No Safe Spaces? | Prager and Carolla | EP 190

[Music] Hi everybody! I'm talking today with Dennis Prager, who you might know from PragerU. He's a nationally syndicated radio talk show host heard on some 300 stations across America and around the world. I'm also talking with Adam Corolla, who's best known as a comedian, actor, radio personality, television host, and New York Times best-selling author.

Well, back to Dennis, he is also the co-founder and president of Prager University, the largest conservative internet video site in the world, with over a billion views per year, 65 percent of which are by people under 35 years. He's a New York Times bestselling author as well of 10 books, a biblical scholar with expertise in biblical Hebrew. The third volume of his five-volume commentary on the Torah, The Rational Bible, will be published in the summer of 2021. It's become the best-selling Bible commentary in the country.

Back to Adam, currently hosts The Adam Corolla Show, which holds the Guinness Book of World Records for most downloaded podcast. We're going to talk today about the movie that these two gentlemen were deeply involved in, a documentary, No Safe Spaces, and the problems it's encountered in distribution. Well, we're going to range out from there into issues of free speech and perhaps beyond that, as well. So welcome, guys! Thanks very much for talking with me today.

Dennis, maybe you want to start? Do you want to talk a little bit about Craig or you and also maybe about the movie No Safe Spaces? About the documentary?

Well, one relationship of PragerU and the movie that Adam and I are in is the suppression of free speech. I testified at the U.S. Senate two years ago on what they were doing to PragerU videos. It may be the single funniest thing on YouTube except for anything Adam Carolla does. I'm not being cute; Adam Carolla is perhaps the funniest human being in the English language. He might even be the funniest in any language, but my ability to assess that is limited.

Well, I'm number four in Urdu. That's very impressive!

I was wondering if that exists. That's the Pakistani life.

Well, you want to crack the top five; you better be familiar with that!

That's great! Well, you see what I mean, Jordan? I have a big problem when I appear on stage with Adam, and that is I'm totally happy if he talks the whole time. All I do is then do you know that this is not even answering your question, but I just want to say this, you'll get a kick out of it. So Adam and I have gone around the country doing events on stage, and he may not even know this, but there are times during the event where I will say to myself, "Dennis, they're also paying you, so you should speak." I feel a moral obligation to talk, but selfishly, I'd just rather laugh because we all need laughter. Anyway, his insights are just deep.

Anyway, what I said was the funniest thing on YouTube was this: I was at a Senate subcommittee on the suppression of free speech testifying about what's happening to PragerU, where hundreds of our videos are placed on the restricted list. Meaning, if you have a filter against pornography and violence, you actually can't see the video. One of them was, in fact, one that I had given. I only give one-tenth of the videos; ninety percent are other people. But I have given a number of videos on the Ten Commandments, for example.

So Senator Ted Cruz asked the representative of Google, “Why did you suppress people from seeing this on YouTube; it is still there! Why did you put Mr. Prager's talk on the Ten Commandments on the restricted list?” And the man looked at Senator Cruz and said, “Because it mentions murder.” And I remember humming the Twilight Zone theme because I felt I had entered an alternate universe.

So what do you think the reason was, Dennis? I mean, obviously, look, that's got to be a bit of a PR nightmare for Google to do something like that, so it smacks of a certain degree of incompetence to begin with. I like to hypothesize incompetence before malevolence. So why do you think it was censored that specifically, and then why, with regards to—is it reasonable to call what's happening with PragerU censorship? And why do you think it's happening?

Well, I'll tell you the—I’ll answer the last one first, and this will help you realize that I think there's more malevolence than incompetence. There is never an instance in the history of the world—and this is my field of study since I was in graduate school at Columbia; that's why I studied Russian, was to read Pravda and visit the Soviet Union on multiple occasions and other communist countries. There is no instance in world history since the Russian Revolution of the left gaining power and not suppressing speech. Liberals offer free speech; conservatives are for free speech. The left has never been for free speech.

Okay, so let me ask you a clarifying question there. All right, because you know I come—I'm a Canadian, and I suppose along with the Scandinavian countries, we're tilted a fair degree to the left compared to the U.S. And so, I mean, freedom of speech is in reasonable shape in our countries, those countries that I mentioned. And so when you talk about the left, tell me more specifically what you mean, and how you would define that particular state because you're not talking about the Democrats per se, I can't imagine, or perhaps you are.

The Democrats used to be. I was a Democrat. The Democrats used to be liberal. The Democrats, when I was a kid in the 70s, Nazis—real Nazis, not people they just call Nazis—real Nazis with swastikas, demonstrated in Skokie, Illinois, because a lot of Jews lived there, especially Holocaust survivors. It was a particularly vicious act, and Jewish groups, the ACLU, liberal groups, the Democratic Party, all defended their right because in America anybody could say anything except yell fire in a crowded theater. That is no longer the position.

You're right, you're—I’ve wondered about that for a long time.

Okay, so no, well, if you're wondering, I'm not—you said something the left didn't like that you were not going to be told by the government what pronoun you will use.

Okay, so let me ask you another question. So when I look at political surveys, I see that there's a very limited number of people on the right that you could describe as extremists, and there's a very limited number of people on the left who appear to support the more extremist leftist propositions. And so I do believe that in some sense, it's more difficult for people on the left to draw distinctions between acceptable leftist ideas than it is for people on the right. I mean, on the right, you draw the line with claims of racial superiority; on the left, there's obviously trouble brewing on the extreme, but defining exactly where it is and drawing a border around it seems to me a relatively complex task.

And well, you asked me why I got in trouble. I mean I got in trouble because I said, "Well, I'm not sure where to draw the line, but that particular law compelling speech, with its implicit theory of identity, has gone too far as far as I'm concerned." But you know, the fact that that caused so much trouble, I think is an indication of the fact that it's difficult to draw the line.

Well, I think you're on to something with the extreme part of the right wing party is pretty definable, and I think most reasonable people agree that the farthest right, you know, Jews shooting laser beams into the—into the sky and shooting down satellites or whatever crazy stuff comes out of QAnon or sort of far-right stuff, racial things of that nature. I think we can all agree that that's pretty definable, and that most people on the right will not cross that border.

William Buckley helped with that, wouldn't you say?

I would, but on the left I feel like there’s a much greater sense of, “Well, we don't agree with AOC, but we're not going to say anything about it,” or we’re not going to define it or the Squad. So there's a much more—you know, I live in California; most everyone I work in Hollywood, everyone's on the left. Their thing is sort of like, “We don't like what Gavin Newsom is doing, but he's still our guy.”

And you know, we'll go—well, that's part of this difficulty with drawing borders. Like I've had conversations with Democrats about the idea of equity, for example, which is a no-go zone as far as I'm concerned because of its connotations of equality of outcome. But they insist, generally speaking, that most of the people who are using the term equity are really using it as a proxy for equality of opportunity.

They're lying to you.

They're lying. They're flat out lying either to themselves or to you, and both are dangerous.

Equity? Why? If the word equity means equality, why don’t they use the word equality?

Well, that's right, that's my argument.

Doesn’t mean equality.

Well, what do you think it means exactly?

I know what it means. It means equality of outcome, just exactly what you implied it meant.

That’s okay, so it means—why do you think that's so toxic?

Because it means standards don't matter; it means results matter.

