In a video released Dec. 2, Julie Hartman says she spent eight hours in the hospital with Dennis. “So many of you are asking for information… All we want is information. This is going to be weeks, months for him to recuperate. If we’re not telling you information, it’s not because we are withholding it. We don’t have information… Dennis is 100% mentally there. He even said it to me with his limited ability to mouth words.”
I find it odd how everybody who knows Prager’s condition won’t say much about it.
It must have to do with his boss Salem and its affiliates and ad contracts. As long as the daily show remains the Dennis Prager show, even with substitute hosts, Salem can charge full price, but once Salem admits that Dennis Prager will never be back, they immediately lose money.
It doesn’t matter how much Dennis Prager values honesty and transparency, we’re talking a buck here, buddy, and the lawyers’ directions come first.
A Nov. 20 post on RadioDiscussions.com reads: “The problem with replacing a show is that affiliates sign contracts for that show. Scheduling guest hosts doesn’t change their contracts. But if they completely replace the show, the affiliate contract becomes void. So it’s easier to just have guest hosts. Also, the guest works with Prager’s team. Replacing the show puts the production team out of work.”
A friend says:
I guess Prager fans don’t know the meaning of words open and transparent. If Prager or Hartman wanted to be transparent, someone should explain (1) the circumstances under which Dennis hurt his back and neck. Was he drunk, was he under the influence of medication, was he sleepy and fell when he got out of bed in the middle of the night and had to urinate? Where did he fall? The most dangerous room to fall in is the bathroom followed by the kitchen because of the hard surfaces. Was he knocked unconscious by the fall? Could he get up? Was he immediately transported to the hospital? The next stage in transparence is the diagnosis. What did the physicians who examine him find. What tests did they run and what did they learn. How long was he hospitalized before they did surgery. Was Surgery laid out to Dennis as his best option for treatment. What surgery was performed. It doesn’t do to say neck and back, the answer should be more exact and precise. What was his prognosis before surgery and immediately after surgery. At what point did the doctors (or staff) realize that he had developed pneumonia. What sort of pneumonia was diagnosed. What was his prognosis and how has the prognosis changed he first was diagnosed with pneumonia. What has the treatment been. How successful has the treatment been And what is his prognosis today. Instead we have nothing substantive (as you point out) possibly to hide his condition from Salem [as well as advertisers and affiliates].
I wonder if Prager’s doctors were educated at Prager University?
I suspect that when Dennis Prager’s life is on the line, he has no interest in all the supplements he shills such as Ruff Greens, The Wellness Company, Nerve Renew, Jigsaw Health, Relief Factor, Riduzone, but instead he wants the best medicine available, not the nonsense he pushes on air such as Zelenko Protocol. Dennis Prager rejects studies that don’t accord with his common sense, but I suspect that when it comes to his own care, he wants the most rigorous available.
Why Are Right-Wing Radio Hosts Still Being Such Jerks About COVID?
On Monday, Nov. 1, Dennis Prager began his popular radio show with a very strange boast. “I rarely say, ‘I did the following.’ It’s not my style,” the 73-year-old conservative host and YouTube culture war impresario said. “But I believe I am responsible for the CDC announcing the following: that if you have natural immunity you are less immune than if you have the vaccine.”
Pragerwas referring to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, released on Friday, Oct. 29, which found, basically, that the immunity conferred by full vaccination with an mRNA COVID vaccine is more effective than the “natural immunity” gained by having had and recovered from COVID-19. Good news, right? Ha! If you welcomed the CDC’s findings, you are almost certainly not in Dennis Prager’s target demographic.
The CDC’s conclusions are broadly in line with the scientific consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. And they directly contradict Prager’s contention, voiced over and again on his long-running, nationally syndicated show, that natural immunity to COVID-19 is superior to vaccinated immunity. To Prager, the CDC’s latest findings did not mean that he, Prager, was wrong—they meant that the liberal, corrupt health agency had ginned up a bogus study in order to cloud the debate and specifically silence his voice.
“All I did was open up to you, my audience,” Prager said, referring to his advocacy for natural immunity. “I had no idea that I would shake up the nest to the extent that I did.” Assuring his audience that he had done “a lot of homework on COVID,” and highlighting an Israeli study from August (even though it has not yet been peer reviewed and had certain limitations that ought to make any prudent person think twice before citing it as definitive), Prager weaved a fantastical counternarrative as a way of underscoring his central point: that the CDC study in question was a dirty, rotten lie. “To some of you, it is stunning to say the CDC is lying,” said Prager. “To me, it is like saying the sun shines brightly when there are no clouds.”
