Intel Leak

Dennis Prager here. Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast. To hear the entire 3 hours of my radio show commercial-free every single day, become a member of PragerTopia. You'll also get access to 15 years' worth of archives as well as the daily show prep. Subscribe at prageropia.com.

I love that Sean knows to play this when I guest host. I don't even tell him, folks. He just knows. Hello everyone. For those of you who do not know who I am and do not recognize the music cue of Billy Joel, my name is Julie Hartman. I am an avid Billy Joel fan. Every time I guest host for this program, we have got to listen to him at the start. I do a show on the Salem News Channel called Timeless with Julie Hartman, which is both a news program and a non-news program where I talk about timeless, eternal, non-political subjects. And I am also the co-host of a podcast with a guy you may have heard of called Dennis Prager. Our show is called Dennis and Julie. I'm very honored to be sitting in for Dennis today. He is actually in Mexico right now giving a speech to 2,000 people. It is amazing how much our dear Dennis travels. He has more energy than a toddler who drank a Red Bull. It's really, really amazing, especially at his age, all of the traveling that he does. And God bless him, and thank God people still want to hear from him. Starting off today, we have a lot of news stories to cover. We're going to be talking about China's military drills around Taiwan, the left's attack on Justice Clarence Thomas, which is just ridiculous, Evan Gershkovich a Wall Street Journal reporter being officially charged in Russia with charges of espionage. But first, we have a pretty big breaking news story. According to the Wall Street Journal, this is one of the most significant leaks of classified U.S. documents in recent history. This has been exposed this past weekend, and it is pretty good timing, I guess, of the U.S. government to release this bombshell over Easter weekend when not many people are paying attention to the news. But we're paying attention to it now. This breach has exposed top-secret U.S. intelligence information that is now in our adversary Russia's hands. So according to the Wall Street Journal, these documents were circulated on a messaging group of about 12 mostly United States-based individuals on the app Discord. For those who don't know, the app Discord is an app that was created to enable gamers to message each other about various video games that they were playing. But over time, it sort of evolved into more of just a general messaging group, like a WhatsApp app again. So in January, an anonymous member of this messaging group on Discord began to post pictures of about a dozen files with top secret and classified markings on them. So let's look at what some of these documents expose. Number one, many of them talk about the war in Ukraine, including United States and Ukrainian communications about the types of heavy weaponry and equipment held by 9 Ukrainian brigades, as well as precise numbers about Ukraine's deteriorating air defense system. This obviously is of immense strategic importance to Russia. Now that Russia has access to these documents, they know a lot about the internal workings of the Ukrainian military system. Number 2, another thing that these documents revealed are US communications with our allies, namely South Korea and Israel. And allegedly, a few of these classified documents show a correspondence where Mossad, which is the Israeli counterpart of the CIA, the Israeli intelligence service, they show a correspondence where Mossad is again allegedly, it's not confirmed, but allegedly encouraging Israeli citizens to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and specifically his judicial reforms, which have caused a lot of upheaval in Israel. Now, Mossad and top Israeli government agents are vociferously denying these charges. Again, it is just an allegation at this point, but some U.S. officials have seemed to confirm that this was taking place. And number 3, another big thing that these documents have revealed is intelligence that the U.S. has intercepted from Russia, including internal Russian Ministry of Defense deliberations on supplying ammunition to the Wagner paramilitary groups in Africa. Those of you who listen to my show Timeless know that I talk about the Wagner paramilitary group a lot because it is exercising a really huge presence in the continent of Africa. This group was founded in Russia in 2014, and it rose to prominence during Putin's invasion of Crimea in 2014. What we forget is that in addition to invading Crimea, Putin also stationed troops in the eastern part of the Ukrainian mainland in a region called the Donbas region, which we know is now of immense importance in this war in Ukraine. Putin seems to have taken this region. So this Wagner Group rose to prominence in 2014, and now this group has moved into Africa, allegedly to support African citizens against jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda. But really what Russia is doing by, by moving these Wagner paramilitary groups into Africa is to try to exercise their control and dominion in the continent at the expense of the United States and other Western groups. For instance, earlier this year, the two African countries of Mali and Burkina Faso made French troops leave their country, and they replaced those troops with Wagner paramilitary troops. So again, these documents reveal this intelligence that the United States intercepted from Russia about these groups, which is of huge importance to us. So what's just so upsetting about, about this breach is that we have exposed our own country's intelligence, we have exposed our allies' intelligence, and we have also exposed our ability to intercept our adversaries' intelligence. So from the time that these documents were beginning to be circulated on this app Discord back in January of this year, the United States government astoundingly did not know that this was happening. In fact, they did not learn about the circulation of these top secret classified documents until March. I'm reading from this morning's Wall Street Journal, quote, the documents stayed among the members of the tiny group on the Discord messaging platform until early March, when another user reposted several dozen of them to another group with a larger audience. From there, at least 10 files migrated to a much bigger community focused on the Minecraft computer game. Yes, folks, this is really happening in our country where top secret classified documents are being exposed and circulated on apps where people are talking about Minecraft. A sign of our times. So again, the US government only became aware of this leak in March, and they only became aware of it when our adversary exposed that this leak had occurred. A Russian propaganda account on Telegram posted some of these documents, and they actually posted several documents that they themselves, the Russians, doctored, including one document in which Russia changed the numbers to inflate Ukraine's death count in the war and minimize Russia's. So they are sending this around to their people via Russia propaganda tools and saying, hey, look, this is a US classified document. They, of course, doctored it, but they are, they are using this to their advantage to, to make it seem like even we, the United States, believe that they are winning the war, which does not appear to be true at this very moment. The Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into this matter. The Department of Defense came out this weekend and said that they have already changed procedures for how their military personnel get access to documents. But let's just be honest, this is too little, too late. And it is also really bizarre the way that this intelligence has been leaked. As I have said multiple times, Discord is a software that gamers use to talk about Minecraft and other games. It's just, it's just incredible that the On this, this kind of platform, we are exposing top secret classified documents. This is not the first time the classified documents have been posted on game-related servers. Last year, players of the War Thunder military vehicle game posted real classified information on British Challenger 2 tanks. And back in 2021, another user posted classified material about the French Lecker tanks. So again, this is not the first time that this has happened, but it's really pretty rare to see such a bizarre medium of exposing classified documents. We live in a time, it seems, over the past few months where classified documents are being revealed and exposed. Of course, there were several boxes of classified documents found at President Biden's home in Delaware, in his garage, and also at his Chinese-funded think tank dating back from the time that he was vice president. Former Vice President Mike Pence also had a small number of classified documents in his Indiana home. Of course, people were up in arms about President Trump possessing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, though a president has different regulations and powers to possess such documents. And President Obama left the White House with 30 million documents. So again, we live in this time where it seems like our really important classified material is being dealt with recklessly. In the next segment, I'm going to talk to you about the procedures that are now in place for handling these classified documents and why they are ineffective in leading to breaches like this one. I'm Julie Hartman. We'll be back.

