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SEE THREE 3 26

see main dennis

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see ryan walters okla school sup

SHILL LOMBORG PATRICK MOORE LINDZEN KOONIN

JORDAN PETERSON

KIRK FARAGE

ALEX EPSTIEN CO2 BS

DONORS TRUST BRADLEY

CHEVRON WILKES FRACK

PJT 2025 KEVIN ROBERTS

SCAIFE SEARLE ADELSON

ANNA PAULINA LUNA?

VICTOR HANSEN

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see WOD4

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tag https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager

rww tag  PragerU

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ALDEN TRAVIS ? FAKE SELF INVEST 6 26

I Hate PragerU | Short Documentary - YouTube

PragerU on X: "PragerU staff team arriving in Seattle for our court hearing tomorrow against Google and YouTube.Tune in tomorrow!#StandWithPragerU https://t.co/jXVEWHe5Ae" / X

SAT AUG 27 2019 SEATTLE

So, our executive director, Alan Estrin,

5:52

5 minutes, 52 seconds

She seems friendly. The 20th century was the most murderous century in recorded history. And who did all this killing?

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5 minutes, 59 seconds

Big governments. Evil individuals without power can do only so much harm.

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6 minutes, 4 seconds

But when evil individuals take control of a big government, the amount of harm they can do is essentially unlimited.

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6 minutes, 12 seconds

Hey, here's that sparkling water for you. Thank you so much. Yeah, of course.

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6 minutes, 15 seconds

The right fears big government. The left fears big [music] business. But Coca-Cola can't break into your house or

6:23

6 minutes, 23 seconds

confiscate your wealth. Only big government can do that. As irresponsible as any big business has ever been, it is

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6 minutes, 30 seconds

only big government that can build concentration camps and commit genocide. Seven. That actually kind of made sense.

...

BLK DUDE XAVIER

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9 minutes, 10 seconds

I understand that you see PragerU, you might think it's a racist organization or bigoted. I tried to look into it and one, there's no racism here. There's no

bigotry here. And everything is rooted in facts [music] and truth. You can see our sources. We have them listed out all over our website. And for me to be able

9:26

9 minutes, 26 seconds

to see the receipts that [music] told me everything I needed to know. I mean, funny enough, I was basically in your position like 3 to 5 years ago [music]

DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH

...

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8 minutes, 45 seconds

I [music] want the next generation of kids to be able to question, to be very curious and learning about our history.

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8 minutes, 52 seconds

or 20 minute videos would be four times as great and effective. Just something to think about.

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8 minutes, 59 seconds

No matter what your perspective is, left or right or in between, it's raising Americans who understand that through our differences, we are one nation.

Marissa StrEIt

...

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11 minutes, 15 seconds

Well, we're really looking to educate everybody. [music] Everybody should have an opportunity to hear different perspectives to learn about America and and why America is so prosperous.

...

CRITICS VOX THEY ARE INTOLERANT FAKE NEWS

BAD POEMS IN PK HOMELESS DUDE

MY NAME ALDEN

ANTI SEM WHITE NAT’L

Louisiana House bill call Prageru anti-Semitic if it's clearly not true?

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15 minutes, 49 seconds

Allan, Marissa, Jill, Xavier, they all put on a nice show for me. I'll give them that much. But I know they're hiding something. I need to talk to

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15 minutes, 57 seconds

someone who has seen Prageru from the inside, but isn't on the inside of Prageru and isn't afraid to talk. Dave,

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16 minutes, 5 seconds

hi. Uh, thanks so much for taking the time. Hey, Alden. Glad we could make it work.

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16 minutes, 11 seconds

All right, let's just start here. You were progressive once, like a real one. Like Young Turks progressives.

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16 minutes, 18 seconds

My name is Dave Rubin. I am the newest host here on the Young [music] Turks Network. We're doing a show called The Reuben Report.

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16 minutes, 25 seconds

Now you're Mr. Liberty. What happened to you?

BS PRAGER INVEST 6 26 PUBLIC SCHOOLS BRAINWASH

CRITICS JEALOUS OF CLICKS

BRANDON TATUM AA

KNOWLES ELDER

FEAR MOST, NOT SPOZED TO TALK TO THESE PPL; NOT --> RW, JUST REG GUY TRYING TO FIGURE OUT; ASKES FOR JOB; NO CREDITS.

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MMA

The newest distorted history lessons of PragerU Kids

New videos include stories downplaying racism, pushing climate and science misinformation, and spreading other right-wing narratives

Written by Sophie Lawton

Published 03/17/26

In 2023, Media Matters performed a comprehensive review of all the videos shared to the PragerU Kids YouTube channel and found examples of distorted history and right-wing talking points. Recently, media observers have noted that PragerU Kids is “primed to capitalize” on the loss of the now-defunded PBS, so we reviewed videos posted to the YouTube channel over the last two years.

IFrame Content

In this updated review, we did not include PragerU Kids' more benign video series, such as "Street Smarts," in which two hosts ask children on the street basic trivia questions about politics. Other series on the channel we omitted from this review, like "Cash Course" and "Unboxed," include basic advice or trivia about various topics. Instead, we focused on series and videos most likely to include divisive or untrue content based on our previous analysis, such as the “Leo and Layla” series and videos on topics like immigration and science. PragerU Kids has proven it has no issue using its content to spread right-wing and false narratives, no matter what the topic may be.

Since our original review in 2023, the organization has doubled down on these themes. We concluded that new PragerU Kids videos downplayed systemic racism, rejected multiculturalism, understated the European role in slavery and consequences of colonialism, demonized communism and socialism, spread climate and science misinformation, and promoted religion in schools.

PragerU is a media organization founded in 2009 by conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager that produces right-wing propaganda videos. In 2021, the organization launched PragerU Kids, a vertical aimed at creating content for children's education.

PragerU Kids now claims to be “approved educational resource” in 11states, and in 2025 the organization partnered with the Trump administration to host a “Founders Museum” exhibit at the White House. Some of the videos we analyzed also contained narratives that parallel the administration’s agenda on immigration, education, and climate. The organization is also workingwith the America 250 Civics Education Coalition to provide content for their Freedom Truck Mobile Museums celebrating the 250th anniversary of America.

Attacking post-apartheid efforts in South Africa

In its newer videos, PragerU Kids suggests that post-apartheid efforts in South Africa are unfair and harmful, that police violence can be avoided in traffic stops if the driver has a “good attitude,” that in post-slavery America everyone knows prejudice is “a terrible thing,” and that DEI is “hurting the people it claims to help.”

South Africa: Lwazi’s Hard Lesson," a video from the “Around the World” series, centers on a young Black boy, Lwazi, who is torn between two different explanations for South Africa’s enduring inequality. On one side are Lwazi's parents, who believe that “different rules for blacks and whites,” or affirmative action, are at the root of the nation’s problems. On the other is Lwazi’s older brother, who believes “racism remains the reason so many blacks have remained in poverty” and “blamed whites, specifically farmers and landowners, for all the country’s problems.”

But when Lwazi makes a new white friend, he learns the “truth,” including that “not all white people were rich,” and that some had “faced hardship and large numbers were leaving the country because of safety fears.”

The video ends with a group of Black South Africans protecting a white neighborhood from a mob of young men “looking for trouble” that includes Lwazi's brother, who attacks Lwazi’s white friend and then disappears. The video concludes that “the efforts tried” to improve the country, “like rewarding people for their skin color and not ability, have failed and are leading to South Africa’s destruction.”

:{:{Video}:

Citation

From a September 18, 2024, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "South Africa: Lwazi’s Hard Lesson"

Despite the video’s claims that white South Africans are fleeing the country for their safety, according to police data from South Africa, “most victims of rural crime are Black.” White South Africans currently make up 7% of the population and own approximately 70% of the land in the country. Though the Trump administration has proliferated claims of a genocide against white South Africans, a court there ruled this year that such claims are “not real” and “clearly imagined.”

A “How To” video posted in August 2023 titled How To Handle Getting Pulled Over" claims, “A lot of people think that if they get pulled over they're going to be needlessly handcuffed or bullied by a police officer.” The video then depicts a police officer holding a driver down on the hood of a car and questioning him aggressively and notes that such a situation “is not going to happen. The officer is just trying to do his job without getting killed.”

The video also puts the onus on the driver to make interactions with police officers safe and has a section titled “Control Your Attitude” where the narrator claims, “If you want your interaction with the officer to go smoothly, you need to have a good attitude.”

The organization Mapping Police Violence says 9% of police killings in 2025 began with traffic stops. In recent years, police officers' handling of traffic stops has come under scrutiny for use of excessive force, with Black Americans, in particular, dying “in disproportionate numbers from police violence.”

A video from the “Leo & Layla”series with Benjamin Banneker, a famous Black mathematician and naturalist, depicts the children telling Banneker that “by our time, slavery is abolished and is fully understood as evil, and prejudice is known as a terrible thing,” and Banneker responding, “People in my time are being judged by the color of our skin. Hearing from you that America will grow out of this terrible prejudice is comforting.” In reality, a 2025 survey found that “most Americans say there is at least some discrimination against Black, Hispanic and Asian people.”

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Citation

From a February 23, 2024, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Benjamin Banneker: Surveying The Future of America"

PragerU Kids goes after DEI programs in an “Around the World”video set in Chicago. The narrator opens the video by claiming that since diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were implemented, “academic achievement has sunk, classrooms have turned more violent, and schools in tough areas are nowhere near equal to those in nice neighborhoods.” The voiceover asks, “Is it possible that DEI is hurting the people it claims to help?”

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Citation

From a March 28, 2025, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Chicago"

This video also accuses colleges of teaching future educators that “students' grades and behavior are determined by things like skin color or what neighborhood they live in,” that tests aren't “sensitive to all students,” and that requiring correct answers is “actually racist.”

Some of the PragerU Kids videos tell stories of other children around the world learning to reject multicultural societies or embrace strong borders and measures like Brexit.

One “Around the World” video tells thestory of a Colombian teen trying to assist migrants crossing the Darién Gap, ending with the message that “unsecured borders bring crime, violence, and suffering” and “strong borders are more humane.” The story echoes the anti-immigration agenda of the Trump administration.

:{:{Video}:

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From a January 22, 2025, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Colombia: Sofia Survives the Border"

Another “Around the World”video opens with a narrator complaining about the “multicultural suburbs” of France losing their “love of country” and claiming France's “Western ideals are in jeopardy.” The narrator asks, “Can this proud nation survive the division it's facing?”

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Citation

From a December 5, 2024, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "France: Andre Loves His Homeland"

The video also features a Black French boy, Andre, who gets into a quarrel with his immigrant friends because he thinks they are not patriotic enough. The narrator states, “His friends and their families accuse many French traditions of being racist and think French culture is often hostile towards customs from their homelands.”

