Dennis Prager, radio host and expert at hyperbole, is following in the footsteps of the greats. And by the greats, I mean the other prominent conservatives who proved they couldn’t think for themselves in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Like Eric Metaxas and Jerry Falwell Jr., Prager has proven that there’s no philosophical leap he won’t make in defense of President Trump.
In a PragerU video uploaded last week, Prager defends Trump’s notorious Access Hollywood comments about sexual harassment. If it seems weird that Prager is bringing up a three-year-old scandal, there’s a reason. Prager seems to have finally worked out a way to justify dissociating Trump, the implementer of GOP policies, from Trump, the man accused by dozens of women of sexual harassment and assault.
First, a little refresher on the Access Hollywood tape. During a 2005 interview with Billy Bush, Trump bragged about being able to do what he wants with women. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” he says. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
This is what Prager refers to as a “somewhat gross” manner of speaking. Somewhat. But it’s not enough to reflect poorly on Trump.
“I love clarity, and especially moral clarity,” Prager says, beginning his career as a philosopher. Then, flying in the face of the world’s great thinkers, he explains:
Sure, no one is perfect. But that’s really not the point.
If “private talk is not an indicator of a person’s character,” then Aristotle, the poor sap, was wrong. As C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man:
An ethical man will turn always toward good things, whether that person is alone or facing the public. So, who died and made Dennis Prager smarter than Aristotle?
Prager goes on to say that “the whole point of private talk is to vent,” which means to say “silly things, to say gross things.” Isn’t sexual harassment just so silly?
He then launches into a comical analogy about how he would be considered sexist and racist if you could hear what he has to say about bad drivers. “I hate that group for that minute,” he explains, blissfully unaware that hating bad drivers actually only requires you to hate a particular driver, not the entire gender or ethnicity to which they belong.
To be fair to Prager, he has held this philosophically incoherent position on public versus private morality for some time. Back in 2000, he wrote that Hillary Clinton wasn’t an anti-Semite for allegedly calling a campaign manager a “Jew bastard.”
“It is immaturity to assume you can assess people by what they say,” Prager insists. After all, we urinate in private but not in public. Yes, that’s an actual argument that Prager makes. Sure, “the public-private distinction in the moral arena is enormous,” when you’re talking about going to the bathroom.
Note that Prager never repeats Trump’s language (or Hillary’s for that matter) because it’s more difficult to justify “gross things” when you don’t have to mouth said “gross things.”
Prager should just come out and say he doesn’t care how Trump talks about women. He alludes to this when he scoffs at the idea that Trump could be “misogynist because of comments that he made in private,” as if the lack of audience changes the morality of his words. On top of all of this, Trump’s “private” comments are not inconsistent with his public persona, from bragging about his sexual prowess on the Howard Stern Show to his comments about Megyn Kelly.
Plus, unlike privately complaining about women’s driving habits, Trump’s comments literally make reference to illegal assault. Trump’s words aren’t just “locker room talk,” and Prager should know that.
Your private self is much more real than the one you reveal when you know everyone’s watching. That shouldn’t be too hard to understand, but it looks like Prager, like many of Trump’s defenders, remains willfully ignorant of the truth.