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Julie Hartman here, host of Timeless with Julie Hartman and the Dennis and Julie podcast. This is the second segment of the first hour of The Dennis Prager Show. We are discussing, quote, one of the most significant leaks of classified U.S. documents in recent history. That is according to The Wall Street Journal. So, you know, a light subject here at the start of the show. As I said in the last segment, these are documents with top secret and classified markings that were circulated on a gaming messaging app called Discord. They include intelligence pertaining to the war in Ukraine, correspondences with our allies and intelligence that the U.S. has intercepted from our adversaries. But now, of course, none of this is top secret and it is no longer really intelligence. It is now open to the public and is in the hands of our adversary. That is Russia. The documents look like they were prepared for General Mark Milley. This is according to the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense. General Milley is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff. So the fact that these documents look like they were prepared for General Milley, coupled with the fact that these documents were circulated and leaked on a gaming messaging app where people talk about specifically and especially war games, it seems likely that this was a military breach, that some high-up military personnel who had top-secret security clearance decided to expose these documents that are so crucial to our national security. A former Department of Justice official, Mark Ramondi, has said that the pool of people who are able to access classified and top secret information in the US government has expanded hugely after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. You know, on my show Timeless, I had two former FBI agents join me on the program. One, Kyle Serafin, who has made the news recently because he was a whistleblower who actually exposed and made public the FBI's recent internal memo where they have called Catholic Americans, quote, domestic terrorists. So he is one of the FBI agents I interviewed. Another was Tom Baker, who recently retired from the bureau. And both of them corroborated what this former DOJ official, Mark Ramondi, has said, that indeed the number of people who have access to classified documents proliferated after 9/11, and that the FBI really became more of a surveillance and intelligence service since those terrorist attacks. So as I said in the last segment, I want to spend a little bit of time talking to you about what we know, the systems that are in place right now about how top secret and classified documents are supposed to be handled. And it really does reveal, or at least give us a clue as to why over the past few months, it seems that reliably every few weeks another bombshell report comes out about classified documents being leaked. We see that these measures that we have in place do not appear to be very strong. So what we know is that government officials are only allowed to look at classified documents in sensitive compartmented informational facilities. These are called SCIFs, S-C-I-F-S. That is the acronym. And these SCIFs are, are sort of all over the place. You would think that they are in underground bunkers, you know, bomb-proof areas, or, you know, just maybe even in FBI headquarters. But actually, there are many of these SCIFs, for instance, around the White House. For instance, the White House Situation Room is one of these places where intelligence officials or government officials are allowed to look at classified documents. But what we don't know, what the government has not provided information on, is how does it happen that so many officials are able to leave these SCIFs, these SCIFs, with classified documents? Again, we have seen this repeatedly. Former Vice President, our current President Joe Biden, had classified documents discovered in his home and in his think tank. Former VP Mike Pence had classified documents discovered in his home. Obviously, former President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. President Obama left with 30 million classified documents when he left the White House, as did the Clintons and the Bush family too. So we don't know why and how so many documents are allowed to leave these facilities. And also, in this era of barcoding, like you have at a public library or at a grocery store, where if you're at a public library, you check out a book, they scan it, they know it belongs to you, they know it's in your possession, and it's very clear how long you have it for. In this era of barcoding, why aren't these classified top secret documents being barcoded? In other words, why don't they have a system where if a government official leaves with a classified document, they have to scan it out and it's in the system which government official has access to that document so that when something like this happens, when we see that there are classified documents being circulated on Discord, this messaging service, the government officials can look at the classified document, look at the barcode that would be associated with it, and see which member of our government checked out that classified document, and they could trace the breach back to that person. Doesn't that seem to be a lot more of a rational and effective way to going about organizing and keeping track of classified documents than what we have now. Because what's really scary about this story, and it was also really sort of frightening, not just with this Discord messaging story, but also again with former VP Mike Pence, with President Biden, is that it didn't appear that our government officials knew that these classified documents were missing. It was just that they were found and it was like, oh, whoops, we have all these classified documents. Gee, didn't realize that. Like, doesn't our government know that these documents, and especially these ones that were leaked on Discord pertaining to top secret information about the war in Ukraine and the United States' strategic plans to help aid them in weaponry, like, don't people realize that this stuff is missing? So we can only hope that this will wake up our government, this will wake up our government officials, because this is an enormous breach. And the final thing that I'll say on this story, and by the way, I encourage all of you who want to, to please call in and tell me me your thoughts on this or if you have any questions or you would like to challenge something that I said, the number is 1-800-PRAGER-776. Again, that is 1-800-PRAGER-776. But the final thing that I'll say is that this should not be a shocking story to any of us, sadly, right now in this country where there has been a profound deterioration in certain values that used to prevent breaches like this from occurring. There's been a deterioration in the value that we place on merit, on the sense of responsibility to one's country, on the idea of doing your due diligence, doing what is right. There is a war nowadays on these values. We see it everywhere. We see it on small levels, on social media or in interpersonal relations. We see it in college admissions procedures. We see it being espoused by our thought leaders, our celebrities. And what people don't realize is that when there's a war on these values through many different parts of our country, it affects all different parts of our country. And it has led to a breach like this from occurring because, again, people don't value a sense of responsibility to one's country and doing the right thing. In the next segment, we will be talking about China's military drills around Taiwan. I'm Julie Hartman. This is The Dennis Prager Show.

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Welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show. I'm Julie Hartman. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Julie R Hartman. You can see on those accounts highlights from my show Timeless with Julie Hartman and also my show with Dennis Prager called Dennis and Julie. New episodes of Dennis and Julie come out every Monday and episodes of Timeless come out Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday. Moving on to other news, China is in its third day of conducting military drills around Taiwan. On Saturday morning, the People's Liberation Army of China announced the immediate start to these three days of drills, which have included missile tests in and around the island of Taiwan. What we know is that the Chinese military has deployed 71 aircraft, including fighter jets jets, reconnaissance aircraft, and refuelers, as well as 9 naval vessels around Taiwan this weekend. The vast majority of both those aircraft and vessels have crossed the median line, which is the de facto border between Taiwan and China, and the naval vessels circled around the entirety of the island in just about a day and a half. Now, the U.S. Navy has apparently put some of our vessels as a deterrence to China in the South China Sea. But as recently as today, China has nevertheless continued these drills in and around Taiwan. Many believe that this is retaliation for Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen for visiting the United States. She visited Los Angeles, California, just a few days ago, and she actually met with our House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Now, China had made it clear in the weeks leading up to her visit that they viewed her visit to the United States as highly provocative. A spokesperson for China's Taiwan Affairs Office said ahead of her visit, quote, this is a provocation that seriously harms China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. And destroys peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. We firmly oppose this and we will definitely take measures to resolutely fight back. And now with these military drills, we see that they have indeed followed up on their word. China has also announced sanctions against the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and against two of its officials. China right now is in its most aggressive stance against Taiwan since its 1949 revolution. And for the rest of the show today, not for the rest of the show, forgive me, for the rest of the hour today of this first hour, I'm going to be talking about why we should pay attention to the way that China is treating Taiwan. You know, a lot of people argue, and actually the president of France as recently as yesterday made this very same argument. It's sort of a why should we care argument about Taiwan. It's a similar argument that people use about the war in Ukraine. The United States, we know, has gotten into some very ill-advised military entanglements trying to prevent dictatorial regimes from prevailing in certain countries. Of course, I'm referring to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and we have seen how those have ended up for us. So there are large swaths of Americans who hear that China is wanting to invade Taiwan or is stepping up the ante with its military presence. And many of these Americans think, why should we care? Taiwan is not, you know, under the jurisdiction of the United States as Ukraine is not. Why should we care? We have gotten ourselves into too many of these foreign entanglements. We have got to stay out of it. And you know what? Those are very legitimate arguments, especially given our history. But the reason why I want to talk to you today about what China is doing with Taiwan is not so much because of how it affects Taiwan, though I think that is important, but really because of how it affects us. Interest rates are good indicators of economic activity. Test scores are good indicators of educational outcomes and activity. And the way that China is handling Taiwan is indicative of how it views itself on the world stage. If China gets away with invading Taiwan, that says a lot about how China is asserting itself and imposing a new world global order that is replacing the United States as a hegemon. So we should all care about what is going on here with Taiwan. So as I said, China is now in its most assertive stance since Taiwan, really because China now has the military and political power to flex their muscles, whereas over the past few decades they have not been able to do that because, astoundingly, just about 3 or 4 decades ago, China was a very weak, backward country. In the next segment, I'm going to be continuing with this, why this is so important, what it reveals about China eclipsing the United States on the world stage. Again, these are military drills that China is conducting in and around Taiwan. I'm Julie Hartman. We'll be back.