The main conflict of the video involves a teacher who doesn’t condemn a ban on some “Muslim head and facial coverings.” Andre supports his teacher's views, but after he is pressured by his friends to steal from his teacher, the teacher makes Andre visit a museum where he learns about famous people who moved to France “to accept and benefit from its cultures and traditions.” Then Andre “had to admit that newcomers assimilating to French society was the right thing to do.”

The themes of nationalism and rejection of multicultural societies continue in London: Alistair Understands Brexit." In this video the narrator argues that immigrants used to assimilate to British culture, but “some of today's immigrants come with different expectations.” Main character Alistair wonders “how can the U.K. maintain its culture and traditions with unlimited new arrivals who don't want to adapt.” The video seems to suggest that citizens of the United Kingdom should be “British through and through,” like Alistair's friend whose parents immigrated from India but assimilated to British culture.

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Citation

From a March 22, 2024, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "London: Alistair Understands Brexit"

The video also pushes pro-Brexit talking points about taxes and business, explaining that being part of the European Union “means more paperwork and taxes” for Alistair's parents’ business, costs the U.K. a lot, and involves the U.K. in an “external” governing body that “may have other priorities or agendas unrelated to the United Kingdom’s well-being.” It argues that Brexit would give the U.K. “national sovereignty” and “full control over immigration, security, and a visa system.”

“Leaving the EU is a vote of confidence in the U.K.’s ability to govern and protect itself,” the video continues, with Alistair speaking up in favor of Brexit in his class and getting bullied on his school cricket team. He ultimately leaves that team and joins a “scrappy new club team” that doesn’t have EU-associated fees and the family toasts a “new beginning” for his family, his team, and the country.

One “Leo & Layla”adventure takes the siblings to Mississippi in 1943 to meet Sadao Munemori, a Japanese American World War II soldier, who teaches them how to “be a victor, not a victim,” despite his family’s imprisonment in an internment camp.

Munemori tells Leo and Layla, “My heart does hurt that many Japanese Americans have lost everything, including their freedoms and dignity,” but “I was equally outraged at the attack on my country” when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

The video suggests Munemori enlisted in the U.S. military as an act of patriotism after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but in reality he enlisted prior to the attack. Munemori sacrificed his life for his fellow soldiers in April 1945 and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

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Citation

From a September 8, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Sadao Munemori: Patriotism in the Midst of Persecution"

Multiple videos in the channel downplay both the role the United States and Europe played in slavery and the consequences of colonization.

In avideo from the “Leo & Layla” series, Layla is struggling to write an essay for school about slavery. Layla calls it a “heavy topic” and says, “It's hard to even think there was a time when people in our country owned slaves.”

Leo replies, “Yeah, I know, but weren't there also some really good people from the West who did a lot to end slavery?”

The pair then head back in time to speak with William Wilberforce about his work to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

This video downplays Europe's central role in the slave trade, saying, “People who [had] been forced into slavery by tribes in Africa [were] then sold to merchants from Great Britain and other countries.”

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, “Slavery had existed in Africa prior to this point, but this new commodification of human beings by European powers was entirely unique and it drastically changed the African concept of enslavement.”

Wilberforce also states that slavery has “been a part of every society throughout history.”

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Citation

From a November 15, 2024, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "William Wilberforce: Ending the Slave Trade"

Although the video attempts to downplay Britain's role, in reality, in Wilberforce's 1798 speech on the abolition of the slave trade, he squarely puts the blame on himself and “the whole Parliament of Great Britain” for the slave trade. He asserts: “We are all guilty. We ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others.”

Layla's takeaway from the conversation with PragerU's version of Wilberforce is that “we all know that slavery was a horrible practice and part of Western history, but that doesn't change the fact that Great Britain and the United States were some of the first nations to end this horrible institution.” In fact, many countries outlawed slavery before the United States, including Mexico, Britain, France, and Denmark.

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Citation

From a November 15, 2024, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "William Wilberforce: Ending the Slave Trade"

The minimization of Europe and America's role in slavery has featured in previous “Leo & Layla” videos with Christopher Columbus and Booker T. Washington as well.

PragerU Kids co-creator Jill Simonian hosts “Craftory,” described as a series dedicated to “American history made fun for young kids with easy, family-friendly, DIY crafts.” In one such video, titled George Washington Carver Peanut Puppet," Simonian tells the story of Black agricultural scientist George Washington Carver, giving only a passing mention to the role of slavery in his life.

“His childhood was not easy,” she says. “He was forced to work as a slave, but he loved learning, set goals, and grew up to be a leader who changed the farming industry.” She calls slavery just one of “many challenges” Carver faced before becoming a student.

In a video from the “Otto's Tales” series titled Let's Visit a California Mission," Simonian claims the missions were built “with the goal of spreading Christianity to the Native Americans here” and that the missions “taught the natives about God, farming, building, and many other important skills for everyday life.” In reality, the California missions were known for enslaving and brutalizing Native Americans.

One “Craftory” video titled Native American Powwow Drum" also glosses over the violence European settlers committed against Native Americans. Simonian tells the story of Thanksgiving and the video ends: “They didn't always get along. It took time and sometimes a lot of fighting. Everyone had to learn to trade skill and customs to survive and create the most free country on Earth, our United States of America.”

Native Americans were massacred, forcibly removed, and enslaved by European settlers.

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Citation

From a November 7, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Native American Powwow Drum"

A new series released at the end of 2025, “Trailblazers of America,” consists of videos about historical American pioneers and glorifies the colonization of America, demonizes indigenous tribes, and conveniently omits violence perpetrated by the settlers in question. In avideo about Johnny Appleseed, the narrator describes indigenous land as “hundreds of thousands of miles of wilderness that could be turned into productive farmland” by settlers, using this as justification for the Northwest Indian War. In videos about California settlersJohn Sutter andJohn C. Frémont, PragerU simply ignores that Sutter used enslaved indigenous people to build and maintain his fort town and that Frémont led a massacre against the Wintu tribe on the banks of the Sacramento River. Six of the seven videos in the series have over 1 million views on PragerU Kids’ YouTube channel.

The channel also dedicates videos to promoting the state of Israel and its founding while completely omitting any mention of Palestine or Palestinians.

Two “Leo & Layla” videos feature prominent figures in Israel’s history, Theodor Herzl and Menachem Begin, who share with the siblings their vision for a Jewish ethnoreligious state of Israel.

When Leo and Laylameet Herzl in Switzerland prior to the first Zionist Congress, he tells the pair he has “invited Jewish delegates here” for the congress to create “a country for ourselves in our ancient homeland,” later adding, “This land [Israel] was promised to us by God, and our holy city Jerusalem was selected by him.”

When Leo and Laylavisit Begin during the signing of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Begin also calls Israel “a land promised to us by God,” tells the children that “even when I was a young lad in Poland I dreamed of helping my people return to the promised land and establish a modern state in Israel's ancient home,” and says that “we were very fortunate and determined, and now the country of Israel is thriving.”

Begin bemoans that “most of our neighbors don't like us very much” and when asked why, he rewrites history, claiming when the modern state of Israel was created, “many Arabs living in the area didn't like that” and “many of them fled because they were worried about war. We were willing to let them stay and become citizens of Israel, but they left for other countries … and those countries have started wars against us.”

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Citation

From an October 20, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Menachem Begin & Anwar Sadat: Israel & Egypt's Treaty"

Multiple videos on the PragerU Kids channel are dedicated to portraying opposition to communism and socialism as the animating force in politics, with one figure likening communism to a teacher “forcing” students to be equal.

When Leo and Layla travel back in time to 1983 and talk toPope John Paul II, he tells them that Poland is currently “fighting the ultimate injustice” — “the major evil that is communism.”

Layla claims that she has heard “a lot about communism and socialism on the news back home” and “a lot of younger people really want the United States to try it.”

The pope is horrified, warning the children that communism “is a political system that does not recognize God” and “destroys countries” as “societies collapse morally, intellectually, and economically.”

“To a communist, it is fair when nobody is free to rise above what the government allows,” the PragerU pope declares.

“That makes me think about what’s happening at my school,” replies Leo, who complains about his teacher changing the grading scale to benefit more students and compares it to communism.

“My teacher is sort of forcing all of us to be equal and thinks that lowering the standards will help struggling students do better, and I think that’s totally unfair,” he says.

The pope calls it “a great comparison” and agrees with Layla that “some young Americans don’t realize how good we actually have it.”

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Citation

From an August 25, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Pope John Paul II: The Pope Who Stood Against Communism"

A pair of “Around the World” videos published in 2025, Venezuela: Vivi's Life under Socialism" and Cuba: Tito’s Trouble with Communism," continue the theme.

“Socialism is a system where citizens do not own anything individually,” claims the narrator in the Venezuela video. “Eventually, all socialist countries face serious scarcity of basic needs, such as medicine and food. … Every country that has tried socialism ends up with these problems.”

In the video on Cuba, a character states, “More people than ever before are waking up to the evils of communism, and that's a really good thing.”

In a video making the case for capitalism, titled Peru: Carlos Climbs the Ladder," the narrator claims that “Peru used to be very poor, with socialist governments tightly controlling the mines through a planned economy,” and redistributing wealth through taxes “discouraged work and hindered economic growth.” The video goes on to claim privatization of the copper mines led to “incredible results.”

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From an August 16, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Peru: Carlos Climbs the Ladder"

The Peru video also criticizes protests against mining, claiming the companies made a deal for the land with indigenous Peruvians who later “changed their minds.” It also villainizes protesters, claiming that “stopping production would affect not only the families of all the miners, but Peru's entire economy as well.”

Protests at Peru's Las Bambas copper mine have been frequent since 2015 and are often focused on environmental impacts of the mine or lack of compensation for local communities.

Other PragerU Kids channel videos downplay climate change and offer a slanted take on science.

A video titled Netherlands: Florian Feeds the World" is about the government of the Netherlands capping farmers' greenhouse gas emissions — specifically nitrogen — and the farmers' revolt that followed.

The video claims that “farmers know that the right amount of nitrogen is essential for growing strong, healthy crops,” noting that Dutch crops “feed people across Europe and as far away as China,” and that limiting the use of nitrogen could result in starvation.

Donald Trump made the same claim in a 2022 speech when speaking about the Dutch nitrogen crisis and denying climate change, saying efforts to protect the environment will lead to “famine and starvation.” In reality, the climate crisis itself is expected to be a direct cause of food shortages and famines.

Jill Simonian reads a story for the “Otto’s Tales” series titled Let's Visit an Alaskan Glacier" in which animals from Alaska downplay climate change and its effects on the planet.

One orca tells the other characters, “The ice is always changing and moving. It would take hundreds of years for these glaciers to completely melt.”

A polar bear voices similar sentiments, claiming, “Sometimes melting can cause problems for people, like when there's flooding, but nature changes all the time for many reasons.”