Is there equity in the NBA? How many Jews are in the NBA? How many Japanese are in the NBA? There's no equity in the NBA, and there shouldn't be. I only want the best basketball players, and I want the best pilots, and I want the best physicists.

And do you know that they are dropping—I'm very into music, so the New York Times has advocated the dropping of the blind auditions for the New York Philharmonic. No longer shall you choose the best violinist or oboist; you choose based on the color of the violinist or oboist—that's equity.

Okay, so you're making two arguments about equity. One is that it flies in the face of a rank order of value with regards to competence, and it's predicated on a distribution of equality by immutable characteristics like race and sex and gender, perhaps sexual preference—all these things that become part of the cultural context, and that's equity. And the word is being used because it doesn't mean equality of opportunity, which means a playing field that's open to everyone who strives forward and who are then chosen on the basis of their merit.

And how would you define merit, just out of curiosity?

Well, I think I'm sorry, Dennis, but I think the blind—you know, it's really hard to quantify certain things like who is the best oboist. It's difficult, but that's why you put the curtain up, and you have experts listen. It doesn't mean they're right; it just means the only thing they're factoring in is the ability, or the perceived ability, of the oboist on the other side of the curtain. And once you pull that curtain down, you sort of bring everything into question.

Okay, so you know—if you're trying to hire someone in the U.S., the laws are set up this way, and I know these laws quite well. So if you want to hire someone, you're bound by law, first of all, to do an analysis of the job requirements. So you have to make a list of what competence means in that particular context, so that's merit as defined by that job. Then you have to have to use the most reliable and valid test that's legally available to do this selection, or you can be—or you're liable under the appropriate employment law. So merit has this very specific definition; it's sort of within occupations. So you define it within an occupation, and then you have to use a selection technique that assesses for that and that should be blind to immutable characteristics like race, etc.

And I mean that's how the law was set up for years. And now we see this situation, where this is restorative justice—that's the doctrine. Is that what we're seeing? Why do you have a problem with that exactly?

Well, I'll give you an example in my mind. You know, Dennis brought up sports. I try to think, why, as human beings, are we so attracted to sports? Like, everyone loves sports. But why does everyone love sports? Why are the ratings for the Oscars plummeting every year, and the ratings for the Super Bowl going up every year? You know, if you just looked at a chart of the Super Bowl starting in 1970 and the Oscars starting in the 1970s, the Oscars, I think, outrated the Super Bowl. But at a certain point, the Oscars have less than 10 million, and the Super Bowl is always 40, 50 million.

So what is that, as human beings? What are we responding to? Well, what we're responding to is when we watch the Super Bowl, we believe that the best players are on the field, regardless of whether the entire defensive side of the ball is black or Asian. There's never been an instance of the owner's son starting on the defense or the coach's son starting on the defense.

Now, it doesn't mean there's not a 12th guy who's on the bench who is actually better, but it means in the coach's eye, these are the 11 best players to put out on the defensive side of the ball and the offensive side of the ball. And we never question it. When you then watch the Oscars, and you see a lot of the diversity and a lot of the forced diversity, you think to yourself, “Are these really the best seven or eight films of the year, or are we trying to conjugate some way to open it up for things that are better or different, I should say, than just the best film?” And once you start down that path, I argue it's a very slippery slope. We tune out; we lose interest.

What's the big beef on the Oscars, best films every year? It's like, “I didn't see half these things. Were they really the best film?” And then I saw two of them, and I didn't like them.

So you don't think we trust the selection process?

So I wanted to answer your question. You said, “Why do we like sports so much?” And that'll lead me to another question that maybe I can direct to you. So I think Dennis will find this interesting, maybe he'll agree, maybe he won't. But the word sin is derived from the Greek word hamartia, which means to miss the mark. And so it's an archery term. And you know, people are very, very goal-directed. And what you see in sports is the assemblance of teams of excellence competing and cooperating because they're playing the same game. So that's the cooperation to hit the target.

And every time someone excellent hits the target, it inspires awe in the audience. And that's why everybody leaps up, sort of not even of their own accord. Right? They're possessed by the spirit of the game. And so there's something that's very, very deep going on in a sports spectacle because we're all participating in the celebration of the team effort to facilitate the ability of the individual to attain the goal. And that runs through sports; it's dramatized in a way that's not rationally criticizable.

And your point is if that's gerrymandered, then people won't appreciate it anymore. But here's the question I have for you—why do you think that the meritocracy of sport is so widely accepted and not a subject of public attack when there is a public assault on the idea of merit in almost every other domain? Why does sports get a pass, so to speak?

I believe in sports, we would all realize the absurdity if we tried to mess around with the meritocracy of it. If you said there haven’t been enough Jewish heavyweights in the last 30 years, we need to get a Jewish heavyweight and put them out there with Tyson Fury or whoever the current heavyweight belt holder is. I think we would all understand the sort of bizarre nature of that, and we all sort of inherently understand it wouldn't work.

Or, back to Dennis's example, if we took—you know, why do you think it's more obvious to us? I think you might be right, but I can't figure out exactly why we seem to accept—I mean, people suffer for the distinctiveness and athletic ability. I mean, it's a trope of many, many American films. You know, there's the boy who would like to make the football team but can't, and it's painful. And so we accept that that pain is real and it exists, but we don't use that to justify an assault on the meritocracy of sport. I just can't figure out why it's so self-evident.

You say it is, but Dennis, do you have any ideas about that?

Well, because it's more objective than subjective. If you hit 40 home runs, you're a great player. We don't have 40 home runs in almost any other area of life.

So you think it's a measurement issue?

Yes, it is a measurement issue. That's exactly right. Stats are the—the fans are crazy. Best baseball fans can tell you the batting average of the first baseman on the Detroit Tigers 12 years ago. This is what they live for—stats. But there are no stats in much of life.

Back to my overweight right?

So, well, so that also means that the people who are criticizing our society for its power base, say, rather than its merit base, they're partly led to that conclusion by the fact that the stats of life are not nearly as obvious as the stats in sports.

I would argue—sorry for cutting you off, Dennis, but I would argue that in this particular case, stats are on the other side. So, they go: Delta Airlines has less than 14 African American pilots. Delta Airlines employs less than six percent female pilots and less than one percent transgender. So if you think about the stats, we do love stats, but they get used against us on the other side when they're constantly talking about, you know, police reform or the fire department is in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, but yet the fire department doesn't represent the constituency of the group that it serves, you know, because it's only 13 Latino.

They do love stats, but they love them from a different side of the equation, right?

But exactly, but those are not stats of excellence. Those are stats of what Jordan calls immutable characteristics, right? The stats are easily measurable.

But yes, that's what I was pointing out about sports. But I believe that other stuff is measurable too. I believe that it is that unless one enters the world of the absurd, which we have entered, Beethoven is greater than anybody composing music today. Is greater, for that matter, than any non-German composer who ever lived. The greatest composers were overwhelmingly Austrian and German.

So why do I care? I only care about there being great music. I'm a Jew. I know Wagner was a rank anti-Semite and Hitler's hero, and I love Wagner's music. I don't give—I don't care when I listen to his music, when I hear The Ring or, you know, any of his other operas, the man was a genius.