The Dennis Prager Show.

Julie Hartman sitting in for Dennis Prager, we are talking about the 3 days of military drills that China has been conducting in and around Taiwan. I am making the argument that every American, even Americans who are isolationist with regard to foreign policy, every American should care about this because the fact that China thinks that they can get away with this and display such military might in violation of the international order speaks volumes about how they view themselves and what they think that they can accomplish against the United States specifically. So as I said, this is in response, or a better word is in retaliation, to the president of Taiwan visiting the United States last week and meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Also last August, after the U.S., then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan China warned that it was a provocation and staged military war games around Taiwan, including firing missiles into the water close to the island. Last October, at the 20th Party Congress, President Xi Jinping of China urged China's military to, quote, focus all of its energy on fighting in preparation for war and affirmed China's right to take, quote, all measures necessary to seize Taiwan. Reunification of the motherland must be achieved, President Xi yelled to applause. It must be achieved. Also, another important development in January of this year, China conducted strike drills, sending 71 aircraft, including fighter jets and drones, into Taiwanese airspace, which is really what he is doing now this past weekend in Taiwan. The US, as I said, has pledged to support Taiwan since 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party, after losing the Chinese Civil War, went to the island. And so it's very interesting that China is flexing its military might now against Taiwan. It shows, among other things, that they don't view the United States as a threat to them. They don't think that the United States is as capable as it once was of following through on that promise that we made to protect Taiwan. And they also, it shows that they, meaning China, don't care about shaking up the international order. They know that they can carry out these military drills and the United States will not care. This is also because China has very adeptly bought off top officials in the United States including our president, Joe Biden. This has led President Biden to deny the threat that China poses to the United States, which only makes China even more motivated to do what it wants, indeed conducting these military drills around Taiwan. Let's listen to what President Biden said just a few weeks ago during his State of the Union address about the threat that China poses to us.

Before I came to office, the story was about how the People's Republic of China was increasing its power and America was failing in the world. Not anymore.

He goes on in the State of the Union, gaslighting the American people.

Today, we're in the strongest position in decades to compete with China or anyone else in the world. Anywhere else in the world. And I'm committed.

So this is a perfect situation for Xi Jinping. He has bought off President Joe Biden. And for those of you who are listening and wondering where my evidence is, well, just look to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal where there have been many correspondences between Hunter Biden and top CCP affiliates. One Chinese energy tycoon actually gave Hunter Biden a 3.5-carat diamond as a gift. Hunter Biden and his associates also talk about China paying them money for, quote, introductions alone that the Biden family would make to Chinese officials. And also in one of those emails, there was a cut that was supposed to go to, quote, the big guy. And guess who the big guy is? President Biden. Hunter Biden's, uh, uh, business partner actually went on record with the Wall Street Journal saying that the big guy in those email exchanges was President Biden. So again, here there's this perfect situation for Xi Jinping where President Biden is in office. They have bought him off. So he says things like that to the American people, gaslighting us into thinking that China is not a threat when indeed China has become a huge threat to us, especially over these past 2 years. China has boosted its military spending by 7%, both in 2022 and this year in 2023. They have the largest military in the world. They have 2.2 million members, $224 billion in spending in, in total. And also the Pentagon announced just a few months ago that China has officially surpassed the United States in their number of intercontinental ballistic missile launchers. Congress also published a report at the end of last year that sometime between 2015 and 2020, The Chinese Navy has surpassed the US Navy in battleships. So again, knowing this information, it seems all the more obvious why China is expressing and demonstrating such hubris and thinking that it can just conduct these drills around Taiwan and that the US will not respond because clearly the US hasn't responded over the past few weeks. What President Biden has done and whoa, these are really big deals to deter the threat posed by China to Taiwan. He has gained some access to Filipino military bases so U.S. planes can be stationed there. And he has sent— ready for this— 100 more troops, American troops, that is, to Taiwan. That's right, just 100. I said that number on my show Timeless, and someone wrote in to me and said, you definitely missed a zero. And I said, no, I didn't. President Biden said— sent 100 more troops to Taiwan to help the military there, which was up from 30 That's right, 30. Not 300, not 3,000, 30 troops. So Xi Jinping really views us as pretty weak and pathetic, which is why he is doing what he is doing now. Also, Xi Jinping has really, he really is an eerily brilliant leader, an evil leader, but eerily brilliant because in addition to buying off the United States, he has bought off countries around the world, literally everywhere in the world, ranging from Colombia to Hungary to Singapore, investing in those countries economically militarily so that those countries cannot react if and when Xi Jinping invades Taiwan. We'll be wrapping this up in the next segment. More on China's military drills in and around Taiwan. I'm Julie Hartman. This is The Dennis Prager Show.

