People do not yearn to be free, they yearn to be taken care of. Being anti-left is a noble fight against the fall of the Western civilization, says Prager

"Woke is in fact an euphemism for left. It is anything that the left does not want to be said, that´s really what it amounts to. So today, we simply have a new variation on the theme of censorship and a particularly sick one. You have to say the opposite of what everyone knows to be true," says Prager in an exclusive interview for INFO.CZ. He also adds, that socialism is a form of religion and that he considers the fight against it and against the left in general a noble form of protecting the Western civilization from collapsing.

Dear readers, it is my great pleasure to welcome to this interview on INFO.CZ a man you probably know or at least have heard of. He´s a radio show host, a writer and founder of PragerU, Mr. Dennis Prager. Dennis, it is a pleasure and an honor to have you. Welcome to Prague.

Thank you. It´s wonderful to be here and to be with you.

I would start with a question that is fairly new to us, Czechs, but it´s been big in the USA in the past years. It is the woke culture, the woke people. In Europe, it is still quite an undiscovered phenomenon yet, we can just see the first parts of it emerging. But in America it is becoming a huge movement and I would say, that you can see it as one of the driving forces of the new left. To the Czech and central European audience, how would you describe the term „woke“ itself?

Woke is really an euphemism for the left. Just like politically incorrect was an euphemism for the left. They´re always euphemisms. Woke is anything that the left does not want to be said, that´s really what it amounts to. There´s no woke right culture, right? So this is a new form of censorship, but the left has always censored. There is no example since Vladimir Ilyich Lenin until today of the left being in power and dissent being allowed. There is no example. Liberals allow dissent, conservatives allow dissent, the left has never. 

So today we simply have the latest form of the woke culture, it´s a particularly sick form, because even the leftist ten years ago, let alone in Lenin´s time would not have said that men give birth. So wokeism is a new variation on the theme of censorship and a particularly sick one. You have to say the opposite of what everyone knows to be true. Everyone knows only women give birth. If you went to an university, you got a degree in wokeism in addition to your degree in biology, history, black studies or whatever. You got a degree in wokeism, so you´ve learned that if someone says: „Men do not give birth“, they are not only wrong, they are haters. So this is beyond Orwell.

You´ve kinda mentioned it in your answer, so it brings me to my next question. When we´re talking about the freedom of speech, which is fundamental not only to the Constitution of the United States of America but I would say to every single constitution of every single democratic country, do you think that the freedom of speech is endangered nowadays? And another question, that you´ve also mentioned: Where would you draw the line between free speech and hate speech?

The answer to the first one is very simple. This is the greatest threat to free speech in American history. There was more free speech even during the civil war in America. We have never before questioned free speech in the United States. It was given. I may disagree with you, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it. That´s an old saying. But not any longer. If I am on the left and I disagree with you, then you should not have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. This is truly new. And the most important freedom is the freedom of speech. But as I´ve already said, the left has never valued the freedom of speech. Liberals do, conservatives do, but the left has never. I would be open with you as someone who has loved America all my life – I find it depressing, the ease at which the left has been able to suppress free speech. Google, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, universities… not just the social media, but the universities. Students are afraid to raise their hand in class and say something that the left wing professor disagrees with. People are afraid to speak up at work because they´ll be fired. You´re now entering a Soviet type of society, you´re leaving America and entering Soviet. So the threat is the greatest in American history. 

And where does the free speech differ from hate speech? They don´t differ. Free speech includes hate speech, that´s the definition. Otherwise, there is no such thing as free speech. I consider left wing speech hate speech. I consider Black Lives Matter speech hate speech. „All whites are racist“ is as pure form of hate speech as I´ve heard in my life. And that is allowed and not only allowed but said at every university. If I have the power, would I suppress that speech? No. Because I believe in free speech. But when you graduate an university not only in America but also in England, Canada, the West generally, you do not learn to think, you learn not to think. So in America, about 40% of students do not believe in free speech for hate speech. They don´t understand that it means they don´t believe in free speech. They don´t understand that.

You´ve mentioned the role of social media, we´ll get to that, but first I would like to focus on the role of traditional media. Because many of, I would even say most of the media outlets in the world, especially in the western world, are more or less openly leaning towards the liberal world views, while the conservative ideas are being criticized and ostracised as backwards steps in the much desired road to progress and modernity. What should the conservatives do about that? What should they do in order to make their words have the power that they are supposed to have and to show the world that it is not hate speech, it is not backwardism, but a fundamental part of a free speech debate?

