Dennis Prager is a wealthy conservative author, speaker, and broadcaster, who also runs a website, Prager University, featuring short “instructional” videos. For some reason I don’t understand, he manages to lure some big names to do those videos, including George Will and (as I recall) Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I suspect the $ are a lure. The videos are conservative, pro-captialism, pro-religion (so long as it’s not Islam), and pro-free-market. I avoid the site.

Last Tuesday, Prager jumped the shark, publishing on his website a screed called “How is the Godless West Working Out?” As you might guess, he thinks it isn’t; in fact, he thinks that godlessness will doom us to perdition. Prager’s screed sounds for all the world like the ravings of Pat Robertson. If you were attracted to Prager University before, have a look at these excerpts:

The West has been in moral decline since World War I, the calamity that led to World War II and the death of national identity and Christianity in most of Europe. There has always been one exception: the United States. But now that is ending. The seeds of America’s decline have been sown since the beginning of the 20th century, and they came to fruition with the post-World War II generation, the baby boomers. Radical and aggressive secularism and atheism have replaced religion in virtually every school and throughout American public life. . . . The prices that we Americans and Europeans are paying for creating the first godless societies in recorded history amount to civilizational suicide. Boys and girls are not to be referred to as boys and girls; Western elites dismiss national identity as protofascism; the belief that moral truth exists has been destroyed and replaced by feelings and opinions; fewer people are marrying; and more people live alone than at any time in American history.

Seriously? Civilizational suicide? I’d suggest Prager, a practicing Jew, read Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, which makes a pretty strong case that hand-in-hand with the rise of secularism—and probably partly because of secularism—Western society is getting better.

And the man is obsessed with sexuality:

Western European countries have become empty, soulless places. They are pretty and appear materially secure (for now), but they stand for almost nothing (except “multiculturalism” and “tolerance”). They have replaced a Jewish population that overwhelmingly wanted to assimilate with a Muslim population that does not want to. And nearly all European countries are headed to Greece-like insolvency as fewer and fewer workers pay enough in taxes to support those who collect welfare, and as tensions with their Muslim inhabitants increase. But the good news is that now, beginning with Italy and New York, citizens can watch each other masturbate or urinate in public. There is no way to prove that God exists. But what is provable is what happens when societies stop believing in God: They commit suicide.