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Monday, April 10th, 2023. Welcome, welcome back, excuse me, to the second hour of The Dennis Prager Show. I am Julie Hartman sitting in for Dennis today. He is in Mexico speaking to a small group of about 2,000 people, which is just amazing. I'm very honored to guest host for him. I am the host of Timeless with Julie Hartman as as a show with Dennis Prager himself called Dennis and Julie. Dennis and Julie comes out on Mondays and Timeless comes out Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You can follow me on Instagram at Julie R. Hartman and email me at julie@julie-hartman.com. There has been a huge attack on Clarence Thomas coming from the left over the past few days that I want to talk to you about now. It is really just despicable. To see what they are doing to this great man. And it lacks any basis when you look at the details. This actually would be laughable if it weren't so morally abhorrent, the way that they are trying to slander this man's name more than they already have tried to do. ProPublica, or ProPublica, not quite sure how to pronounce that because I've never heard of it, but it's apparently a left-leaning website. Last Thursday, published an article in which they alleged that Justice Thomas had egregiously violated ethics rules as a Supreme Court justice. So what did he do? Well, his grievous, uh, crime and error is that he has a rich friend named Harlan Crow, who is a billionaire real estate developer, and Justice Thomas and his wife have apparently spent a lot of time with this friend including on his yacht, private plane, and vacation resort. So again, this left-wing, uh, left— this left-leaning website ProPublica has said that this is a violation of ethics rules because Harlan Crow is, uh, very involved, at least they say, in right-wing politics. They say he, quote, has deep connections in conservative politics, and they are doing a lot of, uh, mental, uh, gymnastics in order to argue that somehow Justice Thomas is being bought off by Mr. Crow in a way that is not proper and for Supreme Court Justice to be associating with a billionaire right-winger. Although the US Judicial Conference has recently changed its rules to require Supreme Court justices to include more disclosure with regard to their personal dealings, at the time that Justice Thomas Thomas was on these private planes or yachts or going on these trips, the court's rules did not require that justices disclose gifts of personal hospitality. Justices are only obliged to disclose such gifts if they pose a conflict of interest involving cases before the Supreme Court, but there is no evidence that Mr. Crow, this man that Justice Thomas is associated himself with, has any relations to any previous, current, or upcoming cases in the Supreme Court. So Justice Thomas did nothing wrong. In fact, in a recent statement, Justice Thomas has said that he actually sought guidance from his colleagues and superiors at the court who said that he was not required to report this kind of hospitality to any officials. And Justice Thomas also said that now that the US Judicial Conference has changed the guidelines, he has said, quote, it is of course my intent to follow this guidance in the future. So again, ProPublica has said that this man has deep connections to conservative politics. And oh my gosh, the article is so funny to read because they also cited another conservative leader that Justice Thomas has associated himself with and has said, of course, that this conservative leader is manipulating Justice Thomas to seek an originalist jurisprudence approach. This man is Leonard Leo. He is the head of the Federalist Society, and he apparently has joined Mr. Crow and Justice Thomas on their vacations. And this ProPublica website has said that Leonard Leo, quote, is an architect of the Supreme Court's recent turn to the right. So it's very clear that this has no basis. It's very clear that it is illegitimate. But of course, Of course, many people in Congress, that is Democratic members of Congress, have taken this and run with it, in fact calling for Justice Thomas to be impeached or to resign. A representative, Ted Lieu, has said, quote, "Is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas corrupt? I don't know, but his secretive actions absolutely have the appearance of corruption." So funny. But they're corrupt. He continues, and he apparently violated the law for the good of our country. He should resign. Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin said that his committee, quote, will act to impose a new enforceable code of conduct for the court. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has echoed, quote, all of this needs robust investigation. And of course, AOC chimed in. She said, quote, I think this is an emergency. I think this is a crisis. Oh my God, a crisis. He went on a yacht with a billionaire. My God, how horrible. She continues, I think we've had a crisis for some time on the Supreme Court. I will support impeachment if no one's going to do it. I would certainly be open to doing so. And of course, the left-leaning mainstream media— that was a redundant way to characterize them— has jumped on this anti-Clarence Thomas bandwagon. Rolling Stone had a headline yesterday that said, Clarence Thomas: Very Cool and Legal for GOP Megadonor to Show Me in Luxury. And then the subheading of this article says, the Supreme Court justice has responded to a bombshell ProPublica report by defending his friendship with billionaire Harlan Crow. So funny that Rolling Stone has called this, quote, a bombshell report, because you may recall that during the Twitter Files scandal, which indeed was a bombshell. Bombshell. It exposed that the FBI was having weekly meetings with top Twitter executives to influence tweets to suppress conservative content. FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million. That was a bombshell. And Rolling Stone called it, quote, a snooze fest. So they're calling this non-bombshell a bombshell and they're calling an actual bombshell a snooze fest. But why are we shocked? We live in this world where men are women, women are men, illegal is legal, abnormal is normal, corruption is decency, decency is corruption. I mean, there is a constant subversion of values in every corner of our society. So why are we so shocked by some of these headlines? I'll read to you two more. Slate magazine has said Clarence Thomas broke the law and it isn't even close. Okay, what law did he violate? Vox has said Clarence Thomas's failure to disclose luxury trips is likely a brazen violation of ethics law. This story raises a moral revelation, if you will, that I've been contemplating for some time now. I actually asked our dear friend Dennis Prager about this on our most recent episode of Dennis and Julie. I said to him, it seems that throughout history, Those who are truth tellers have been the most persecuted. And Dennis Prager said, yes, indeed, that is true. I asked him, is there any righteous person, any leader in the Bible, for instance, that wasn't persecuted? He said no. We just had Easter. We just all celebrated Easter Sunday. I mean, what, what a prevalent example of this, that Jesus Christ, one of the most righteous and peaceful an honorable people to walk the face of the earth, was unjustly crucified. The whole symbol of Christianity imparts this moral truth. The most righteous are always the most persecuted. And that is the same with Clarence Thomas. What a dignified, graceful man whose reputation has been smeared and tarnished relentlessly by the left. We all remember in the early 1990s when he was going through the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, they made the, uh, baseless claim that he had allegedly sexually assaulted or at least engaged in some sexual harassment with Anita Hill while Ms. Hill worked at the EEOC. This was, again, a baseless claim. There was very little evidence that this had occurred, and in fact, many of the witnesses that Ms. Hill brought before the Senate Judiciary Committee actually proved to not be reliable. But still, as our dear Dennis would say, truth is not a left-wing value. Power is a left-wing value. They don't care if it ruins this man's life. They don't care about smearing or tarnishing anyone's reputation, even if it is baseless. If it works for them, then that's what they'll do because they just want to get power. Of course, I'm not referring to every single person who identifies as a liberal, but I'm certainly referring to most people who identify as Democrats today and as leftists. And you know what is really scary about this? They have no shame for the fact that they are just lying and they are grasping at straws here. There's always been corruption. There's always been political persecution in this country. But at least people once upon a time had some shame about it. And what the left is now doing to President Trump, what they are doing to Clarence Thomas, and what they are doing to people like you and me just every day, citizens who are conservative. We saw this with the Twitter Files suppressing conservative content. They have no shame about doing the wrong thing as long as it achieves their ends. We'll be back. I'm Julie Hartman.

The Dennis Prager Show.

Welcome back. We are talking about the left's shameless attack on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and indeed what is What's so scary about this attack is that it is shameless. It is baseless. And nevertheless, members of Congress are using it to say that Clarence Thomas should resign or be impeached. I'd like to clarify something before we go to a call. I said in the last segment, I was talking about Anita Hill, and I, and I believe that I had said that there were allegations that she was sexually assaulted while she was working at the EEOC. I believe I clarified it in the last segment, but I'd like to clarify it again. That the allegations were actually not about sexual assault, but rather about sexual harassment. Anita Hill alleged that Justice Thomas made sexual innuendos to her during the time that they worked together at the EEOC. Before, again, we move on to this call, I actually would like to make a quick note about these words, assault versus harass. I pride myself on using clear language. And really, the fact that I slipped up in the last segment and I called harassment assault is actually very revealing about some of the ways that people my age talk about these issues. I just graduated from college less than a year ago. And this whole— this thing has gotten me thinking about how in college, really, those terms were synonymous. People sort of threw them around like sexual assault and sexual harassment were the same thing. Which sort of I indicated in the last segment, or at least I sort of showed that I guess, uh, I unfortunately let that blurring, um, of the distinction sort of seep into my language. But it is really important to clarify that they are different things. Of course, any kind of sexual wrongdoing is never okay, but still today, people, especially my age and on college campuses, think that innuendos or think that some more benign instances of sexual harassment are assault. So anyway, I just thought that I would say it. It's a very important lesson in being precise with one's language, especially with regard to issues like these. Going on to a phone call about this subject, the left's shameless attack on Justice Clarence Thomas. Let's go to Mike in Detroit. Hi, Mike.

Yeah, yeah, these are like the 3 D's strategy that they use, you know, denigrate, dehumanize, and demonize. Their enemy. I mean, they started this and they never let up with President Trump with the bedwetting Russian collusion thing, which was absolutely ridiculous, cost us $30 billion. But you know, they did this with Kavanaugh and they tried to pack the court. They encouraged their surrogates, the domestic terrorist groups, which is what they are, you know, Black Lives Matter and Antifa, to literally go to Supreme Court judges' homes and try and intimidate them. So they have nothing. If you took all of the constituents out from under the protection of the umbrella of the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the deep state, they would be rejected out of hand for their ideologies and their behaviors and all the rest of it by most of the people in this country. So really, this is what their agenda is, you know, just the Rules for Radicals agenda, I would say.

