In this monologue on the Dennis Prager Show, Dennis Prager warns that America is becoming increasingly unfree, arguing that the loss of free speech is the most serious threat to human dignity. He invokes the Patrick Henry maxim “Give me liberty or give me death” to stress that without the ability to speak openly, people are reduced to mere biological beings. Prager draws on his experiences in communist countries to illustrate how totalitarian regimes suppress speech, enforce equality over excellence, and create a silent, joyless public sphere. He then turns to contemporary America, citing Victor Davis Hanson’s recent piece and the case of musician Ariel Pink, who was publicly shamed, threatened, and lost his livelihood after attending a Trump rally. Prager blames “Big Tech” – especially Twitter and Facebook – for wielding “tentacles” that strangle dissent, and criticizes the political left for indifference to free‑speech erosion. He also attacks the left’s demographic agenda, claiming they discourage reproduction and thus create a world “not worth bringing a child into.” Prager concludes that while the left can suppress speech for a time, a sizable portion of Americans who cherish liberty will eventually resist, potentially leading to violence, a scenario he has warned about throughout his career.
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Dennis Prager Show. It's already Friday. I find that amazing. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, today in an increasingly unfree America. This is a frightening time, and I don't get frightened easily, as you know. I'm much more frightened by the end of freedom than I am by the COVID virus. I actually take seriously the Patrick Henry line, "Give me liberty or give me death," because when you don't have freedom— and the biggest freedom is freedom of speech— you are a biological creature. You are not a human. If you can't say what you think for fear of retribution, you become an eating and drinking and relieving being, but you, you have lost that which truly makes you human— the ability to express yourself. When I visited communist countries, that's what I was struck by. The relegation of human beings into this basically biological status. They woke up, they went to work, they didn't get paid based on excellence, just on equality. They went home, they were monitored for speech at all times. The streets were very quiet because there's really not much to say to anybody in a totalitarian state. I was struck by that, by the number of people in the street in Moscow, let's say, and the lack of banter, certainly the lack of smiles, because you're not, you're not human. So it's one of the reasons it's always been a problem in Russia, the drinking problem. But it's one of the reasons that it, it was exacerbated terribly, uh, the amount of, uh, alcohol consumed in the Soviet Union, because there's nothing else to do. This is what the left does whenever it takes power— it ends freedom. Tucker Carlson last night had a musician on. The guy is a fairly popular musician. His name eludes me now, but it's not, not critical, although I would like to help him out. And, uh, he went to the rally, then went home— well, went to his hotel to take a nap. He never set foot in the US Capitol. But it was, uh, it was publicized because he's a public figure, he's a musician. It's publicized that he was at the rally, and the mob, the real mob, came out against— yes, Ariel Pink, that is correct. And the The mob went after the, the company that pays him on their payroll to, to be a musician, and they were attacked, and death threats came, and they let him go. He has no income now. He attended a peaceful rally. If you attend a peaceful rally for the right You— whatever people can do to ruin your life, to destroy your income and your name, they will do. This is unprecedented. Unprecedented. Maybe, maybe it was— there was a brief period when this was what happened to active communists, people who supported Stalin, the second greatest mass murderer in history, the first greatest being Mao. In terms of numbers. Mao, Stalin, Hitler. That's why Victor Davis Hanson, not a man to throw rhetorical bombs, ends his piece today. Its tentacles— that is Big Tech— its tentacles are strangling the thoughts and speech of an increasingly unfree America. People don't seem to care. The left doesn't seem to care. Even liberals, they don't seem to care about free speech. But as I said, that's what makes us who we are. Give me liberty or give me death makes sense. I don't want to live unfree. That's— what do you do then? What makes you human? That you eat meals? You reproduce? Although that's rarer and rarer on the left, which is one of the good things about the left. They don't— they've chosen, in many cases, not to reproduce. Why bring a child into a world that the left has produced? That's really what it is about. We will make this world so much worse that it's not worth bringing a child into the world that we create. They don't say it that way. They don't even realize it. There's no self-awareness on the left. This is, uh, it's, it, it's exponential every day, the increase in suppression. How do you suppress half the population? Well, it's easy if you have all the levers of power. That's what was done. You know that people don't know this, a tiny percentage of the Russian population was in the Communist Party. I think it's like 4%, 5%. I, I don't remember. I'll look it up. There's a tiny percentage. It's very easy for a tiny percentage to control a vast number of people. If you have every apparatus of power, then you can do it. So, uh, at some point though, there are enough Americans who actually cherish liberty and who do believe, give me liberty or give me death. And then you will have violence in the country. You, you can't suppress people's speech, uh, uh, forever. And some— something will happen. I've warned about this all of my life. I've always known that most people think that I was exaggerating when I speak about the mortal threat that the left constitutes to civil order, to a good society. I would love to know who these anonymous mobsters are who threaten people's lives because you attended a Trump rally. That is what is involved here with the impeachment. The desire to— first of all, there's an emotional loathing of the man, not because quote-unquote he lied or he's a narcissist or any of that. No, it's because they couldn't control him. That whatever the left doesn't control, it hates. Whoever they don't control, they hate. I mean hate. They're— it's all phony about the, uh, the, the charge that he leads to violence. I mean, as Victor Davis Hanson writes today, they have, uh, on the Twitter, they, they had— let's see, the— I always remember the head of Donald Trump The, uh, Kathy Griffin, she retweeted 2 days after the election last month, or 2 months ago, she retweeted the notorious picture of her holding a prop that looked like the bloody head of a decapitated Donald Trump. Did she lose her Twitter account? Is that incendiary? Earlier last year, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, tweeted out a call to his followers to destroy Israel. Both tweets passed the censorship rules of Twitter's 20-something judges in San Francisco. Trump has been banned, in contrast, for life from Twitter and barred indefinitely from Facebook. Okay, 1-800-PRAGER-776. I'm Dennis Prager.