Before I answer you, I would just make one distinction. The media of the western world are not liberal leaning, I wish they were, they´re left wing leaning. I draw a big difference between left and liberal, I´ve written a lot about it, I have PragerU videos about it if your readers are interested. Leftism is the opposite of liberalism, just as it is an opposite of conservatism. How can we get our voices heard more? They´re doing everything to shut us down, everything. Because they know in their hearts, that if the people hear non-left ideas, they will reject the left. We don´t believe that when you hear the left wing ideas, then you will reject the rigth, we don´t believe that. 

We want people to read the New York Times, we want people to hear a left wing intellectual, but they don´t want the people to be able to read any of us or hear any of us. That is the difference. And they´re right. When I go to an American university to speak, I know that in ninety minutes, I can undo four years of left wing indoctrination and they know it too and that´s why they protest when I or any other conservative go to campuses.

They know that we can undo their four years of indoctrination in ninety minutes. We can undo it with a five minute PragerU video and that´s why they hate PragerU, because we have intellectuals, phenomenal people from Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, from the New York times, from all of their venerated institutions. We have voices that are offering conservative ideas and they don´t want them heard. I have the battle in America to convince the conservatives to speak up. To as we put it come out of the closet, most conservatives in the USA are in the closet. 

When I walk to airports in the United States, I am frequently recognized, people would come over to me and it´s unbelievable that I am experiencing at an american airports what I have experienced when I went to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. People would come over to me there and before they speak, they would look around if no one is listening. And now people at airports do that to me - „Who´s gonna see me talking to Dennis Prager?“. And then they would quietly say: „Just want you to know Dennis, I agree with you, I am a conservative too.“ They say it very quietly. This is a different America.

We can move onto the big question on social media. We all know that they play a crucial part in our lives in the 21st century and their political inclination is even more visible than the traditional media´s. The conservative figures and pages are being shadowbanned or straightforwardly banned, PragerU is one of such examples, it happened to you on various social media. It is also being used by the left as a part of their argumentation, saying: „Look, those guys got their page banned which must mean they have done something bad.“ In general, do you think that the way social media work nowadays is sustainable and can it survive?

Why wouldn´t it survive? Look, all bad things come to an end, but how long did it take for communism in Europe? 1917 to 1991? That is a long time and a lot of people suffered and died in the meantime. Nothing lasts forever, but they´re certainly not getting weaker, they´re getting stronger. Social media are the driving force, but universities are the driving forces too. The American Medical Association announced just before I came here that they do not believe the birth certificates should list sex. No sex. All American Births should have no sex listed because the child would choose the sex later. This is the American Medical Association, not the American Fanatical Association.

When we talk about the banning of conservative profiles and pages on social media, do you think it is censorship? Do you think we should view censorship in this broader sense or we should just focus on the censorship being an act of state, where the state mandates something not to be published?

I don´t understand that argument some people give, that only the state can censor. People play with words as if what they´re saying has any logic. If I am at a university and I can´t print an article with a conservative point of view, I am being censored, even though the university is not a government, so what – I am being censored, I don´t understand it. So of course it is happening, and what is happening in America is very very bad. We´re having a combination of the state and business together suppressing freedom. That´s called fascism when the big corporations and big government collude. That´s basically fascism.

What is your opinion on the very common argument saying that it is a private business, a private company, and it can set its own rules and apply their own set of rules as selectively as it wants?

I have asked from the beginning, people have argued that, including some libertarians, so I´ve asked them a question – In America we have three different airlines – American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Airlines, so let´s say the three major airlines like the three big tech announce that if you voted for Donald Trump, you can not fly on our airlines. They´re private airlines, why can´t they do that?

Or the mobile phone operators for example…

Yes, these examples are legit. If you walk on a Delta flight with a Wall Street Journal, you may not fly, if you walk on with New York Times, you may fly. It´s a private airline, why can´t it do it? Because if you don´t American, Delta or United, you basically don´t fly anywhere.

You´re not left with many choices.

That´s right! And if you can´t use Facebook and Google and Instagram and Twitter, what are you going to use? So the argument is so odd, they have a monopoly essentially on the human ability to communicate, but hey, they´re private! If that is the case, bust them up, break them up! You can´t have such a monopoly and misuse it.