Yes, he is referencing the Saul Alinsky book from the 1970s, Rules for Radicals. Saul Alinsky was a hero of the last left, continues to be a hero of the left. He, uh, Obama has called him a personal hero. And actually Hillary Clinton wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley College on Saul Alinsky. He has this quote where he says, accuse your enemies of doing what you are doing in order to create chaos and inculcate them against evidence of your own guilt. And that is what we are seeing on display today. The left wags their fingers at people like Clarence Thomas for improper ethics violations, allegedly, when they all the time engage in improper ethics violations. Again, I point to the Twitter Files, what we are seeing with members of our government colluding with big tech companies in order to suppress conservative content. Thank you very much, Mike, for that phone call. I'd also like to say, again, I'm really harping on this idea that the shamelessness of the left's attacks attack on Justice Thomas, and as Mike brought up, on people like President Trump, is really what's scary here. That it is so obviously baseless. It is so obviously such a stupid, made-up, grasping-at-straws charge. And yet we have Congresspeople who are shamelessly using it as a phony basis to want to impeach Clarence Thomas. This shows the contempt that they have, not just for people like Clarence Thomas, not just for people like President Donald Trump, but for the American people. What I think we fail to see sometimes is that lying is a form of contempt. BSing is a form of contempt. Essentially, when people are lying to you or when they're BSing you, they are saying to you, I feel like I can get away with this. I don't respect you enough to tell you the truth. Truth. And I think that you are stupid enough to fall for it. So when people like AOC are going in and attacking Justice Thomas on a phony fraudulent basis, people think that she's just going after the right. No, she's going after the American people. This is what President Trump so eloquently says. He says, they're going after you. I'm just in the way. So this is something that we all sort of need to be able to see because it's right in front of us, the contempt that these individuals have for the American people. People, the ease with which they lie. It is undermining our democratic norms. It is undermining the fabric of this country. But these individuals do not care insofar as it helps them achieve their political goals, in this case, to oust Justice Thomas and pack the court with more liberal justices. Moving on to other news stories, we have to talk about Evan Gershkovich, that American Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained in Russia at the end of March. He is officially been charged with espionage, quote, in the interests of his own country. The Russian state media came out this weekend and reported that indeed he was formally charged. Mr. Gershkovich and the Wall Street Journal have both categorically denied these allegations. Indeed, there has been no evidence that Mr. Gershkovich was in fact committing espionage, but this is the way that Russia plays the game.

Game.

