Free Republic

Here are some unhappy statistics: -- In America between 1946 and 2006, the suicide rate quadrupled for males ages 15 to 24 and doubled for females the same age. -- In 1950, the suicide rate per 100,000 Americans was 11.4. In 2017, it was 14. -- According to Grant Duwe, director of research and evaluation at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, in the 1980s, there were 32 mass public shootings (which he defines as incidents in which four or more people are killed publicly with guns within 24 hours). In the 1990s, there were 42. In the first decade of...

The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles has discovered that PragerU is making inroads with teenagers and she’s not happy. She's written a long article, a combination of honest facts and oozing snideness, that reveals her disdain for and fear of conservative values. Dennis Prager matters because he is persuasive. In the early 2000s, as I was going through the process of disengaging from a Democrat party I realized bore no relationship to my values, he helped me create a framework for my new worldview. I’ve also loved his PragerU videos. While open about their biases, they are temperate in tone...

In my last column, "Newsweek Hits a New Low," I wrote about Newsweek's dishonest description of what I had said on one of my weekly PragerU "Fireside Chats." A viewer had asked me to respond to a statement Anne Frank made in her epic Holocaust diary. Frank said, "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart." The Newsweek headline, "Conservative Radio Host Ridicules Anne Frank," was simply a lie. In order for readers to appreciate the level of mendacity, I had my entire response transcribed and placed it in the column.A few days later I received a...

BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera. He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the...

The left-right divide in America is, unfortunately, unbridgeable. There are three reasons. First, we are divided by our vision of what we want America to be. The right believes the founders' vision was brilliant and moral, that bourgeois middle-class values are superior to alternative value systems; that rights come from God, not man; and that the state must be as small as possible. The left (not liberals) shares none of those values. Second, we are divided by the means we use to achieve our vision. Given their different ends, left and right obviously differ on what means to use to...

AG Barr is digging deep to investigate the origins of the Russia hoax; Dennis Prager joins the show to weigh in.

The entire American left -- the mainstream media, the environmentalist movement and Democratic politicians in particular -- are celebrating the involvement of teenagers and even younger children in protesting the world's "inaction" with regard to global warming. And not just the American left, of course. The left throughout the world is celebrating. A 16-year-old Swedish girl whose contempt for adults is breathtaking is an international hero. Congressional Democrats invited her to testify in Congress, and the United Nations has likewise invited her. The mayor and city council of New York City further politicized their city's public schools by allowing students...

The Equation That Explains So Much Evil By Dennis Prager Our age loves scientific equations. Here’s one you weren’t taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:GI – W = EGood Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E).You weren’t taught this rule at college because the modern university believes only science has rules. “Rules of life” is another term for wisdom, and there is no wisdom — or even pursuit of wisdom — at our universities.The Rules of Life Life has rules just like the natural sciences do. Examples include:Ingratitude makes happiness...

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, never said there were "fine" Nazis or Ku Klux Klansmen.This is one of the two great lies of our time -- the other being that all Trump supporters are racists -- and perhaps in all of American history. I cannot think of a lie of such significance that was held as truth by so many Americans, by every leading politician of one of the two major political parties and disseminated by virtually the entire media.The major news media need to understand these are important reasons that half of America considers them frauds....

Every non-liberal leftist — that is, nearly every Democrat running for president, New York Times and Washington Post columnist, CNN and MSNBC host, and your left-wing brother-in-law — labels every Trump supporter and, of course, President Donald Trump, a “racist.” And they don’t stop there. Leftists don’t only label the half of the country that supports the president “racist,” they label all whites and America itself “racist.” If your son or daughter attends or recently attended an American university, it is close to certain he or she was repeatedly told that America and all whites are racist. According to the...

Why So Many Mass Shootings? Ask the Right Questions and You Might Find Out By Dennis Prager Published on June 5, 2019 • Dennis Prager This past weekend, Americans learned of another mass shooting, this time by an employee who decided to murder as many of the people he had worked with for years as possible. As of this writing, the murder toll is 12 people.Every American asks why. What was the killer’s motive? When we read there is “no known motive,” we are frustrated. Human beings want to make sense of life, especially of evil.Liberals (in this regard, liberals’ views...

