And i am looking forward to a great weekend with all of you guys, but this morning i have the great honor and privilege to introduce Dennis Prager. I am a huge fan of mr. Pragers work for two big reasons. Number one, without his show i would not have found this distinct organization, Young Americas Foundation, which ive had the privilege to intern for this summer. And number two, because i believe mr. Prager provides something very important, something very unique and something lacking for most of our policy discourse today, and thats moral clarity. Dennis prager is the host of the widely popular and influential talk show the Dennis Prager show, which can be heard 9 00 a. M. To 12 00 p. M. Pacific. He can also be seen regularly on cnn and fox news. In addition to his daily radio show, mr. Prager lectures frequently on various topics from religion to politics. He is also a prolific commentator, writing a weekly column that appears in townhall. Com, national review, among other places. His writings have also been featured in the Weekly Standard and the wall street journal. Mr. Prager is the author of six books, the nine questions people ask about judaism, which is an introduction to judaism in the world. Number two, why the jews, the reason for antisemitism, happiness is a serious problem, still the best hope, why the world needs American Values to triumph, which i highly recommend, and the ten commandments, still the best moral code. Mr. Prager has produced three films and is currently in the process of producing the fourth, no safe spaces, which hell be producing with filmmaker and comedian adam corolla. He was a fellow at columbia university, school of International Affairs where he did graduate work at the middle east and russian institure. He has taught russian and jewish history at Brooklyn College and president Ronald Reagan appointed him to the u. S. Delegation to the vienna review conference on the helinski accords. He also received an honorary doctorate of law at pepperdine university. He periodically conducts orchestras and has introduced hundreds of thousands of people to classical music. In 2011, mr. Prager cofounded Prager University with his producer allen esturn, which is an institution of Higher Learning on the internet with a unique difference. All of the courses are five minutes long. The courses distill the best ideas of the best minds in the world, and cover the disciplines of political science, history, philosophy and religion, economics and psychology and the faculty includes paul johnson, george gilder, Arthur Brooks and peter craft and many others. And by the end of the year, i am pleased to report, Dennis Prager you will have over 400 million views. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dennis Prager. [applause] dennis hi, everybody. It is wonderful to be back. Thank you, ross, for the kind , meaningful words. I will just tell you that introducing is not as easy as it seems. At the university of colorado in boulder many years ago, a young woman, a student there introduced me and she announced, this was the first time she was ever publicly speaking, which became apparent momentarily. [laughter] dennis and so she read all she had to do, really, was read from this script thats provided, but she was quite nervous, and it said that the actual words were the Los Angeles Times said that mr. Prager is preoccupied with good and evil, and she read it the Los Angeles Times said that mr. Prager is preoccupied with doing evil, and i remember my first thought was, how does she know . [laughter] dennis be that as it may, it is good to be here despite the fact it is 6 00 a. M. For me. I came in from california last night. [cheering] dennis wow. Hey, if thats an achievement in your eyes, im in good shape. Thats really great. By the way, just by clapping, how many of you have seen two or more videos of Prager University . [cheers and applause] dennis okay. All right. Thats very important to me, as you well know. So i really take this seriously or i wouldnt cross the country. And then im going back today because i consider this so , significant. So i thought, what can i talk to you about in the 45 minutesplus questions that i have . And i thought, you know what . Im going to not talk about politics as such. Well talk about what i like to call on my radio show, the ultimate issues. So im going to give you it all has political ramifications, but i would like to give you about five or six points of ideas that have animated my life and that ive learned in a much longer life than yours and so here they go. Its not in order of importance, theyre all very important, and i can give you another six, and another six, and another six, and another six, because its the purpose of adults to tell young people what theyve learned, otherwise, whats the proof to getting older . Right . By the way, there is proof to that. Say youre 20. Every one of you knows how much more you know about life than you did at 15. So double that. How much more will you know at 40 . So theres certain inevitability, but not entirely because there are people who get older and stay stupid and i dont mean to put them down. [laughter] dennis well, actually, i do. [laughter] dennis theres something wrong in not growing, but thats another subject. Number one, and oddly enough, it might be it might be the most important single thing because if you dont know this, i dont think wisdom is possible. Thats how much weight i place on this realization, and i know that if you dont agree, it it will be painful to hear, but youre not snowflakes. So im prepared to Say Something that you may not have thought about or even thought about and come to a different conclusion , and that is people are not basically good. If you dont know that, i do not believe wisdom is possible, and i do not believe it is possible to make a better world. It is the great myth of the postenlightenment western secular world that human nature is good. Human nature is not good. Its not evil. If it was purely evil no good would be done. There are good people, of course there are good