This is what Russia does when they want something. They want to do a prisoner swap or a quid pro quo. They detain an American in order to achieve their ends. This is the first American journalist arrested in Russia on allegations of spying since the Cold War. And what has been a— I mean, there are many unfortunate consequences of, of this detainment, namely that a person's life, Evan Gershkov's is at stake here. But also another unfortunate outcome is that a lot of Western journalists have exited Russia. There has been this exodus out of Russia by people from countries who are historically at odds with Russia. And this is part of Putin's strategy, I'm sure. He wants to intimidate other reporters so that other reporters don't stay in Russia and report on certain things that Putin does not want exposed to the public. In the next segment, I'm going to talk to you about why this detainment of Evan Gershkovich is really consequential for the United States for another reason, and that is it raises questions about fairness. There is another American still in Russia on the same charges of espionage, Paul Whelan, who President Biden has seemed to have forgotten. We'll be back. I'm Julie Hartman. It's the Dennis Prager Show. We are talking about Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been detained and now officially charged with espionage in Russia. He is the first foreign reporter charged with espionage since the Cold War. But there is another American who is currently in prison in Russia for the same charges, though he is not a reporter. This is Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who has been held in Russia since 2018. He was actually in the country going for a friend's wedding when he was detained by officials and charged with espionage. Like Mr. Gershkovich, there is no evidence that Mr. Whelan has in fact committed did what he is being accused of, that is spying on Russia for the benefit of the United States. Our Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, told reporters this past weekend that he had a call with his Russian counterpart where he was talking about Mr. Gershkovich being charged. And Secretary of State Blinken said that he demanded that Russia release both Mr. Gershkovich and Mr. Whelan. But we have seen that the Biden administration does not seem to care very much about Mr. Whalen. And the evidence is what happened with Brittney Griner. Ms. Griner, who is the WNBA basketball player, she was in Russia traveling for basketball back in February of 2022 when just a few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, she was detained by Russian officials at the airport after they found hashish oil in her luggage. Hashish oil is a cannabis product, and in Russia cannabis is strictly forbidden. It is against the law to possess marijuana products. And so she was charged with a crime, she was put in jail, and of course we all hopefully remember what happened in that last December she was swapped. Russia and the United States did a prisoner swap where she was exchanged for Viktor Bout, who has a nickname, the Merchant of Death. Death, he took arms from the Soviet Union and sold them to various resistance movements around the world. And in fact, he is largely responsible for really wreaking havoc in the continent of Africa with a lot of those civil wars because he would sell arms to both sides. So, Miss Greiner was exchanged for Victor Bout, but Whelan was left in the dust. Even though, A, he had been in Russia for longer. Again, he's there since 2018 and Brittany Greiner was only there for 9 months. B, he did not commit the crime that he was accused of. And whether or not you agree with Russian law, it is a fact that Ms. Greiner did in fact commit a crime when she was in Russia. She did violate Russian state law. Again, whether or not you agree with that, when you go to another country, you know that you are signing up for being under their jurisdiction, which is different than the United States. And C, and of course this is less important, A and B are much more important, but C, Mr. Whelan is a veteran. Ms. Griner, before she was detained in Russia, would go on speaking tours where she would talk about how much she despised the United States and thought that it was a systemically racist country. But of course, President Biden thought that it would be politically advantageous to him to trade Griner instead of Whelan because Ms. Greiner is Black, a lesbian, and a celebrity. So she fits, she has a lot of points as far as the intersectionality scale. And President Biden thought that it would be much more of a boost to him and his reputation to say that he got a Black lesbian out of Russia instead of a white man who is a veteran. But again, now if there's a prisoner swap, which looks like it's probably, I mean, this is what usually happens in order to get Americans who have been detained in Russia back. If there's a prisoner swap, there is really no good reason for the Biden administration not to trade Whalen first. He's been there for longer. He is, he is in prison on the same charges as Mr. Gershkovich, and he was passed up for Brittney Griner. So all of those points of evidence indicate that he should be traded first. Of course, we all want Mr. Gershkovich and Mr. Whalen to be traded at the same time, but usually that doesn't happen. Usually it's just a one for one. One thing that the Biden administration seems to have not embraced is something that once made the United States great, and that is our finely tuned sense of fairness. Whenever I think about this finely tuned sense of fairness, I recall the late Senator John McCain from Arizona. He fought in the Vietnam War when in 1967 his plane was shot down over North Vietnam Vietnam, and he served 6 years in Hanoi as a prisoner of war under torture. The North Vietnamese offered him repeatedly the ability to be released, and he refused to be released until all of his other fellow American POWs were released. Indeed, they were freed in March of 1973. But for the rest of his life, McCain walked with a limp. He couldn't raise either arm above his shoulder. Which he could have avoided had he taken that opportunity to be released. But he understood fairness. Welcome back to the third hour of the Dennis Prager Show. I am Julie Hartman, a Billy Joel fan, though I will admit to you, dear audience, that I just asked Sean, is this a Billy Joel song? I don't believe I've ever heard this song. How nice. Well, there's always more to learn in this life. Life, isn't it? Isn't there, I should say. I host the show Timeless with Julie Hartman. I also co-host a podcast with Dennis Prager called Dennis and Julie. Dennis and Julie comes out every Monday, and Timeless comes out Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I really would like to encourage you— I mean, of course, to watch my show Timeless, but because this is a Dennis Prager audience, I'd like to take a moment to really encourage you to check out our show Dennis and Julie if you haven't already. I may be a little biased, but I really think that it's unique. It's really not so much a political show as it is a show that discusses all aspects of life. And those of you who have listened to it know how very true that is. So please do check out the show, Dennis and Julie. I am not saying this as a brag. I am saying this because I am so honored. Dennis Prager has never had a co-host in his 40 years of radio until this show. D&J shows you that it is indeed very unique. New episode later today at 1 PM Pacific, 4 PM Eastern. Sean, thank you for telling that to me in my ear. Moving on to a news story, 500,000 people, including Elon Musk, have signed a letter urging tech companies to pause artificial intelligence and advanced advancement. This is from the Future of Life nonprofit. Their acronym is FLI, and FLI, according to its website, is seeking to mitigate large-scale technology risks. And they issued a letter calling for a pause again in AI advancement, and they were astounded by how many people signed the letter— 50,000 in total, including 1,800 CEOs and 1,500 professors, including, as I said, Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX founder and Twitter CEO, Stuart Russell, professor and AI researcher at UC Berkeley. Fascinating that he's an AI researcher who thinks that AI development should be paused. And also Yoshua Benningo, who is a scientific director at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. The letter says, quote, AI systems with human competitive intelligence Intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity. Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an all-out control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one, not even their creators, can understand, predict, or reliably control. For those of you who are listening and are wondering what AI is, I understand why you're wondering it. I didn't really get it until a few weeks its definition is that it is a branch of computer science that builds smart machines that are capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. So we have seen the most recent example is ChatGPT, which uses machine learning. It scans human responses, pieces of human writing to prompts, and it generates responses that sound human-sounding but are in fact not. I'm sure many of you have used ChatGPT. You can type in a question and it will answer you in just 5 seconds. You can say, write a eulogy to my friend Dan, and it will scan, you know, 500,000 eulogies on the internet and create one just for you. In some ways, people think that technologies like ChatGPT can be good, but if we're entering a world where people don't have to write eulogies for their friends, a machine can just do it for them. Well, is that a world we want to be in? It appears not, even according to these tech tycoons such as Elon Musk. This whole story has really made me reflect. Boy, what a time to be alive in 2023 with regard to this advancement of technologies. Over the past few centuries, we know that technology has really sort of come into a category of its own as far as advancement. Never in the history of our world has technological advancement happened so rapidly and on such a large scale as it is, as it is, or as it has during our lifetime and during the past few centuries. Overwhelmingly, this technology has served to make our lives safer and more efficient. I think that few people would deny that technologies such as airplanes or hearing aids or prosthetic legs or MRI scans have enriched humanity. They certainly have. But really starting in about 1945, I would, I would trace it to with the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb that the United States detonated 2 times in Japan. And certainly over the past decade with the advent of social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and now with stuff like ChatGPT or virtual reality headsets, we've entered this new realm of technology where we have kind of made— of course, there's more technology to be made to make our lives more efficient and to make us healthier, but we have achieved such phenomenal growth and such phenomenal success that we are entering this realm where we're sort of just making technology because we can. And we have to consider, just because we are capable of making something, does that mean that we should do it? Dennis is listening right now. I know that because I was texting with him and I said to him, you're going to love what I'm talking about this segment. I'm going to reference right now a story from the Torah that is the Tower of Babel story. I have to tell you, dear audience, this story alone I think is enough to evince the Bible's divinity. This was written 3,000+ years ago during the time when people had sticks and stones as technology. And yet the story is ever relevant and true today. People think that the main takeaway from the story is that it explains why and how God confounded our language, but there is actually a really important moral revelation that has a lot of relevance to this discussion here of AI and the development of technology. So this story comes from chapter 11, and in in it, this group of people decide to build a tower, the Tower of Babel, to the heavens. And the reason why they want to make this tower, according to the Torah, is, quote, to make a name for themselves. And so God looks at these people who are building a tower to the heavens, and he says in, again, Genesis chapter 11, if as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. So God decides to confound their language, disperse the population, and again, people think that that is the main takeaway of the story. But the moral lesson here is so important. The fact that it is not good news when people want to make a name for themselves, specifically when they want to make technology, build a tower to make a name for oneself. Technological advancement, as with everything in our society, needs to be tethered to morality. This is something that we are losing, and we are seeing the consequences in nearly every corner of American life. You know, you don't send, or at least in principle, you shouldn't send your kids to school just so they, for the sake of making them smart. Smart, just for the sake of the fact that they could regurgitate and retain certain facts. If schools are doing the right thing, which unfortunately we are seeing increasingly they are not, they will guide students' intellect and with moral values. That is what makes schooling truly effective and truly rich. That is indeed what the purpose of schooling should be. And that is no less true with technology. We can't just make technology for the sake of making it. It has to be guided by morality and by values. It needs to exist within certain guardrails. Otherwise, we are going to have Tower of Babels all around us, technologies that just exist for the sake of it and that actually can be harmful to society. And that is what we are seeing right now. Now. I mentioned virtual reality headsets. Of course, there are some ways people argue that VR headsets can really help our society. I was reading an article about how it can help if, if a doctor puts on a VR headset, uh, the VR headset can help guide his or her motions during surgery. Of course, there are ways that these things can be very good for society, but I'll tell you something really eerie. The Chinese Communist Party, according to research done by John Moody, who's the former vice president of Fox News, has said that it wants many members of its population to get virtual reality headsets. Why? So that they can control their population. The CCP doesn't care if their people are free in another reality. They can eat whatever they want, walk wherever they want, do whatever they want, as long as they are in that fake reality and the CCP gets to control them in real life. This is what happens when we pursue technological advancements. Just for the sake of it. As with any story in the Torah, it would behoove us right now to remember Chapter 11 of Genesis, the Tower of Babel story. With all of these technologies and indeed ChatGPT, it seems Elon Musk and the other signees of this letter may have read the Torah too. We'll be back with more news. I'm Julie Hartman.

I've been feeling this way.

Welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show. It is the third hour, second segment. Boy, does it go by fast. I'm Julie Hartman. I would like to encourage you to consider watching the new docuseries called Firearms and Freedoms: Ammunition for Debate for a balanced and nuanced docuseries on Second Amendment rights and gun freedom. Challenge your assumptions by going to firearmsandfreedoms.com. There have been a lot of news stories, as there are every week about transgenderism. This past week was no exception. I'm going to read to you 3 headlines that really encompass what is going on with regard to this transgender issue here in our country. First, Dylan Mulvaney, a trans activist and influencer, has been hired by Nike to wear and advertise female sports bras. Dylan Mulvaney was born a boy boy transitioned to be a girl, and now she is all over Instagram, or he, being paid by Nike to wear women's clothing and to come across as a woman. That's headline number 1. And by the way, this is not the first time that Nike has used a trans influencer with their marketing to women. For instance, in 2021, they launched a Play New campaign, and their objective was to get 400 million teens across the the world to try new sports. And specifically, Nike said that they were targeting young women in countries like India, where young women face more barriers to playing sports than men. So who did they use as the face of this Play New campaign? Well, someone who was not born biologically as a woman, a trans activist named Mara Gomez, who was the first trans woman to play in Argentina National Women's Professional Football League. Oh yes, get young women to play sports by putting someone who is not biologically a woman and who is competing in women's sports nevertheless, which is deteriorating women's sports. Use them as the face of your campaign, Nike. That makes a lot of sense. So that falls into the category of headline number 1. Headline number 2, across the pond, Britain's publicly owned Channel 4 network has debuted a quote, body positive television program in which full-grown adults, including post-operation transgender individuals, strip down naked in front of children to supposedly educate youngsters on different body types. And number 3, just a few days ago, this announcement came out that a California Christian school is no longer going to receive state funding.

