the am conservative gottfried

ntbcw ACU?

natcon?

off bs 7 26

Contributing Editors

W. James Antle III James Bovard Ted Galen Carpenter Ryan Girdusky Paul Gottfried James P. Pinkerton Matthew Walther John A. Burtka IV Peter Tonguette Doug Bandow Bill Kauffman Peter Van Buren Douglas Macgregor Jack Hunter Kelley Beaucar Vlahos Ted Snider

Experience

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James Bovard is a contributing editor for The American Conservative. He is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. His latest is Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, and a frequent contributor to The Hill.

James Bovard - Wikipedia 7 26 some talk

James Bovard (/bəˈvɑːrd/; born 1956) is an American libertarian author and lecturer whose political commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist^[1] and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy and nine other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, The American Conservative, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.

Early life

He has written Wall Street Journal articles about his experiences as a shiftless highway worker ^[2] and a one-season Santa Claus.^[3] His early career was summarized in a 1988 National Journal profile headlined, "A Free-Lance Crab Apple Shaking the Federal Tree".^[4]

Views

In 2017, Bovard criticized President Donald Trump for the missile strike in Syria and referred to it as his "biggest foreign folly." Bovard writes, "Four years ago, Trump warned in a tweet: 'If the U.S. attacks Syria and hits the wrong targets, killing civilians, there will be worldwide hell to pay.' But the Trump administration has sharply increased U.S. bombing while curtailing restrictions that sought to protect innocents. A British-based human rights monitoring group estimated Friday that U.S.-led coalition strikes had killed almost 500 civilians in the past month—more than any month since U.S. bombing began. A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that coalition airstrikes have caused a 'staggering loss of civilian life.'" He also stated that "Trump's most dangerous innovation involves direct attacks on Syrian government forces."^[5]

In 2018, Bovard was critical of Trump, saying that he "has said and done many things to appall the friends of freedom. From Trump's pro-torture comments to his praise of police brutality to his cruise-missile barrage against Syria to his threat to annihilate North Korea, there are ample signs that he scorns a freedom-and-peace posture."^[6]

Bovard is a critic of the Transportation Security Administration, writing that "the TSA has a long history of intimidation. In 2002, it created a system of fines to penalize travelers with bad attitudes, charging up to $1,500 for any alleged 'nonphysical interference.' This included any 'situation that in any way would interfere with the screener and his or her ability to continue to work or interfere with their ability to do their jobs,' according to a spokeswoman. The TSA failed to specify exactly how much groveling was necessary and eventually abandoned the regime of fines." He also criticized the TSA's watchlist and concluded that "the TSA's latest anti-privacy charade is yet more evidence that the agency should be done away with. After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA has no excuse for groping more."^[7]

Reception

Bovard's work has received both praise and criticism in mainstream outlets. In 1994, columnist George F. Will called him “a one-man truth squad.”^[8]

A 1999 Wall Street Journal review referred to him as “the roving inspector general of the modern state.”^[9]

In 2007, The New York Times described him as an “anti-czar czar” in a survey of Washington “czar” roles.^[10]

Selected works

The Farm Fiasco (ICS Press, 1989). ISBN 1558150013.
Fair Trade Fraud: How Congress Pillages the Consumer and Decimates American Competitiveness (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). ISBN 0312083440.
Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (St. Martin's, 1994). ISBN 0312123337.
Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (St. Martin's, 1999). ISBN 0312214413.
Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton–Gore Years (St. Martin's, 2000). ISBN 031224052X.
Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). ISBN 1403966826.
The Bush Betrayal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). ISBN 1403968519.
Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). ISBN 1403971080.

Reception of selected works

On Attention Deficit Democracy: Publishers Weekly noted the book's polemical sweep and emphasis on skepticism toward state power.^[11]
On Terrorism and Tyranny: A Boston Globe review called it a “scathing” account of the post-9/11 war on terror.^[12]

[### Biden Plans Expansion of Feds' Army of Snitches in 'Dollars for ...

