Politics & Power Quote by Dennis Prager

Prager is swinging a blunt instrument at a modern liberal ethos he thinks has replaced desert with entitlement. The repetition of "earn" works like a drumbeat: respect, income, responsibility, the vote, even punishment. By stacking moral goods (respect), economic goods (income), civic goods (the vote), and moral/accountability goods (punishment) into one list, he collapses wildly different debates into a single story about merit. That rhetorical compression is the point. It turns complicated questions about rights, dignity, and social obligation into a personality test: do you believe people should have to prove themselves first, or do you think some things are owed?

The subtext is a familiar conservative critique of liberalism as psychologically and politically averse to judgment. "Anathema" is doing heavy lifting: it frames liberal disagreement not as a policy dispute but as a near-religious taboo, a moral allergy to the very concept of earning. That choice of word nudges the listener toward indignation rather than deliberation. If liberals cannot tolerate "earning", then they are not merely wrong; they are unfit custodians of a society built on work, hierarchy, and consequences.

Context matters because Prager is a media polemicist speaking into America’s long argument over welfare, affirmative action, criminal justice reform, and voting rights. The line about "the vote" is especially revealing: it flirts with the idea that civic participation should be conditional, a provocative reversal of the post-civil-rights consensus that voting is a foundational right rather than a prize. The quote functions less as diagnosis than as mobilization: it offers listeners a clean moral frame and a villainous opposite, packaged in a single, memorable cadence.