The video ends with the message that “we can all do certain things to help nature like not litter and not waste water, right? But it's almost impossible to control nature.”

It is widely agreed that actions by humans have altered the Earth's climate, increasing the temperature of the planet's surface by more than 1 degree celsius.

:{:{Video}:

Citation

From a December 20, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Otto's Tales: Let's Visit an Alaskan Glacier"

In two “Leo & Layla” videos, the pair travel back in time to visit scientistsNicolaus Copernicus andMichael Faraday. In both videos, the scientists discuss the hostility they faced when countering “established scientific theories” and disagreeing with things “everyone believes.”

Copernicus tells the children, “It's a good reminder that ideas aren't correct simply because everyone believes them. Do your own research.”

Faraday similarly says that he is facing “a lot of hostility from other scientists of my time” as he challenges “well-known and established scientific theories.” He also says: “It is my duty as a scientist to share whatever I discover about the natural world. But more importantly, it is my duty as a Christian to reveal that the natural world was created by God.”

Layla also claims of modern science, “There's been so much stuff on the news about some scientists who want a certain result and then do an experiment that will only give them the result they want.”

Both of these videos share common themes with the Trump administration's rejection of climate and health science. For instance, in an April 2025 interview, Trump administration Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told parents to “do your own research” while repeating false claims about vaccines and drug regulations.

:{:{Video}:

Citation

From a December 1, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled "Michael Faraday: Pioneer of Electromagnetism"

Trump has announced plans to “issue new guidance protecting the right to prayer in our public schools.” In Texas, some schools are adopting a state-developed curriculum that critics say infuses Christianity into lessons.

Similarly, PragerU is sharing Judeo-Christian Bible stories through its PragerU Kids curriculum.

In avideo from the “Craftory” series, while teaching viewers how to make a book cover, Simonian discusses the beginnings of education in the U.S., arguing that the Founding Fathers wanted citizens to be “educated with morals and religion” so they would “know the difference between right and wrong,” adding, “And this is still very important.”

Simonian says Puritans came to America for religious freedom, and the “Bible was a main part of how they learned to read and think.” She says the Bible was used as a “textbook” in early American schools, and students “often learned their ABCs with Bible names.”

Simonian notes that “many schools even started the day with a prayer and a Bible reading.”

:{:{Video}:

Citation

From an August 15, 2023, PragerU Kids video uploaded to YouTube titled, "Schoolhouse Book Cover"

Many of the videos in the PragerU Kids channel are retellings of Bible stories, such as a craft video titled “12 Tribes of Israel Tree,” which explains how to make a pipe cleaner tree and shares the story of the 12 tribes of Israel from the Book of Genesis. There are also videos titled Otto’s Tales: The Wise & Foolish Servants" and Joshua & the Walls of Jericho," which feature storybook readings based on biblical tales. And in the “Leo & Layla” series, the siblings travel back in time to meet bothAbraham andDaniel, who retell their Bible stories. (The Abraham video includes awkward explanations about Abraham fathering a child with his servant and attempting to sacrifice his son.)

MMA //

  1. ### Research file: We watched every PragerU Kids video. Here are the lowlights.

09/08/23 9:15 AM EDT

  1. ### Meta is allowing PragerU Kids to flout its advertising policies and promote its propaganda-filled school curriculum without necessary labels

09/01/23 9:00 AM EDT

  1. ### The lessons Florida public school students will learn from PragerU Kids

07/27/23

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an 3 26

Indystar reports Indiana’s Gov. Mike Braun has signed a new bill forcing state colleges and universities to include a “classics-based” examination embraced by religious colleges in Republican states.

For decades, the ACT and the SAT have been the gatekeepers and the standard-bearer of college admissions to measure a student's aptitude in core subjects like math, science and reading. But proponents said the test “would better assess students who received a classical education, typically offered to homeschooled students or at private or charter classical schools,” according to the IndyStar.

The newly required Classical Learning Test aims to promote the "Western intellectual tradition" that right-wing supporters claim has been abandoned by existing standardized tests.

The change stems from a legislative bill that also “requires schools to teach a 2000s-era anti-poverty theory involving waiting until marriage to have kids as part of schools' good citizenship instruction,” reports IndyStar. “It passed mostly along party lines amid criticism that the CLT could disadvantage students who are less accustomed to Western ideas.”

"It has baked-in prejudices that would make students who come from less diverse backgrounds appear to have done better than students from more diverse backgrounds," said Joel Hand, a lobbyist for the American Federation of Teachers for Indiana, during Senate committee testimony in January.

Classic Learning Test creator Jeremy Tate applauded the bill's passage in Indiana in an X post Feb. 24.

“While Tate has said the test is not partisan, his company's expansive Board of Academic Advisors include administrators from religious colleges and right-wing figures like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and PragerU CEO Marissa Streit,” reports IndyStar. “It's also been promoted by Sen. Jim Banks, who called it the "standard for academic excellence."

PragerU is not a university, but a conservative nonprofit known for producing wildly inaccurate educational videos. One PragerU videofrom its history series depicts abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass arguing that the founders’ decision not to abolish U.S. slavery was worth it because it helped convince the Southern colonies to join the Union.

“Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it,” the video depicts Douglass saying.

Teachers' unions and academics also doubt the value of the Classic Learning Test considering its concepts and biased arguments.

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scientology

Cardone is also a featured content creator on far-right PragerU's website, where he is described as "an entrepreneur, real estate investor and sales trainer recognized for his high-energy approach to business and personal growth." In 2011, the Village Voice reported that Cardone had reached OT VIII (Operating Thetan Level Eight), which is the highest level within the organization.

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RWW

Ryan Walters and PragerU teamed up to quiz teachers transferring from "woke" states. Their only goal is selling conservative talking points.

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an 8 25

A new White House history exhibit has drawn fire from historians for using AI to generate fake quotes from founding fathers.

NPR reported Wednesdaythat the White House unveiled a striking new history exhibit, "The Founders Museum," which was presented in collaboration with the far‑right media group PragerU and was housed within the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.

The display features 82 original paintings depicting figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Betsy Ross, alongside more than 40 AI‑generated short videos in which Founding Fathers were animated to relay their stories, available both onsite and online.

READ MORE:'Trump takes this snub personally': Conservative mocks 'saddest little dictator'

The White House has asserted that AI brought “these people, places and events … to life, making history engaging to Americans across the country.”

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But historians have expressed concern. William G. Thomas, vice president of the research division at the American Historical Association, was quoted in the report as acknowledging the project’s ambition. However, he warned that AI could reshape historical figures’ words and stories without a clear factual basis.

Brown University history professor Karin Wulftold WGBH News that some portrayals — such as that of Mercy Otis Warren — felt watered down, reducing her critical voice to bland patriotic platitudes.

“In the video, it acknowledges that she’s a writer, and that writing wasn’t something that women were encouraged to do, certainly in public,” Wulf says. “But it then has her say these kind of pablum pieces about patriotism and liberty that are so much less stringent and so much less potent than what she actually said at the time," she said.

READ MORE:'We have a problem': CNN data guru sounds alarm as 70% of Americans abandon core value

One AI video stood out. It featured John Adams declaring, “Facts do not care about your feelings,” a phrase popularized by modern conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro.

Moreover, Samuel Adams is presented as saying he was labeled a “troublemaker,” a term that only came into use decades after his death and didn’t enter common usage until well into the 20th century.

PragerU’s CEO, Marissa Streit, defended the project in comments to NPR, saying it had been developed through a joint effort involving White House experts, PragerU scholars and widely referenced historical sources.

According to the report, Streit also plans to take the exhibit on the road using mobile museum trucks and encouraged its adoption in schools, state capitols, and embassies leading up to America’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

READ MORE:'Disgrace': Fox sparks outrage by cutting off Epstein presser to run 'counter-programming'

Last month, President Donald Trump ordered a sweeping review of the Smithsonian museums, demanding their exhibits align with a more celebratory portrayal of American history. The president complained in a Truth Social post that they currently focus too much on “how bad slavery was” and lack optimism about the country's achievements.

His remarks were strongly denounced by historianswho said he was trying to "whitewash history" by going after the Smithsonian.

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Next to his long-running radio show, Dennis Prager, now 77, is best known for PragerU — which isn't an actual university, but rather, a program of far-right propaganda videos launched in 2009. One of PragerU's admirers is Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's ultra-MAGA public schools superintendent. And according to CNN, Walters is now using PragerU to screen applicants for ideological purity and to make sure teachers in the state's public schools aren't "woke."

The screening process, CNN's Sunlen Serfaty reports, gets underway on Friday, August 15.

"Teachers from 'liberal' states who have relocated to Oklahoma and are seeking to work there must take a controversial new assessment, given for the first time today, that 'keeps away woke indoctrinators,' according to Oklahoma’s top education official," Serfaty explains. "Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's superintendent for public instruction, told CNN that if applicants do not pass the test, they will not earn a teaching certificate to be able to teach in public schools in the state this school year, which begins for some Oklahoma districts on Monday."

READ MORE: This single sentence will fast-track Trump to a prison cell

Serfaty adds, "The decision to use the assessment, developed by PragerU, a conservative media company whose teaching materials are now approved for use in public schools in ten U.S. states, opens a new front in the education culture wars just days before schools are to open their doors."

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PragerU's materials, according to the CNN reporter, have "been embraced by the political right for offering curriculums that champion ideas aligned with the Make America Great Again movement."

According to Serfaty, Walters' "multiple-choice assessment for teachers" contains "around 50 questions." One proposed question, Serfaty reports, "deals with gender — asking teachers to select from a series of multiple-choice answers which chromosome pairs determine biological sex."

"Another question asks why freedom of religion is important to America's identity," Serafty notes. "Other questions include asking for the first three words of the Constitution, naming the two chambers of the U.S. Congress, and identifying the number of U.S. senators…. The test specifically evaluates educators on areas including their understanding of 'American exceptionalism' and their 'grasp of fundamental biological differences between boys and girls,' Walters said."

READ MORE: 'Financial ruin': Trump's White House is terrified of losing this lawsuit

*Read the full CNN article at this link.

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critics of far-right Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Ryan Walters often attack him as a highly performative MAGA troll. Walters' antics include purchasing Donald Trump-themed Bibles for classrooms and promoting the false, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

But Slate's Molly Olmstead, in an article published on July 22, emphasizes that Walters' buffoonish qualities don't make him any less dangerous. And she emphasizes that his plan to screen education applicants for MAGA purity shouldn't be taken lightly.

"This month," Olmstead explains, "Oklahoma's education department announced an innovative new approach to screening aspiring teachers in the state: any applicants from 'woke' states would need to first pass an ideology test created by the right-wing group PragerU. It was an announcement that seemed engineered to draw national news coverage and inflame liberal audiences. Under this plan, teachers from states with 'progressive education policies' would be tested on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism, and 'the fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.'"