The American Conservative

https://www.theamericanconservative.com › bidens-dolla...](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/bidens-dollars-for-collars-new-snitch-army/)

James Bovard is a contributing editor for The American Conservative. He is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit ...

Trump’s Iran Bombing Is the Latest in Presidential Absolutism

James BovardJune 26, 2025

does President Trump have any legal basis for his foreign policy actions aside from his personal entitlement to absolute power? Presidents have been scorning congressional leashes on their foreign interventions since at least the Korean War. But Trump’s erratic behavior and fevered comments almost make President Richard Nixon look mild-mannered.

Democratic members of Congress and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) are pushing for a vote on a War Powers Act resolution to put a leash on Trump. But in the same way that President George W. Bush found lawyers that assured him the president was authorized to order torture, so Trump supporters are denying the validity of any law restricting the White House’s warring. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) declared on Tuesday: “Many respected constitutional experts argue that the War Powers Act is itself unconstitutional. I'm persuaded by that argument. They think it's a violation of the Article 2 powers of the commander in chief.” Johnson is blocking any vote in the House of Representatives on that resolution.

Some Trump apologists are claiming that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), enacted in response to the 9/11 attacks, provides all the legal justification that Trump needed. Since President George W. Bush listed Iran as part of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address, that entitles subsequent presidents to scourge Iran forever. There was no justification for putting Iran in that 2002 trifecta, but lack of evidence rarely impedes presidential prattle.

Kamala’s ‘Freedom From Freedom’ Hoax

James BovardNovember 2, 2024

Do I Look Like a Russian Propagandist?

James BovardOctober 31, 2024

The Democrats’ Three-Decade War on Honest Voting

James BovardOctober 20, 2024

‘Trump-Washing’ U.S. History Endangers Our Freedom

James BovardOctober 1, 2024

Kamala’s Biggest Lie on Race and Inequality

James BovardAugust 27, 2024

Kamala glorifies Berkeley’s failed school busing regime, which leaves black students five years behind white students.

ggl 7 26

[### Freedom of Speech According to the Gospel of Koch

CounterPunch.org

https://www.counterpunch.org › ...](https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=211895)

Aug 18, 2021 — In other words, freedom is good, government is bad – the heart of the libertarian message. The truth will set you free. In a November 12 2020 op ...Read more

[### James Bovard Media Bias Rating

AllSides

https://www.allsides.com › news-source › james-bovard-...](https://www.allsides.com/news-source/james-bovard-media-bias)

James Bovard is a libertarian author whose work focuses on governmental abuses of power and corruption. He's been featured in major publications such as the ...Read more

Missing: koch ‎| Show results with: koch

[### Konkin on Libertarian Strategy

Mises Institute

https://mises.org › mises-daily › konkin-libertarian-strategy](https://mises.org/mises-daily/konkin-libertarian-strategy)

06/24/2026 • Mises Wire • James Bovard. James Bovard recently ventured near Washington's Reflecting Pool and reports on the current madness involving the ...Read more

[### Jim Bovard: Libertarian Muckraker

YouTube · misesmedia

3.3K+ views · 12 years ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd-0JGjARGc)

18:20

Jim Bovard talks with Jeff Deist about his incendiary career as a journalist, the American people as Mencken's "Booboisie", ...

Missing: koch ‎| Show results with: koch

[### Jim Bovard

The Libertarian Institute

https://libertarianinstitute.org › author › jbovard](https://libertarianinstitute.org/author/jbovard/)

2 days ago — Jim Bovard is a Senior Fellow for the Libertarian Institute and author of the newly published, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty ...

[### Public choice theory is crucial to understanding the ...

