Is Dennis Prager Lying or Just Confused?

Conservative and hard-Right, AM radio  talk show host, Dennis Prager has often made the claim that he constantly monitors the Internet for mentions of either his name, or that of his non-accredited (and therefore, not-real) university, Prager University-PragerU-for short, or both.  To my knowledge, he has not mentioned exactly how he performs this monitoring; through bots or search alerts or some other way, and also to my knowledge, he has not mentioned the results of these searches in a positive light: Instead, Prager has only mentioned the results of these searches in a negative light.

Such was the case when, about a month or two ago, on his nationally broadcast morning talk show, Prager railed against an article published on the liberal and left-leaning website, Media Matters for America (MMFA), the author of which referenced Prager’s apparent insistence that in any marriage, the wife has “an obligation” to her husband to give him sex when he desires it, regardless of how she feels about it, or as Prager wrote, “her mood”.  The article in MMFA referenced a December, 2008 article, written by Prager on the conservative website, Townhall, titled, “When A Woman Isn’t in the Mood: Part II”.

Prager was nearly livid at the MMFA author’s insistence that Prager had stated that wives have “an obligation” to give their husband sex, regardless of their “mood”, because, Prager claimed, he had never actually stated that doing so was an obligation.

That was not the first time I had heard Prager making the same argument, for example, appearing on Fox News host, Tucker Carlson’s evening conservative talk show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, in 2018, and I had heard Prager complain before about this very same claim made against him by other people. However, this last time, I was not working when I heard Prager making this argument and as such, I was able to research the claims made by Prager, specifically those he made about the more recent MMFA article and I found several problems with not only his claims, but the way in which he made his argument against the MMFA article and its author.

To begin, Prager started to read selected quotes from the MMFA article, but, just before he did, he seemed to not know nor understand who, or what, MMFA actually is, asking his off-air producer (something Prager frequently does on his show), how big MMFA is, saying something to the effect of his asking earnestly because he honestly did not know, seeming to claim that he had never heard of MMFA.  The problem with that is that, if we, his audience are to take Prager at his word, then according to him, he monitors the Internet for any mentions of his name or that of his “university”, or both.  The assumption being, or course, that anytime such mentions occur, Prager would be made aware of it.  So, if Prager seems ignorant of MMFA, then that is because he has never heard of them, or at the least, he has never heard of them in regards to any mentions of his name or PragerU.  The problem with that is that a quick search of the very same Internet will eventually lead the searcher to MMFA’s very own Dennis Prager webpage which is actually two pages and lists seventeen articles dating back to at least 2010, mentioning either Prager or PragerU’s name.  This realization results in one, or some combination of the following conclusions: Prager does not actually monitor the Internet for any mentions of his name or that of his “university”; he does monitor the Internet, but somehow, any mentions of those two names in MMFA escaped him; he does monitor the Internet, but does not know how to use whatever system he might have in place to do so; he’s forgotten about any mentions of those two names in MMFA or; he’s lying.

Prager then went on to read from the MMFA article, but, shortly into his reading of the article, he stopped and noted to his audience that the author never used any quotation marks in the article, telling his audience that that is a sure sign that someone is lying or making things up out of whole cloth.  When I researched, and found, the article to which Prager was referring, I discovered two more problems with Prager’s argument: the first was that, throughout the beginning of the article, the author-as is custom with online articles-uses embedded hyperlinks to lead readers to the sources of his information; the second problem was that, toward the end of the article, the author does indeed use quotation marks.  As before, this realization leads to one, or some combination of the following conclusions: Prager does not understand the purpose served by the use of embedded hyperlinks; he didn’t see the embedded hyperlinks; he never actually read all, or even part of the MMFA article, or; he’s lying.