READ MORE: This White House lie shows they know Trump is in trouble

Olmstead continues, "The screening is guaranteed to test teachers for a deeply MAGA-inflected understanding of U.S. history, government, and society: PragerU, a right-wing group with a stated mission of countering leftism in education, is already known for its white nationalist-adjacent content for schoolchildren."

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PragerU is the brainchild of Dennis Prager, a far-right talk radio host and Trump supporter.

"Walters' proposals for the school system have included a mandate that all public schools teach the Bible; a plan to collect children's immigration status when they register for public school; and new social studies standards proposals that would have high school students 'identify discrepancies in 2020 election results,'" Olmstead observes. "Each of these announcements solidified Walters' reputation as a relentless attention-seeker, calculating every action from his office to appeal to the power players of the MAGA movement…. These stunts have paid off. Walters has been profiled in outlets all over the country, and he has become the face of the Christian nationalist campaigns into public education."

The MAGA Republican's stunts, Olmstead argues, raise the question: "Is Walters all superficiality, a media-obsessive without the stamina or standing for real, transformative politics? Or is he actually capable of remaking Oklahoma's schools — and signaling what MAGA could bring to schools across the country?"

READ MORE:GOP sen tells constituent he’s 'not obligated to listen' after she’s denied care over marital status

"In sign of just how bizarre American politics have become in this second Trump era," Olmstead warns, "Walters may be a bit of both. As traditional institutions and procedures buckle under MAGA politics, Walters has proven that with the right national climate, slapdash own-the-lib pronouncements can become serious policy. He's a performer, but he also happens to be a major change-maker…. It may be tempting not to take people like Walters seriously, but he has proven that with enough volume, some gimmicks stick."

READ MORE:'Errand boy': Trump official reveals what president talks about during nightly 1 AM calls

*Molly Olmstead's full article for Slate is available at this link (subscription required).

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07/18/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters is enlisting PragerU propagandists to devise an “assessment” that Walters says would protect students from “woke” teachers moving into the state from places with more progressive education policies like California or New York. It’s the latest Fox News bait from Walters, a Christian nationalist zealot and ardent MAGA activist, who announced the policy with typical-for-him smears about teacher unions wanting to “destroy this country.”

Walters’ plan to screen teachers for “woke” attitudes comes as Oklahoma, which is ranked near the very bottom of states in educational achievement, is experiencing a serious teacher shortage. While Walters has portrayed the requirement as taking effect immediately, the details are still being worked out just weeks before the start of the new school year.

Walters said the Prager assessment would evaluate teachers on their understanding of the Constitution, American exceptionalism, and the “fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.” He said teachers who do not pass the test would not get a teaching certificate.

In announcing the plan, Walters declared, “We’re raising a generation of patriots, not activists, and I’ll fight tooth and nail to keep leftist propaganda out of our classrooms.”

Of course, he’s fighting tooth and nail to bring right-wing propaganda into the classrooms in the guise of “patriotic education.” Walters says he’s out to ensure that teachers coming into Oklahoma don’t “malign President Trump.” PragerU’s CEO Marissa Streit said the assessment will “ensure teachers champion America’s greatness.”

This isn’t Walters’ first partnership with Prager. Last year, he appointed Dennis Prager and other right-wing activists to an “executive review committee” to provide advice on overhauling the state’s social studies curriculum. Right Wing Watch noted at the time that “the educational materials produced by Prager's own organization are rife with disinformation and right-wing propaganda.”

Although Dennis Prager is Jewish, he is allied with Christian nationalists like Charlie Kirk and promotes their false claims about U.S. history. When Keith Ellison became the first Muslim elected to Congress and chose a Quran for his ceremonial swearing in, Prager slammed him for not using a Bible, saying, “If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress.”

The new social studies standards developed by Walters and his right-wing advisers mandate that Bible studies and teaching about Jesus be incorporated into the curriculum.

And at the last minute, Walters snuck in a requirement that students be taught conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen from President Donald Trump. The legislature had a chance to reverse that decision but chose not to.

Last fall, Walters bought more than 500 expensive “Trump Bibles” for Advancement Placement government classrooms and announced the creation of an Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism. He ordered every school to show students a video of him praying for President Trump.

Walters also sought millions in tax dollars to buy 55,000 Bibles to be placed in every classroom; the official request for proposals from vendors was written in such a way that the only Bibles that would meet the requirement would be ones from which Trump and his family profit. It required the use of the King James translation “for historical accuracy.”

Walters’ policy pronouncements seem calculated to get him attention even when he lacks the actual legal authority to carry them out, leading state Rep. Forrest Bennett to describe Walters’ efforts as a “grift.”

Here’s how Right Wing Watch described Walters in a 2023 post about the Moms for Liberty summit at which Walters spoke:

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is waging a scorched-earth campaign against teachers and teachers unions, which he called “terrorist organizations” at a budget hearing in May; he has been accused of lying to legislators at that hearing. At a state board of education meeting, Walters played a five-minute video savaging teachers unions, a video so hostile—it included insinuations that teachers supported pedophilia—that educators feared it would incite physical attacks on public schools. His agency banned sexually explicit materials from school libraries without defining the term. After Trump’s recent indictment, Walters put out a press release headlined, “Joe Biden Leading a Banana Republic Coup Against American Justice,” an indication of his focus on MAGA politics and promotion of Trumpish conspiracy theories.

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07/18/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

The Wall Street Journal published its highly anticipated story on the relationship between President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, and Trump is already threatening to sue.

Republicans have gone into total meltdown over allegations that President Donald Trump sent a spicy letter to Jeffrey Epstein that included a drawing of a nude woman.

The president denied a Wall Street Journal report alleging he had sent a salacious birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein.

Why does the House speaker think the president’s approval rating is “skyrocketing”? Because from his perspective, Democrats literally don’t count.

Robert Burns won a coin flip to become mayor—and he's turned a neutral office into a pulpit for his right-wing religion.

John Adams says "facts do not care about our feelings" in one of the AI-generated videos in PragerU's series partnership with White House.

On January 6, 2021, Christian flags, wooden crosses, and “Jesus Saves” signs mingled with pro-Trump banners as insurrectionists, inspired by a buzzing undercurrent of religion and outrage, reacted with violence and stormed the U.S. Capitol.

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msnbc press show chuck todd? prager u ryan walters says schools unions tcher marxist 5x no challenge?

prager says back to basics many times, schools 1930’s socio pts out segregated

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google demonetized The Heartland Institute in June. Here are 4 more channels that appear to violate its misinformation policy.

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 07/31/24

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google demonetized The Heartland Institute in June. Here are 4 more channels that appear to violate its misinformation policy.

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 07/31/24

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google is profiting from PragerU’s climate denial ads on its search engine

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 04/16/24

Google is allowing right-wing propaganda organization PragerU to run climate-denying ads on its search engine even though the tech giant previously committed to prohibiting ads that feature claims that contradict the “well-established scientific consensus” about climate change.

In 2021, Google updated its ad policy to prohibit ads for or on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

Yet, nearly three years later, Google is still profiting from ads that contain climate change misinformation.

When Media Matters searched for phrases like “climate change,” “global warming,” and “climate crisis” on Google Search, the search engine returned PragerU ads that promised its website reveals “the truth about climate change” — or what it calls the “fake climate catastrophe.”

“Climate policies are causing inflation and keeping poor countries trapped in poverty,” the ad-description text read. “Get the facts with our Climate Change and Energy playlist.”

[ggl screenshots see monetize ads]

When clicked on, the ads lead Google Search users to a video on PragerU’s website titled “Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?” In the video, anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger tells the audience that “pushing the planet toward wind and solar energy would actually cause more harm to the environment than good.” (While all extractive processes have environmental impacts, scientists agree that the consequencesof burning fossil fuels on the climate along with the declining costs of both renewable energy and renewable-energy storage make those cleaner technologies essential to a sustainable energy future.)

Shellenberger is known for spreading misinformation about wind energy and downplaying the impacts of climate change. In 2020, Shellenberger wrote an article in which he claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” A 2022 report produced by hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists argued that climate change has increased the intensity — and in some cases the frequency — of extreme weather events.” Shellenberger has also defended former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before” and “driving them [whales] crazy.” In 2023, he produced a documentary that alleged — again, without concrete evidence — that “government officials have been lying” about the role offshore wind turbine construction has played in causing whale deaths.

The video featuring Shellenberger is one of 30 videos on PragerU’s “Get The Truth About The Climate” playlist.

Other videos on the playlist feature an assortment of well-known climate deniers, including former BP chief scientist Steve Koonin and nuclear energy consultant Patrick Moore, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he co-founded Greenpeace.

In a video titled “Is there really a climate emergency?” Koonin claims that climate change is not settled science, an argument he also detailed in a 2021 book called Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Another video on the playlist called “The truth about CO2” features Moore, who claims that rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere do not present a danger to humans and that “we're already seeing the positive effects of increased carbon dioxide now.” “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is,” Moore adds.

Video

CitationPragerU ad in Google's search engine, accessed April 4, 2024

PragerU is deeply rooted in climate change denial

Along with the Daily Wire, PragerU is financially dependent on generous donations from fossil fuel billionaire Farris Wilks.

Recently, PragerU Kids, a PragerU offshoot that produces conservative “educational” content targeted at school age children, has partnered with five different states to bring right-wing propaganda into public school classrooms.

Media Matters reviewed PragerU Kids’ ”educational” content and found it was rife with misinformation about climate change. In one video, a cartoon narrator explains why embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw uprising, when Polish Jews attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation during WWII.

Since 2021, researchers have demonstrated that Google has failed to follow through on its promise to address climate denial. One study found 100 monetized YouTube videos that seemingly violated Google’s climate change misinformation policy. The videos had accrued more than 18 million views. Despite those seeming policy violations, only eight of the hundreds of climate-denying videos studied were eventually demonetized. Google has also profited significantly from ads placed by fossil fuel companies attempting to “greenwash” their reputations as drivers of the climate crisis.

  1. ### Climate solutions coverage on broadcast news programs declined in 2023

04/16/24 9:49

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Arizona education official announces partnership with right-wing propaganda machine PragerU Kids

WRITTEN BY SOPHIE LAWTON

PUBLISHED 02/01/24

Arizona’s GOP Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne announced alongside PragerU CEO Marissa Streit that PragerU Kids’ videos and “educational” content would be available on the Arizona Department of Education website. Arizona is now the fifth state to add PragerU Kids materials to their educational curriculum following Florida, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and Montana.

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During the press conference Horne claimed, “The problem we’ve had is, in some classrooms only the extreme left side has been presented.” Horne followed up by attacking critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs criticized the partnership, calling PragerU’s lessons “fake history” and Arizona House Rep. Raúl Grijalva labeled it as “unaccredited right-wing propaganda.”