The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com › news › 2017/07/21](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/07/21/public-choice-theory-is-crucial-to-understanding-the-criminal-justice-system/)

Jul 21, 2017 — To borrow from the great writer and civil liberties advocate James Bovard, democracy might be helpful if a group of five can't decide what to ...Read more

[### Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF)

InfluenceWatch

https://www.influencewatch.org › non-profit › future-of-...](https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/future-of-freedom-foundation-fff/)

James Bovard is a policy advisor to FFF and an adjunct research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. Bovard is a USA Today columnist, a ...Read more

nepo baby

[### Restoring a Nation - Speakers | Institutes and Centers

Franciscan University of Steubenville

https://institutes.franciscan.edu › restoring-a-nation-speak...](https://institutes.franciscan.edu/restoring-a-nation-speakers/)

Rachel Bovard is senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a cohost of the Edmund Burke Foundation's NatCon Squad podcast. She has ...Read more

Missing: James ‎| Show results with: James

[### The roots of a young conservative in D.C. Rochester Beacon

https://rochesterbeacon.com › 2019/03/08 › the-roots-of-...](https://rochesterbeacon.com/2019/03/08/the-roots-of-a-young-conservative-in-d-c/)

Mar 8, 2019 — At 35, Rachel Bovard—who grew up in Dansville—has become a leading strategist and voice on the right in America. In a conversation ...

Missing: editor ‎| Show results with: editor

[### Who We Are

The American Conservative

https://www.theamericanconservative.com › who-we-are](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/who-we-are/)

O'Neill Jr. Rachel Bovard · Daniel McCarthy · Catharine O'Neill Gillihan ... Contributing Editors. Join. Subscribe · Donate. Info. FAQs · Customer Service ...Read more

[### Rachel Bovard

The American Conservative

https://www.theamericanconservative.com › author › rac...](https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/rachel-bovard/)

Rachel Bovard · National Conservatives are Fighting for You · Beside a Golden Door · Why Republicans Must Rethink Antitrust · Too Few of the President's Men.Read more

Missing: James ‎| Show results with: James

an 3 23

the no lnx

American Conservative (TAC) is cutting senior editor Rod Dreher's column was recently published for the last time after 12 years of success, Vanity Fair reports.

Per Vanity Fair, according to two sources familiar with the matter, the column's extensive stint —described as one of the most bizarre diatribes in opinion journalism — came to an end after "one particular reader" believed Dreher's posts "had simply gotten too weird."

Vanity Fair reports:

That disgruntled reader wasHoward Ahmanson Jr.,the heir to a California banking fortune and the sole benefactor of Dreher's six-figure salary at TAC, which is published by American Ideas Institute, a nonprofit. This unique funding arrangement—a single donor choosing to cover one writer's entire salary—was paired with an even more unusual editorial arrangement: Dreher was allowed to publish directly on TAC's site without any revisions or legal oversight, according to the two sources.

READ MORE: 'Not a difficult decision': Ohio paper nixes 'Dilbert' cartoon after Trump-supporting creator's racist rant

The sources noted the first clear "red flag" Dreher waved, in Ahmanson's opinion, occurred in 2021 when the writer published a blog "debating circumcision," saying, "All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that.”

Moreover, Vanity Fair reports:

He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is 'profoundly evil;' detailed the 'formal' Catholic exorcism of a friend's suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate's uncircumcised penis.

One of the knowledgeable sources paraphrased Ahmanson, saying, "At some point, he basically decided, 'This is too weird.'" He decided, "'I don't want to read this or pay for this anymore.'"

Dreher said he will likely carry his beloved blog to a Substack, while remaining an editor at large with TAC.

fox officially authoritarian?

yikes omg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/josh-hawley-love-america/

Sen. Hawley's Orwellian 'Love America Act' is part of the fascist campaign to rewrite history

no lx

Chauncey DeVega and Salon August 06, 2021

Donald Trump may no longer be president, but the American people are still stuck in a state of malignant normality that his presidency brought into being.

