Study Them

 

Breitbart News reporter Alana Mastrangelo and Matt Perdie report today on an interview (12/29/2023) with Dennis Prager was in recently in which Prager is quoted as observing that corporate media are afraid that one PragerU video will undo all the Leftism of years of public school.

 

I will quote from most of the Breitbart article—in full paragraphs when selected--as written and then comment on it:

“PragerU founder Dennis Prager told Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow that the corporate media fear that “one five-minute PragerU video will undo all the leftism” taught in years of public school.

“Since Tennessee, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, Florida, and Texas have considered allowing teachers to use PragerU videos, every major media outlet in the United States — NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post — have just attacked us,” Prager told Marlow at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

“Our videos are five minutes. They fear that one five-minute Prager U video will undo all the leftism of eight years of elementary school and four years of high school,” Prager added.

The PragerU founder went on to say that the corporate media also fear that if conservative speakers “show up for 90 minutes on a college campus, we will undo four years of their left-wing indoctrination.”

“They’re right,” he added. “It’s a legitimate fear. It is like the fear of a ship: one hole can sink a battleship.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Marlow noted that one of the criticisms leveled against PragerU “is that you only provide one perspective in the videos,” which Marlow said he did not accept as a premise, given that the corporate media and institutions of higher learning also only offer one perspective.

“It’s so ironic coming from NBC News, which, of course, offers only one perspective,” Marlow said, adding that “the American university system” also offers one perspective, pointing to an economics course he took while in college.”

 

My response: Prager does only offer the conservative perspective, but he does not pretend to be objective; he presents his views and does not pretend to be ‘balanced and objective and content neutral’. Leftists do only offer their slanted, true-believer version of truth, most lies and half-truths, but they have only their subjective perspective, while posturing about how impartial and non-partisan they are.

 

Still, as a moderate on arriving at truth, discovering it, living by it, we need to study deeply oppositional perspectives, lay them out not as red herrings or straw men, but as they are presented by their practitioners and advocates. Then we need to offer the reader or audience a middle position and then our position. Only then may we argue for our position so that the public gets a rounded, impartial view of what we have laid out, and then we can offer our reasons for why our perspective is right—that would be honest journalism and philosophizing.

Breitbart: “The whole course was a simple Keynesian model,” Marlow said. “There was no Adam Smith, there was no Thomas Sowell, there was no Milton Friedman. It was just Keynesian economics, that’s it, taken as gospel. It was just one perspective.”

Prager reacted by saying, “I don’t know if one percent of American liberals heard of Thomas Sowell.”

“The man is one of the giants of 20-21st century thought, and they don’t even know who he is,” he added. “We know all their ‘giants,’ but they don’t know one of ours. And the fact that he’s black makes him even more undesirable to be known.”

Marlow responded by telling Prager, “On your recommendation, I consistently still read the New York Times, and this is one of the things that I know you do to keep sharp. We do this on the right.”

“We know what they know. They don’t know what we know,” Prager affirmed. “We read what they read. They don’t read what we read.” . . . “

My response: The Right in America studies the Left and knows their giants, their positions, and their rationales, but most of the Leftists are intellectually lazy ideologues and Marxist true believers. They do not know and have not studied our positions and leaders, because they think it is all inferior, racist, unjust lies and gibberish, and they do not want the young or the public exposed to an alternative point of view at all. If they deny that dissenting views exist, and eliminate all public and free thought, freedom of speech, and public, open debate, then they have a monopoly on shaping opinion for the masses.

As a criticism to conservatives, I would warn them that we study the Left while they do not study us, less out of a pure love of objective truth and being passionate about all points of view on any and all subjects, than because cultural conservatism is in danger of being defeated by total victory and domination everywhere in America as cultural/postmodern neo-Marxism is the new replacement culture, a mass movement laying siege to America.

 

We have to study them because we are being defeated. We likely will defeat them, but once we have intellectual and cultural supremacy and hegemony, we must teach, as moderate ethicists and moderate lovers of truth, our young to be anarchist-individuator supercitizens who need full access to every point of view, before making up their minds. We must trust in their eventual, united consensus of good judgment and common sense concluding that the American Way, with Mavellonialist touches added, warts and all, is still about the best cultural system that humans can devise, so we will not lose the next generation, by instructing them to be intellectually and study all points of view before deciding where to land on the issues. This fearless, strong mental approach will make these self-realizers so intellectually smart and wise, that they usually will adopt our program conservative moderation. Letting them free to have access to all information, and then empower them to make up their own minds of their own free will—this does more than anything (We adults give up the control of access to information to the next generation, and our voluntary loss of information monopoly will allow free thinkers to choose to side with us of their own free will, and that love of our Western, American tradition is the most virtuous and effective means of saving our way of life.)  to protect our way of life; it is better than suppressing Marxist, atheist, postmodernist and progressive criticism of our American way.