PragerU Ambushes Our Schools

PragerU, a nonprofit political advocacy group, is stepping up to “save our schools,” promising to liberate them not from their economic woes but from the false perils of the Left. Let’s be clear. Despite its name, PragerU is not a university, is not accredited, and does not offer degrees. It was founded in 2010 by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager (described by some as a “reasonable” Rush Limbaugh), and funded originally by fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, whose family members still sit on the board. Other funders include Republican mega-donors — and conservative charitable foundations like the National Christian Foundation and the DeVos Family Foundation. The group typically spends 40 percent of its annual budget of more than $68 million on marketing.

With six states opening their doors to PragerU materials — Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Hampshire, Louisiana, and Montana — PragerU pledges to counter the “left-wing ideology rampant in our public schools” with supplemental curricular materials, offered freely online, that are “rich in American history and values.” These materials include a plethora of slick five-minute videos designed to appeal to kids from 5 to 18, all touting “America’s blessings and its unlimited opportunities.” Are you a prospective 5-year-old radical? PragerU wants to help you create a respect-our-military wreath that you can hang on your door all year round! Are you in junior high and thinking about joining an anti-racist organization? Then meet a blazingly blue-eyed Christopher Columbus, who tells you, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?  I don’t see the problem.”

For high school students, we find videos in which people tell you the supposed real story about the world. Some sample titles: Sex Is Binary; Who Needs Feminism; Capitalism Wins; As the Rich Get Richer, the Poor Get Richer; Why I Don’t Want and Don’t Deserve Reparations (with a Black narrator); and Make Men Masculine Again.

As we might expect, most of this news is delivered by white men. White women stand in as concerned parents on such subjects as The War on Boys and The Sexualization of Children. A Latinx woman, a reporter for Breitbart News, tells us Why Immigrants Should Love Columbus Day, and a Black woman (always smiling) gives us A Short History of Slavery, which never examines racism, Black people’s resistance, or slavery’s ongoing repercussions, but instead insists that “white men led the world” in ending this brutal institution.

Guess or Mess

PragerU’s offerings include a second, international YouTube channel, a student ambassador program called PragerFORCE, and a program that allows parents and teachers to access lesson plans and study guides. In 2021 they launched PragerU Kids, which, along with its videos, includes free digital magazines directed toward 3rd to 5th graders that feature historical figures “often mischaracterized or forgotten in today’s classrooms.” They assure us that these materials provide our kids with a “fun and digestible way to learn about American values.” In addition to a strange mix of U.S. presidents (a list that ends with Gerald Ford and does not include Richard Nixon), this potpourri includes Charles Schwab, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt — with Margaret Thatcher, Ayn Rand, and Amy Coney Barrett thrown in for some gender balance — giving us, along the way, a skewed, Eurocentric, individualist and pro-capitalist version of history.

To encourage the reading of these materials — and to streamline their messages even further — PragerU has developed a Nickelodeon-style game show called Guess or Mess that rewards elementary kids for absorbing facts about these historical figures. The format plays into youngsters’ sensibilities. Two grade school contestants (who’ve been given one of PragerU’s magazines about their figure) play the game, and if one gives a correct guess, the other gets hit with a mess, in the form of pickle juice or silly slime or stinky-fish-jello or mealy worms. As the kids squeal with delight, their arms dripping with goo, they learn that Amy Coney Barrett is “an originalist, which means she believes judicial matters should be settled based on a reading of the Constitution as it was written.” Or they hear this deceptive bit of greenwashing on John D. Rockefeller, who “refined oil for the poor man” and “believed a successful business requires a strong religious foundation.” 

In their promo for Guess or Mess, a spokesperson states: “Seeing kids having fun while learning about American history gives you hope for the next generation.” Behind the glitz, the manic colors, and the carefully honed delivery lies a clear agenda. PragerU is intent on answering the question, “Can We Change the Minds of Gen Z?” with a resounding yes — by any means possible.

The Climate Crisis

For PragerU, the climate crisis is as unreal as systemic racism. To narrate their many anti-climate change videos, they feature a roster of folks that the Guardian calls “a who’s who of climate deniers and discredited contrarians,” among them Alex Epstein. In addition to prior connections to both the Cato and Ayn Rand Institutes, Epstein’s credentials include failure to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, support for the Keystone Pipeline, and the belief that CO₂ is beneficial for both “plants and Americans.” He is author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, a book one critic called “a particularly fluent, elaborate form of climate denialism.” In the PragerU video The Real Climate Crisis, Epstein argues that the upheavals we’re facing were created not by an overabundance of fossil fuels but by climate change policies resulting from the war on Ukraine that have caused a shortage of fossil fuels, resulting in higher energy costs and widespread inflation. This, and conditions resulting from shortages of fertilizer, will, he claims, cause (in no particular order) widespread job loss, mass starvation, civil unrest, death, crop failures, and riots. And as a further example of PragerU’s upside-down thinking, Epstein claims that “fossil fuels make us safer from climate change” by powering the machines that protect us from storms, extreme temperatures, and drought.

This belief, that so-called energy poverty is the imminent threat, takes a more insidious turn when embedded in an animated video Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis. Here, the world as we know it has turned completely upside down. Climate change is taught in school. Ania’s friends have all become climate activists. Ania, believing that energy poverty is the real culprit, begins raising questions in class and, in this version of speaking truth to power, loses her friends. Her immediate family, proud of her for telling the “truth,” begin sharing their own stories of resistance to oppression, and her grandfather reveals that, as a Polish Jew, he fought back against the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising. “Fighting oppression is risky,” Ania intones toward the end, “and it always takes courage.” This story brazenly co-opts the narrative of Greta Thunberg’s painful journey to convince those around her that climate change is real and uses it to vilify activists such as Greta herself, suggesting that the climate denier has now become the equivalent of the Jewish resistance fighter, and the activists and teacher have assumed the role of Nazi oppressors.

Behind PragerU’s smiling facade lies an agenda that is vicious and terrifying. And our public schools, after decades of intentional weakening, have become vulnerable to attack. For example, despite the enormity of the climate crisis, too many schools lack the resources to teach about it critically and honestly. Textbooks that we count on for foundational information — including science textbooks — typically dismiss or bury the climate crisis. PragerU has positioned itself to take advantage of these deficiencies, providing instant, easily assimilable classroom lessons that not only ostensibly fill curricular gaps but — using the organization’s rhetorical trickery — attempt to implant a worldview that undermines work toward a sustainable planetary future.

In 2021, Steve Bannon proclaimed, “The path to save our nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.” Three years later we’re watching as a multipronged, right-wing campaign to ban books and provoke curricular battles at school board meetings plays itself out. Whether other states adopt their “turnkey curriculum,” PragerU has inserted itself into these debates. In a well-funded movement to privatize education, PragerU’s propaganda represents an additional right-wing weapon to fuel polarization, shred the commons, and undermine trust in public education. 

Yet PragerU’s visibility is attracting pushback. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described their videos as “a dog whistle to the extreme right.” And Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, concerned that PragerU is working to impose Christian nationalism on our schools, has sent public record requests to education departments in Oklahoma and Florida to determine how their materials were vetted and approved, an inquiry that could result in legal action. “These partnerships are so new,” says Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, “so we’re waiting to see what reveals itself. This is just the beginning.”