Psychologist John Gartner describes such a state of being this way:

Malignant normality is when a malignantly narcissistic leader takes control of society and gradually changes reality for everyone else. So their crazy internal reality becomes enacted in the lived true external reality of that society. This is how a leader can come in and change the mores of their society.

In his role as national cheerleader and secular priest, President Biden is trying to provide moral leadership and healing for a traumatized nation, still shell-shocked by the Trump movement's continuing assault on democracy and society.

Biden's efforts have provided only short-term relief. The neofascist threat is escalating;Biden and the Democrats have shown themselves largely impotent against it. The coronavirus pandemic is now resurgent because of a new variant and Trump's followers' refusal to be vaccinated.

For these and many other reasons — most notably, extreme wealth and income inequality and the global climate crisis — America is becoming a dystopia.

The collective emotional state of many Americans, or at least those who are paying attention and still care, is frustration and unease.

Malignant normality creates a playground for fascism and other forms of right-wing maleficence. The Jim Crow Republicans and other elements of the white right are taking advantage of this broken America to escalate their attacks on free speech, reason, truth, reality, human and civil rights and multiracial democracy by weaponizing the nearly meaningless term "critical race theory." (Yes, the term has a real meaning in academic discourse, but not as bandied about by Republicans in 2021.)

For the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley, the notorious Missouri Republican, such a crisis is a dream opportunity. Last week, Hawley proposed a bill called the Love America Act of 2021, which would deny federal funding to schools that teach the real history of America and the centrality of racism and white supremacy to the country's origins. The key text of this document reads:

RESTRICTION ON FEDERAL FUNDS FOR TEACHING THAT CERTAIN DOCUMENTS ARE PRODUCTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY OR RACISM — … [N]o Federal funds shall be provided to an educational agency or school that teaches that thePledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States is a product of white supremacy or racism.

Hawley's "Love America" bill is not a joke. It is a statement of shared principles and loyalty to an anti-democratic, racial-authoritarian movement that is winning victories all over the United States.

For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now mandating thoughtcrime surveys to determine the political beliefs of teachers and students in public colleges and universities.

Florida has also "banned" the teaching of "critical race theory" in public schools, and will permit — in practice, this may mean encourage — students to record classes without the knowledge or consent of their teachers. This potentialsurveillance is an obvious form of intimidation or threat against intellectual freedom, and specifically targeting teachers and other education professionals who are perceived as "liberal" and therefore "unfair" to conservatives.

The Republican-controlled Texas Senate has passed legislation overturning a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement be taught in public schools. That legislation would also remove a course requirement that the Ku Klux Klan should be condemned. As I wrote recently for Salon:

... the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Project and "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."

Tennessee has proposed fining school districts at least $1 million if a teacher "willingly violates" state laws against discussing racism, white privilege or sexism in class. Education Week reports, "Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel 'guilt or anguish' because of past actions committed by their race or sex." Similar forms of censorship will be imposed in Oklahoma, where "educators could have their teaching licenses suspended or revoked and schools could lose accreditation if an investigation finds evidence that they taught about racism and sexism in ways that violated the law." Parents in that state will be allowed "to inspect curriculum, instructional materials, classroom assignments, and lesson plans to 'ensure compliance.'"

These attacks on the teaching of actual history are an Orwellian attempt to control both the present and the future in order to remake America as an apartheid regime. Realpolitik is also in play here: Facing changing demographics and political unpopularity, Republicans seek to use a larger culture-war strategy to win elections and hold onto power by any means possible.

White supremacists and other right-wing ideologues, in the longer view, want to destroy public education and replace it with their own propaganda indoctrination program. One important element is "racial erasure," in which the truth about American history is replaced with fantasies of white innocence, white nobility and white supremacy.

As Clint Smith writes in the Atlantic, for many so-called conservatives, "history isn't the story of what actually happened; it is just the story they want to believe. It is not a public story we all share, but an intimate one, passed down like an heirloom, that shapes their sense of who they are. Confederate history is family history, history as eulogy, in which loyalty takes precedence over truth."