Huh? Why would the CDC rush out a false study—co-authored by more than 50 people—just to neutralize a random right-wing radio host? Why would Prager presume calumny and conspiracy in the agency’s motives? These fair questions naturally beget another fair question: Why are so many right-wing talk show hosts still being such dicks about COVID measures?
…“I took ivermectin for the last year and a half as a prophylactic, believing, and I put my actions where my mouth was, believing that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and zinc, et cetera, over the course of time, that it would prevent COVID from being seriously injurious to me,” Prager said on that Nov. 1 show, railing against those fools in the media who dared to characterize ivermectin as a mere “horse dewormer.” As per the irrationalist imperative to willfully confuse correlation with causation, the host presented his victorious bout with COVID as clear evidence both of the merits of Dr. Prager’s Curative Elixirs and of the superfluity of the various vaccines. By ostensibly proving that his ivermectin use was what prevented him from dying from COVID, Prager hoped to demonstrate that he was once again privy to the “real truth” that the liberal establishment is determined to suppress.
For decades now, the most successful conservative broadcast media sources have sought to isolate their audiences by constantly sowing distrust of any news outlet or official entity that exists outside of the hard right. The unifying theme is the notion that there are no depths to which the deep state, liberal media, and elitist professoriate will not stoop in order to advance their godless, anti-American, and culturally transgressive agendas.
So for committed Pragerheads, it is perfectly rational to believe—even as 750,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19—that the media is still suppressing the real truth about ivermectin and that the CDC is basically SPECTRE, because right-wing media has literally spent decades convincing its audience that politics is as conspiratorial and simplistic as a James Bond movie. “It’s impossible, virtually impossible, to live in a right-wing bubble,” Prager said on his program on Wednesday, in a statement that is so un-self-aware as to be almost entirely self-aware. Prager surely understands how right-wing media works, even as he also surely understands that he can never, ever publicly admit it.
This cynical strategy, enervating enough in normal times, is especially frustrating in the midst of an ongoing public health crisis in which lots and lots of people are still dying in part thanks to the endemic misinformation being spread by dummies on the radio. Actually, dummies might not be the right word here. No matter what you might think of their politics, Prager and his nationally prominent peers are not stupid. You can tell this is true because they are so adept at dancing right up to the lies-and-lunacy line while almost never crossing it. The evening opinion hosts on Fox News, for example, rarely tell outright lies; instead, they draw false equivalencies, or cherry-pick outlying details and use them to inaccurately characterize the whole, or offer misleading narratives that can be explained away as matters of opinion.
Even Prager is not explicitly anti-vaccine. He does not say that the vaccines don’t work, or that they are actively harmful to those who take them. Instead, he disparages them via a boatload of logical fallacies that he presents as plain common sense. “I have never once told any of you or anyone not to take the vaccine; it is not my province to tell you what to do. But it is my province to tell you the truth, and the truth is that natural immunity is stronger,” said Prager on Nov. 1. “Alex Berenson wrote about this. He’s the guy who was with the New York Times until he started telling the truth.”
As always with right-wing anti–virtue signaling, deflection is the point here. Prager and his peers’ goal writ large is to get their audiences so hot and bothered about federal government overreach and the scurrilous rascals in the elitist media that those audiences do not stop to think critically about what these hosts are actually selling. When Prager threw his show to commercial break, his announcer reported that The Dennis Prager Show was broadcasting “live from the Relief Factor Pain-Free Studio.” The ad gave away the game.
As historian Rick Perlstein observed in his seminal Baffler essay “The Long Con,” and as anyone can observe by watching or listening to more than 20 minutes of conservative broadcast content, right-wing media is and has long been underwritten by billions of dollars of advertising for dubious curatives. While lots of reputable news sources also have some questionable advertisers, the practice is particularly pervasive on the right…
“The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place,” wrote Perlstein. “One weird trick”–style remedies, in a very real sense, pay the salaries of hosts such as Prager; these hosts are incentivized to tout them just as their audiences are conditioned to trust them. The vaccines threaten the framework of burnished shit that supports and sustains these sorts of programs…
On Monday, Prager led off his show by blasting the city of Los Angeles for a new ordinance that would require patrons to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test in order to dine inside a restaurant, get a haircut, or engage in certain other indoor activities. Prager warned of “the communist hell that all communists create, and will in the United States if allowed,” and bemoaned “the love of power and the hypochondriacal fear, the maniacal fear that pervades the left about [COVID] and global warming.” Then, he threw the show to a commercial for Relief Factor, in which he spoke glowingly about the supplement’s “100 percent drug free ingredients, each helping your body deal with inflammation.”
…the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined “Ideas Will Drive Conservatives’ Revival.” Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed “Health News” included the headlines “Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days,” “Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easily—without drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet,” and “High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points.” It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying that’s now sutured into the modern conservative movement’s DNA—and to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers.
When Prager came back, he was at it again about natural immunity and the CDC—“who I believe are professional liars,” he clarified. By sowing doubt over the vaccines and crying foul over mandates, Prager and his peers are running through the tribal script of right-wing infotainment, otherizing every idea and institution that could plausibly be considered “liberal.” But in a very real sense, they just don’t want the liberals’ miracle drugs, because they already have plenty of their own.
In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value…. I learned of the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta…
These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.
Dishonesty is demanded by the alarmist fundraising appeal because the real world doesn’t work anything like this. The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will—and the monster shall be banished for good.
This method highlights the fundamental workings of all grassroots conservative political appeals, be they spurious claims of Barack Obama’s Islamic devotion, the supposed explosion of taxpayer-supported welfare fraud, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
And, in an intersection that is utterly crucial, this same theology of fear is how a certain sort of commercial appeal—a snake-oil-selling one—works as well. This is where the retail political lying practiced by Romney links up with the universe in which 23-cent miracle cures exist (absent the hero’s intervention) just out of reach, thanks to the conspiracy of some powerful cabal—a cabal that, wouldn’t you know it in these late-model hustles, perfectly resembles the ur-villain of the conservative mind: liberals.
In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.
…Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal.
On May 4, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission delivered stark warnings to the members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The agency’s acting chairman, Willie Phillips, told the senators, “We face unprecedented challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electric system.”
FERC Commissioner Mark Christie echoed Phillips’ warning, saying the U.S. electric grid is “heading for a very catastrophic situation in terms of reliability.”
Dennis: "This is completely because of Joe Biden and the Democrats… Why do these people want to destroy the economy? Because it is all about chaos and power… We are in for quite a ride. What happens when you don't get electric power? Do you understand we won't have enough electricity?"
Does anyone without an agenda believe that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to destroy the economy and that the Democrats are the sole reason for strains on the electrical grid?
Dennis: "It's shocking that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told the truth."
Prager's agenda is epistemic sabotage. He wants you to know that you are being lied to by Big Government, Big Media, Big Law, Big Academia and the like, that he is on your side battling the nefarious elites, and that he will give you the truth to the best of his ability while the establishment sources will not.
Once Prager successfully conned himself that he was uniquely qualified to discern the truth and that the powers that be were lying, my guess is that this transformation happened in high school through the massive social reinforcement flowing from his charisma, it was easy to con the rubes.
Dennis: "Was this reported in the New York Times? The LA Times? Washington Post? CNN? MSNBC? NPR? PBS?"
Like the typical guru, Dennis tells you that competing sources of influence are lying to you while he gives you the truth.
Posted inDennis Prager|Comments Off on Dennis Prager Can Now Mouth Words
The writer must give up his soul in order to write. He must give up his soul to become the body writing.
To write Stavrogin, then, the writer must be open to possession; he must be willing to be seduced by the loss of personality necessary to produce writing that is of other than personal value. The moral danger for the writer-for the writer writing with the body-is this possession. Stavrogin, after all, is not a writer, but he is a rapist. Pyotr/Nechaev is not a writer, but he is a murderer. To write the possessed, the writer himself must allow his body to be possessed by their demons. He cannot appease these demons with mere blood-as we have seen, the writer must “give up his soul.”