Finally, at the heart of all of this is Prager’s claim that he “never” stated that a wife had “an obligation” to her husband to give him sex, regardless of what she is feeling.  On a side note; the issue of “feelings” is an oft-beat upon drum by Prager, claiming that feelings are the sole prevue of the Left and that basing anything-any decision-on feelings is, in his words, “foolish”, and Prager touches on that subject in the same article.  However, the following are Prager’s own words from that article:

(Note: all emphasis mine)

“In Part I, I made the argument that any woman who is married to a good man and who wants a happy marriage ought to consent to at least some form of sexual relations as much as possible.”

“In Part II, I advance the argument that a wife should do so even when she is not in the mood for sexual relations. I am talking about mood, not about times of emotional distress or illness.”

“The baby boom generation elevated feelings to a status higher than codes of behavior. In determining how one ought to act, feelings, not some code higher than one’s feelings, became decisive: “No shoulds, no oughts.” In the case of sex, therefore, the only right time for a wife to have sex with her husband is when she feels like having it. She never “should” have it. But marriage and life are filled with “shoulds.””

“Thus, in the past generation we have witnessed the demise of the concept of obligation in personal relations. We have been nurtured in a culture of rights, not a culture of obligations. To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no” -- and that this “no” must be honored -- renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages based on mutual obligations -- as opposed to rights alone and certainly as opposed to moods -- are likely to be the best marriages.”

So, on the one hand, Prager is correct in claiming that he never actually directly stated that a wife has an obligation to her husband to give him sex regardless of her feelings, but he does, however, frame the entire subject within the greater idea of relational and personal obligations, specifically in marital relations, especially when he wrote that, “marriage and life are full of “shoulds”’.  And so, on the other hand, if Prager is not actually, categorically stating that wives have such an obligation to their husband, he is, at the very least, heavily implying, exactly that.

As someone who has a graduate degree, and, according to his biography on his own website, "holds an honorary doctorate of law from Pepperdine University", it would seem plausible that Prager would know and understand the difference between what he actually wrote and what he was arguing against on his radio show.  It's often difficult for me to pinpoint what some conservatives are doing with their argumentation, but I contend that conservatism, and current Republican dogma, trace their roots to authoritarianism and as such, a key component to their argumentation is a heavy reliance upon what is known as, "argumentum ad ignorantiam", or an appeal to ignorance.

As i wrote earlier in this essay, I was not working the day I heard Prager make this particular claim, so I was able to research it.  I firmly believe that, especially in the case of Right Wing Media (RWM)-a field dominated mostly by white men who self-identify as Christian, and to a lesser degree, Jewish-rely heavily upon the rhetoric of ethos in which their audience believes, on faith, everything that they say, or write.  So, in this case, Prager-who attacks the Left on a near-hourly basis on his show-attacks a writer for, as I mentioned above, a liberal and left-leaning website, for writing the following sentence in her online article, "He’s compared a wife’s “obligation” to have sex with her husband whether she wants to or not to a man’s obligation to go to work even if he’s not in the mood."  Please not only note her use of quotation marks (around an embedded hyperlink), but that their use has two potential uses: she is either directly quoting Prager (which she was doing); or that she was using the quotation marks to denote a deliberate misinterpretation of whatever was being quoted (which, I believe, she was not doing).  Also note that the overall focus of the article was PragerU itself, not just Prager's essay-of which the MMFA author focused on only one part-and that her reference to that essay is literally, a 32-word sentence from within a near-15,000 word article.  In this way, Prager's telling of the article paints a very different picture from the reality-and Prager must know this, therefore, standing firmly upon his platform of rhetorical ethos, Prager appeals to the ignorance of his audience.

And he is doing so deliberately.

The ultimate question is why is (or perhaps, more appropriately-and honestly-did he do) doing this?  Because, if my theory about RWM's heavy reliance upon ethos as the source of their authority, then wouldn't misleading their audience-deliberately or not-undermine that ethos and their credibility?  And, wouldn't they know this?  If the answer to both of those questions is, yes, then the answer to the first question in this paragraph is that they-and he-are doing it on purpose and that purpose is to get their-and his-audience to believe every word that they say, without question.  Or, as the chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, Republican Lamar Smith said, "Better to get your news directly from the President. In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth."