YOUTUBE STAR MR. BEAST BUILT WELLS IN AFRICA AND SOME PEOPLE ARE…ANGRY?

Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz accused Mr. Beast of having “received extremely light criticism in the past for the way you’ve monetized ‘kindness’ content that some vulnerable people found to be exploitative.”

There are two main “arguments” here, although that might be giving them too much credit.

The first is that Africa doesn’t need charity. While there is certainly a broader, nuanced conversation to be had about the systemic problems holding back progress in Africa and whether some forms of Western charity are counterproductive, it’s still just generally untrue as a matter of objective facts and statistics to claim that it doesn’t have a poverty problem.

Yet it’s also obviously untrue in the specific situations Mr. Beast was involved in — because many of the places he built these wells did not previously have clean drinking water. If he were doing something unnecessary, the actual beneficiaries wouldn’t have been so incredibly grateful.

In the same vein, if Mr. Beast’s actions “shamed the Kenyan government,” that’s actually a good thing. Kenya’s government is quite corrupt, and if so many of its people don’t have access to clean drinking water, it’s not doing its most basic job.

You know you’re over the target if you receiving flak from Taylor Lorenz.