I think we´ve already touched the topic, the thing is in the West generally, especially in the Anglo-American countries many of the young people from my generation, I am 32 years old, and even younger people openly cheer for socialism. Maybe it´s because they don´t have the experience that the people from central Europe have, where their parents had to live under socialism. We´ve seen it in the case of Cuba recently, where people are desperately risking their own lives to flee the socialist regime while the American youth is openly cheering for Cuba, that they have given the people free healthcare and so on. What do you think caused this progress? Because in Lenin times all the hardcore leftism was driven by poverty and by the people who honestly lived in terrible conditions, but nowadays it´s driven by the first world kids living in prosperity and probably the best times in history. What do you think that caused that?

The following I believe that caused it, not in the order of importance, but all is important. One is the death of religion. Everybody on Earth is religious, there is no non-religious human being in the world. So you either have in the West the judeo-christian religion, a Bible based religion, or you´ll have a secular religion. So marxism is a secular religion, socialism is a secular religion, communism is a secular religion, environmentalism is a secular religion, feminism is a secular religion…

Does that apply to wokeism as well?

Yes, wokeism is an expression of all those other religions. Religious catholics, protestants, mormons and jews in America are not left wing, overwhelmingly not. Some are, most of them are not. Which proves my thesis. Secular conservatives are very naive, they´re sort of naive as liberals. They think that conservatism can survive the death of religion and it does not, it can´t. But that is another subject. To answer your number one is secularism. How can an American believe in socialism given the record of socialism? It´s because they need something to believe in, since they were given nothing. They were deprived of believing in America, they´re taught that America is a bad place and they are deprived of believing in religion, they are taught that religion is for idiots. They have nothing to believe any longer, so socialism sounds good. 

Number two, they believe deeply in getting things from the state. As I have said thousands of times and I should say it again – most people do not yearn to be free, they yearn to be taken care of. So they would trade in, like in the diabolical trade with Mephistopheles, freedom for benefits from the state. You give me free education, you give my kids free lunches, give me free healthcare, I´ll give you my freedom.

You gave the allegory with Mephistopheles which brings me to my allegory with the biblical confusion of languages, because I think and it is being discussed, that both the words „liberal“ and „conservative“ are kind of being hijacked by groups that are being neither liberal nor conservative. The first word, liberal, is being taken hostage by the hardcore left wing, the left wing extremist, the woke culture, who are only liberal on your opinions as they are 100% matching their own, while the word conservative is also being taken hostage by various strongly nationalist groups, by straightforwardly conspiracy theories believers. Both of these groups are not given the words good names. What should the actual liberals and the actual conservatives do to get their words back?

Publically declare what you are for and what you are against. The right wing problem you have described is nonexistent in the United States, we don´t have a fascistic movement in the United States. I am not a young man and how come in my whole life I have never come across a white supremacist?

You never have?

I´ve been to all fifty states and not only that I have never met one, but there is a young woman from Harvard University who´s been working for me and with me really this past summer. She reads all of my mail and she made a very intelligent observation and said: „You know, I haven´t seen one white supremacist e-mail.“ Now according to the left anything we say is a dogwhistle for the fascists and white supremacists.

And they would probably assume that you would be popular with the groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and similar.

Yes. So why I ain´t getting mails saying: „Hey Dennis, keep it up, great!“ Not one in my lifetime. So we don´t have this issue. Right wing in America means conservative, it doesn´t mean antisemite, antiblack, antihispanic, antianything. It means antileft. Thank God, that´s a noble, noble, noble… did I say noble?

I think you did a couple of times.

And I say it again, that is a noble endeavor. To fight the left is to fight to keep the Western civilization from dying. You in Europe have a different story, there is a tradition here in some countries of far right wings who are dangerous, who are antisemitic, who are xenophobic and all those things. So it just takes a conservative to condemn them. We have nothing in common with them, have a nice day. Most conservatives in Europe have nothing in common with these people, but the left will always have to lump you with them.

Would that apply to the left´s usage of the word liberal for the actual liberals? Because there are even right wing liberals and libertarians, so should they always say: „These guys are using it wrongly, it has nothing to do with us.“

I would invite your readers to go to the internet and search for Dennis Prager 32 questions. I write a column every week and some 6 months ago I wrote a column 32 questions to ask your friends and relatives to find out if they are liberal or left. They´re very important questions. For example: Do you support all black dormitories on college campuses?

I think that´s kind of an apartheid…

Yes, that is exactly correct. At the very least it is racial segregation. I was raised as a liberal jew and we hate racial segregation, but the left loves racial segregation. The left is the most antiblack force in the United States, the only systemic racism in America is on the left. That´s the Orwellian truth.