The Daily Wire and scumbags like Dennis Prager are not the answer to Wokism

Christians lying about published research is not the solution to crazy people lying about everything else

I don’t watch nearly as many “skeptical” YouTube channels as I did in the first decade or so of the 21st century, when Christian creationists in the U.S. were trying in significant numbers to have the Book of Genesis taught in place of biological evolution in public-school science classes. It’s hard to believe that only fifteen years ago, this was the most significant culture-war conflict affecting public education, given how comprehensively depraved so many public-school teachers and their antics are today.

Prominent conservative Christians have been complaining forever about being persecuted, marginalized, and silenced in America. Since these people, like the spokespersons for all movements, are typically rich, it’s hard to take them seriously. And since it’s clear that no existing deity fulfills, or even could fulfill, the characteristics of the one they describe—basically, an insecure and hypocritical celestial retard who kills people in huge numbers in lieu of defending his own alleged arguments and principles—the need to resist the teaching of creationism, which posits that all of modern geology, biology, and cosmological physics are bullshit, on basic epistemological principles will remain for as long as public education is an option in the United States.

Ironically, or perhaps simply as a basic result of the longitudinal interplay of culture wars and their primary orchestrators, Christians are finally being marginalized and attacked by the media in most of the ways they have traditionally pissed and moaned about. It’s not a uniquely targeted campaign; Wokism seeks to undercut and demolish all existing social structures, be it sectarian religions, the nuclear family, citizen distance running, and rules about sticking your tongue up the anus of a seven-year old as part of a first-grade “Get to know your teacher” exercise.

The Daily Wire is a conservative independent publishing behemoth founded in 2006 by Jeremy Boreing and Ben Shapiro. I am not familiar with Boreing, but Shapiro is a bright but deeply abrasive figure whose normal speech cadence is 1.75X and who lies every time he starts talking about religion. That he is plainly a smart guy, in fact, is the main reason his theistic jabber seems so discordant; he often bullshits, but the only time he appears to flat-out lie is concerning the divine.

Dennis Prager, a longtime grifter and buffoon in the Donald Trump mold, is also associated with the Daily Wire. Prager is Jewish, or Jewish-ish, but over his long career he has increasingly aligned himself with conservative Christians because in the United States, there has always been far more money to be made scamming from a Christian standpoint than from that of an insincere Modern Orthodox Jew.

In 2009, Prager established “PragerU,” essentially an unending series of five-minute videos. For years, these were, I believe, posted only on YouTube. But during the Trump presidency, when Trump was pretending to believe in God and Christian leaders embracing bullshit theologies where pretending to buy this pretense, YouTube started removing PragerU videos. And because Prager’s typical rants target gay people and essentially every aspect of Wokism, he’s since become even more of a pariah on YouTube, where traditional liberals are no longer welcome either if the speak factually about covid, Ukraine, or the fact that Jill Biden has, according to sources, long been taking her song’s crack-bloated dong for a far longer time than some critics believe. The U.S. is simply a marvelous nation and we don’t need the rest of you fuckers telling us what to do. America is the greatest country on Earth and has been for thousands of years.

PragerU is now associated with the Daily Wire. In one recent video advertising the superior mental health of believers versus nonbelievers, Prager simply stitched together material from three different social-psychology papers to establish his conclusion. Like any CNN, MSNBC, Fox News or New York Times hack, Prager knows what his bosses and audience want and need and always works backward from conclusions drawn to adhere to this need.

Rationality Rules is a solid YouTube channel, even if I don’t watch much of it anymore since too many “skeptics” and “science defenders” are now in the “chicks can have dicks” camp, and relentlessly pressure those who are not (like the founder of Rationality Rules) to go along with this and similar ideas. His exposure of Prager’s bullshit is quick and uncontroversial.

One of the ugly consequences of the failure of genuine liberals to police themselves—and that characterization is, of course, a tragic understatement—is that assholes like Matt Walsh, a Christian asshat-beard combo who spends much of his time believing the year is approximately 1958, have become responsible for saying obvious things liberals should be able to say without consequences to their careers, but cannot. Since criticisms of transgender and racialist lunacies are no longer permitted in liberal circles, it’s up to asshats like Shapiro, Prager and Walsh to serve as the only high-profile American media figures to discuss basic facts about reproductive biology.

And these guys are just grifters. Perhaps the Daily Wire is a necessary c. 2023 instrument given the utter collapse of the corporate media, and it does reporting on stories the corporate media refuse to touch. But these qualities alone do not a reliable outlet make, in the same way that he lack of quality candidates in the 2024 presidential race and Trump being absolutely correct about the intentions of the Deep State and doesn’t make Trump any less of a turd, or any better a candidate to occupy the Oval Office, than he was in 2015. (It may not cheer anyone up to acknowledge that there no good people will ever again be allowed to serve as POTUS, but because it’s true, it certainly streamlines our* worldview at the same time it reassures us that life is barely worth living and worsening by the hour.)

Prager and others, however, are undeniably correct about the psychological benefits of religious belief coupled to participation in a religious community. Maybe believers aren’t correct about everything, and in some cases they appear to be wrong about almost everything. But with community typically serving as a vital anchor in their lives, they’re a lot happier in general than people like me. Shutting down churches during covid-19 seemed like the right thing to do for about two weeks before it quickly became obvious that this was stupidity bordering on cruelty.

When the religious, even the hyper-devout, don’t bother anyone with this—and most believers don’t—they should simply be left alone. But when public figures they admire are no more honest than the people transparently working to scuttle their lives, then followers of sites like the Daily Wire are wasting their time. Substack is full of independent voices on the believer side (some conservative, others liberal, most "heterodox”) who don’t try to seduce readers with bullshit; you can see some of the ones I follow on my profile.

One tenet I do share with even the hyper-religious is the rejection of the complete nihilism baked into Wokism. I may be a materialist at a philosophical level, but this is not because I decided to become one; I just remain unconvinced that a conscious creator necessarily underlies “existence.” But at the same time, especially as someone who was deeply into astronomy before I was a teenager, I’m awestruck in the same way as anyone else just by being outside and pondering the origins of the ~13.7-billion-year-old space, possibly a subspace, we inhabit. I see no need to attach anything that isn’t provably there to these incredible vistas and mindscapes, but anyone who doesn’t possess a smidgen of religious wonder is probably not using a fully developed human mind.