So I don't assess—the University of Pennsylvania, they took down the English department. An Ivy League university took down Shakespeare's picture because he was a white European male, and they put up a non-white lesbian instead. Not because of measurable excellence, but because of immutable characteristics.

Yeah, well, I guess Adam's point is that it's easy for people to default into easily measurable statistics when the alternative measurement systems are somewhat obscure. It's harder to rank order musicians by their quality. I mean, you could look at how often their pieces are played by major orchestras, for example, but you could make a case that that's a consequence of systemic prejudice as well.

So you have these stats that signal immutable group membership that are pretty comprehensible, and they lead people astray because they can't evaluate the broader context of excellence so easily. I mean, we have to look for cognitive biases, right, when we're trying to explain things.

As I said before, reaching for malevolence, even though I'm perfectly willing to reach for malevolence when I think it's there. So let's move back to No Safe Spaces. If you don't think it's malevolent, what do you think is the justifiable reason for taking down Shakespeare at an English department?

Well, that might be envy and resentment. That could well be. I mean, I talked to somebody interesting recently, Paul Rossi, who is the New York teacher who stood up against the political correct incursion into the private school at Grace Church. It was—and he talked about the attraction that post-modern theory held for him when he was an undergraduate, and he said he really wanted to be a creative writer, but he really didn't have the talent for it. And so it was kind of annoying for him, in some sense, to be exposed to all these great authors because it represented the pinnacle that he couldn't scale. And then when he was introduced to postmodern theory, which critiqued all of these great authors as perhaps not great at all, let's say it satisfied some vengeful and resentful element of him.

I mean, he grew out of that and was able to talk about it, but I think that that's—I think he made a fair case. And as I said, I'm willing to identify malevolence, but for me, it's a last reach. I look for cognitive biases and that sort of thing first.

And I mean, I think too, you look at so many people attracted to radical left ideas, for example, they're predominantly young people—not only, but predominantly. And you know, they're looking for a causal myth, let's say. They're looking for a myth, and a causal explanation, and it's fed to them. It's not a surprise that they devour it.

Some of that's malevolence because it gives them a target for their resentment and their anger, but some of it's just ignorance; they haven't been taught a more comprehensive viewpoint. I mean, you're trying to do that, at least to some degree, on PragerU, and you're having some success with young people as well, which is quite interesting.

Right. I don't charge the young people with malevolence; I charge the people teaching them with malevolence. People who teach the 1612 narrative are malevolent. They loathe the United States, and this is their way of destroying our society by teaching young people that it was founded in order to preserve slavery. It's a gargantuan lie.

And again, I just need to say this again to the dismay of many of my fellow conservatives because I read comments on my pieces on the Internet. I'm interested in comments, and many think I'm a fool or—no, they don't say naive—for distinguishing between liberals and leftists, but it's a huge distinction. The only way for the salvation of the West is to teach liberals that the left is their enemy and not the right. That is the key task of all of us. Liberalism has nothing in common with leftism and everything in common with conservatism.

So what do you think that liberalism and conservatism have in common? Where's the common ground?

Let's begin with free speech, the subject of this. I also think intellectual honesty. You know, a couple of guys in this town who I know who are—I wouldn't call them leftists, but I call them Democrats, probably progressive, who are also liberal in a true sense are Bill Maher and attorney Mark Garagos. They're both vote Democrat, but when subjects come up, they're intellectually honest, and you end up agreeing on quite a few things with these folks just because they're having intellectual honesty.

So you know, they may be on the left when it comes to some social issues or maybe some border issues, but they do understand governmental overreach and tyranny and oppression and things like that, especially as it pertains to COVID, and they have an intellectual honesty. A perfect intellectual honesty subject is Israel versus Palestine. If you're on the left, you have to side with Palestine. If you're liberal, you can vote Democrat, be liberal, and intellectually understand that Israel's not the problem in that region. And that's a pretty good yardstick, I would say, to measure liberal versus leftists—Israel.

Okay, so Dennis, you're drawing the distinction between liberals and leftists in that sense, the leftist that you're having the trouble with. So here's a question for you. So if the liberals and the conservatives have common ground, and they have the right behind them, so to speak, I mean, the correct, let's say, the honesty, and the whole weight of—I wouldn't just say Western civilization, but the central civilizational tendency. Because I think it's a mistake to identify this reflexively with the West. But in any case, why has the left become so attractive? What are the liberals and conservatives doing wrong with regards to their—the education of young people or to the marketing of their ideas? I mean, what's going on? What's happened here?

All right, you're right. That's a very fair question. I did a research on the five embassies that showed that the Black Lives Matter banner, the U.S. embassies around the world, five that were identified. One of them was the United Kingdom, the largest U.S. embassy in the world. And I looked up in each case to who the ambassador was. I was curious who would put up what I consider a hate group banner in front of the American embassy.

And it turns out, fascinatingly, that the UK—we don't have an ambassador to the UK; we have a chargé d'affaires. The head of the embassy in the UK is a woman, and in the Wikipedia entry, it noted in passing that her mother is on the board of the New York Civil Liberties Union. And I mentioned that on my radio show, and I said, “You know, leftists really do tend to perpetuate themselves better than we do. The number of conservative parents with kids on the left is far greater than the number of leftist parents with kids on the right.” But the reason is obvious.

The reason is they have everything. They have kindergarten, they have elementary school, high school, college, university, postgraduate, the media, sports, late-night television. There is nothing that we have except independent voices like the three of us here, and thank God others in addition to us—that's the reason. If the schools were all conservative, then the leftist parents would have a very difficult time keeping their kids leftist. This is not funny.

When I talk to left-leaning people in the United States, they feel that they’re on the defensive. They feel that the right has more power. They point more to state governments, for example. And it does seem to me as an outsider—because I'm an outsider to all of this—that one of the things that does characterize the United States, maybe more than any other country in the entire West, perhaps not because there are countries that might be an exception, is that there is a reasonably decent balance of power between the right and the left.

If you consider the totality of the system—I mean, you have Democrat power federally, but at a—I’ll make—with all of the people who say that to you the following deal: “We'll give you state governments; you give us elementary schools, high schools, and graduate schools and universities, and we'll make that. Let's make that.” You get—we’ll take the New York Times; make it conservative. You can have all the state governments you want.

I think it’s such a—they live in a deluded image of themselves and the world if that's what they believe. Oh, you have state governments? We have the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and Columbia and Yale and Harvard and Stanford. But you have state governments? Please.

Okay, so that's interesting. I mean, you believe that these educational institutions—you also included The New York Times—and I'm not going to dignify The New York Times by calling it an educational institute, but you believe that the educational institutions, from kindergarten all the way up through the universities, have the signal power in the American culture. Do you think that's a reasonable claim?

I'm not disputing it; I'm asking you if that's what you believe.

How could it not be? That's where your kids spend most of their waking hours.

Well, I mean, it's—you know—

Go ahead, sorry.

I think Jordan's asking is it a foregone conclusion that all the universities and high schools and junior highs are left-leaning, 99 percent?

Yet.

Well, I'd like—I mean, it’s certainly been something that's very disturbing to me. I think the objective evidence supports the supposition that they're overwhelmingly left-leaning, and it certainly seems to me that these critical ideas—the idea sent especially that the structure of the West is predicated on the arbitrary expression of power—I think that's the most fundamental pathological claim that emanates from the West, is that power is the fundamental human motivation and that our functional institutions are essentially predicated on the arbitrary expression of power.

