Dennis Prager is a conservative Jewish talk show host with a You Tube channel featuring guest contributors who deliver short, informative videos that educate their viewers about conservative ideology. Not long ago, a liberal vlogger named Shaun recorded a half-hour attack screed (mostly criticizing a five-minute long video) titled “How PragerU lies to you.”
Shaun focused most of his criticisms on a video of conservative author Andrew Klavan talking about feminism, but seemed most upset by the fact Prager videos defend capitalism and “white Christian men” from the typical criticisms coming from socialists and secular liberals. Of course, it isn’t terribly difficult to defend capitalism against a fatally flawed economic theory like socialism, which isn’t just wrong or bad, it’s absolutely evil. Any argument advocating socialism can be destroyed with a single word: Venezuela. Socialist governments don’t just kill people; they frequently commit mass murder.
While his people are literally starving in Venezuela, former cab driver Nicolas Maduro gorges on outrageously expensive steaks and enjoys fine cigars, living like a king.
Or a dictator.
The only happy people under a socialist government are the people in power, and they never redistribute the wealth of the people fairly or equitably.
But let’s stick with the subject of feminism for the moment, since that’s what Shaun spent the majority of his lengthy diatribe yammering about.
The short video about the misandry of radical feminism featuring Andrew Klavan, shown below, inspired the majority of Shaun’s criticism.
Apparently Shaun wasn’t expecting his viewers to check his “facts” because he probably wouldn’t have recorded his video if he had. The problem with calling Andrew Klavan a liar because of his characterization of modern feminism is that Klavan had first offered the following disclaimer:
Now, I’m going to have to speak in generalities, and I understand there are all kinds of exceptions to what I’m about to say. But the generalities remain generally valid. Feminism denigrates masculinity in men by relentlessly calling us toxic for our flaws, rather than appreciating us for our natural qualities of energy, risk-taking, and leadership.
Andrew Klavan. Prager University “Who Needs Feminism” video.
Ironically, Shaun’s claim that Klavan was being dishonest about feminism is the most indisputably false claim in the video. To be sure, Klavan was harshly condemning the modern feminist movement when he said, “Feminism is a mean spirited, small-minded and oppressive philosophy that can poison relations between the sexes,” but what he said was absolutely true.
For example, one of the more popular feminist slogans of the last few decades was, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” The slogan was first coined by a woman named Irina Dunn and then made famous by feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Klavan’s point was perfectly valid. Steinem’s openly hostile attitude toward men was hardly the exception; it’s more like the rule for modern feminism.
Radical feminist Catharine McKinnon confessed to her misandry using these words:
Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.
Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State, page 647.
Seriously? Since when did consensual sex become indistinguishable from rape to women? What about when my wife tries to instigate a romantic moment between us…is she supposed to be raping me?
This is sheer lunacy. Not to be outdone, Teen Vogue columnist Emily Lindin tweeted, “I’m actually not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations. If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”
Think about what Ms. Lindin is saying for a moment–she’d be happy to allow innocent men to be punished for crimes they didn’t commit, as long as (patriarchal) society is destroyed in the process. That’s not just wrong, that’s seriously evil.
Question: what exactly does a false accusation of rape cost Ms. Lindin? What price might she be paying? It will probably cost the accused his life savings, and possibly his freedom, to defend himself against a truly reprehensible allegation. Her words might sound a little more noble if Ms. Lindin faced incarceration or bankruptcy herself, but it doesn’t cost her anything if bad things are happening to other people. What an awful excuse for a human being.
Even more disturbing, Bari Weiss audaciously echoed Ms. Lindin on the editorial pages of the New York Times, writing, “Countless innocent women have been robbed of justice, friends of mine insist, so why are we agonizing about the possibility of a few good men going down?”
Um…because it’s morally reprehensible to wish for innocent people to be punished for crimes they did NOT commit? What if the falsely accused person was your son, your brother, or your father? Have radical feminists completely lost their minds? (The question is rhetorical.)
