, 60% of the Olympic athletes’ food was vegan (not even vegetarian). According to The Australian, the Australian government flew in “more than 700 kilograms of eggs and a ton of extra meat” to feed Australian athletes.

— Also to combat climate change, athletes’ dorms were not allowed to have air conditioning. They were to be cooled, in the words of The Washington Post, “by other cooling methods.” But few countries relied on “other cooling methods,” so they shipped in portable air conditioning units — all of which ended up doing what many green policies do: increasing the “carbon footprint.”

— And true to its wokeness, the IOC forced women boxers to fight biological males. The IOC allowed male boxers to fight women despite the males’ having been previously banned from women’s boxing by the International Boxing Association.

Sporting organizations independent of the IOC set their own eligibility rules — which usually means biological males cannot compete in women’s sports. But for the second straight Summer Olympics, Olympic boxing has been run by an IOC-appointed committee, not by a functioning governing body for that sport.

As a result, every woman who faced Khelif or Lin was soundly defeated. Women who devoted their lives to the grueling sport of boxing and to the goal of one day winning an Olympic gold medal were cheated out of the possibility.

Of course, the world’s mainstream — meaning left-wing — media supported the IOC. The worst among the awful media may have been the Associated Press. In the view of the AP, Khelif, not the women Khelif beat up, was the real victim: Khelif was the victim of “online abuse from around the world over misconceptions about her womanhood. … Major celebrities and others have questioned her eligibility or falsely claimed she was a man.”

According to the AP, opposition to the biologically male boxers was “amplified by Russian disinformation.” “Russian disinformation slams Paris and amplifies Khelif debate to undermine the Olympics” was the AP headline of its “news” piece on Khelif’s winning a gold medal. AP cited NewsGuard — a left-wing disinformation organization that masquerades as a “fact checker” — as agreeing that Russian disinformation played a critical role in the Paris Olympics.

The once-respected AP, which, like other mainstream “news” media, has become a disgrace to the news profession, not only blamed Russian disinformation but also blamed — you guessed it — racism. Another AP headline: “For female athletes of color, scrutiny around gender rules and identity is part of a long trend.”

The article went on to say: “Female athletes of color have historically faced disproportionate scrutiny and discrimination when it comes to sex testing and false accusations that they are male or transgender.” And it quoted — you guessed it again — a professor:

“Medical anthropologist Danyal Kade Doyle Griffiths, an adjunct professor with the City University of New York (said): ‘These examples strike me as particular cases where racism and transphobia and intersex phobia are kind of inseparable.'”

The whole charge of AP and the professor is a falsehood. White biological men who claim to be female and compete against women are routinely attacked for cheating. See, for example, an earlier column about the University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas, who claims to be female and robs women of their swimming records.

NBC also claimed Khelif was a victim: “Algerian Imane Khelif won welterweight gold Friday … overcoming a firestorm of questions from opponents wrongly questioning her gender.”

No one exposed the deceit of the IOC and the left-wing media as effectively as the women who were forced to fight against Khelif and Lin. NBC itself reported the words of Mexico’s Brianda Tamara after she fought Khelif in Dec. 2022:

“When I fought her I felt very much out of my depth. Her blows hurt me a lot, I don’t think I had ever felt like that in my 13 years as a boxer, nor in my sparring with men. Thank God that day I got out of the ring safely.”

Essentially Sports reported that female boxer Svetlana Kamenova Staneva of Bulgaria, who lost her chance at a gold medal when she was defeated by Lin, refused “to shake hands with Lin Yu Ting and instead (was) defiantly displaying an ‘X’ gesture in the ring, implying her XX chromosomes compared to her opponent’s reported XY chromosomes.”

A Turkish female boxer, Esra Yildiz Kahraman, also displayed an “X” gesture after Lin defeated her.

Presumably, the IOC, AP, NBC and NewsGuard regard all these women fighters as sore losers.

It all began when the world saw Angela Carini, the Italian female boxer, quit her fight with Khelif after just 46 seconds. Sobbing at having to quit the fight, she later told the press: “I am heartbroken. I went to the ring to honor my father. I was often told that I was a warrior, but I preferred to stop for my health. I have never felt a punch like this.”

The solution is testing for chromosomes — not testosterone levels, not genitals, not self-identification. It may well be that Khelif herself did not know until tested that she was a biological male. Unlike Thomas and all the transwomen who play against women, Khelif was not necessarily a cheat.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni got it right: “Athletes who have male genetic characteristics should not be admitted to female competitions.”

Former President Donald Trump said essentially the same thing.

Vice President Kamala Harris has thus far said nothing.

 

This column was originally posted on Townhall.com.

Brought to you by www.DennisPrager.com