I always think that people who say that are confessing more than they are accusing. Because most of the people I’ve seen who claim that seem to be perfectly willing to use power as their predominant mode of operation in the world. I guess I would also ask you—why is it that the story that power is the fundamental animating spirit of civilization, let's say—well, we'll say Western civilization just to keep it narrower—why do you think that story has such resonance, especially given—well, let's leave it at that?

I mean, I have thoughts that also pertain to the schools. Because to me— and then I’ll answer your question, but I'm curious—what are the origins of schools and why, or why to the left and not toward the right?

So if you've got a group—and we've all done it—where they go, “We want you to speak to a group of commercial property builders. You know, these guys do tenant improvement work, and they do commercial work, and they're real estate developers and engineers and architects and builders.” You'd know who you were talking to. I mean, you know what their politics were, just a small example.

In my spare time, I like to race cars. All the guys who show up to the track, they basically have the same politics. And the reason they have the same politics is because they live in a world where they have to prepare their car, then they have to go out and execute it, and they have to drive their car. And it's a real meritocracy because someone's going to get the checkered flag, and someone's going to come in last. And they have a sort of collective mindset, just like most people who run a small business have a sort of mindset—they want less regulation and lower taxes and breaks, and they tend to be Republicans.

So what are we finding on school campuses? Well, who is attracted to be a professor? Who's attracted to be a schoolteacher? It really is a little slice of socialism here in the United States. We're basically saying, “You get a job; you don’t get paid that much, but you can never get fired. You'll get tenure. It'll be an easy life. You'll never really have to hang your neck out or your shingle out. There's no chance you're going to go bankrupt. There’s no chance you're going to be at the top, and there's no chance you're going to be at the bottom. You'll just sort of have a job forever.”

So those are the people who are attracted to the profession. Nobody I know who's an entrepreneur is attracted to be a schoolteacher. Maybe later on, after they’ve sold their third company and have more money than they can count, they want to go back in and teach them business classes or something like that.

But you're attracting people who have a little bit of a socialist bent or leaning just from the beginning versus folks who want to go into the military or folks who want to start their own small business. Now how long would it take for those people to start indoctrinating your kids? I don’t want to use a word that's that strong, but it's essentially getting them to sort of think the way you think. I use this example: what if all teachers were vegetarians? They said vegetarian. How long before your kid came home for Thanksgiving and said meat was murder? It would be impossible for them not to sort of have that through osmosis or beyond sort of push that agenda to your kids.

So it’s going to go this way; it has to go this way because the campuses are inhabited with people who naturally lean toward that and lean away from the entrepreneurial spirit. Then once the kids graduate, they end up at The New York Times, and now The New York Times is The New York Times. So this shall continue, in my opinion, because it's at its fiber; that's what it's based on.

I was talking to a group of Canadian dissident academics yesterday and one of them, Janice Fiamingo, she's a former feminist, former English professor, who abandoned her leftist ideology a number of years ago and has become a very vocal and articulate critic of leftist activism in academia. She pointed out something quite interesting that's a bit different in terms of its causal pathway let's say in the universities. You know, back in the 60s, women’s studies was established, and women's studies putatively was about women. But perhaps it was mostly about critique of male dominance.

And so then perhaps it was particularly about critique of dominance, and that idea got a toe hold in the universities, and it started out with women’s studies but spread to the whole grievance studies industry, and that's more or less taken over the administration and you know pushed its tentacles out into the rest of the faculties as well—literature, English literature in particular, the humanities more generally, the social sciences to some degree, and now increasingly biology and physics.

It's not so much a temperamental argument, you know, as a structural argument, that we set up an institution that was based on what would you say—resentment and hatred, at least to some degree—and then that generalized across the disciplines.

Well, yes, I agree fully with that. I just want to go back to the question you posed about power. You made—you offered a throwaway line which I thought was utterly correct and insightful, that when the left talks about power, it’s confession rather than accusation alone. That is—and here is a massive disadvantage to people who are conservative—I’ll use myself as an example only because I speak for many in this way.

I have been asked to run for office all of my public life, and I actually once did file to run for senator of California, and then I woke up—sober, and I don’t even drink. But it was a moment of non-sobriety! In any event, I’ve always said on the radio I am infinitely more interested in influence than power. I have no interest in having power.

How distinguished them?

How to distinguish them? Yes. Because I can only—influencing you is not the same as having power over you. I cannot tell you that you must keep your store closed and go out of business because of a virus. I have no desire to have that power, and I resent those who do. And if you used your influence, how would that differ from the expression of power?

Well, power is coercive; influence is not.

Everybody—well, let's expound on that a little bit because this does get to this question. See, I'm staggered by the idea that a very large minority of the population now appears to believe that the guiding spirit of human civilization is the arbitrary expression of power rather than something like influence or cooperation or negotiations. The left cannot influence—that's why they don't debate us.

I have had the number of leftists who have accepted invitations to my radio show in 35 years can be counted on the digits of your hands and feet. I even had Howard Zinn come on to my show. I've extended—I have said I will pay a thousand dollars to any New York Times columnist, other than Bret Stevens, who comes on anyway to come on to my show. I will pay ten thousand dollars to have any black leader debate Larry Elder. They’ll never do it.

They don’t debate because they’re crappy at influence; they’re great at power. And that’s what they know—power.

And so they would say, you know, they would say, “Well, you call it influence because that suits your moral—that puts you in the moral high ground, but you're a privileged person; you're white, you have access to a huge media empire; you can say what you want and you can talk to millions of people; you call that influence, but we call it power.” And part of it is because you didn’t deserve what you have, and that’s a consequence of your privilege. And I mean, this isn't something I believe, but so how do you explain Oprah Winfrey?

I’m sorry! Did I—are we still on?

Well, because Jordan had to switch between the person that was trying to punch holes in your point and then back to himself, so I don’t think Jordan knew how to reply in terms of should I reply as myself or the naysayer that it’s—well, I could, yeah, I couldn't come up with an argument from the perspective I was trying to, you know, put forward. I mean, I think Oprah Winfrey was successful because she’s credible, and remarkable—that's my hypothesis.

Okay, so she’s a token. How about that? She’s a token. Yes!

The number of black influencers in our societies, Don Lemon—token! I mean, it becomes an absurdity after a certain period of time. Anyway, that’s—it’s a non-sequitur whether or not I—I have an advantage, being white, is a non-sequitur to the issue of I don’t want power over other people. We conservatives want to be left alone; the left does not want to be left alone, and they don’t want to leave you alone. I want to leave you alone, except for the most obvious things—you can't murder; you can't steal, etc.

But by and large, we want to leave others alone. I know they will raise abortion, but if they don’t acknowledge that abortion is at least a moral issue and that there is an issue about whether it should be banned, I fully acknowledge that; but there is no issue about whether it is a moral issue that the human fetus is worth less, literally worth less, than a hamster. There are laws protecting hamsters; there are no laws protecting the human fetus. I mean, it’s so—but other than that, they can’t come up—we don’t want to intervene in your life like they want to intervene in ours.

