Author: Dennis Prager

Understanding why Mitt Romney so decisively won the first presidential debate is as important as the fact that he did. Why? Because once we know the reasons, almost everything about President Barack Obama and this election becomes clear. First, Obama lost because he, like virtually the entire left, lives in a left-wing bubble. Left-wing academics […]

For at least the last hundred years, the world’s most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam. It is leftism. Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all […]

Given the awful state of the American economy, featuring a four-year high unemployment rate and an increasingly crushing national debt … Given that America is at least as hated in the Muslim world as it was when George W. Bush was president — despite the Obama policy of obsequious rhetoric directed toward that world … […]

Have you noticed that the left regularly condemns alleged conservative “hate speech” but is almost completely silent on the most pervasive hate speech in the world? Take New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example. On Jan 8, 2011, in Tucson, Ariz., Jared Loughner murdered six people and gravely wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. That very […]

The most important event at either national convention was the “vote” taken by the Democratic delegates on a last-minute resolution to reinsert the words “God” and “Jerusalem” into the Democratic Party platform. Regarding God, since Karl Marx, the aim of the left, everywhere on Earth, has been a godless society. And the Democratic Party has […]

My fellow Americans, my fellow Republicans: The 2012 election is not an election between two men but between two entirely different visions of America. President Obama and I are simply the standard bearers of opposing, and may I add, irreconcilable visions of what America is and should be. The Republican Party and I represent American […]

Rep. Todd Akin has, unwittingly to be sure, harmed the pro-life movement, his senatorial race in Missouri, the Republican Party, and therefore quite possibly the nation. Every person who speaks or writes for the public will make an occasional faux pas, and sooner or later, will write or say something inappropriate. The game of “gotcha” […]

The Republican vice-presidential candidate, Congressman Paul Ryan, is the Democrats’ political version of the Anti-Christ. He believes in self-reliance; the left believes in reliance on the state. His moral values are shaped by religion (Catholicism); the left is frightened by religious Christian politicians (and athletes, and members of the armed forces, and talk show hosts, […]

The Democratic mayors of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. gave Mitt Romney and the Republican Party the greatest gift possible. They provided the American people with as clear an example of the unbridgeable differences between left and right, between Democrat and Republican, as could be hoped for. And it was largely wasted. The […]

One of the NCAA’s punishments of Penn State was the vacating of all its football team’s wins from 1998 through 2011. It was in 1998 that Penn State coach Joe Paterno and university officials became aware of the accusation that assistant coach Jerry Sandusky had showered with a young boy. As a result, Penn State’s […]

James Holmes is a human earthquake. We are as ill-equipped to predict the eruptions of such human beings as we are to predict the eruptions of the earth. But that doesn’t mean that nothing meaningful came out of the Aurora tragedy. Something quite important did, though few Americans are aware of it because it has […]

According to conventional wisdom, the older the person, the less young people are inclined to listen to him or her. This is probably true for some of you. But I do not believe that it is true for most of you. Most young people have tremendous respect for older people’s views. I saw this firsthand […]

They found the “God-Particle.” That was the headline in many of America’s news media. It turns out that the name actually derives from substituting “God-particle” for “goddamn particle,” the original name some scientists had given the elusive particle. But the media adopted the former nomenclature. Why? Because otherwise, the bulk of humanity would not pay […]

Given how many more Americans define themselves as conservative rather than as liberal, let alone than as left, how does one explain the success of left-wing policies? One answer is the appeal of entitlements and a desire to be taken care of. It takes a strong-willed citizen to vote against receiving free benefits. But an […]

Commentators on both the right and left and both secular and religious note with disdain that Mormons (Latter Day Saints, as Mormons refer to themselves) have irrational practices and beliefs. The former, we are told, includes the wearing of sacred undergarments and the latter includes posthumous baptisms and the claims by the prophet of Mormonism […]

The quotation of the week last week had to be that of Harvard professor Daniel E. Lieberman in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology, was among those who publicly defended New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to ban the sale of sugared soft drinks in […]

CHURCHVILLE, VA–The earth has failed to warm at all for 15 years now, and American farmers are afraid of losing the “renewable fuel” mandate for corn ethanol– which has given them record crop prices and incomes since 2007. So, they’re proposing a new entitlement designed to ensure that they’ll never lose money again. Their proposed […]

On his army blog of January 19, the commanding general of Fort Bliss (Texas), Major General Dana Pittard, wrote regarding members of the military who commit suicide: “I have now come to the conclusion that suicide is an absolutely selfish act. I am personally fed up with soldiers who are choosing to take their own […]

You cannot understand the left if you do not understand that Leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some Left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in Leftism have as many dogmas as the most […]

On Saturday, Mitt Romney delivered a speech to the 6,000 Liberty College graduates. It was an important speech, not only because it seems to have closed the gap between Romney and evangelical Christians but also because it spelled out major themes in Mitt Romney’s understanding of America. Romney: “You know who you are. And you […]

In addition to labeling conservatives and Republicans “anti-woman” (for opposing government-mandated free contraception), “anti-black” and “anti-Hispanic” (for advocating photo identification for voting), and “anti-science” (for skepticism regarding the belief that man-made carbon emissions will destroy much of the planet), Democrats now regularly label Republicans “anti-gay” (for opposing same-sex marriage). All these charges are demagogic. But […]

Election Day 2012 will not be a presidential election. It will be a plebiscite. Americans will not only be voting for a president (and a House and a third of the Senate). They will be participating in a plebiscite on the definition of America. If Americans re-elect the Democrat, Barack Obama, they will have announced […]

Does it break some unwritten rule for a columnist to bring his readers’ attention to his own book? If so, I ask your indulgence. But, after nearly a thousand columns and twelve years since my last book, I hope readers will forgive me for noting that today, April 24, 2012, HarperCollins is publishing the culmination […]

As all baseball fans and many other Americans know, the manager of the Miami Marlins, Ozzie Guillen, told Time magazine that he loves Fidel Castro. The news focus has been on Guillen’s remarks — for which he has profusely apologized — and whether the Marlins were right to suspend him for five games. More important, […]

In light of the tragic killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin — and the manufactured hysteria surrounding it — one thing needs to be stated as clearly and as often as possible: The United States is the least racist and least xenophobic country in the world. Foreigners of every race, ethnicity, and religion know this. […]

Apparently, many liberals were disappointed in the administration’s performance before the Supreme Court. They felt that the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, did not respond effectively to the challenges of some of the conservative justices. The editor of Commentary, John Podhoretz, offered an explanation on his magazine’s blog. “American liberals,” he wrote, “know their […]

In his front-page-of-the-business-section “Economic Scene” column in The New York Times last week, Eduardo Porter wrote, “The United States does less than other rich countries to transfer income from the affluent to the less fortunate.” Think about that sentence for a moment. It ends oddly. Logic dictates that it should have said, “transfer income from […]

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, has gone to the United Nations — specifically the U.N. Human Rights Council — for, in the words of USA Today, “help battling what the organization views as forces attempting to push back voting rights.” Those “forces” are laws being passed by various states […]

After 25 years of lecturing on happiness, writing a book on the subject (“Happiness Is a Serious Problem”) and devoting an hour of my radio show every week for the last 13 years to happiness, here are some conclusions about who is happy. People who control themselves. Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the […]

Here in Sydney, Australia, where I’ve been lecturing for a week, I may have had one Australian-born waitress or waiter and one Australian-born taxi driver. As is my wont, I ask all of them where they were born and, whenever possible, have some discussion about their native country. I say “whenever possible” because, unlike in […]