Media Matters has published a comprehensive research file on the PragerU Kids curriculum. PragerU Kids is conservative propaganda that denies climate change, excuses European colonization, and whitewashes slavery. It has published hundreds of videos containing misleading and revisionist history lessons skewed towards far-right ideologies. One video on Christopher Columbus justified the genocide of indigenous peoples and downplayed the moral crime of slavery.

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Far-right PragerU co-founder admits to 'indoctrination' campaign: 'We bring doctrines to children' - Alternet.org

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in July, Florida became the first state to allow schools to incorporate instructional videos with a conservative viewpoint from vendor PragerU into their classroom materials.

Oklahoma and Montana rapidly followed. New Hampshire in September approved the use of online PragerU videos to satisfy financial literacy requirements in public schools. PragerU and one state education board member announced it was on the approved vendor list in Texas as well, but other state education officials denied it.

The growing movement concerns many researchers and scholars, who say the videos share misinformation and who worry that it may set a precedent for allowing other such distorted content into public schools.

The videos are available free of charge for any classroom. Despite its name, PragerU is not a university. It is a conservative nonprofit that produces short videos on historical, economic and climate topics. The organization, formally the Prager University Foundation but known as PragerU, is founded and run by conservative talk-show host Dennis Prager and funded by a number of like-minded philanthropists. PragerU touts its conservative view as a “free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.” But critics say it distorts science and whitewashes unpleasant aspects of historical events.

In a fundraising plea in his organization’s 2023 biannual report, Prager wrote: “Do you think the left is scaling back? You know the answer. They will use our nation’s problems to push for more government control. They are following the Marxist playbook we are well familiar with. The left is a force for chaos.” He then said PragerU is expanding to fight that narrative.

At a Moms for Liberty convention in Philadelphia in June, people demonstrating against the conservative parents’ group accused him of “indoctrinating children.” Prager didn’t deny it. “All I heard was, ‘Well, because you indoctrinate kids.’ Which is true, we bring doctrines to children. But what is the bad of our indoctrination?” he said.

The organization markets kids videos in subject areas such as economics, character development and Judeo-Christian values. A PragerU video in its history series, in which two modern-day animated kids, Leo and Layla, travel back in time to talk to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, has come under some of the harshest criticism from historians and academics.

The video suggests that Douglass, who had been enslaved, believed that the founders’ decision not to abolish slavery in the U.S. Constitution was worth it because it helped convince the Southern colonies to join the Union. “Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it,” he says.

The “glorious liberty document” is taken out of context. It comes from Douglass’ 1852 speech on the Fourth of July, in which he also says Black Americans like himself “are not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary. Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

It is this sort of cherry-picking that has led scholars to say that the PragerU videos are slanted and incomplete.

The video is an “appalling” misuse of Douglass and mischaracterizes his role in U.S. history, Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, told Education Week.

Later in the video, the animated Douglass criticizes fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who burned a copy of the Constitution because it didn’t outlaw slavery. The Douglass character tells Leo and Layla that “radical” behavior like Garrison’s is out of line, and working within the system is a better way to effect change. In a veiled reference to modern-day protest movements, the kids in the video respond with: “We’ve got that type in our time,” followed by an exchange about supporting the U.S. government.

According to the PragerU Kids website, Leo and Layla’s historic time travel adventures, which include travels to meet biblical characters, are meant for third to fifth graders. The Around the World series is meant for grades six and up.

Another animated PragerU video, “Florian Feeds the World,” features a Dutch farm boy who fears that government regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will destroy his way of life. And one called “Mateo Backs the Blue,” starring a Hispanic boy in Los Angeles, criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement. Both are part of the Around the World series.

“The Prager videos are flag-waving tripe,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania. “The one where they have [a cartoon] Frederick Douglass talking about slavery is highly distorted.”

“They are highly inaccurate,” Zimmerman added. “They paint a story of unbending liberty and freedom providentially inspired from beginning to end.”

Zimmerman said he is not out to censor the videos, but that they shouldn’t be incorporated into schools’ curricula. “This isn’t an issue of free speech. Everyone is free to look at these videos. I’m not saying they should be prohibited in any way. But they should not be embraced by school districts.”

PragerU’s website also includes videos of its news programs, talk shows and short documentaries that express a point of view on hot-button social issues. “Detrans: The Dangers of Gender Affirming Care” is one. It shows a person, Daisy Strongin, who became a trans man but then regretted it. It also shows people saying that gender-affirming procedures are “barbaric pseudo-science,” a view at odds with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.

This isn’t an issue of free speech. Everyone is free to look at these videos. I’m not saying they should be prohibited in any way. But they should not be embraced by school districts.

– Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania

The Florida Department of Education approved the use of PragerU videos in classrooms across the state.

The agency “reviewed PragerU Kids and determined the material aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards,” Cassie Palelis, deputy director of communications for the department, said in an email to Stateline.

Those standards are very broad, requiring teachers, for example, to “review causes and consequences of the Civil War.”

“PragerU Kids is no different than many other resources, which can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion,” Palelis wrote.

In New Hampshire, the State Board of Education unanimously agreed to allow high school students to use PragerU courses to satisfy a financial literacy requirement.

The series of 15 five-minute videos includes sessions on pay stubs and taxes; money management and budgeting; credit, debit and debt management; borrowing, student loans and credit and debit cards; and videos on investing.

A video on taxes shows young people screaming, wincing and groaning every time it’s explained that taxes are taken out of a paycheck to pay for things such as the military, roads, fire and police. The video ends with the statement that taxes are an “unavoidable and frustrating fact of life.”

While not overtly political, the videos are simplistic and don’t give students the depth of knowledge they need to handle finances, said Micaela Demeter, a member of the Dover School Board in New Hampshire, who testified at a public hearing in mid-September against the use of the PragerU videos.

“I think financial literacy is an essential human skill,” she told Stateline in a phone interview, while underscoring that her views were her own and she was not speaking for the Dover board. “But I do not believe what PragerU is putting out is sufficient. It’s ‘edu-tainment.’ It is not the caliber that New Hampshire students or any students need.”

She added that her larger concern is “that this is just the foot in the door for PragerU,” echoing several others who testified at the three-hour hearing.

She said she believes that PragerU is looking at the financial literacy curriculum as “the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship.”

“It is hyperpartisan and that does not belong … in any district in New Hampshire,” Demeter said.

GOP Lawmakers Intensify Effort to Ban Critical Race Theory in Schools

Stateline tried repeatedly for comment from PragerU, but the organization did not answer requests nor respond to emailed questions.

Adrienne McCarthy, an academic researcher within the Kansas State University College of Education and co-author of a study on PragerU, said in a phone interview that while she agrees financial literacy should be taught, “why use a non-credentialed organization with a clear agenda to be in part of your curriculum?”

“By adopting any part of the curriculum, you are providing them with a sense of credentials and authority on the matter,” she said. “The recommendation by the school board means this is a credible source.”

She said the financial videos point out how “taxes are a ball and chain, and just state abuse, rather than looking at why taxes are used as they are.”

PragerU solicits contributions at the end of some of its videos. The organization did not list its contributors on its nonprofit tax form, saying the information was “restricted.” But McCarthy and media reports said contributors include Dan and Farris Wilks, who made their fortune by founding an oil and gas hydraulic fracturing company, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an organization that supports conservative policy priorities such as the “teaching of American exceptionalism.”

In September, PragerU posted a video featuring CEO Marissa Streit and Julie Pickren, a member of the Texas State Board of Education, announcing that the company is “now in Texas,” saying that “children in thousands of K-12 Texas schools now have the opportunity to learn from PragerU’s wholesome, patriotic, and age-appropriate content.” But after numerous news articles questioning whether the state education board had approved the platform, Pickren posted a clarification on Facebook, saying that PragerU had been “placed on the Comptroller’s master bidder list” to be allowed to bid on contracts with Texas schools.

However, a search of the site did not show Prager as one of the bidders, and Jake Kobersky, director of media relations for the Texas Education Agency, said in an email to Stateline that PragerU “has not been approved by either the Texas State Board of Education or the Texas Education Agency as a curriculum vendor and is not included on any supplementary curriculum lists.”

Elsie Arntzen, Montana’s superintendent of public instruction, also appeared in a Prager video announcing her state’s partnership with the organization. PragerU is listed as a “bonded textbook dealer” on a Montana state website. Arntzen said the PragerU videos would provide an opportunity to “enhance learning, wherever learning takes place,” at home or at school.

In September, the Oklahoma Department of Education launched its partnership with PragerU Kids. State Superintendent Ryan Walters, in an announcement, said the relationship “will help ensure high quality materials rich in American history and values will be available to our teachers and students.”

The next month, the nonprofit advocacy group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State announced it is looking into both Oklahoma’s and Florida’s use of the videos, saying they promote religion and particularly Christianity.

“Public schools are the building blocks of our democracy. We owe it to our children to ensure their public schools provide a high-quality education that is free from religious coercion and rooted in facts, not theology or political ideology,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, said in announcing the effort.

The group particularly pointed to a cartoon video about George Washington, in which the first president is depicted as saying that “having a religious and moral population is important for a healthy republic.”an 11 23 no lnx

Montana extremism watchdog is warning against the state's Office of Public Instruction's (OPI) recent approval of educational materials from the right-wing organization Prager U, News From The States reports.

Per the news outlet, "Montana follows Florida and Oklahoma in approving the license for PragerU in the state, as first reported by Montana Free Press. However, a public schools official said approval of teaching the controversial content in classrooms will be in the hands of local school board trustees in Montana."

The news outlet notes:

Some examples of PragerU Kids Media Matters listed in the summary of its analysis:*

According to the report, Montana Human Rights Network's Cherilyn DeVries said, at first the video seems reasonable. It sounds like 'Oh, patriotism is good' or you know, 'We all want a healthy economy' or 'We should all get along.' And then they kind of dive into some of the racism and minimize anti-Semitism."

She noted that "in the wake of the pandemic, kids are still struggling and looking for something strong to believe in, and PragerU can seem very convincing," saying, "This seems to be a reasonable position, and then suddenly they are getting partisan and extremist propaganda mixed in with their curriculum at school. This is how these kinds of positions and groups get normalized.”

DeVries emphasized, They cast doubt on the realities of climate change and the brutality of slavery. They make completely false claims about public school curriculum. They dismiss well-documented incidents of discrimination. Organizations promoting misinformation and openly partisan agendas like this have no right to force their way into nonpartisan public schools."