Perhaps most important, the right-wing moral panic over "critical race theory" is a way of to erase from public memory the struggle waged by Black Americans for centuries to defeat white supremacy in its various forms. To that point, chattel slavery and theJim Crow regime were America's native forms of fascism. Black people defeated those forces and in doing so saved American democracy from its own worst impulses. To erase the Black Freedom Struggle is to make the case that American fascism will be victorious and that resistance is futile.

It is also crucial to understand that America's state of malignant normality is not isolated or unique, but is part of a neofascist attack by the global right on multiracial and multiethnic democracy around the world. As de facto spokesman for the American white right, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has taken a pilgrimage to Hungary, now under the one-party rule of Viktor Orbán, who has become a role model for the Jim Crow Republican Party and the American neofascist movement.

Orbán has created a fake democracy in Hungary, where elections still occur and tepid opposition is permitted, but in practice he can remain in power indefinitely. He has silenced the free press, crushed any serious democratic opposition, encouraged political violence against his regime's "enemies" and attacked colleges, universities and other centers of learning. The obvious goal is to silence dissent and produce obedient and compliant citizens who do not seek to exercise critical thinking or speak back to power.

In an essay for Vox this week, Zack Beauchamp discusses the larger significance of Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest:

In his Monday monologue, Carlson told his listeners that they should pay attention to Hungary "if you care about Western civilization, and democracy, and family — and the ferocious assault on all three of those things by leaders of our global institutions." He tweeted out a friendly photo with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and is confirmed to speak at a government-supported conference in Budapest on Saturday. ...

[R]ight-wing observers, typically social conservatives and nationalists, see Orbán's willingness to use state power against the LGBT community, academics, the press, and immigrants as an example of how conservatives can fight back against left-wing cultural power. They either deny Fidesz's authoritarian streak or, more chillingly, argue that it's necessary to defeat the left — a chilling move at a time when the GOP is waging war on American democracy, using tactics eerily reminiscent of the ones Fidesz successfully deployed against Hungary's democratic institutions.

Beauchamp observes that the "Republican turn against democracy" and the American right's growing interest in Orbán's Hungary, expressed with unusual frankness and eloquence by Rod Dreher of the American Conservative, "is in significant part fueled by the right's sense of leftist ascendancy — heightened by electoral defeats in 2008 and 2020 and strengthened by defeat in culture war battles like same-sex marriage":

This, ultimately, is what makes Carlson's pilgrimage to Budapest so worrying. The Fox host's massive following gives him unusual power to set the terms of the conversation on the right; when he talks, Republicans from Trump on down listen. His bear hug embrace of Orbán could not only bring the Dreher view out into the open but also strengthen its influence over the GOP.

Republicans today aren't directly imitating Orbán; they have their own anti-democratic playbook, drawn from all-American sources. Carlson's active embrace of Hungary's strongman risks making that connection more direct, giving Republicans more ideas for how to seize control and a more powerful sense of justification in doing so.

For those who believed that Biden's election could clear the haze and wake the American people up from the living nightmare of the Trump regime, these last seven months have been increasingly painful. And now the pandemic's third wave arrives as a gut punch to them as well. Biden and other Democratic leaders still appear obsessed with "bipartisanship" and to this point have refused to act with the "urgency of now" to fight back against Republican attacks on Black and brown people's right to vote. Even under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice seems to be protecting Donald Trump instead of investigating and prosecuting him for his crimes against democracy. The overall effect is like being smothered.

Conditions are likely to get worse — perhaps much worse, with Republicans likely to recapture one or both houses of Congress in 2022 and Trump likely to return as a presidential candidate in 2024 — before they get better.