May 27, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Speaking with one of the best-known conservative Jews, Dennis Prager, at the PragerU summit last week, world-famous psychologist Jordan Peterson spoke of God and his views of faith. After speaking about his dislike for the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ Peterson said, “I think that Catholicism — that's as sane as people can get.” Peterson has often been asked about his faith, if he believes in God, and he said the question has always troubled him. He promised a podcast on the matter since he has given his dislike for the question much...

At PragerU, we have released about 400 videos on virtually every subject outside of the natural sciences and math. Along with two billion views, the videos have garnered tens of thousands of comments. So we have a pretty good handle on what people most love and most hate. For example, any video defending America or Israel inevitably receives many negative responses. But no videos elicit the amount of contempt and mockery that videos defending religion, explaining the Bible, or arguing for God do. Why is that? There is a good reason. The Bible and the left (not liberalism; leftism) are...

Last week, The New York Times published a cartoon so anti-Semitic that Bret Stephens wrote in his Times column that it was "an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Sturmer." Der Sturmer was the Nazis' major anti-Semitic newspaper. A Times columnist charging the Times with publishing a Nazi-like cartoon is quite a moment in American publishing history. For those who haven't seen the cartoon, here is Stephens' description: "The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized...

Sometimes, a few sentences tell you more about a person -- and, more importantly, an ideology -- than a learned thesis. That is the case with tweets from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama two days ago in response to the mass murder of more than 300 Christians and others in Sri Lanka. Their tweets are worth serious analysis because they reveal a great deal about the left. Of course, they reveal a great deal about Clinton and Obama, too, but that doesn't interest me. And that, too, is important. Many Americans -- especially conservatives and "independents" -- are more interested...

Sometimes, a few sentences tell you more about a person — and, more importantly, an ideology — than a learned thesis. That is the case with tweets from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama two days ago in response to the mass murder of more than 300 Christians and others in Sri Lanka. Their tweets are worth serious analysis because they reveal a great deal about the left. Of course, they reveal a great deal about Clinton and Obama, too, but that doesn’t interest me. And that, too, is important. Many Americans — especially conservatives and “independents” — are more interested...

The symbolism of the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral, the most renowned building in Western civilization, the iconic symbol of Western Christendom, is hard to miss. It is as if God Himself wanted to warn us in the most unmistakable way that Western Christianity is burning -- and with it, Western civilization. Every major Western (and one major non-Western) social and intellectual force has conspired to rid Europe of Christianity and the civilization it produced. Within the Western world, the French Enlightenment -- the intellectual basis of the French Revolution and the modern West -- sought to replace Christianity, and...

I have decided to finally read what is widely regarded as the literary work that unleashed the modern feminist movement, Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." I am halfway through the book, and I find it to be a well-written cri de coeur (cry from the heart). Historically speaking, there was always much to lament regarding the status of women. Though I have none of the contempt Friedan has for "housewifery," her description of women who felt they had no sense of self because they were only someone's wife and some children's mother is emotionally compelling. But a big and troubling...

Nothing keeps me religious more than the left, not even religion itself. I am not even particularly "spiritual." My religiosity is overwhelmingly rational (the title of my Bible commentary is "The Rational Bible"). I believe in God because creation rationally suggests a Creator. The force that has most propelled me to religion is the great (secular) religion of the last hundred years: the left. If most people of the left (the left, not liberalism) -- people who have not only rejected but scorned God, Judaism, Christianity and the Bible -- were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty and had...

From the beginning, I repeatedly said the charge that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election was a lie. The president's description of it as a "witch hunt" was accurate. I regularly acknowledged that I was putting my credibility on the line by stating that it was all a hoax. But how did I know that? After all, I wasn't privy to any confidential intelligence. One answer is I used common sense. The Trump-Russia collusion charge and the Donald-Trump-is-an-agent-of-the-Kremlin charge struck me -- and tens of millions of other Americans...