READ MORE:'I refuse':Oklahoma teachers allowed to push PragerU’s 'revisionist propoganda'

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https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/dennis-prager-vast-majority-your-kids-teachers-lie-about-whites

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columbus with bad accent? on msnbc

rww July 24, 2023 

Tags: Jack Hibbs Jack Posobiec Jason Storms Lauren Boebert Pete Hegseth Ron DeSantis Rusty Thomas Reproductive Right sRound-Up Operation Save America PragerU

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https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/dennis-prager-women-are-disproportionally-wrecking-west

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fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

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VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

:{:{}:

}:

“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

---

fox stepford mat'l

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-keeps-booking-pharmaceutical-heir-whose-mom-paid-specialist-deprogram-her-wokism

no lnx vid

Fox News keeps booking a pharmaceutical heir whose mom paid a specialist to “deprogram” her from “wokeism”

Mount Holyoke alum Annabella Rockwell works for conservative edutainment organization PragerU, which she credits with freeing her from liberal indoctrination

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 11/29/22

A spectre is haunting college campuses — the spectre of wokeism. It is an ideology and a cult that separates children from parents, rendering each unknowable to the other. Misery and alienation: This is the goal of these indoctrination centers. But all is not lost. A small band of rebels stand in their way. They are the ragtag freedom fighters at PragerU.

That, at least, is the story the producers and talent at Fox News are telling their viewers.

Leading the charge for liberation is pharmaceutical heir and PragerU director of development for Palm Beach Annabella Rockwell, who can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower, thank you very much. Rockwell fell victim to the siren song of wokeism her first year at Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college in Massachusetts.

“I studied history and politics at Mount Holyoke,” Rockwell said in a November 15 interview with her boss, Dennis Prager. “Every class was, you know, history, but history with race, history with gender.”

By the time Rockwell graduated in 2015, she was “totally indoctrinated,” she said in a recent interview with the New York Post. Her mom, Melinda, “enlisted the help of a deprogrammer who charged $300 a day as well as Annabella’s old tennis coach, Scott Williams,” to overcome her daughter’s “brainwashing.”

Rockwell had the support of her family’s personal fortune, but she needed something else: a light in the darkness. As she told Fox News’ top star and white nationalist Tucker Carlson on Monday evening, her salvation came at the hands of PragerU, where she now works, when one of its videos came up on a social media feed. This heartwarming story shows how PragerU funnels young people into reactionary politics – and just so happens to be a great branding opportunity to further spread that organization’s propaganda.

“I had to unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free,” she said.

“Amazing,” Carlson responded. “It is a cult. Its aim is to separate you from the people who love you most.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Teaching history without race or gender is obviously better, which is exactly the type of top-notch scholarship you can get from Prager and his absolutely real university.

Fox News’ Outnumbered analyzed Rockwell's hero’s journey on Monday afternoon, prior to her debut on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Co-host Emily Compagno, a paragon of intellectual rigor — who also knows more than a little about learning history without regard to race or gender — weighed in with the insight and precision that’s become her trademark.

College students are “being taught to hate their country; they’re also being taught to hate their families,” Compagno argued. “And that is step one of true indoctrination.”

Video CitationFrom the November 28, 2022, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered

But, like the totalitarian cult of wokeness itself, Rockwell wasn’t yet satisfied with her conquest. She pushed forward, appearing Tuesday morning on Fox & Friendsto share her tale of woe and redemption, explaining how she finally broke free of her ideological prison.

In 2020, at the height of what has been referred to as the largest protest movement in the history of the United States, Rockwell saw the light.

:{:{}:

}:

VideoCitationFrom the November 29, 2022, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

:{:{}:

}:

“It wasn't until seeing the riots happening that I realized, OK, this is so hypocritical. Like, why are we fighting for equality and empowerment by burning down people's [PVT PROPERTY = > HU RIGHTS] businesses?” Rockwell explained. “It just doesn't make sense to me.” (One way to make sense of the George Floyd uprisings is to study “history with race.”)

Rockwell closed out the interview with another plug for PragerU. Whatever else the organization’s shortcomings, it appears that marketing is not one of them.

---

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU

pragerU, short for Prager University, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit media company that creates videos on various political, economic, and sociological topics from an American conservative viewpoint.[4] The organization was co-founded by Allen Estrin and talk show host and writer Dennis Prager in 2009.[4][5][6][7] The organization relies on tax-deductible donations, and much of itsearly funding came from billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.[4][7]

Despite the name, PragerU is not an academic institution and does not hold classes, does not grant certifications or diplomas, and is not accredited by any recognized body.[7][8] PragerU is frequently criticized for presenting misleading or factually incorrect content in its videos, particularly those that downplay climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and racism, as well as those that oppose immigration.[9][10][11][12]

History

PragerU was founded in 2011 by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager and radio producer and screenwriter Allen Estrin,[13] in order to advocate for conservative views and to offset what Prager regards as the undermining of college education by the left.[6][14] The two originally considered making it a brick-and-mortar university, but the idea was revised into a digital product to save money.[7] PragerU is based in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California,[4] and it had around 50 employees as of January 2020.[7] PragerU encourages students to join "PragerFORCE", an international student organisation to promote PragerU's videos and ideology, about 6,500 college and high school students promoted its videos as of 2020.[7]

Since a lawsuit over the use of a photograph in 2013, PragerU has used animation in its videos.[15] PragerU reached a billion views in 2018.[4]

In the fall of 2020, PragerU started fundraising for PragerU Resources for Educators and Parents (PREP), a program targeted towards kindergarten and school-aged children.[18] PREP released its first content on April 5, 2021 and has since released a large amount of content for young children.[19][18]

In July 2019, PragerU representative Allen Estrin attended then-United States President Donald Trump's Social Media Summit, along with other conservative organizations and people such as Charlie Kirk and James O'Keefe.[16][17]

Conflicts with YouTube and Facebook

In October 2016, PragerU claimed that YouTube had put 21 of PragerU's videos in the "restricted mode" setting, which ensures content is age appropriate.[6][20] YouTube responded, saying: "We aim to apply the same standards to everyone and we don’t censor anyone. Often it’s not the right approach to say that videos with the same topic should get the same rating. We’ll need to take into consideration what the intent of the video is, what the focus of the video is, what the surrounding metadata of the video explains."[6]

In October 2017, PragerU filed a federal lawsuit against YouTube's parent company, Google, claiming that 37 of its videos were unfairly demonetizedor flagged so that they could only be viewed with "restricted mode filtering", which limits views based on viewer characteristics such as age.[20]

PragerU claimed that Google's demonetization and flagging violated the First Amendment by arguing that YouTube was a public forum. In March 2018, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh dismissed the case, ruling that because Google was a private company, PragerU had failed to show that Google had infringed its free speech rights.[21][22][23] In February 2020, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this ruling.[24][25]

In 2018, as part of its efforts to counter misinformation, YouTube added fact-checking tags to PragerU's videos about climate change.[26][9] In August 2018, Facebook removed two PragerU videos from its platform. It later restored the videos, saying that they "were mistakenly removed."[5][27] According to Francesca Tripodi, professor of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill, there are plausible non-ideological explanations for Facebook's removal of several of the videos.[28]PragerU contended that Facebook had engaged in deliberate censorship.[5][27]

Finances

The organization depends on donations to produce its content.[29] Much of PragerU's early funding came from hydraulic fracturing (fracking) billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.[4][7] Two members of the Wilks family sit on PragerU's board.[4] The next-largest donor is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.[13][30] Other donors include the Morgan Family Foundation, F**idelity Charitable Gift Fund, Donors Trust, the late Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson,[8] Lee Roy Mitchell,[8] and the Minnesota-based Sid and Carol Verdoorn Foundation, led by former C.H. Robinson CEO Sid Verdoorn.[30]

As of 2018, the organization reportedly had a $10 million annual budget, of which it spent more than 40% on marketing.[4] In 2020, PragerU reported to have received about $28 million in revenues, most of it from donations, and reported approximately $28 million in expenditures, with 39% going into marketing.[1] PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups.[31] In 2019, it ranked among the 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.[31]

In 2020, PragerU received $704,057 in COVID-19 relief loans from the Paycheck Protection Program.[32]

PragerU provides an extensive range of donation methods including donations of cryptocurrency, stocks, the incorporation of PragerU into a will, and direct transfers from an individual retirement account.[33]

Content

PragerU releases one video per week on various topics from a conservative viewpoint that according to its site "advances Judeo-Christian values." As of May 2020, its YouTube channel included 968 videos.[34] Each video costs between $25,000 and $30,000 to create.[4] Its guests cover a range from the secular right, the far-right, and the theocratic right.[35] Some prominent video presenters have included Tucker Carlson, Nigel Farage, Charles Krauthammer, Michelle Malkin, Bret Stephens and George Will.[7]

Among topics covered, PragerU videos have argued against a $15 minimum wage, against increased gun control, and in support of capitalism.[4] Although topical, PragerU videos largely avoided mentioning Donald Trump during his presidency.[7][29][36]

Dave Rubin stated in a video that "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia" are "meaningless buzzwords". In a video about the alt-right, Michael Knowles argued that it has nothing in common with conservatism and instead is close to leftism, except the left is much larger.[4][35] PragerU videos also promote the Electoral College, arguing that it thwarts voter fraud and that "pure democracies do not work".[13]

According to Francesca Tripodi, PragerU's videos advance the conspiracy theory, popular among the alt-right, that whiteness and conservatism are under attack and many videos on PragerU focus on delegitimizing the mainstream media, accusing it of being based on emotion or opinion rather than fact.[35]

Over a dozen videos promote fossil fuels and dispute the scientific consensus on climate change.[9] According to the non-profit think tank InfluenceMap, targeted ads posted on Facebook included misleading material that cast doubt on science, framed climatic concerns as ideological and hysteria and promoted a conspiracy theorythat "big government control" is the real motivation behind energy policies to reduce gas emissions.[37]

By 2015, PragerU developed two partnership programs to promote its views, including religious material, in public and private schools. PragerU's Educator Program supplies teachers with lesson plans and study guides that accompany videos. Secondary school teachers and college professors can register their classes through PragerU's Academic Partnership program, which lets students sign up and allows teachers to monitor their students' progress.[38]

Reception

According to a 2019 report in theLos Angeles Times, PragerU videos have been watched more than 2 billion times and were becoming a staple on college campuses.[31] In its 2020 annual report, PragerU stated that its videos have received over 4 billion lifetime views.[1] PragerU has ranked highly in influence compared to other free-market advocacy organizations, such as Reason and National Review.[39]

Vanity Fair said PragerU "packages right-wing social concepts into slick videos" and that PragerU was "one of the most effective conversion tools for young conservatives."[40]

Sociologist Francesca Tripodi has studied PragerU's marketing and messaging for the nonprofit Data & Society.[41] She found that PragerU relies on search engine optimization and "suggested content" to market its videos.[12][41] She noted that PragerU was popular among the respondents in her study and that they all either liked or shared PragerU videos on Facebook. Tripodi argued that PragerU allows viewers to dabble in content that "makes connections to" the alt-right's talking points.[4] In this way, viewers identifying as mainline conservatives gain "easy access to white supremacist logic".[12] She also demonstrated an algorithmic connection on YouTube between PragerU, Fox News, and alt-right personalities.[41][12]