To survive and triumph over American neofascism Americans' well of endless optimism must be fortified with something more durable and realistic, such as the formula suggested by Italian philosopher and activistAntonio Gramsci: "optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect." In Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks,"he wrote: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

That is precisely where Americans find themselves now: The waking nightmare of the Age of Trump, from which we have not escaped, is one such "morbid symptom." Recognizing that truth may make it possible to return to full political and social consciousness, and begin the real work of repairing and rebuilding American democracy.

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PragerU cloaks its extremism in a veneer of respectability, and that’s crucial to its success.

The site, founded in 2011, is known for its polished and persuasive five-minute videos. Some videos focus on history, like the legacy of Christopher Columbus (apparently he’s gotten a bad rap) or the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt (the “New Deal” actually made things worse). Others tackle ongoing issues dividing the world such as religion (the West can thank “Judeo-Christian values” for its success) or the push for a $15 minimum wage (a bad idea!).

If you didn’t know much about the specific presenters, their bios give the impression that many of them are relatively mainstream right-leaning media figures. For instance, PragerU has videos hosted by multiple Pulitzer Prize winners, popular TV hosts, sports journalists, current and former Washington Post columnists, a Canadian former prime minister, a five-time Emmy Award winner, a nominee tohead the Labor Department, atwo-time presidential candidate, a former White House press secretary, as well as current and former faculty at respected institutions such as West Point, Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, and Princeton, among others.

Some of the site’s videos are … well, they’re fine. Comedian Yakov Smirnoff hosts a clip about the importance of laughter in healthy relationships. Col. Ty Seidule delivers a straightforward answer to the question of whether or not the Civil War was really about slavery (he says it was). Other clips, such as Adam Carolla’s ode to personal change, J:{ordan Peterson:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:’s call to “fix yourself,” or Michele Tafoya’s “secret to success,” are just boilerplate self-help speeches we’ve all probably heard dozens of variations on in our lives. It’s the combination of respectable-sounding presenters with a handful of harmless clips that cover for the site’s hard-right ideology.

[pix From PragerU's February 2014 video, "Feminism 2.0."

Peterson’s “Fix Yourself” video is a perfect example of PragerU’s ability to use gateway videos to pivot to something much darker.

Peterson posted “Fix Yourself” -- a standard clip about self-reflection and improvement -- in January 2018. But a few months later, he came up with a video titled “Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids,” in which he rails against professors who are “indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology.”

These people “have made it their life's mission to undermine Western civilization itself, which they regard as corrupt, oppressive, and patriarchal.” This “gang of nihilists,” as Peterson puts it, is made up of “post-modern neo-Marxists” whose ideas “should be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

Peterson’s views make him an extremist, and he’s far from the only one with a PragerU platform. YouTuber Steven Crowder’s video about Columbus Day engages in wild historical revisionism and claims that criticizing Columbus is “an exercise in hating Western civilization, which is really just an exercise in hating yourself.” The site posted (and later deleted) a video by slur-slinging right-wing conspiracy theorist Owen Benjamin demonizing leftists. Author Douglas Murray appeared in a video claiming that the decision of European countries to take in refugees from the Middle East and North Africa was a form of “suicide, the self-annihilation of a culture.” Ben Shapiro’s treatise on Western superiority was built upon bad facts and bad arguments. Shapiro’s Daily Wire colleagues Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles,and Matt Walsh railed against feminism, political correctness, and the very concept of self-esteem, respectively.

It’s no huge surprise that PragerU’s content often mirrors the views long championed by its namesake, Dennis Prager, a radio-host-turned-digital media mogul.

No one article can truly encapsulate Prager’s decades of political commentary, but he did a pretty decent job summarizing his own worldview in a March column in the National Review. In the piece, he explained why he didn’t believe the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to disrupt the 2016 election:

But the biggest reason I never believed the Russian collusion charge was that the charge emanated from the left. And the Left lies about everything. Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. People on the left say whatever advances their immediate agenda. Power is their moral lodestar; therefore, truth is always subservient to it.

…

If you always doubt a leftist claim, you will almost always be closer to the truth. I employed that rule in concluding the collusion story was a fraud, and it served me well.

