Dennis Prager Will Not Be Bullied By Anne Frank

People aren't 'basically good' and teenagers are stupid.

Rightwing intellectual Dennis Prager, the Family Values guy who explained child hunger is OK because free school breakfasts "weaken the parent-child bond," recently took on another pernicious corrupter of the world's morals: Anne Frank. The teen diarist, who died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, was absolutely wrong when she wrote "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." Oh yeah? Dennis Prager, like any good Puritan, knows that human nature is essentially corrupt and sinful, which is why the Nazis persecuted Anne Frank and her family in the first place. And to rein in sinful human nature, we need strong authority figures who'll enforce God's laws and preserve us from chaos.

Prager summarized that a bit more succinctly, though, explaining Anne Frank didn't understand basic morality because she was a "secular Jew," and besides, "I don't get my wisdom from teenagers."

A fan from Idaho (don't look at me!) wrote in to ask Prager what he thought of that popular Anne Frank quote, and after taking a moment to scratch his dog's ass, Prager got to the important stuff. He probably wants you to know that he's very sympathetic to Anne Frank's plight!

My reaction to Anne Frank, she wrote that in her diary, the most important Holocaust document, a teenage Jewish girl, a Dutch Jewish girl who hid with her family until they were betrayed by someone to the Nazis, who they then shipped them to the death camps [...]

Her diary is very famous, and it gives a face to the horror of the Holocaust. I know she wrote that, and my answer is, it doesn't matter that she wrote it. I don't get my wisdom from teenagers.

Look, folks, just because Anne Frank is popularly thought of as an avatar of the human ability to remain human in the face of unspeakable horror, that's no reason to take her word for anything on morality. Humans are sinful by nature, dummies, and what does a 15-year-old know? Especially one who, however tragic her short life was, didn't even get a legitimate moral grounding from her parents, who weren't right with God either?

That she was a wonderful young woman and wrote an unbelievably powerful document that will last forever is beside the point. I don't expect 16-year-olds, unless they grew up in a religious Jewish or Christian home -- she was a secular Jew -- most kids believe that. But it is not true. So it has never been an issue with me. "Well, you disagree with Anne Frank." So what?

I guess the only surprise here is that Prager didn't turn the answer into an attack on Greta Thunberg, because what do teenagers know about anything, unless they're protesting abortion and smirking in a Native American's face.

Turns out this is really a BIG THING for Prager, whose bogus "PragerU" (not an actual educational institution, and given to lying about history) addresses human nature:

Are People Born Good?    www.youtube.com 

Short answer: Of course not! Look at all the evil in the world, stupid. There's also no such thing as economic or social influence, that might cause evil, except for when liberals let humanity's basic selfishness and impulsiveness run riot. And just look at the historical record of mass slaughters by governments, which in Prager's telling conveniently doesn't include the Crusades or the Inquisition.

Prager has been pushing this rebuttal to Anne Frank since at least 2014, when he visited African sites from which people were sent to the Americas as slaves, and explained,

I was overwhelmed by the amount of cruelty human beings have inflicted on other human beings.
  
There is no limit to suffering human beings have been willing to inflict on others, no matter how innocent, no matter how young, and no matter how old. This fact must lead all reasonable human beings, that is, all human being who take evidence seriously, to draw only one possible conclusion: Human nature is not basically good.

There is no more obvious example of widespread wishful thinking than the belief that people are basically good. Come here and see where millions of men, women and children were yanked from their families, villages and friends, and then shipped in torturous conditions in ships from hell to a life sentence of backbreaking work. And then tell me that people are basically good. And needless to say, do the same after visiting a Nazi death camp or a Cambodian killing field.

Prager also used his trip to Africa to decry how terrible it is that American liberals exaggerate, for political reasons, the evils of current racism in the USA, because slavery was very very bad and we don't have slavery anymore, now do we? Also, he added, America is a really GREAT place to be black:

[Nearly] every African who has given the issue thought knows that America is not only not racist, it is the best place for an African to immigrate to. That is why more black Africans have come to America voluntarily than came to America as slaves — a statistic that virtually no college student is allowed to know.

Africans who immigrate to America know how little racism exists there. They suspect it before emigrating from Africa, and they know it after arriving in America. Indeed, America, the left's depiction of it notwithstanding, is the least racist country in the world.

And if any African immigrants think they experience racism here, that's only because they've been corrupted by America-hating liberals and therefore can't be happy like black conservatives , who just sing about Jesus all day.

Also, do not ask Dennis Prager about the Australian wildfires , because he'll just blame them on pagan nature-worshipers giving all the water to stupid fish that should go extinct.

In conclusion, if you take Dennis Prager as your moral compass, you are a pretty strange person. I only say that because I'm inherently sinful and want to lead you astray.

Postscript: Dennis Prager has accused us of being "deceitful" in this piece, andwe have a reply. 

[ Jason Campell on Twitter / Dennis Prager ]

Yr Wonkette is supported entirely by YOUR donations! Unless you can afford to donate but don't, in which case we're looking at you.