Andrew Klavan specifically described modern feminist mythology as the idea that “men have oppressed women, and now must be suppressed in their turn to even things out.” Now, after reading the public statements of Ms. Steinem, Ms. MacKinnon, Ms. Weiss, and Ms. Lindin, does anyone (besides Shaun) doubt the veracity of his claim? For that matter, can any claim made by Andrew Klavan in his five-minute video be proved false beyond all reasonable doubt? The argument that Steinem, MacKinnon, Weiss, and Lindin don’t speak for all feminists is ridiculous, because they are widely perceived to be the leaders of the feminist movement. And where are the dissenting feminist voices?
In fact, Shaun’s video fails his own standards for fact checking and his criticisms reek of hypocrisy. For example, he prattled on for several minutes about the fact that “Prager University” is a You Tube channel, not an actual college or university that awards credit toward graduation for watching videos that are only five minutes long. Only a complete moron might think that watching free videos on You Tube would earn a college degree. Shaun also claimed that the “Wilkes brothers” privately fund Prager University, yet at the very end of the Klavan video, the Sadler family was thanked for their financial support to produce it. Apparently Shaun didn’t think anyone in his audience would question whether his criticisms were fair and accurate.
Shaun’s strongest negative reaction was about the fact Klavan noted that men tend to be physically stronger and have bigger muscles than women, which is sort of like saying water is wet. His extended tirade about Rosie the Riveter was way off target–Klavan didn’t even mention the origins of the propaganda image created during World War II called “Rosie the Riveter” (probably due to the time constraints of the five-minute format) and only pointed out that the evolution of Rosie into a feminist icon was absurd. It indisputably true that most biological men naturally have more muscle mass and bigger, stronger bodies than most women. Stating the obvious isn’t misogyny or telling a lie. There’s a reason that men and women don’t normally compete against each other in athletic events. Generally speaking, men can lift more weight, run faster, and hit harder than women. Women have competitive advantages over men in many other areas that don’t involve brute strength, and it’s pretty silly to deny the biological fact that men tend to be physically stronger than women.
However, the depths to which Shaun will go to deny reality become clearer when he shifts the focus of his attack to capitalism. In his warped view of the real world, a successful small business/flower shop will inevitably evolve into an all powerful, evil Walmart-like corporation that ultimately invades the Netherlands to get a monopoly on tulips, or some such nonsense. The truth is that capitalism provides consumers many more choices. Yes, you can find a McDonald’s restaurant in Hoboken, New Jersey or Hong Kong, but McDonald’s hasn’t put the local hamburger joint out of business. Most people who care about the quality of their hamburgers more than their Happy Meals probably don’t want Le Big Mac or Burger King, either.
According to liberal elitists like Shaun, the superior alternative to capitalism can only be socialism, where misery is more equally distributed among everyone excluded from the ruling class. The problem is that when the government redistributes wealth by force, it is never equally distributed among the “have-nots.”
In 2017, Venezuelans lost an alarming average of 24 pounds per person. Over the same time period, Nicolas Maduro probably gained weight while repeatedly refusing to accept humanitarian aid to the people of Venezuela, calling it a veiled attempt by the United States to destabilize the country. The socialist dictator would rather let his own people starve than risk a threat to his power. Think about that. The people who want the United States to embrace socialism are promising not to repeat the same mistakes every other socialist regime in history has made. It’s easy to resist the temptation to become corrupt when you don’t have any power, though.
It’s sort of true that Steven Crowder uses the same sort of clever editing tactics to spice up his videos that criticize socialism as Shaun the liberal vlogger has used to demonize capitalist ideas.
But that’s where the comparison ends. There’s a good reason that Louder with Crowder has attracted an audience of 3 million subscribers while by comparison, Shaun (presumably of the dead) has 166,000 subscribers. Crowder’s videos are informative and entertaining. On the other hand shared misery is for sale, but nobody seems to be buying. Most Americans understand that capitalism works, everywhere it’s tried. Socialism has never worked. That economic philosophy inevitably leads to fraud, government corruption, widespread misery, and sometimes even death.
As Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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