There’s a big difference between critical thinking and reflexive contrarianism. A 2011 blog post shines further light on how Prager sees the world:

Ever since I attended college, I have been convinced that either “studies” confirm what common sense suggests or that they are mistaken. I realized this when I was presented with study after study showing that boys and girls were not inherently different from one another, and they acted differently only because of sexist upbringings.

To Prager, if evidence doesn’t support his existing beliefs, the evidence must be wrong. This is instructive when it comes to understanding what kind of education one might get from a diet of PragerU videos.

Like many of his PragerU presenters, Prager himself is a far-right extremist on a number of issues. He’s claimed that theGreen New Deal “will lead to bloodshed, loss of liberty, loss of human rights.” He has a long history of making false claims about HIV and AIDS -- specifically that it’s not something straight people need to concern themselves with. 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. He’s argued that legalizing same-sex marriage would open the door to legalized incest and polygamy, compared the Supreme Court’s Prop 8 ruling to a coup, and said that banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity would lead to “fascism.” He’s also one of several conservative commentators who were adamant that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard wasn’t motivated by anti-gay hate.

He’s stated a belief that people saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas” is a sign that “Americans today are less free than at any time since the abolition of slavery (with the obvious exception of blacks under Jim Crow).” Prager also argues that discussion of campus rape culture is “a gargantuan lie” pushed by feminists “to get votes.” In 2012, Prager equated the NCAA’s punishment of Penn State University for its role in covering for assistant coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial sexual abuse of young boys with the act itself, writing, “The lesson the NCAA is teaching young people — that history and truth don’t matter if enough powerful people don’t want them to matter — can be as injurious to society as the cover-up was to the victims of Sandusky.” In 2006, he wrote a column arguing that Rep.-elect Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim, should not be allowed to be sworn into Congress unless he did so with his hand on the Bible, not the Quran as he planned on doing. In that column, Prager compared the Quran to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.

[pix From PragerU's November 2016 video, "Just Say 'Merry Christmas.'"

PragerU's funding largely comes from extremely religious GOP mega-donors with ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Thanks in large part to the backing of fracking billionaires and Daily Wire funders Dan and Farris Wilks, Prager was able to fund PragerU, creating an outsized platform for his extremist views.

An April 2015 report in Rewire put a spotlight on the organization and its plan to get its videos incorporated into public school lessons. At that time, according to Rewire, the Wilks family had given more than $6.5 million to PragerU. A brief look at some of their beliefs shows why they made for such a perfect fit for Prager:

In 2013, at a Pastors and Pews event sponsored by the American Family Association, Dan Wilks had this to say about education: “I just think we have to make people aware, you know, and bring the Bible back into the school, and start teaching our kids at a younger age, and, uh, you know, and focus on the younger generation.”

His brother Farris went on to add: “They’re being taught the other ideas, the gay agenda,every day out in the world so we have to stand up and explain to them that that’s not real, that’s not proper, it’s not right.”

A Reuters report about the brothers’ support of Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign helped further illustrate their extreme positions on things like LGBTQ rights and climate change:

In sermons, recordings of which were reviewed by Reuters, Farris Wilks has called homosexuality “a perversion tantamount to bestiality, pedophilia and incest.” “It’s a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children, and straight people having kids, to fulfill their sexual habits,” he said.

Climate change, he says, is God’s will. “If (God) wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” he told congregants at a service in July 2013.

With large chunks of money coming in from these extremely religious GOP mega-donors with ties to the fossil fuel industry, it’s not exactly shocking that the site would have videos with titles like “Climate Change:What’s So Alarming?” “Do 97% of Climate Scientists Really Agree?” “The Paris Climate Agreement Won’t Change the Climate,” “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” and “The Truth about CO2.” PragerU also has an entire series about the Ten Commandments, which Dennis Prager describes as “all that is necessary to make a good world.” And George Will, Kimberley Strassel, and David French all have videos explaining why campaign finance reform and/or public disclosure laws are actually tyrannical, anti-democratic, and/or a way for progressives to ruin the lives of people they disagree with.