A Buzzfeed News article published in 2018 attributed PragerU's success to the quality of its production values compared to similar outlets and to its use of popular presenters with established audiences. The article also noted that it had received comparatively little attention from news and media analysts due to PragerU's lack of coverage of topical issues, such as Donald Trump.[4]

In an August 2019 article written by Drew Anderson of GLAAD, an LGBT media monitoring organization, Anderson noted PragerU's ties to white supremacy and white supremacists, and also noted PragerU's "Horrific Anti-LGBTQ Record".[42]

Reason has criticized PragerU's claims of being censored by big tech companies for being false, as the company's content had not been removed from any social media platforms, and that they indicate a misunderstanding of the First Amendment as protecting a party from any type of censorship, when that law merely protects content from censorship by the government.[43]

Climate Feedback, Reuters and the Weather Channel have found that PragerU's videos promote inaccurate and misleading claims about climate change.[9][44][45]

PragerU's coverage of COVID-19 has been criticized for spreading false and misleading information about the pandemic.[10][46][47][48]

In 2019, Mike Gravel, a former United States Senator from Alaska, launched The Gravel Institute, a progressive left-leaning think tank, to counteract PragerU.[49][50][51]

On race, Pam Nilan, in her 2021 book Young People and the Far Right, says that PragerU "pretends to sidestep" white supremacy, but that "the message is always that white culture is better than other cultures."[52]

Criticisms of videos

Historian Paul Gottfried, who has written extensively on the subject of fascism, harshly criticized a PragerU video hosted by Dinesh D'Souza which stated that fascism was a left-wing ideology. D'Souza maintained that Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who influenced Italian fascism, was a left-winger, to which Gottfried noted that this contradicted the research by almost all scholars of Gentile's work who view him as a distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.[53]

According to Joseph McCarthy of The Weather Channel, in the 2016 video "Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy", fossil fuel proponent Alex Epstein promotes misinformation about climate change, including false and misleading claims.[9]

Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute criticized a 2018 PragerU video by Michelle Malkin that argued for stricter restrictions on immigration. Nowrasteh wrote that the video was full of errors and half-truths and omitted relevant information.[11]

In 2018, the PragerU video "The Suicide of Europe" by Douglas Murray argued that Europe is "committing suicide" by allowing mass immigration. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described the video as a "dog whistle to the extreme right". Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League described it as "filled with anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric".[12][30]

"Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?" is another video that theSPLC says contains such dog whistles. In this video, Vanderbilt University professor Carol M. Swain argues that the Southern strategy, the political strategy which saw the Republican Party exploit racial tensions to appeal to white Southerners, was false revisionism. History professor Kevin M. Kruse said that the video presented a "distortion" of history, "cherry-picked" its evidence, and was an "exercise in attacking a straw man".[12]

Some PragerU videos claim that the gender pay gap does not exist[13][54] and, according to Mother Jones, argue that there is no police discrimination toward African-Americans.[13]

In June 2020, Snopes criticized the video "How To End White Privilege". The video argued that white privilege is a myth because a black police officer's race did not provide a barrier to his success. According toSnopes, the video is inaccurate as recent history and statistics indicate that white privilege still exists.[55]

In October 2020, Gita Jackson of Vice noted that "There's already a cottage industry of YouTubers trying to debunk PragerU."[51]

References

-----

. Further details can be found in first ten minutes of this May 9, 2017 videohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qQqtuoRHg

:{:{}:

prager u amb[ several donation asks]

intro warns ppl they will be ejected after warning?!

bkdrop capitalism is the only solution to poverty?

clarity > over agreement

i am not offended by free speech

alexis our prof and advisor ;  shadow? bruin reublican put names on www

known dennis p for 20 years reads blurb? columbia school of int'l affairs fellow?

vienna --- conf reagan allen co fdr univ, all 5 min long

battle of ideology left v rt

latest communic prof ling?

sir edmund burke good men to do nothing

crowd goes wild

no ref to McNutt? confrmation?

vienna helsinki acords RR

bruinrepublicans www red ice ?  hannity today show

columbia inst  (grad st) fellow

keith sing? commun tsing?

intro end 4:15

big gov?

Q&A marry early? 1967 frat boy vn flipped 90's prager, medved rt radio

rubric for truth? post mod does not beleive in truth; world come to end b/c of co2; warming consensus but none on why and absol no for catastrophe alarm MO of left Leftism ... bk 11 hysterias all fraud...end

}:

prager U

Watch Dennis Prager's LIVE speech at UCLA on the main differences between the left and right. Does UCLA have enough safe spaces to handle triggered students? DONATE today, because donations are how we get more PragerU videos to more young Americans.http://l.prageru.com/2oRDYjL PAYWALLThank you to the Bruin Republicans for hosting Dennis! If you're watching this speech, congratulations! That means you know how to get around the YouTube censors, who are restricting this video.

LI 2 22 James Enstrom

President, Scienific Integrity Institute & Faculty Advisor at UCLA

Los Angeles, California, United States215 connections

---

see shapiro

Farris Wilks is one of the billionaire Wilks brothers. Dan and Farris Wilks made their fortune selling their hydraulic fracking business, Frac Tech, for $3.5 billion to the Singapore government in 2011. According to *Forbes*, Farris Wilks and hisbrother are each worth $1.4 billion as of December 2017. [1]

The Wilks brothers have been described as “the Koch brothers of the Christian right” for their funding of anti-abortion and anti-LGBT groups. In addition to a variety of groups on the Religious Right, the brothers have funded organizations associated with the Koch brothers’ political network such asthe American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN). Farris Wilks runs The Thirteen Foundation, which has been described as “one of the biggest and quietest anti-abortion donors in the United States.” [2],[3], [4]

“The Wilks brothers worry that America’s declining morals will especially hurt the younger generation, so they’re using the riches that the Lord has blessed them with to back specific goals,” the Christian Broadcasting Networks’ David Brody reported from an event run by “Christian-Nation extremist“David Lane in 2013. Farris Wilks said they want to “bring the Bible back into the school and start teaching our kids at a younger age and focus on the younger generation.” [5], [6]

In 2011, Farris and wife Jo Ann each contributed $50 million to help found The Thirteen Foundation. According to The American Prospect, the foundation then gave gifts that “amount to a massive infusion of funds into some of the most aggressive right-wing organizations that are fighting legal equality for LGBT people, access to contraception and abortion services for women, and promoting the Tea Party’s vision of a federal government that is constitutionally forbidden from protecting American workers, consumers, and communities by regulating corporate behavior.” [7]

Some of those funded included American Majority, the Franklin Center, theHeritage Foundation, and the SPN, allpart of the Koch brothers’ political network.[8]

Farris Wilks is a pastor for the Assembly of Yahveh 7th Day Church near Cisco, Texas. The church was founded by his parents, Voy and Myrtle, in 1947.The church holds that the Bible is “true and correct in every scientific and historical detail” and that “homosexuality is a serious crime.” Abortion is also a serious crime, “It is murder” including cases of pregnancy from rape or incest, *Reuters*reported. [9], [10], [11]

The Wilks family made headlines when they gave $15 million to back the 2016 presidential bid by**Ted Cruz,and reportedly set up a private fundraising gathering for Cruz a  Farris Wilks’ ranch. The brothers are also among the largest landowners in Montana, the *Billings Gazette* reported in 2014. [11], [19], [12]

The Wilks Brothers and PragerU

Dan and Farris Wilks aretwo of the largest funders of PragerU (AKA “Prager University”). Farris’ Thirteen Foundation gave $1 million to the foundation in 2015, while Wilks has given at least $120,000 through the Heavenly Fathers Foundation, according to publicly available 990 forms reviewed by DeSmog. [13]

PragerU, which is not an accredited academic institution, was created by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Pragerwho has “historically fought against what he describes as ‘liberal’ evils—marriage equality, feminism, and multiculturalism.” According to its 2014 annual report, PragerU was advancing with the specific goal of targeting middle school and high school children. [13]

The group’s “Environmental Science” course is dominated by climate change deniers such as Alex Epstein,Bjorn Lomborg,Patrick Moore, and Richard Lindzen.[14]

Dennis Prager has called campus rape a “gargantuan lie to get votes” and “nonsense” promoted by the “feminist left.”[15]

Stance on Climate Change

July 2013

“If [God] wants the polar caps to remain in place, then he will leave them there,” Wilks said, according to sermons reviewed by *Reuters*. [11]

Key Quotes

September 2015

“We support (Cruz) because he believes in the morality of the free market, in keeping our country safe, and in the right of the unborn not to be killed in their mother’s womb,” Farris Wilks said in an email to Reuters. [11]

February 2014...

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121 desmog

DeSmog reviewed numerous accounts during and in the wake of the Capitol attack. Social media posts showthat several other climate science deniers, like the UK-based columnist James Delingpole and Steve Milloy, publisher of the JunkScience.com website, joined many on the far-right in circulating false information suggesting that it was not the visible pro-Trump participants who had been planning online for weeks to “occupy the Capitol,” but instead members of their opposition — the loose, left-wing movement known as antifa — that actually invaded the building. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that there was “no substantive evidence” that any antifa supporters had participated in the pro-Trump insurrection, adding that many claims of antifa involvement had cited a source that had, in fact, reported neo-Nazi participation.

Screenshot of retweet by @JunkScience on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Others in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, like the conservative media organization Prager U, used their social media presence to share messaging that sought to shift focus to last summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings.

==

omg

https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/report-facebook-employees-have-evidence-showing-pattern-preferential-treatment-right-wing

A new BuzzFeed report reveals that Facebook employees have evidence that shows the platform gives preferential treatment to right-wing Facebook pages, which is at stark odds with conservatives’ frequent and unsubstantiated claims that social media platforms are censoring right-wing accounts.

An August 6 article from Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac reports that there are growing internal concerns about how Facebook handles misinformation, particularly misinformation related to voting and the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

In internal message boards, employees questioned “the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages” including the far-right outlet Breitbart, which Facebook considers a “trusted new source.” Reportedly, employees have evidence that shows “a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages,” including interference in Facebook’s fact-checking process from company leaders such as Facebook Vice President for Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan. Kaplan, a former deputy White House chief of staff for the George W. Bush administration, reportedly pushed for Facebook to partner with right-wing groups and wasinvolved in nixing proposed solutions to stop political polarization on the platform.

This reporting comes as right-wing politicians and figures continue to baselessly accuse Facebook and other social media platforms of censorship and anti-conservative bias. During the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing last month, conservative lawmakers repeatedly alleged that Facebook is biased against right-leaning content. Additionally, Fox News attacked Facebook and accused the platform of censorship after Facebook enforced its policy against COVID-19 misinformation.

