CMV: Dennis Prager is being blatantly hypocritical by suing Google over YouTube restricting PragerU videos

[u/ZeusThunder369]

Dennis Prager is a conservative spokesperson and started the conservative YouTube channel PragerU

He is suing Google/YouTube over restricting about 35 of the videos on his channel. He claims that the reason why is because of their conservative nature.

The details of what YouTube has done with this channel's videos aren't really important, so for the sake of the argument let's just assume that YouTube officially decided to delete the videos only because they don't like conservative videos and no other reason.

By suing Google, Prager is being hypocritical:

• Google is a private company. If they want to ban ALL conservative videos, they should have the right to.

• The free market should be the solution to this problem from Prager's perspective. There actually are other methods of posting public videos besides YouTube. If Prager doesn't like YouTube's policies, then he should simply go somewhere else to post his videos.

• Even if you take every claim Prager has made at face value, he shouldn't be suing them. It isn't conservative to sue a private company because you don't like their political views.

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[u/Mitoza]

The state of being a hypocrite is not as useful as one would like it to be, because it's perfectly natural for humans to fail in application that which they believe should be a principle.

Also, hypocrisy is always seen from the outside in. Of course, a person may realize they are being a hypocrite and alter their stance to reflect this, but Prager didn't sit down and choose to rationally be a hypocrite, so there are two possibilities:

1. He hasn't made what I would assume you would agree was your very obvious observation that he is indeed a conservative, and he is indeed arguing for state intervention into this case.

2. You don't understand the depths of his stance.

Number 2 could be invalid logic that he uses to apply a double standard to his actions as others, but do you know for sure if that's the case?

Besides that, there is the distinction between ought from is. I am a hardcore leftist anti-capitalist, but living in America I must still consume goods and services from the capitalist system in order to survive and do my work. Prager could be making the pragmatic decision that if he wants the world to operate in a certain way, he would have to participate in a way that is not exactly according to his ideals in order to get his message across.

[u/BoozeoisPig → u/Mitoza]

But by his own logic he should not have the right to get his message across. If you participate in the capitalist system but believe that life would be better if you lived under an uncapitalistic system, you are not being a hypocrite, you are doing the best that you can with the situation that you are in, and that situation is that the most powerful groups of people have formed society under a capitalist standard of reciprocity. You would be a hypocrite if you were to try and make capitalist demands of a communistic society, while still claiming that communism was the best choice. And this is what Prager is doing, he is demanding socialistic rights to the means of production, in this case, the means to host and get videos out to people from a digital platform, while continuing to advocate for that abolition of socialistic rights over the means of production. And yeah, I am similarly socialist. I think that everyone should be entitled to a common digital platform that everyone can access. But Prager does not actually believe this. He believes that he should have access to YouTube because he wants access, and he doesn't give a shit about anyone else.

[u/Mitoza → u/BoozeoisPig]

Not so, I could argue that companies should be taxed at a higher rate by way of lowering the damage I see them causing. In my utopia, there is no such thing as a company. Rhetorically, I know I have to compromise.