Luke Ford

Dennis Prager writes Mar. 1, 2016: I have been a radio talk show host for 33 years, nationally syndicated for 18. I have never experienced anything similar to what I am experiencing now. Until recently, the only hate mail I ever received was from a small number people on the left. The major reason for this, I am convinced, is that I don’t yell at callers and I treat callers who disagree with respect.

Reading my emails these days is a brand new experience. I receive hate mail, sometimes laced with obscenities, from Republicans. Most come from Donald Trump supporters, even though whenever I explain my opposition to Trump, I also explain that I understand why so many people support him, and even though I ask anti-Trump listeners to respect these Trump supporters.

To show how widespread the hatred among Republicans is, here are excerpts from an email sent by a Ted Cruz supporter in Michigan. He was livid at my having suggested that Cruz consider announcing that he will now back Marco Rubio to give Republicans a unified opposition — the only chance to stop Trump. I might add that I have said many times that if I could simply appoint a Republican president, it would be Cruz, since he is a true conservative and he doesn’t care whether people love him. However, I believe that Rubio — at least until this weekend and his imitation of Trump’s high school level of personal insults — has been the Republican with the best chance of defeating Hillary Clinton.

The listener’s email read in part:

“Dennis, I can’t tell you how pissed off I am at you for suggesting Cruz drop out in favor of the back stabbing, lying Rubio. You have compromised your own principles. … Despicable! (people) like you … lie about ‘if I could appoint a president, it would be Cruz.’ Screw you and all your Salem colleague’s (sic) for pushing the false narrative ‘Rubio is more electable.’… I am no longer a faithful listener and have switched back to Rush after many years. You have lied by obfuscation, and tried to manipulate your listeners, and for that, I despise you and the other Salem turncoats. You all can go f—yourselves!”

As noted, I have quite a few emails from Trump supporters who after years, even decades, of listening to my show, have decided that I am no longer worthy of being listened to. If one doesn’t support Trump, they believe, one is a traitor to the cause.

It is important to point out that I have said over and over that I would vote for Trump if he were the nominee because it is difficult to conceive of even Trump being worse than four more years of a left-wing president and decades of a left-wing Supreme Court. But to more than a few Trump supporters, that is not enough: If you don’t support Trump, you are the enemy.

In a nutshell, the hatred and contempt some of the Republican candidates have shown one another is reflected among rank and file Republicans. I understand why — most Republicans view this election as the last chance to save America from becoming the opposite of what it was founded to be. The left has been eating away at America’s foundational values for nearly a century, and it has been largely successful. Two examples: Seventy percent of college students do not believe in freedom of speech if the speech might hurt someone’s feelings, and many young Americans support a democratic socialist for president.

Meanwhile, many Republicans believe that only their candidate can turn things around. Therefore, Republicans who oppose their man are regarded as no different from Democrats — indeed, perhaps worse.

So this is where we stand today:

Many anti-Rubio Republicans regard Rubio as a traitor on the immigration issue and therefore have contempt for his supporters. Many anti-Cruz Republicans regard Cruz as an extremist conservative who is, moreover, a misanthrope, and therefore have contempt for his supporters. And many anti-Trump Republicans — perhaps most — regard Trump as a dangerous fraud, and therefore view his supporters with contempt.

Needless to say, with these attitudes, there is little chance any Republican can win.

So, then, despite eight years of failure under a Democratic president, and with Hillary Clinton — widely regarded as an untrustworthy woman who has put her pursuit of money and power above the interests of her country — as the Democratic candidate, Republicans will still lose.

And Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves.

Dennis Prager writes: A pillar of contemporary leftism is the notion of “white privilege.” Given that a generation of high school and college students are being taught that a great number of “unearned privileges” accrue to white Americans — the charge of white privilege demands rational inquiry.

The assertion turns out to be largely meaningless. And more significantly, it does great harm to blacks.

First, no reasonable person can argue that white privilege applies to the great majority of whites, let alone to all whites. There are simply too many variables other than race that determine individual success in America.

And if it were true, why would whites commit suicide at twice the rate of blacks (and at a higher rate than any other race in America except American Indians)? According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, white men, whom the left argue are the most privileged group of all in America, commit 7 of every 10 suicides in America — even though only 3 of 10 Americans are white males.

Whatever reason one gives for the white suicide rate, it is indisputable that, at the very least, considerably more whites than blacks consider life not worth living. To argue that all these whites were oblivious to all the unique privileges they had is to stretch the definition of “privilege” beyond credulity.

Second, there are a host of privileges that dwarf “white privilege.”

A huge one is “two-parent privilege.” If you are raised by a father and mother, you enter adulthood with more privileges than anyone else in American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity or sex. That’s why the poverty rate among two-parent black families is only 7 percent. Compare that to a 22 percent poverty rate among whites in single-parent homes. Obviously, the two-parent home is the decisive privilege.

Another “privilege,” if one wants to use that term, that dwarfs “white privilege” is “Asian privilege.” Asian-Americans do better than white Americans in school, on IQ tests, on credit scores and on other positive parameters. In fact, according to recent data from the Federal Reserve, Asians are about to surpass whites as the wealthiest group of Americans. Will the left soon complain about Asian privilege?

And how about “gentile privilege?” For most of American history it was a lot easier being a Christian than being a Jew in America. Yet, I do not know a Jew — myself included — who doesn’t believe that to be a Jew in America has always been an unbelievable stroke of good fortune. It is not surprising that an American Jew, Irving Berlin, wrote “God Bless America.”

There are even times when there is “minority privilege” in America today. Every high school student knows that given similar scholastic and extracurricular records, one’s chances of being accepted into a prestigious college are considerably greater if one is a member of a minority, most especially the black minority.

Read on.

Judaism has no position on a minimum wage, but most Jews in America are on the left and so they support a strong central government and higher minimum wage.

Dennis Prager writes:

The majority of Jews support increasing the minimum wage to $15. If asked why, they respond that a person cannot support a family on the current minimum wage, that it is matter of social justice and the Jewish obligation of tikkun olam (repairing the world).
I have no doubt that most of these Jews and the non-Jews who support the $15 minimum wage are sincere in their beliefs.
But sincerity is meaningless when you are wrong. The $15 minimum wage will hurt people, not help them, and it will do economic and social damage to California and New York, the two states that have thus far passed this minimum wage law.
In fact, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, actually admitted as much — on the record — at least twice.
In January, the Sacramento Business Journal reported that Brown said: “Raise the minimum wage too much, and you put a lot of poor people out of work. There won’t be a lot of jobs.”
And then again this month, the Sacramento Bee reported:
“Brown, traveling to the state’s largest media market to sign the landmark bill, remained hesitant about the economic effect of raising the minimum wage, saying, ‘Economically, minimum wages may not make sense’ [italics added]. But he said work is ‘not just an economic equation,’ calling labor ‘part of living in a moral community.’ ”
But if the minimum wage hike doesn’t make economic sense, it cannot make moral sense. The whole point of the minimum wage increase is to improve people’s economic condition. If it doesn’t, it isn’t moral. When “you put a lot of poor people out of work,” that’s immoral.
Even The New York Times editorialized how disastrous the minimum wage is. It ran the following headline on an editorial:
“The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.”
The editorial went on to explain, “There’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed.”
But that was in 1987 — when some liberals still sat on The New York Times editorial board. Today, The New York Times is edited by leftists who support the higher minimum wage, not by liberals.
There is a huge difference between liberals and leftists. When deciding what political, social, and economic positions to take, liberals ask, “What does good?” Leftists ask, “What feels good?”
It feels good and moral to raise the minimum wage to $15; and feeling good and moral is a core impulse among progressives.
But the $15 minimum wage isn’t moral. It’s immoral. When the government raises the minimum wage, it destroys jobs and creates inflation — both of which hurt the poor the most.
Here’s one simple proof: If raising the minimum wage is good for workers and good for the economy, why not raise it to $20 an hour, or $30 or $50? Whatever answer you give applies equally to a $15 minimum wage.

Read on.

Dennis Prager writes: This month Stanford University students voted on a campus resolution that would have had their college require a course on Western civilization — as it did until the 1980s.

Stanford students rejected the proposal 1,992 to 347. A columnist in the Stanford Daily explained why: Teaching Western civilization means “upholding white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

The vote and the column encapsulated the Left’s view of Western civilization: In Europe, Latin America, and America, the Left loathes Western civilization. Wherever there is conflict between the West — identified as white, capitalist, or of European roots — and the non-West, the Left portrays the West as the villain…

Today, the Left would revile any Westerner who used such language as xenophobic, racist, and Fascist. The Left similarly describes any suggestion that anything Western is superior to anything non-Western. Likewise, the Left dismisses virtually all Western achievements, but regards criticism of anything non-Western as racist, chauvinistic, imperialist, colonialist, xenophobic, etc.

That is why the Left is so protective of Islam. America’s first left-wing president, Barack Obama, will not use, or allow the government to use, the words “Islamic terrorism”; and all criticism of Islam is labeled “Islamophobic,” thereby morally equating any such criticism with racism. It is not that the Left is sympathetic to Islam; the Left has contempt for all religions. It is that many Muslims loathe the West, and the enemies of my enemy (the West) must be protected.

That is why the Left loathes Israel. If the Left actually cared about human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, or freedom of speech, religion, and the press, it would be wildly pro-Israel. But Israel, in the Left’s view, is white, European, and colonialist; in other words, Western. And the Palestinians are non-Western.

So, then, the Big Question is, Why? Why is the Left hostile to Western civilization? After decades of considering this question, the answer, I have concluded, is: standards. The Left hates standards – moral standards, artistic standards, cultural standards. The West is built on all three, and has excelled in all three.

…the protection of Islam on the Left is so thorough that one cannot even say such obvious truths as that the status of women has been far superior in the Judeo-Christian West than in the Islamic world. The veil, for example, is dehumanizing; yet, in a speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a rabbi, at the time the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said that the veil “deserves our respect.”

Read on.