Not long after Florida adopted new curriculum standards for middle school-level Black history courses — which received bipartisan backlash for its instruction on the “benefits” of slavery — an animated video went viral online. The video, called “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass” featured a cartoon version of the abolitionist telling a pair of child time-travelers that slavery was a “compromise” between the Founding Fathers and the Southern colonies.
PragerU is absolutely the worst right-wing propaganda you can imagine. It’s not a university, it is a YouTube channel that produces 5-minute videos loaded to the gills with wildly wrong takes on every aspect of political life.
Breadtuber Shaun has made kind of a point of debunking PragerU’s nonsense, but he’s just one hobbyist, while the cranks at PragerU do this full-time for big fracking dollars.
ETA: the threat of PragerU is not that they will advance the “culture wars,” but that they can effectively indoctrinate kids by teaching them a cartoonish version of everything. I’d argue this has nothing to do with the “culture war,” which is just about using controversy over differing lifeways to create vapid political hay for GOPers who can’t win support by advocating for their policies. This move with PragerU is an attempt to short-circuit that entire political arena, in which right-wing culture war is just a smoke-screen they use when they have no weapons or ammo.
Dennis Prager is promising to create a generation of the stupidest, most ill-informed, politically impotent and malleable slaves. Florida and Oklahoma are buying.
I remember a decade ago or so parents were complaining that teachers were using film strips and videos in place of actual teaching.
So PragerU is giving it’s content free to OK, but is FL paying for their crap?
I got my education and got out years ago. I’ve two cousins who are teachers back there are I’m not even going to touch this bullshyte with them.
My hope is that out of state higher learning institutions consider this when a Pager educated kid applies and requires immersion in accredited secondary courses as a prerequisite for admission.
Of course this won’t matter to the greater number of Pokiehoma and Floriduhh high school graduates.
Poor kids might as well be edgycated out in the cow pastures…
“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
The motherfuckers have their Orwell down cold. Unfortunately no one bothered to stick around in their liberal colleges to hear the part that it’s not supposed to be a fucking roadmap.
I don’t think it’s because there aren’t other suppliers, I think they went with Prager for the same reason they went with Brett Kavanaugh: he’s the most awful choice the moment will bear. They want something even fringier.
They want to be able to teach kids that non-whites and non-Christians are heathens from whom the Chosen People must be protected, and that requires getting all those savages out of government and keeping them out forever – and if that means getting rid of elections because the animals always use their numbers to crowbar their way into power, then so be it: we don’t need democracy anyway, not so long as we have the Good Book (and our high priests) to light the way! They want to replace public education with “Sunday school.”
If they had the White House right now, and thus the Dept of Ed, they might feel empowered to go with somebody even more unhinged, like… if Ginny Thomas were secretly writing historical fanfic for WattPad as “Clarice von Robespierre.”
I see one of the courses is “How to Treat an American Flag.” Reminds me that I have never seen the flag so disrespected as by MAGA. They merchandise the crap out of it. They’d put it on toilet paper to make a buck. They routinely distort it, put Trump holding a gun on it, use it for any old purpose and on things made to be thrown away. And they dare lecture the rest of us on how to respect it. Infuriating.
Josh Marshall yesterday posted a story about a WSJ poll showing Biden and Trump tied. I think it’s relevant that one of the pollsters has been on Trump’s payroll in the past.
" What the Journal does not mention anywhere is that Fabrizio also worked as the chief pollster on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And since the start of 2023, Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has paid Fabrizio’s company more than $567,000, according to FEC filings."
Could this be true? Could the Wall Street Journal be so crass? My gut feeling is “yes”. If so, I think we could chop a few points off of Trump’s numbers in that poll.
For anybody who wants to learn more about PragerU, here are a couple recommendations.
1. Shaun’s “PragerU & the Law” (2021)
This is a 23-minute video by lefty breadtuber Shaun, who meticulously walks through one of Dennis Prager’s “PragerU” videos, challenging Prager’s facts, reasoning, and framing when appropriate.
2. hbomberguy’s “The War on Christmas: A Measured Response” (2020)
This is a 54-minute video by lefty breadtuber hbomberguy. It is ultimately a discussion of why PragerU exists and how its propaganda works, but the video gets there by way of ridiculing the clumsy ways that Fox and InfoWars push the “war on Christmas” narrative on TV.
Shaun’s video is much drier than hbomberguy’s, but I think both gents do a first-rate job of wrangling the rhetorical methods, and illuminating the malicious intent, that flow from PragerU.
By way of recommendation, I’ll add that I’ve had a lot of downtime over the past 10 months, and I spent more of that time than I will admit watching these videos, along with others from the same gents, on infinite loop.