Why?

Why? Because they are not going to acquiesce to the state's demands to teach minors about transgenderism and other things that are just not appropriate for young people to be learning. This is the state of our country. These three things have happened in one week, and I recognize that number two, the, the Britain television program is not pertaining specifically to America, but it shows the extent of this transgender movement. By the way, I encourage all of you to go online and look up your state's Department of Education website. You would be astounded as to how many states in this union on their Department of Education websites affirm radical left-wing talking points about race and gender. For instance, the Arizona Department of Education links a chat room where they encourage public school Arizona students as young as 10 years old to talk talk about sex and gender online without their parents knowing. In fact, that chat room that the Arizona Department of Education linked actually has an escape button so that if a parent walks into a room, the child can just escape from the browser that they're on so the parent can't see that they're talking about sex and gender. New Jersey Department of Education has said that they're going to punish certain teachers in school districts that do not abide by their gender and race of course, which includes teaching people as young as 10 years old that sex should be non-binary and that transgenderism is totally normal. This has really just become a movement in our country. And you know, when we see these new woke atrocities, which come about, as I've said, every week, I want you to see what's sort of behind the curtain here because we can just react to each of these on their own and say how ridiculous it is. But I really want to show how this fits into a larger movement, and that is a movement to proselytize, a movement to gain converts. I have heard transgender activists say that what they want to do is just afford tolerance to themselves, or just normalize and eliminate the stigma of transgenderism. That's why they, they talk about wanting to put drag queen story hours in schools. That's why they want— talking about wanting to educate young kids about gender fluidity. They say it's about normalizing, but really, again, it is not. It is about actively recruiting and creating converts. This is in our face all of the time. Nike is plastering a transgender woman on billboards and in our Instagram feeds. Schools are teaching this, you know, nonsense all of the time. All of our TV shows now have gay or transgender characters. This has gone beyond just normalizing this. It is, it is an effort indeed to make people transgender. Think about it. There is no other reason to put a drag queen in front of a 4-year-old or to take young kids and say, huh, you're a little girl who's a tomboy. Boy, or maybe you're not a tomboy, maybe you're a boy. Maybe if you like playing sports and you like trucks and you don't like playing with dolls, maybe it's not that this is just a part of your female character, but maybe it's that you're actually a man. That is taking people and proselytizing them. And it's just so interesting because the same people who proselytize with regard to this transgender issue are the ones that vociferously condemn religious people, Christians specifically, who do proselytize, who do view it as their religious obligation to bring the faith to others. There was a recent MSNBC article about the anti-gay laws that have happened in Uganda. An egregious anti-homosexuality act has been passed, which includes prison sentences and indeed, actually, the death penalty in some cases. And this MSNBC article wrote quote that Christian evangelicals are to blame for this homophobia in Uganda. They argue that Christians brought their religion to Uganda, their awful homophobic religion, and MSNBC disparaged them for proselytizing, essentially. Constantly, the left disparages conservatives for proselytizing or preaching family values. But again, this is no different from this trans issue here. It is trying to recruit converts. And the thing that we should all try to adopt, at least in my view, is that tolerance is very different from outright endorsement and support. Part of living in a pluralistic democratic society is that we need to afford others with whom we disagree tolerance. Tolerance. Everyone, within the bounds of the law, of course, deserves tolerance. But that is very different, as I said, from outright enthusiastic support and endorsement. And now what we see is that the transgender activists are saying that tolerance is not enough. You have to actively espouse and endorse their views, and that counts as tolerance. But we have lost that distinction. Emotion, which is contributing to so much of this proselytizing that we see today. The next segment, I'm going to be talking about another instance of this with regard to the Riley Gaines incident where she was at a Save Women's Sports event and she was assaulted by a transgender individual. We'll be back. I'm Julie Hartman.

The Dennis Prager Show.