Both novels show us this close relation between literature and the extreme mistreatment of bodies at the hands of governments, terrorists, criminals, the self, and demons. Coetzee’s Nechaev recognizes this, saying to Dostoevsky in a dripping cellar with two hungry children feeding on a loaf of bread earned by their streetwalker mother: “I suppose you want to hurry home and get this cellar and these children down in a notebook before the memory fades.” The suffering of children, he recognizes, is precisely the sort of thing that motivates the writer. Suffering children, like the budding breasts of the young girl Matryona, inspire the writer, that is, both suffering and erotic passion open the writer to possession by demonic spirits. Suffering offers the writer the occasion for indulging the transgressive pleasure of possession. Suffering, or its Latin equivalent, passion, licenses the writer to divest himself of the controlling subjectivity of his non-writer self.
The possession invoked by the spectacle of suffering can motivate the writer and the reader to suffer with the suffering-it can instill compassion. Yet the spectacle of suffering can also move the writer and the reader to revel in the delight in his own power felt by the deliberate perpetrator of suffering. Indeed, the writer thus can present us with the torturer as clearly as he or she can present us with the tortured. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky knows well and puts to work in writing Stavrogin’s confession that there is generally more “real life” in fictional rapists than in fictional victims.62 The question that remains is whether U1e writing itself is conducive to the alleviation of this suffering, or whether it merely affords the reader a view of the spectacle of that suffering from a safe aesthetic distance. Faced with a choice between vitality and morals, every writer will choose vitality-and every serious man will choose morality. One would like to believe that the writer suffers with his victims, and thus his art encourages the serious reader to get out of his easy chair and act to alleviate human suffering. But the real Dostoevsky wrote Stavrogin’s confession, and the real J. M. Coetzee wrote The Master of Petersburg.
There are, however, two fundamental rhetorical difficulties with laying out one’s premises, reasoning, and conclusions. Since arguments are anticlimactic if they are explicit, the speaker who is excessively explicit in his or her reasoning is liable to fall into what one may call “the arguer’s dilemma,” with its two horns, the horn of banality and the horn of incomprehensibility. Either the audience can see where you are going before you get there (first horn), or they can’t (second horn). If they can see where you are going, they will lose attention, since to quote Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969 §98, 469), “an anticipated argument is a banal argument,” and the arguer has impaled himself on the horn of banality. If the audience can’t see where you are going, that is, in all likelihood, because they can’t follow the thread of your argument, and the arguer loses their attention as he squirms gored and suspended on the horn of incomprehensibility. If the audience can’t follow your argument, this means that even if you have managed to persuade them, we cannot say that they are persuaded to adopt your conclusion by accepting the argument you have offered for it.
So if you want to argue, you have to find some way out of the arguer’s dilemma: either you have to compose an argument that your audience is able to follow but not to anticipate—an extraordinary achievement—or you have to aim in arguing at some effect other than persuading your audience of the truth of your conclusion through their following and accepting your argument…
…outside mathematics, and certainly in practical affairs, the facts are never all on the table: the question is whether one has the resources to challenge the factual assertions that lead to the conclusions one wishes to reject—whether one can find the key or pick the lock. The issue is what the sociologist of science Bruno Latour has called a “trial of strength”: can you muster the resources required to overcome your opponents’ facts? This can be done by disputing the truth of your adversary’s facts, that is, by arguing, since, The New Rhetoric puts it, “recourse to argumentation is unavoidable whenever… proofs are questioned by one of the parties” (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969, 8). More often, one puts the adversaries’ strength to the trial by offering alternative facts that make your opponents’ claims seem irrelevant—that is, if one has not been bludgeoned into aporia or absence of recourse by the force of the adversaries’ assertions into accepting their arguments.
…Gerald Rafshoon, Jimmy Carter’s principal advertising man in Carter’s 1980. Presidential reelection campaign: “If we had to do it all over again, we would take the 30 million dollars we spent in the campaign and get three more helicopters for the Iran rescue mission” (Popkin 1991, 4). One could claim, with Samuel Popkin, that Rafshoon’s statement shows the limits of image-making as against political reality. But we will better understand the gravity of Carter’s and Rafshoon’s problem if we remind ourselves that the most effective image of President Carter would have been a news broadcast of him receiving the freed hostages.
…In our life together discussion is instrumental to action: discussion is a cost, not a benefit, and so we can only afford some discussion, whether that discussion consists of facts or of arguments. Any new factual assertion threatens the solidarity we have achieved, and thus the ability to act which that solidarity has fostered.
Posted inRhetoric|Comments Off on From Argument To Assertion
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
