Opinion of Dennis Prager

[136or142]

I saw an interview with him about 25 years ago on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder.  Snyder either took Prager seriously at the time or they were personal friends. I remember one minor thing from it and the overall general impression:

1.Prager was genuinely defending the idea that white collar crime did not deserve as serious punishment as a hold up, because a hold up left mental scars for the victim whereas white collar crime (like embezzlement) did not.  Whether there is any truth to that or not, it was obviously nothing more than an attempt to claim that those in privileged positions where they are able to commit white collar crime should not face the same level of punishment that the street punk should.

2.The overall impression was that Prager was a man with an immense ego who seemed to have some serious psychological problem.  I was in my early 20s at the time and I was familiar with many of the concepts that he was referring to but he kept using his own terms to describe them and claimed that he came up with the concept.

For instance, since I mentioned criminal justice issues already, this is just an example. I took a criminology course in the early 1990s and one of the more popular concepts at the time to profile criminal behavior was the concept of 'labeling.'  'Labeling' is the idea that if you call a young boy (and virtually all crime in the 1990s was committed by men, at least violent crime) a 'punk' throughout childhood that they will come to see themselves as a 'punk' and will be more likely to engage in criminal behavior as they get older.

Again, this is just as an example.  Prager would say "I've noticed that young boys who are called punks and the like throughout their childhood are more likely to become criminals and I call this concept of mine 'X.'"  And I watched this interview and thought to myself "huh? it already is a concept but it's known as 'labeling.'  In the half hour interview with Tom Snyder I believe he claimed about five times that, for already existing concepts, he claimed that he had discovered the concept and gave it a different term.  I have no idea what he was up to, but there was (and probably still is) something clearly mentally wrong with him.