[pix]From PragerU's January 2017 video, "What’s Holding the Arab World Back?"

PragerU’s extremist, factually inaccurate propaganda has even drawn criticism from some on the right.

Whether it’s gaslighting viewers about President Donald Trump’s “very fine people” comments after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally or engaging in some truly bizarre Vietnam War revisionism, PragerU has no apparent problem with blatant misinformation in its videos. Some of these distortions are too much for allies (and occasional allies) to handle.

Writing in The American Conservative, Paul Gottfried slammed a PragerU video by Dinesh D’Souza for labeling fascism a leftist worldview based on a factually bereft understanding of Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile’s belief system:

[Prager and D’Souza] zoom to the heart of Gentile’s neo-Hegelian worldview in thirty seconds and state with absolute certainty that he was a “leftist.” We have to assume that Prager, D’Souza and the rest of their crowd know this intuitively, inasmuch they give no indication of having ever read a word of Gentile’s thought, perhaps outside of a few phrases that they extracted from his Doctrine of Fascism. Their judgment also clashes with that of almost all scholars of Gentile’s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.

According to our two stars in what has been laughably named “Prager University,” Gentile proves that “fascism bears a deep kinship to today’s Left.” After all, “Democrat progressives, in full agreement with Gentile, love and push for a centralized state, which manifests itself in stuff like recent state expansion into the private sector.” Among the questions that are left begging are these: “Do the modern Left and Gentile agree on the purpose and functions of the state?” “Would Gentile and Mussolini, who glorified Roman manliness, have rallied to the present Left in its support of feminism and gay marriage?” Did Gentile back in the 1920s favor the kind of “the stuff’ the administrative state is pushing right now?” The answer to all these questions, which of course wouldn’t be acceptable at Prager University, is an emphatic “no.” Control of the national economy by the Italian fascist state, down until its German-puppet version was established as the Italian Social Republic in September 1943, was about the equivalent of that of New Deal America.

In a blog post for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, Alex Nowrasteh picked apart a PragerU video narrated by Michelle Malkin titled “A Nation of Immigration,” saying it is “poorly framed, rife with errors and half-truths, leaves out a lot of relevant information, and comes to an anti-legal immigration conclusion that is unsupported by the evidence presented in the rest of the video.” While it’s unsurprising that the pro-immigration Cato Institute would disagree with Malkin’s conclusions on ideological grounds, Nowrasteh’s dissection of Malkin’s factual errors is illustrative of PragerU’s reliance on omission to advance its narrative.

Reason’s Billy Binion has obliterated PragerU’s claims of censorship on multiple occasions.In one article, he rebutted Prager’s argument that “YouTube's decision to restrict approximately 20 percent of his online 5-minute video shorts on the grounds that they contain mature content -- thus hiding those videos from the approximately 1.5 percent of users who elect for restricted control” was evidence that PragerU was being punished for hosting “a conservative perspective”:

Unfortunately for this argument, Google records show that the Huffington Post, Vox, Buzzfeed, NowThis, and The Daily Show all have much larger swaths of content restricted under YouTube's policy. Seventy-one percent of videos from The Young Turks -- a leftist channel -- are blocked, dwarfing PragerU's share.

In a separate piece, Binion debunked Prager’s claims that Google search’s autofill suggestions were evidence of bias against PragerU.

It’s not enough to just say that PragerU isn’t an actual university. It’s outright propaganda, and those appearing on the channel are propagandists.

As an institution, PragerU has proved to be toxic, and it should be best understood as -- as its “About Us” page notes -- a “digital marketing campaign.” If one of Prager University’s goals really is to “[make] the world a better place, five minutes at a time,” it deserves a failing grade for its current output.