That is why the masks issue became one. You would think it's just science, by the way. If we did follow the science—the New England Journal of Medicine last year, which nobody bothers quoting, did say that they were essentially worthless outdoors and they weren't worth much indoors either. Then they went and said, “Oh, of course, we weren't saying people shouldn't do it, but they didn't take away their original case.”

The masks issue is, in large measure, what conservatives think it is: power, not science.

Well, I think we fortunately, in a bizarre way, just lived through this experiment called COVID-19. You pretty much could divide the country into red states and blue states. So if you just sort of looked at it as an experiment—let's just see if we can remove the politics of sorts from it, and even the disease itself, or any knowledge we have of it, of personal people who died or people who got it or whatever it is. If you just sort of looked at it more as a metaphor, you take the country, you take the blue states and how they reacted—Dennis and I are in California. Or you could have Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan.

She was telling the blue states; they were telling you don't go boating. California arrested a guy who was paddleboarding alone in the Pacific Ocean! I mean, the footage is breathtaking. It's literally a guy on a surfboard with a paddle standing alone, nobody within yards—maybe miles of him—and a boat pulls up, and they literally arrest the guy on the beach, which obviously is much more dangerous than whatever it is he was doing alone.

But if you just said, “Let's just do a little mine, let's have a little experiment. This disease showed up. How did the right-leaning states act and how did the left-leaning states act?” well, that's all you need to know. I mean, it doesn't need to be a virus. The left snapped into action and started doing what they wanted to do, which is control. California's Gavin Newsom and Mayor Garcetti and all—they all jumped into control because that's what they wanted to do.

It's almost like we all had those friends.

Do you guys know if there's any data on death rates between red and left and red and blue states? Any reliable data? Because that'd be quite interesting.

Yeah, there is reliable data, and you may recall that when Texas dropped all of its mandates, the president of the United States said it was Neanderthal thinking. There was absolutely no spike in cases or deaths in Texas. Nobody talks about it now because the president said something incredibly stupid, but typically of the left, they dismissed all freedom-loving policies with regard to this particular disease.

We should have followed what Sweden did. I never thought in my life that I would use Sweden as my moral model in Western society. But the world is not fully predictable.

But I think we have our answer as to which side wants more control because the outcome ended up being the same or, in many cases, better for the red states. So it had really nothing to do with science, and it really didn't have anything to do with data. It's just the left saw it as an opportunity to do what they want to do, what they're inclined to do, which is control, and the right is—Dennis's argument that Dennis made tried some things, but they were trying to refrain from totalitarianity of what the left was doing, which is total control.

So it was a little experiment we just went through; we got the results, and I think it's pretty self-evident at this point.

It is. All right, so let's go back to the movie, if you don't mind. We took a large detour, and it was worthwhile. But you tell us about—tell us about No Safe Spaces first and then tell us about, you know, your attempts to get it distributed or the attempts to get it distributed.

Well, I'll start with the movie and then Dennis will go on to the attempts to be distributed. I actually wanted it to reverse, okay? Well, that’s fine either way. You know, Dennis and I are very different. We have very different backgrounds, but we do have common sense in common. And I have found more and more—and I'm assuming you guys feel the same way—which is just finding someone with common sense seems to trump all the other characteristics that we're constantly talking about, about where you're—what region you're born in or who your team is or what color your skin is.

Dennis and I always had common sense in common, and we struck up a great friendship. We’ve done many speaking engagements. We’ve always had a great time in each other's company. And so when the producers came to us with this idea, I immediately jumped at it just because selfishly it seemed like we could spend a lot of time together talking about a subject that we're both pretty passionate about, which is free speech. Since the time we made this movie, I feel like things have gotten much worse. I think the movie was a bit ahead of its time in terms of what it is, the subject matter. And now I feel like in just the three or four years since we started, this free speech issue has gone into overdrive.

Go ahead, Dennis.

Yeah. A word on the movie and then a word on the distribution. I’ve said from the beginning, and I’m neither arrogant nor humble. I just pretty much try to see myself in life objectively. So I have said this is a great movie, and it’s not a great movie because I’m in it. It might be a great movie because Adam is in it, but the truth is, it’s a great movie, and Adam and I happen to be the quote-unquote stars, but that’s not the point of the movie.

I have watched this about five times. I have the attention span of a child, and so for something to keep me riveted five times speaks immensely about it. It truly is an important movie. It's more important today even than when it was made about free speech. And it's gotten movies within the movies. And anyway, people should see it.

I’d like to point out too, just as an advertisement of sorts, there’s a Canadian equivalent to that movie called Better Left Unsayed that has faced the same sort of distribution problems that you guys have faced, and it focuses on issues that are more germane to Canada although also relevant to the U.S. And so, well, they deserve a note; they deserve to be mentioned. So I’m glad you pointed out.

I happen to think that things are worse in Canada than in the U.S., but that’s an interesting discussion for either another time or later on today. So what was your impetus for making this movie?

I’m in the movement of everything you spoke about—the distribution.

Yes, yes. Netflix refused to distribute it—to stream it, which is incredible given how popular the movie is.

Okay, so make a case for that. Like why?

Okay, so Netflix should have been incentivized, as far as you're concerned, by the fact that the movie was economically successful. And there are other streaming agencies too online that are fairly powerful—Amazon, etc. Have you had any interest from any of the streaming agencies?

Yes. Well, it’s interesting. I don’t know the—I’ll look up the Amazon question. I know that Walmart doesn’t sell it in its stores. They have the same thing. All you need, really, at Netflix or Walmart or any of these is one or two people who are woke to tell, you know, “We can’t do this. We’re going to get a bad name.” And then, you know, what is it to Netflix not to listen to somebody who says, “Oh, Dennis Prager—we know for a fact that it was my name that was the trigger,” which is an interesting thing.

I one day would be fascinating to discuss because whenever my name is raised as this bugaboo, I always say, “Well, can you say anything in 35 years of broadcasting? Ten books, literally 1,000 columns on the Internet plus tens of thousands of hours of the radio recorded. Say one thing that I have ever said that strikes you as extreme.” And so there’s never an example. The New York Times did a piece on me; they couldn't find one sentence. They made up something.

In fact, they said, “Prager suggested.” And I always tell people, if they don’t say “said,” don’t believe the line. “Suggested” is the New York Times, not what I said. And then they had no quotes. But anyway, I've had the same experience, Dennis.

You know, I know, of course you have!

I know that I can't find a thing you've ever said that is an ennobling. I love your work. I wrote the introduction to your biography. I had—I had this experience as well. And then I have another thought, which is I got into a lot of trouble and I got out of favor with critics because it was widely said that Adam Carolla said women weren't funny. Now this is perfect, and you guys have experienced a version of this. I did an interview years ago, and the person said at the end, “Who's funnier, men or women?” And I said, “Well, I think men are. I think it's based on them trying to have sex, essentially.”

So they had to exercise that muscle a little bit, but I know many female comedians that are funnier than anybody any guy ever went to high school with. That then turned into Adam Carolla said women weren't funny, and then they just ran with it.

And that’s up there with that.

Well, look, it's pretty credible what you say because my sense is that there's been a couple of things I've said that have been blown up in the press, you know, and they were exaggerations of the sort that you're describing—taken out of context. I think that in the current climate, if you've ever said anything reprehensible on public record, that you will be slaughtered for it. And so if you haven't been slaughtered for it, the probability that you haven't said anything reprehensible is pretty damn high because people are combing over the utterances of people like you trying to find a smoking pistol.

I don’t know if you can comb over things to find a smoking pistol, but I will tell you another institution that’s sort of been ruined. And I think Jordan was sort of getting to it, and it sort of gets back to the oboe or cello player for the New York Philharmonic. How do you say that one film is definitively better than the other film? You know, it is subjective and/or objective. Sorry, but you are, you know, so a lot of the answers is sort of make a better film and you'll get onto Netflix.

Or make a better film and you'll get into the Sundance Film Festival. So I've had five films all turned down from the Sundance Film Festival. Now, Jordan, the way Jordan's mind is working is you're thinking, “Well, but how do you know?” I mean, they couldn't—no, I’m thinking why don't you organize your own damn conservative film festival?

But the academic in you is thinking, “How do we define that?” And as we spoke about earlier, when the guy hits 40 home runs in a season, that's definable. And when the guy drains 14 three-pointers in a playoff game, that's pretty definable. But how do we do it with documentaries?

And there’s a—well, you could—you could make the case with your film that it had a reasonable success. I hope I’ve got this right; it had enough success at the box office.

I mean, it had enough success at the box office so it should have been economically interesting for a place like Netflix or Walmart. Agreed?

So another system that's sort of been corrupted is you used to be able to go onto the website Rotten Tomatoes and literally check the score of the film. And it's not an exact science, but your film gets a score, and my film gets a score, and here it's pretty good—it’s a score, and it’s pretty good.

Now if you look at No Safe Spaces, the critics have it under 50, somewhere 46, and the audience has it at 99. And I would argue we now must remove the critics from the equation because the critics are so left and so woke that there's nothing—you know, Dennis Prager could make Gone with the Wind tomorrow and it would get under 50 on Rotten Tomatoes.

So they've screwed up their own—they’ve corrupted their own system or sort of polluted their own system. You must now go with the audience because there's two scores: there's the critic score and then there's what the people thought, and we now have to throw out the critics.

And by the way, it's a two-way street. One of the films that would be an Oscar-nominated film that started a young gay black man who was struggling with his sexuality, that'll be 96 with the critics and 65 with the people.

Well, you know, that's a testable hypothesis. You could rank order films by discrepancy between critics and audience and then rate them according to their political affiliation, and you’d have the answer right there.

You could probably—you know, a good statistics tradition could do that in a day. Be a very interesting thing to do because you might be right in a day.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. You’re right; that’s a great point, Jordan.

It's very simple. It's not only what the theme of the film is; it's does it have Dennis Prager’s name on it. Take a look at the arc of Clint Eastwood-directed films and watch how they shrank in the eyes of the critics over the years since he spoke to the famously spoke to the bar, the empty bar stool at the convention.

I know his film about the—that featured the car and the Asian family next door, which I really liked—I mean, that's got slammed for racism, yeah. Gran Torino—

Even by some of the actors that were in it, who I thought were extremely ungrateful, that's my personal opinion. I thought that was a remarkably non-racist film.

I mean, Eastwood was played a character who was, you know, a standard conservative of the Archie Bunker type essentially. But as he got to know his neighbors, he placed his allegiance to them over that of his own family, who he saw as becoming morally corrupt.

How in the world that's a racist film is absolutely beyond me. But Jordan, I think you’re not factoring in—there's two factors. There is what is the film and then who directed the film.

Yes! Yes! If that film was directed by Mark Ruffalo, there would be no issues. He’s a progressive actor; Dennis, I know you don’t know any actors.

You pick the actor that's on—you know, George Clooney, if George Clooney directed Gran Torino, it'd be 15 points higher—percentage points higher with the critics. That's—that’s my assertion.

How well the original New York Times criticism is growing at some point. I can't help but wonder why the original New York Times criticism would be so low because the audience received it so unbelievably well.

It's definitely been politically correlated across the line, that's for sure.

So why were you motivated, you guys, to do No Safe Spaces? And what exactly is it examining?

It's examining free speech, which alone—I mean, first of all, everybody involved in it, all the directors, the writers, the producers, were fantastic people, people I really admire and adore. And originally, it was with me, and then very early on, they said, “Would you like to do it with Adam Carolla?” And I—I don’t know if your viewers are able to perceive this, but we really do adore each other and respect each other.

And so the thought of doing this with Adam was—I was excited, and it turned out that I had every reason to be excited. It’s a great chemistry that we have. Just to hear Adam describe how different our backgrounds are, is worth the price of admission which he does at most of the time when we go public. Adam, why don’t you give a brief review of how different our backgrounds are?

Well, first, our similarities were both over six foot and that’s where it ends. Dennis is, you know, a New York—he’s an East Coast guy. I grew up in North Hollywood, California. Dennis is a scholar; I was put on academic probation at a junior college.

Dennis likes symphonies; I like prog rock. Dennis likes gefilte fish; I like Philly cheesesteaks. Where does it end, Dennis?

Well, what about the religious difference?

Oh yes, he’s a very religious Jew. I’m essentially atheist/pagan, so there’s, again, but you know, the thing I always find about Dennis is an intellectual honesty and a pursuit of truth. And again, he’s not interested in converting people; he’s interested in having a dialogue with people.

And I don’t know what happened to that process. It feels—well, I know what happened to it. I mean, let’s examine that for a minute or two, okay? So first of all, to have a dialogue, you have to assume there are two people involved, at minimum, right?

Dialogue? And that there's a logos involved—that there's a logic there that operates within each individual and between them—and that they are of the sort that can be brought to a different standpoint, a different understanding by the mutual exchange of verbal information.

And that that dialogical process is the means to that, and if you don’t believe that there’s an individual, you believe that there’s group identity, and you don’t believe that there’s negotiation and goodwill in that verbal exchange, you only believe there’s an exchange of power, there’s no dialogue.

And so that’s why, at least normally, why the leftists that you describe—the radicals won’t debate with you. I mean there’s no debate, you see. It isn’t the people on the liberals and the conservatives think that free speech exists; the radical critics don’t. It isn’t about whether or not there should be—that free speech should be allowed—it’s deeper than that.

It’s whether or not there is such a thing as free speech. Like, you know, when the critical race theorists and so forth say that this is a—that they’re offering a fundamental critique of Western civilization, I think the idea that it's Western, as I said, is somewhat an error but that it’s a fundamental critique, they mean that. They mean all the way to the bottom.

And so one of the ideas that’s being criticized is the idea of individuals— the idea that we can have dialogue, that there is logic, that there is a logos that operates between people—that’s all on the table. And that’s why there’s no reason for debate. Besides, you don’t have anything to say, Adam; you’re just an expression of your group.

And if you don’t know that, that’s just your ignorance, or perhaps your malevolence or your self-serving power, something like that. I mean, this really is a fundamental critique. Yeah, Adam is a representative of construction workers.

That’s right, I’m a hard hat!

Yeah, you're right!

You know, I think there is a circling back to Israel and the trials and tribulations; I think we sort of make a mistake in—and we've run into this abroad with a lot of foreign policy—is we assume they want what we want. You know what I mean? Like everyone wants to live in peace. Everyone wants freedom. Everyone wants harmony. And all we have to do is string together the right words in the right order, and we could express that to them.

So we sort of treat it as if you're having an argument with your wife and she just doesn’t understand that you really care about her and love her. And so you will put that down on a greeting card, and we will somehow right this ship or repair this. But if she wants you dead, then what is it that you could say to her that would ever remedy that?

Well, we could modify that slightly because I think you could say that it might be the case that the values that are put forward as central in the West explicitly are the most essential human values, and that that’s universal. But that a dedicated minority in any place can put the boots to that pretty damn rapidly.

And so you know when the foreign policy idea is, “Well, there is a desire for freedom—that’s part and parcel of the human spirit!” Fair enough! But how much opposition does that have to run into before it’s impossible?

And the answer might be—and I think it could well be—that it doesn’t have to run into that much opposition to be in jeopardy. Like a committed minority, a committed small minority can have a disproportionate effect.

I think there’s evidence supporting that proposition.

I may have wanted to comment on what Adam said. I was a student at the two institutes at the School of International Affairs in graduate school at Columbia—the Russian Institute and the Middle East Institute. I did Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian, so I want you to know that Adam's analysis of the Middle East was more cogent than all of my professors in the Middle East Institute at Columbia. He hit it the bullseye!

The staggering error of the naive that everybody wants the same thing—and that's why, for example, I was taught the nonsense—and I talked about this on Fox News two weeks ago, and it sort of went viral—that the battle in the Middle East, I always knew, was not about land. If Israel were the size of Manhattan, they would want to destroy—it’s not about land! That’s—no, no; but every single professor at Columbia said it was land. The New York Times says it’s land. They all say it’s land. You know it; I know it, and Adam knows it. It’s that one side wants the other side dead.

That’s it! Period! End of issue. They want Israel dead.

There is nothing. Israel withdrew from Gaza, and all they got was Hamas. Let me ask you a quick question about that. Do you see any hope? I mean, Israel has been negotiating somewhat more successfully with many countries in the Middle East now than say 15 years ago. Is that true or not?

Yes, in large measure thanks to the man that is reviled by the left, Donald Trump.

Okay, so you do think it's true? Why would you attribute it to Trump?

Because Trump said, “I don’t give a hoot about the Palestinian radicals. They are not the central issue in the Middle East.” And as soon as the rest of the Arab country saw that America was strong and not bowing to the most radical elements of Islamic life, they said, “You know what? There’s nothing—Israel is not all that bad, frankly, and we would like to do business with it.”

Okay, so I'm going to ask a meta question here. Why do you guys think that that conflict got dragged into this conversation? I mean, the reason I'm asking that is because in that conflict, everyone in the world—their eyes are focused on it in a way that isn't true of any other conflict, and it's certainly not a consequence of the number of people who are involved. There's something magical about that conflict, and that pertains to your statement that it's not about land—it's about religion.

And maybe it's about even more than religion. Who knows?

Or perhaps not!

But you know what? What was that? What do you think that called forth that conflict into this conversation?

He raised it when he was talking about the gulf between liberal and left. He gave—to his credit—raised the Middle East as an example. Liberals were always pro-Israel; the left was always anti-Israel. And that’s if you can’t see the moral clarity of the Middle East issue, Hamas primitives versus a modern liberal democracy called Israel, there’s something wrong with your moral compass.

So why do you think the radical left is pro-Palestine particularly? Why did they pick that?

I don't know. Anything about the region, but I do sort of know what animates people. My feeling is—and as someone who grew up with a mother who was sort of this way and a grandmother who dabbled in communism a little bit—they want to push back against everything that is. So it's more of an anarchist approach than it is, "Here’s my plan."

And they always—no one can really say that out loud, but it's more—it’s sort of like defunding. So it’s part of part of a revolution.

And revolution is basically one house has a well-groomed lawn and a white picket fence, and the other one has a sofa rotting on the lawn and a guy smoking weed standing on the porch.

And I only have one Molotov cocktail: what direction do I throw it? It's always going to go toward the house with the white picket fence if these people are lighting them all.

Well, one of the things I have noticed about when—in my discussion with well-meaning people who tilt more to the left, say, than you guys is that they are generally relatively unwilling to consider the role of dark emotions in political motivation. They tend to think things like, “Well, the people on the radical left, their hearts in the right place, but their means are wrong.” But what they’re trying to do is to stand up for the oppressed, however badly they’re doing it.

And I think, “Well, I had this experience—you can tell me what you think of this—but it really—I just re-encountered it. I was looking at the discussion I had with Slavo Zizek a few years ago about Marxism. Punitively, that isn't really what the conversation ended up being about, but I offered a 15-minute critique of the Communist Manifesto at the beginning, and at one point, I described it to the audience as a call to bloody, violent revolution, which is what it was.

And there were a lot of people in the audience, a disproportionate number for my audiences, who came to see Zizek kicked the slats out from underneath me. And so there were a lot of people who were very far left in the audience. And when I said, “A call to bloody, violent revolution,” a good fifth of the audience cheered and laughed.

And it stopped me in my tracks because it was quite chilling. You know, I heard the—I heard the mob in that moment, and you know, it was a Freudian moment. Freud noted that people often laughed at things that had deep psychological significance and also that you could express your true feelings when you were hidden in the crowd.

Well, the true feelings were, well, the Communist Manifesto—the hell with it! Who cares about its rationality and its justification? It’s like it’s a call for a violent revolution and, “Ha ha, hooray! Let’s do it!” And I thought, “Yeah, you bastards! You revealed yourself in that laugh.” And that chilling, awful unconscious willfully blind malevolent glee at the notion of the picket fence burning down, and the question is, well, what’s generating that malevolence?

And the surface story is, well, you got that through ill-gotten means, and so the right thing to do is to take it back. And that goes along with the claim that power is the fundamental motivation.

What I can't understand is how the hell those of us who don't believe that have been so weak—let’s say that we allowed the educational institutions to be overtaken by people who are propounding that preposterous doctrine. It’s like, what the hell’s wrong with us, conservatives and liberals alike?

I don't—they know what they’re doing in that they know everyone’s Achilles heel is a claim of power, especially power that’s ill-gotten. You know, your dad’s rich; now you’re rich. And then your grandfather was a landowner!

Right, and then race! Right? So why do you think they weave race into every single subject? It gets the other side to shut it up, and you don’t have to prove your point. You just call everyone a racist, and we can—we can—

Well yeah, you put them on your heels right away, right? Because if you're yelling about systemic racism and I object to it, I’m instantly a racist. It’s so convenient. But that still doesn't excuse our weakness in the face of that. Now, Dennis, you put your finger on something.

You said the thing about conservatives is they like to be left alone. Well, so maybe that makes conservatives particularly weak in the face of this, right? In the face of—you see, we have fulfilled lives outside of power. I am fulfilled in so many arenas having nothing to do with political power or running the board of education in my local district.

I am fulfilled by my religion. As you heard, I’m religious. I am fulfilled. I love America; I love my Judaism. I love my family; I love my friends. I have synagogue every week, one that I helped found. I mean, my life is so rich—not to mention my music. But theirs isn't. Their richness derives from political activism; that is their raison d'être.

As Adam pointed out, the term I use is chaos.

Okay, so let me bug you about that for a minute. So, I have some sympathy with your argument. I think there's empirical data, if I remember correctly, showing that the most unhappy people are left-leaning men.