people. In fact, my life has been dedicated to the question how do , you make good people . There is no more important question in society. Every other question is secondary to the question of how do you make people good because we dont start out good. People who tell me babies are good have it wrong. Babies are innocent, but theyre not good. No baby has altruism. Gee, you know, ive been puking and crapping and peeing for the last week. My parents really need some time together. So im just going to stop crying tonight. [laughter] dennis let them go out and enjoy each other and then ill resume crying when they get back. [laughter] dennis this does not occur to a baby. By the way, if we were not completely selfabsorbed as a baby we wouldnt survive. I am not antibaby, just for a their record. I was a baby and i had a good image of myself as a baby, so this is not an issue. Please understand, we are not good. There is no parent who i ever met who looked at their kid and said, you know, you share too much. Any of you ever told that by your parents . You just share too much. Learn to be more selfish. It doesnt happen. How many times did your parents say to you, say thank you . Was it 4,000 . 10,000 . Why didnt it work once . If were basically good, oh, of course, i should say thank you, but youre not basically good so you have to be told over and over the unbelievably elementary moral decency of thanking someone for doing something good for you. Even that doesnt come naturally. It is the grand lie of the secular world since the enlightenment that people are basically good, and so much damage has been done by that. For example, one of the biggest is do you blame people for the evil they do or do you blame external sources . If a person rapes, murders, mugs, embezzles, robs a store, burns down a store, do you say they have done evil or they are victims of bad parenting, of racism, of poverty . Thats what i was taught. Poverty causes crime. Who believes poverty causes crime . People who believe people are good so they dont blame the criminal, they blame poverty. The first time i heard poverty causes crime i knew it was wrong , because i thought of my grandparents who were in new york during the depression not just the depression, but unemployed. They were quintessentially poor, and then i thought, how come my grandfather never mugged anybody . No. Isnt that a logical question . If poverty causes crime my grandfather should have been a criminal. But he wasnt because he had , religion. Because he believed that there says, do not steal. Thats why. Theres a big reason, but we because we believe this id yosi idiocy that people are basically good, we have dispensed with religious morality. Oh, i dont need the ten commandments. I am so good. People dont need to be told by a god. It is mocked. We have 400 million views a year at Prager University videos. You know the ones that get the most mocked . Not on health care, not on taxes , and we get a a lot of criticism on those. The ones that say god is necessary. This drives people crazy because we live in utterly secular world , which believes god can be dispensed with morally and exist existentially and so on. Ill get to that in the next topic. One more thing, i dont excuse adults who believe people are basically good. But i excuse kids because its a , nice fantasy and kids believe in fantasies, but for an adult to know the human record and to argue people are basically good, do they not know about the utter universality of slavery just as an example. Utterly universal and there is not a society ney history that we know of that did not have slavery. If people were basically good , why would it have been ubiquitous . Not to mention torture, rape and murder. And to say that after world war ii people are basically good . You really have to suspend judgment. It is wishful thinking. And one final thing, i do not even wish it. I will tell you why. Because i know that people arent basically good. I am so happy every time i meet a good person. Im never disappointed when i meet a bad person. I dont expect much from humans. [laughter] dennis therefore, when i meet a good person, you know what . I have only said, you know what my biggest hobby is . Good people collecting. Thats what i do. I collect good people and its one of the reasons for my energy and my happiness in life. Number two, the necessity of god. Necessity. I am not talking about existence. This is not a talk right now about whether or not god exists. I do believe god exists. Thats a separate issue. I am now not talking people can argue whether or not god exists, what is not arguable is whether god is necessary. There is a piece in todays on , i think the guy wrote it because he knew i was speaking to you. Im going to write them a note and thank them for publishing this. Some professor wrote a piece today, i dont know, i think hes a physicist. I didnt check. He studies the universe and realizes that everything ends, theres no intrinsic meaning to the universe. Its all meaningless, you better make up something or youll go crazy. That is existentialism. How are you doing you meaningless bunch of molecules. You cant do that. Its too painful. People make up meanings, career, love, family, kids, travel, hobbies, otherwise theyll go nuts. And by the way, all of that is great. Im totally into all of those things, but it is made up. In fact, without a god. It is a material universe. All of that is real is matter and therefore life is ultimately meaningless. If you deny that, you are fooling yourself. Maybe its good to fool yourself , so that you have a happier day. But in fact thats the case. ,even if god does not exist, im not talking about existence im , talking about necessity. No god, no ultimate meaning. No god, everything ends when we die. Everything. You there is no afterlife. You see no one you have loved. Everything that has been done, youve done and will be forgotten. Theres probably no one or maybe three people in this room who could even name a greatgreat grandparents let alone knows a , dam thing about them. So dont give me this nonsense