by John Gaudio, Posted 1:45 PM, found by Google around 11:00 AM, October 13th. (just under 48 hours) Updated 11/09/2008. David Sirota and Dennis Prager went head to head in a debate attended by fourteen hundred people. The full, two hour debate is available on DVD. To purchase a copy, please visit The Dennis Prager Store, or call them at 800-225-8584. The first of six topics was Racial Issues / Racial Policies. Highlights include: Dennis Prager saying: "...I believe the conservative, and I thought the liberal, what used to be the liberal approach was that race doesn't mean a thing, that the color of your skin is as irrelevant as the size of your shoe. That is what I was raised as a liberal to believe. Incidentally I still think I'm a liberal. I think liberals have become leftists.  The left took over liberalism after the Vietnam war, and race is one of the examples. Race blind was the liberal ideal. Since the sixties race respect is the liberal ideal. Race consciousness is the liberal ideal. It's a very different view of racial issues.
I also think that the United States is the least racist country in the world, that it is the most open society. That is why more Africans have moved here since slavery, voluntarily, than were ever sent here as slaves... Liberals would have to explain why so many black Africans would want to move to a country they so readily declare racist. Multiculturalism undoes the motto of America, E Pluribus Unum, From Many, One, and it inverts it upside-down, and it says, From One, Many... I am the grandchild of immigrants. My parents were raised in public schools. They were taught to be Americans, not the children of Poles and Russians.... Economic Inequality. One of the major liberal conservative differences is what you fight. Conservatives fight evil. Liberals fight inequality. That's the evil for liberals. I am not troubled by inequality. I am troubled by abject poverty. I am troubled by disease. I am troubled by injustice. I am not troubled by inequality. Only the jealous are troubled by inequality. I do not care that Bill Gates has ten thousand times more income than I do. If he produces a computer that allowed me to write books that I never would have written before the word processor, I bless the man and wish him a seventh airplane. These are differences that we have. Thank you."
 David Sirota saying:
".... Progressives believe that race in America does exist. We don't pretend it does. I think it's presumptuous, especially of people in the majority race, to pretend that race doesn't exist. It's easy to say that race doesn't exist if you are a product of race privilege, and in this country we know that there is race privilege. Progressives don't think that we should have a society that necessarily preferences one race over another. But to not acknowledge the existence of race, is silly, and I'm jut going to give you some facts here because we need to have some facts in these debates. White households, right now, have incomes that are two thirds higher than those of African Americans and forty percent higher than those of Hispanics according to the Census Bureau. White adults were also more likely than black and Hispanic adults to have college degrees and to own their own homes. They were less likely to live in poverty. According to the American Journal of Public Health nine hundred thousand African Americans died in the last ten years because they did not have the same access to health care as non African Americans. So we acknowledge that race exists in this country, that it actually exists as a social force whether we like it or not. Economic inequality. Progressives believe that right now, especially right now in this country, the wealthiest country on earth, the problem is that there is to much inequality, that the mantra of rising tides lifts all boats has been a lie. We have rigged our economy to the point where a rising tide lifts the yachts and leaves the rest of us, most of us, in leaky rowboats." "... So what I'm trying to say here is that we can demonize each other and say that liberals only want to think about race. Liberals only want to address issues like economic inequality, or we can actually look at the reality that liberals, progressives, are the ones who actually acknowledge reality as it exists. If you deny that there is not race in this country. If you deny that there is not inequality in this country and that inequality does not matter, you are not dealing with reality in this country. If you claim that the liberal agenda is to preference one race over another, if you claim that the liberal agenda is to prioritize changing inequality over making sure everybody does well in this country, you're not paying attention to the news. You open the newspaper today and you see a government that has been in the throes of conservatism, deregulatory conservatism, as championed, frankly, by both parties, and you will see that we have had the largest expansion of economic inequality in our nation's history, at least since the gilded age. At the same time, wages, job security, pensions and health care benefits are being driven down. In other words inequality, liberals acknowledge, is directly related to people's ability to do well and have a standard of living that we consider acceptable in this country."
Please follow the links below to find their introductory statements, and look in the future for more excerpts from this outstanding debate. Your comments would also be greatly appreciated. | 