Okay, so—but we’ll leave that to the side. Really not left-leaning. I think it's a tie, so I can't remember the data well enough to cite it with perfect accuracy.

So, but look, so there’s young people—they go off to university, and they're looking for this sense of involvement that you just described. Okay?

Now, the leftist propagandists who are teaching them, let’s say, are appealing to that and offering them a kind of romantic adventure. Now, that that matches their developmental need at that point should be the point at which they're richly encultured by an intact myth, something like that.

Well, the fact that that isn’t being provided in a credible manner is what lays young people open to this kind of propaganda. So it still takes me back to the failure of liberalism and—right? Forgive me, Adam. I—I for just speaking again. I just—I just need to say I have warned about this.

I began lecturing at the age of 21. I have a very odd life, and I remember telling audiences in my 20s, speaking to my parents' generation, the World War II generation, “Your motto was, ‘Let's give the next generation everything we didn't have,’ and specifically material—wealth of education and peace. And the problem is you didn’t give us what you did have.”

I knew this in my 20s. My parents did give it to me, but the World War II generation did not give their children Americanism or Christianity in any coherent manner, and we are living the consequences.

Okay, so justify that. Why would you point to Christianity, for example? Dominant—look, I’m a Jew, but it's a dominant religion of the West, and certainly of the United States. If Christianity—look, Christianity failed in Europe, and we got Nazism, fascism, and communism. What’s going to happen in America when Christianity fails?

Yeah, well, you know, I've been talking to some of the people associated with the rational atheist movement, and what I'm seeing there is some realization that whatever comes up to replace the religion that they decried is going to be a hell of a lot worse than the religion that they decried.

That’s right! And that it makes me think too—you know, go ahead.

And what we get is wearing masks outdoors and copious amounts of hand sanitizing—even when it’s unnecessary. I mean, that is right! COVID has taught us that this is the new religion; it transcends science in many cases.

Guys, I've got to jump off because I have to begin my podcast, but I thank you so much for having me, Jordan. You had to make a pleasure talking to you, and I hope we can have you on my show sooner than later because I always enjoy speaking to you. And I'll leave it in the very capable hands of Dennis Prager!

Now, I’d like that. So let’s arrange that. Okay? I’d like to do that!

Okay, okay, Adam. All right, thanks, Adam.

Thanks! So let's go down the religious route a little bit, and we still—you know, we still haven't talked about that—the censorship that No Safe Spaces has faced. I mean, we touched on it a little bit with Netflix and Walmart.

Well, that’s the—that’s the dominant arena, and obviously it’s completely ignored by the mainstream media, which review nonsense. And this is not a nonsense film. Look, the most important answer to all of this is for your copious number of viewers to actually watch it. It’s available online at so many vehicles. No Safe Spaces, just Salem Now—I know my syndicator has it—SalemNow.com or NoSafeSpaces.com, or it's easy to find.

We have to there are conservative films that I watch out of duty; this one is not out of duty. This is out of pleasure; it is quite powerful.

So the only answer is to succeed without them. But what they have done to the film is not economically—or certainly not morally justifiable. And it gives you an idea, although I think you have an idea of what we’re living through today.

Well, it's funny that a free movie about free speech is having a hard time—in fact, you could probably—you could hardly hope for a better outcome in some very, you know, perverse sense. Just out of curiosity, have you—what would happen if you just placed it on YouTube?

What would happen if we just—that's an interesting—I don’t know the answer. I would have to ask the producers. I only know the content more than that. You mean just free? Just free?

Well, it wouldn’t just be free because you could monetize it through ads now. That’s not a tremendous way of generating revenue, but it might be a way of—it would also be interesting to see what would happen.

Well look, the truth is, I mean, they have to—they’re very honorable, these guys. I haven't gotten a penny, just for the record! I didn’t do this for money to begin with. I would have been happy to make money; I'm not anti-money. But I didn’t do it for money; I did it because I believe so strongly in the message and the greatness of the film.

But their first thing was to repay the people who did invest in the film, and that’s—that’s one economic constraint that can’t be shaken so easily.

That's right! It was an expensive—it—as people will see, it is really well done. But we’re living—I mean, Jordan, we’re just living in a different world. I’ll give you a great example; you’ll find this fascinating.

I was on Bill Maher’s program—I know you've been on— I was on a year and a half ago right before the lockdowns. I never say, by the way, COVID; I always say lockdown. And I was on in October—actually, the lockdowns began in February or March. So I was on—it was October of 2019.

He was talking about how much Donald Trump lies, and I said, “You know, as much as you think he lies, it doesn’t compare to left-wing lies.” He says, “Really? Like what?” And this is, by the way, you could see this. Anyone could see this on YouTube of my appearance on his show.

So I said, “For example, that America’s systemically racist—that is one of the greatest lies in the history of the world. In fact, in my view, I think it's not a lie; I think it's an anti-truth.” Because lies just slip by, right? An anti-truth is a lie that is so egregious that it’s the opposite of what’s true.

I love it! I will cite you, and I will always cite you. I will never claim that I made up that term. That’s great!

In fact, you were like that!

What I have said and written—I taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, and I’ve written books on Jewish history.

So I have said that this is the greatest national lie—libel since the blood libel. The medieval blood libel, for those of your viewers who don’t know, is when Christians accused Jews in the Middle Ages of killing Christian children to use their blood to bake matzah for Passover, which was equally evil and absurd. Massive numbers of Jews were tortured to death as a result, and the entire—all of the Jews of England were expelled from the whole country as a result of that libel.

The second-greatest national libel, in my opinion, is that America is systemically racist. America is the greatest attempt at non-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-racial country in the history of the world. And one of them—but you don’t deny the existence of racism or prejudice, obviously.

Okay, so why do you have such trouble with the term systemic?

Because systemic is—is sort of like when Barack Obama said, “It’s in the DNA.” System right means that the system is geared to hurting blacks.

The system is not.

Right!

So it's the central tendency. The claim is systemic means central tendency.

Yes, exactly! It’s built in. It’s—it’s just that—that’s an anti-truth, to use your term.

So, okay, so let me ask you a question from the side here for a sec.

I was looking at your work on the Torah. I've been thinking about this idea. So the idea of systemic racism is the idea that the central animating principle of the United States is prejudicial and racist to the point of enslavement. That’s the claim. And it’s it’s an analog of the claim that power is the fundamental motivation for human interaction, at least under capitalist conditions, let’s say.

But I think it’s even deeper than that, and so now you studied the Torah in depth, and I’ve been thinking—and you also claim that the Torah was—is the word of God. I've got that right?

Yes!

Okay, now is the ultimate author?

Yes!

Okay, so I'm thinking of the Bible as actually a set of stories that was told across a very long period of time, and they were looped together for reasons that we don’t exactly understand. I’m not speaking as a religious person here precisely, but there’s a voice there that’s part of the central tendency of civilization, and that—that's—and it’s not a voice that speaks of power.

That's right!

Okay, what does it speak of as far as you're concerned? Good and evil.

It speaks about a just God who wants us to be good. It is—it’s almost to the point of sounding corny. Every profound truth is corny, you know? I mean, “Oh, that’s dull.” I’ll live with that.

That’s right!

That’s why—okay, so what does—what is the good that