we live on through the memories of our loved ones, except our loved ones also die. So the memories of you die. You couldnt name three people who lived in the 13th century , whose just name you couldnt do. Lets be honest, its all forgotten. Everything you do, its gone. Its a puff, but if there is a god, its not all over. Now you can say thats wishful , thinking, too. Fine, i told you, invite me back for just gods existence talk. This is not a gods existence talk. Its a god necessity talk. Only if there is a god is there ultimate purpose to life. Only if there is a god does death not end everything. Only if there is a god is there ultimate justice. People who smashed babies heads in world war ii, if there is no god, they simply slinked into the population in which they lived and Nothing Happened to them. And nothing is done for the baby. Its all over. Tough, kid. Thats the way the cookie krum crumbles. Thats the secular view of ultimate justice. Thats the way the cookie crumbles. But if there is a god there is , ultimate justice. Theres a big difference if there is a god or not and if there is a god, there is absolute and objective morality. Evil exists. Actually evil. Just like two and two is four, murder is wrong. Without god, all ethics are subjective. Thats just the way it is. It doesnt mean you cant be a good atheist. There are kind atheists and there are despicable religious people, thats a given, but it has nothing to do with the point. The point is good and evil do not exist objectively if there is no god. See the video that we put out, if there is no god, is murder wrong . Not why, is murder wrong. There was an aimlessness, you know it is the first Secular Society in Human History . Western europe is the first Godless Society in the history of the world and if the left has its way in the United States we will follow because they look at , europe as a model. And let me tell you, you know what the biggest problem in europe is . And there are a lot of problems in europe, but i think the biggest one is the big b boredom. Because ultimately they dont believe in their nations and they dont believe in a religion. They believe in more free hours not to work. That is what has become the great crusade in europe. How can i work fewer hours . Number three. Race is irrelevant. Irrelevant. If you believe race matters, youre a racist. By definition. That is the definition of racism. That the color of your skin determines something about you. We live in the antithesis of the liberalism that i grew up with. Leftism is antiliberal. If you understand that, you know 50 of what you need to know about leftism. Leftism has nothing in common with liberalism. I grew up a liberal. How could i not . Im a jew from new york. So obviously, i grew up as a liberal. On my birth certificate it had liberal. [laughter] dennis it was the single most important item on the birth certificate. This is so i understand that. And as a liberal, i understood to be race blind is the ideal. Character matters, not skin color. The left is the first the american and the western left is the first ideology since the nazis to say race is important. Im not comparing them to nazis. Nazis are uniquely evil. Im merely stating a fact and not an opinion. Naziism and contemporary leftism, no one held race as important. No one. Only racists, neonazis and now the Washington PostNew York Times and every college you go to, they believe race is important. But the university of california has issued a list of microaggressions. You all know what microaggressions are, right . Here is an example of a racist microaggression, a Statement People make thinking its nice, but its really, get it, racist. If you say there is only one race, the human race. You are a racist according to the leftwing leaders of the university of california. Check it, folks. Check it. My credibility rides on every comment i make. I know that. Im very careful before god and man never to exaggerate. That is listed as a statement of racism to say there is only one race, the human race. So you are saturated in an utterly racist environment at almost any university you attend with black dorms and hispanic graduations. Thats all pure racism. No liberal in American History would have counted. If you had told john f. Kennedy that harvard will have a separate graduation for blacks, he would have said it is not possible, because its a liberal institution and he was right. Liberal institutions dont have black graduations. Leftist institutions have black graduations. [applause] dennis number four, and i guess what i am doing is sort of slaughtering a lot of sacred cows. I didnt think of the talk as such, but its really what i guess its come to. Feminism has done a lot of damage. [applause] people always ask me, hasnt it done some good . Of course, its done some good. Can you name anything that has not done any good . Its an absurd question, did it do any good . We dont judge people or ideas by did it do any good . We judge them on the sum total. Is the sum total good or not good . The sum total of feminism has been a moral and personal disaster for the society, but it has done some good. First of all, any decent human knows or must know humans are equal. Theres no egalitarian difference between men and women. It is so obvious that i dont know, i dont think i was a particularly quote, unquote, progressive. I grew up in a normal home and the idea that my father was more valuable than my mother as a human being would have struck me as a more on, that only a moron would say that. Or that in general, men are more important than women. It there were people who believed it in history, i know that. Its a given that that is wrong, but beyond that what feminism has done has hurt people terribly. It has hurt women and its hurt men. I ask every, not every, but almost every woman 25 years of age or younger. Sometimes theyre 32 and they look 25, but theyre not insulted when i tell them, oh, i thought you were 25. Anyway, i really do. I ask a waitress, a flight attendant, somebody im sitting next to on the plane, and i talk to strangers.