Julie Hartman here. It is The Dennis Prager Show. We are talking about transgenderism, this movement that has infected every area of our society. And I was reading some headlines pertaining to this issue. Another headline happened last week with Riley Gaines. Riley Gaines is an American hero. For those of you who don't know her name, you should know her name. She is an NCAA swimmer from the University of Kentucky and a 12-time All-American champion. She competed against UPenn's Leah Thomas, who is a transgender individual born a man and now competes in women's sports in the NCAA, and they allow it because they are woke. So Miss Gaines was speaking last week at a Save Women's Sports event that was hosted by Turning Point USA at San Francisco State University. She really made a benign speech, just saying how women's sports should be left to women, when she, after her speech, was assaulted, physically assaulted by transgender activists, including one man who was wearing a dress. She is now threatening legal action against the school for allowing this to go on. And what is so astounding about all of this is not only that it was allowed to take place, but how the school responded after the violence occurred. I'm reading an email that Jamila Moore, the vice president for student affairs and enrollment Management at San Francisco State University, wrote to the student body. She wrote, today San Francisco State finds itself at the center of a national discussion regarding freedom of speech and expression. Let me begin by stating clearly, the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University. Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care, and compassion, and we value different ideas even when they are are not our own. San Francisco State is regularly noted as one of the most diverse campuses in the United States. But then she goes on to say, but we may also find ourselves exposed to divergent views and even views we find personally abhorrent. These encounters have sometimes led to discord, anger, confrontation, and fear. Thank you to our students who participated peacefully peacefully in Thursday evening's event. Okay, she doesn't say anything about the violence. It took tremendous bravery to stand in such a challenging space. I am proud of these moments. I am proud of the moments when you demonstrate the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. Again, no mention of the violence. And she ends the email by encouraging the Gator community to reach out to people who can help them. She lists the Equity and Community Inclusion Office, Counseling and Psychological Services Office, and the Dean of Student Affairs. This email shows you the extent to which college and university deans are enslaved to the student body. I saw this throughout my time in college. Anyone, even if you're not a student in college, can see it. It is the definition of the inmates running the asylum. There was an incident at my college just a few months ago. They wanted to have a Halloween— or excuse me, a Harry Potter-themed Halloween party. And because J.K. Rowling is apparently a transphobe, a bunch of students said to the Harvard deans that they did not want this Harry Potter-themed Halloween party to take place. So the deans, being the cowards that they are, acquiesced to these offended students and canceled the Halloween party. This email here, not recognizing this violence, is yet another particularly egregious example Some of you in the audience may find what I'm about to say to be a bit dramatic, and if you do, feel free to call in at 1-800-PRAGER-776. But when I see emails like this, I cannot help but think about people in Germany and in the Soviet Union in the 20th century. I wonder how many people in our present time would stand up to the evils of Nazism and communism. This is one of the easiest times and places on earth to stand up to evil. And the evil itself is so clearly wrong. Again, you don't, you don't, I mean, in every sense, it is so easy to stand up. Are you telling me that it is hard to condemn violence? I mean, the fact that this dean couldn't even mutter the words, couldn't even include in her email a condemnation of this trans student, students indeed, assaulting Riley Gaines. It is just despicable. And as much as this country obsesses about past evil, the question that I would like to ask these individuals is, if you cannot stand up to something as so easy to stand up to as saying that assaulting someone is wrong, in a country where it is so easy to stand up, where you are not going to be thrown in prison or killed on the spot for speaking out against the government. Would you really stand up to slavery or to Nazism or to communism or to the patriarchy or all these things that you say you would stand up for? If you are so morally weak that you cannot stand up in society today where it is so easy to stand up, you would not have been able to do it when it really mattered. We'll be back. The Dennis Prager Show. You can call in at 1-800-PRAGER-776. That's 1-800-PRAGER-776. I'm the host of Timeless with Julie Hartman and the co-host of the Dennis and Julie podcast with our dear friend Dennis Prager, who is in Mexico right now. You can follow me at Julie R. Hartman on Instagram and Twitter and email me at julie@julie-hartman.com. There is a fascinating manhunt going on right now in India that has captured the world's attention. Punjab security forces are hunting for a Sikh separatist amid insurgency fears. This Sikh separatist is named Amritpal Singh. He is 30 years old and he is the leader of a group called Heirs of Punjab. He opposes Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government in India, and he is calling for a separate Sikh state in this part of India known as Punjab, which is India's only Sikh-majority state. A few weeks ago, Mr. Singh stormed a police station in Punjab with firearms, and he demanded the release of one of his aides that has been in prison in India. 6 police officers were killed during this storming, which has impelled Modi's government to embark on this massive manhunt front in order to capture Mr. Singh. They have successfully captured many of Singh's closest aides and allies, but they have yet to find him as of today. There is a history between the Sikhs and the Hindus in India that I want to tell you about, A, because it is just simply quite interesting, and B, because I, I think one of the problems in this country, the reason why wokeism has infiltrated nearly every realm of our country is that we don't know how lucky we are to be Americans. We don't know what goes on in other countries, the level of ethnic and religious conflict, the level of injustice and violence. And I think it would behoove all of us to talk more about international relations. You know, they say that comparison is the enemy of joy. That is certainly true with interpersonal relations. But if you are an American American. With regard to international relations, the opposite is true. Comparison is a facilitator of joy if you are an American, because you look around the world and again you realize how lucky you are to live in the country that you live in. So the Sikhs and the Hindus in India, and, and the Muslims for that matter, have had a pretty, um, contentious history. And this goes back to 1980 when thousands of Sikhs were after the Prime Minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, ordered her army in 1984 to storm the Golden Temple, which is one of the holiest sites for Sikhs. This was after there were various insurgencies by Sikh separatists that had been raging for years that were seeking to make Punjab its own separatist state and even infiltrate the Indian government writ large. So Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered ordered the army storming of that Golden Temple, which is one of the most contentious stormings in all of the most recent history of India. And just a few weeks after that raid that the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, and her death was then followed by widespread violence against Sikhs in New Delhi. So there's really just been this cycle of violence between Sikhs fighting Hindus and Muslims and vice versa. And now today, there is a new emboldened Sikh separatist movement in London. Sikh separatists climbed onto the balcony of the Indian High Commission this past week in a show of anger over the crackdown in Punjab. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is quick to arrest anyone who is being seen as sympathetic to the Sikhs. Now, Mr. Singh, this leader of the Sikh separatist movement who is the subject of this manhunt, he has encouraged his followers to associate him with a man named Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. This was one of the former leaders of the Sikh separatist movement, and actually Mr. Singh, again, the guy that Modi's people are looking for, went to the country of Georgia to get cosmetic surgery in order to look like this former Sikh leader. Leader. So it just shows you the extent of this, as I said again, emboldened movement. Now, back to my point about America and international relations. Leftists see the world quite literally in black and white in the sense that they view blacks as only being victims of whites. That is, whites have never been persecuted in their eyes throughout history. But they also see the world in black and white in the sense of that they don't see nuance. I think very few leftists in the United States, again, know the extent to which there is ethnic and religious conflict in places around the world. We're talking about India here. Another really awful part of the most recent history of India was the civil war between Pakistanis and Bengalis in 1971 that led to East Pakistan to be called Bangladesh and West Pakistan to be known as Pakistan. Pakistanis and Bengalis, despite both being Muslim, despise each other because of this ethnic conflict that they have. We're seeing with the story that I just reported that there is strife between Sikhs and Hindus. There is enormous strife in India between Hindus and Muslims, where Muslims that live in the north often send insurgents and have indeed instigated terrorist attacks in India against Hindus. Also, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sent forces to quell Muslims in retaliation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also makes it very hard for people to convert to Islam because he wants to create a Hindu-majority state. The point is, we see this all over the world, and Americans don't understand how lucky we are. We think race relations are bad in the the United States, the only reason why they're bad is because the left is coming up with invisible instances of racism. Of course, I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist. It has always existed and will always exist. But when people are pointing to microaggressions as evidence of widespread racism, you know you live in a pretty darn good country. And all around the world, if you look at the tribal strife between people like the Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, if you look at a country like Uganda where whether it's Black people oppressing fellow Black people with their new anti-homosexuality law, the sectarian strife in the Middle East between Sunnis and Shias, the list goes on. But I just want to impart to you that the more that we all learn about the world, the more that we should be grateful to be American. And as much as I lament the state that we're in, I want to look for solutions. And I really think one of the solutions is to educate people about the world. The world. Again, comparison is the enemy of joy, but not so if you are an American. We'll be back for the final segment of The Dennis Prager Show today. I'm Julie Hartman.

The Dennis Prager Show.

We don't have much time, but I really want to take this call from Amy in Pennsylvania. Hi, Amy.

Hi, how are you?

I'm well, thanks.

You there?

Yes, I'm here. Go ahead. We don't have that much time. I'm sorry to rush you, but—

Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, I'm a conservative all my life. I voted for Trump twice. I have a master's degree. I'm a nurse. I'm 65 years old and I'm transgender. I transitioned about a little over a year ago and I'm 65 5 years old. And I want to say that the majority of transgender people, okay, don't agree with this, with the violence, or, um, you know, people, you know, like trans women, uh, going, you know, competing against women. Um, you know, we believe that the age— you know, a lot of us believe that the age for, you know, children is 18, but also it should be a family thing. Like, you know, being transgender all my life, I know what it feels like and what it felt like. And also in Harrisburg, there was, at the end of March, there was a conference called the Keystone Conference. It's been going on 3 years, and there was over 760 attendees. And they— we fanned out all throughout Harrisburg, and, you know, we used the their bathrooms. We, you know, we ate in their bar, you know. Forgive me, and nothing happened.

Forgive me, Amy, I'm going to have to stop you here. I really wish I could talk to you for longer. Please email me at julie@julie-hartman.com. I really want to talk to you. You seem like a very rational, fair individual, and I thank you so much for your call. And thanks to all of you audience members for listening today, and of course to my team at Salem. I'll see you soon. You can follow me at Julie R. Hartman. Take care.

Dennis Prager here. Thanks for listening to the Daily Dennis Prager Podcast. To hear the entire 3 hours of my radio show commercial-free every single day, become a member of Prager Utopia. You'll also get access to 15 years' worth of archives, as well as the Daily Show prep. Subscribe at pragertopia.com.