Media Matters has repeatedly found that claims of anti-conservative bias on social media platforms are false. In multiple studies over the course of several years, Media Matters has shown that right-leaning and left-leaning content thrives on Facebook, with right-leaning Facebook pages earning more interactions -- reactions, comments, shares -- on posts about voting and posts about protests against police brutality than do posts from left-leaning or ideologically nonaligned pages. In recent weeks, this trend has continued to hold.

BuzzFeed’s latest report about Facebook employees claiming there is a pattern of preferential treatment toward right-leaning Facebook pages and figures further underscores how Facebook has caved to pressure from conservatives, despite evidence repeatedly debunking conservatives’ baseless accusations. From BuzzFeed’s August 6 article:

With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

Zuckerberg danced around the question, but did note that Breitbart could be removed from the company's news tab if it were to receive two strikes for publishing misinformation within 90 days of each other. (Facebook News partners, which include dozens of publications such as BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, receive compensation and placement in a special news tab on the social network.)

“This was certainly one strike against them for misinformation, but they don't have others in the last 90 days,” Zuckerberg said. “So by the policies that we have, which by the way I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make sense to remove them.”

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

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ars tech

our editor-in-chief obviously hates me. That's the only conclusion I could reach after he asked me to watch an abysmal attack video targeting renewable energy—a video produced by a notorious source of right-wing misinformation.

But despite its bizarre mishmash of irrelevancies and misdirection, the video has been widely shared on social media. Perhaps you've seen it, or maybe you just to want to be ready when a family member brings it up in an argument. What, if anything, is true in this farrago of bad faith?

Yes, it’s awful

The video is hosted by "Prager University." My only previous exposure to the organization's videos had beenthis excellent one on the Confederacy by Colonel Ty Seidule, a professor of History at West Point who has since been placed on the Pentagon commission that will examine bases named after Confederate generals. Seemed legit!

Now that I've had to look more closely, however, it turns out that Prager U is not a university—it's run by a talk radio host. Its videos frequently contain misinformation, especially when the subject is climate change. The content is so bad that Google, which is often slow to react to misinformation on its platforms, has slapped fact checks on a number of Prager U videos.

Even without the Prager U branding, the host of this video would cause some concern. Mark Mills is associated with the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank with a long history of rejecting any government involvement in markets. This has left the group with a reflexive loathing of any attempts to address global warming.

Mills himself is not necessarily a reliable source on renewable power, as he's been heavily involved in companies focused on nuclear power and fossil fuel extraction. Mills has also spoken at the climate meeting hosted by the notorious trolls at the Heartland Institute.

All that is to say that my expectations here were low; the reality turned out to be worse.

The problems with the video go beyond simple matters of bias; the whole thing is just terribly argued. We can't possibly go into detail on all of the problems, but we can list a few issues that stood out.

Overall, the video shows a sloppy disregard for facts and offers a biased presentation of the ones Mills gets right, along with a lot of misdirection. If solar panels were so inefficient that we would need to pave over all of Arizona and New Mexico with them, then yes, that would matter. But they're not, so why does Mills even bring it up as a concern?

There are some valid issues here, of course. Mills is right that environmental degradation, abusive labor practices, and repressive governments plague our supply chains. But they plague all our supply chains—not just those for renewable energy. And he's correct that we haven't figured out how to recycle wind turbine blades that reach their end of life. But again, that sort of issue isn't unique to renewable energy.

Critically, the one thing missing from all of this is a recognition of the risks of climate change, which is the whole reason we're trying to shift to wind and solar as quickly as possible. That is apparently because Mills doesn't see much in the way of risks. But here in the real world, those risks are considerable and rising. No discussion of renewable power is competent if those risks are ignored, yet Mills ignores them.

Why now?

So yes, the video is terrible. But I've also grown to think it's significant, and not just because it has found a huge audience on social media. The video signifies two things.

First: a decade ago, the same video would have been about why climate change either isn't happening or isn't a risk. The fact that this one isn't about climate change is a clear indication of how badly that fight has been lost by those who want us to keep using fossil fuels. We've seen record temperatures year after year, and all the things we expected to see have arrived with them: raging fires, massive storms, and droughts. Sure, a handful of people remain unconvinced, but that population has shrunk to the point where nobody pays them much attention.

Second: if the fight about the fact of climate change is over, it has also grown increasingly irrelevant. In the US, President Biden now promises four years of pushing for expanded renewable energy. And the economics are in place to drive renewable power regardless of policy or the environment—which explains why red-state Iowa generates 41 percent of its electricity from wind power. In many areas of the country, wind power is now cheaper than the fuel for a natural gas plant. A zero-emissions grid is now relatively cheap. As a result, 80 percent of the power added to the US grid this year will be emission-free.

the economics are now such that utilities in much of the US will install as much renewable power as their grid can manage while keeping the lights on, as it's now the cheapest way to get power—even if you already have more fossil fuel plants than you need.

And that's "the real world" that this video fails to see, a world where there's no good reason to continue using fossil fuels at the level we have been. So if you don't have good reasons to oppose renewables but still want to see fossil fuels expand, you go with whatever bad reasons you can come up with.

Which nicely explains this video.

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mma grab 520

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Dennis Prager

Conservative talk radio host and founder of PragerU

Dennis Prager is an anti-LGBTQ pundit who has hosted thenationally syndicated The Dennis Prager Show since 1999. In 2009, he founded the conservative nonprofit organization PragerU, which publishes short videos on political and international issues.

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02/13/20 6:20 PM EST

Sam Bee Prager U

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02/13/20 8:45 AM EST

PragerU founder Dennis Prager

Discussing deaths of homeless people, Fox guest says that providing housing would just make the problem worse

12/06/19 8:49 AM EST

The PragerU logo with a purple gradient over it.

PragerU relies on a veneer of respectability to obscure its propagandist mission

09/19/19 11:45 AM EDT

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Google News is elevating websites that push white supremacist rhetoric

08/22/19 2:19 PM EDT

Dennis Prager talking to Fox

On Fox, Dennis Prager lies about Trump's defense of neo-Nazis after the Charlottesville rally

08/07/19 9:17 AM EDT

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Dennis Prager says the Green New Deal “will lead to bloodshed, loss of liberty, loss of human rights”

02/08/19 5:05 PM EST

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PragerU YouTube video features bigoted conspiracy theorist Owen Benjamin

02/04/19 12:57 PM EST

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NRO's Dennis Prager: Campus Rape Culture Is A “Gargantuan Lie to Get Votes”

10/30/14 6:02 PM EDT

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NRO's Dennis Prager: Heterosexual AIDS Is An “Entirely Manufactured” Myth

07/02/14 4:34 PM EDT

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The Bizarre Writings Of A Conservative Radio Host Embraced By Sen. McConnnell To Help With Fundraising

03/18/14 10:19 PM EDT

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/candace-owens-departs-turning-point-usa/

Conservative activist Candace Owens has departed from her role at right-wing youth organizing group Turning Point USA as communications director to focus on her gig at Dennis Prager’s “Prager U” and to work on her own spin-off movement and book.

“I am both excited and sad to announce that I will be officially moving on from my role as Communications Director for Turning Point USA,” Owens wrote in an Instagram post yesterday evening. “My dream has always been simple— to wake up black America—To turn the lights on within a community that has been used and abused by the Democrat party for decades.”

She continued, “With the #BLEXIT movement,the Candace Owens podcast, and my upcoming book— I no longer feel I can be a dedicated communications director to an organization that is rightfully growing rapidly.”

Owens said that she will still be speaking at TPUSA conferences and will continue to chair TPUSA’s annual Black Leadership Summit.

In 2017, Owens began her career under the moniker “Red Pill Black” on YouTube. Her videos reached viral success and she worked her way to guest slots on Alex Jones’ Infowars outlet, going as far as to appear in-studio with Jones for a co-hosting feature. With her message that black Americans have been taken advantage of by Democrats, she eventually landed the role of Turning Point USA communications director and became a semi-regular guest on Fox News. Last year, Owen was given a major thrust into the public consciousness when rapper Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks."

in recent months, Owens has started a podcast with Prager’s digital outlet called “The Candace Owens Show” and launched the “Blexit” movement, which encourages black Americans to step away from the Democratic Party and join the Republican ranks. She also appeared on Capitol Hill last month at a hearing on the threat of white nationalism in America, where she managed to derail what was planned to be a serious domestic terrorism discussion. Owens insisted that the Southern Strategy—the Republican Party’s well-documented post-Civil Rights Act plan for building power by exploiting racial resentment among Southern white voters—was a “myth,” a ridiculous and ahistorical claim she got from a Prager U video.

Tags: Candace OwensPragerUTurning Point USA

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https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/prageru-youtube-video-features-bigoted-conspiracy-theorist-owen-benjamin

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pragerU YouTube video features bigoted conspiracy theorist Owen Benjamin

Benjamin says racial and homophobic slurs are “hilarious” and got kicked off of Twitter after going on a weird rant about the genitals of a Parkland shooting survivor

WRITTEN BY CRISTINA LÓPEZ G.

PUBLISHED 02/04/19

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

PragerU, the online operation peppering the internet with viral far-right propaganda, featured bigoted Owen Benjamin in its latest video. Benjamin was kicked off of Twitter permanently in 2018 following a bizarre rant about Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg’s genitals.

Will Sommer

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@willsommer

Another conservative figure was  banned from Twitter today: comedian @owenbenjamin, who apparently earned his ban after using a ton of racial slurs on the site.

Will Sommer

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@willsommer

Owen Benjamin's Twitter ban comes after he went on a bizarre rant about David Hogg's genitals...see for yourself https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/981359404875505669 …

Ken Klippenstein

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@kenklippenstein

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In his February 4 video, Benjamin attempted to dissuade PragerU’s audience from arguing with leftists by calling “raising kids without a gender identity” “a form of child abuse” and by baselessly claiming white people are being demonized “for the world’s problems.”

Benjamin is a right-wing comedian whose brand of “criminally unfunny” comedy includes using the N-word and homophobic slurs and calling it “hilarious.” He’s also a conspiracy theorist who has claimed to hundreds of thousands of viewers on his YouTube channel that the moon landing never happened.

PragerU has a history of using its massive, wide-reaching platform to push misinformation and extremism. It has blamed racial disparities on “black culture,” and on Columbus Day, it featured a video that showed a racist depiction of indigenous people as cannibals wielding salt-and-pepper shakers. On Facebook, the PragerU Brasil page has posted a Russia Today article to its over 14,000 followers falsely claiming that the American Psychological Association had stated it was “bad to be a man.” PragerU’s founder, Dennis Prager, has waged a dangerous, yearslong campaign against basic facts about AIDS, once calling heterosexual AIDS an “entirely manufactured” myth.

And yet, PragerU’s propaganda and misinformation are being inserted directly into schools, as the company provides “content directly to teachers and students” and is “developing relationships with educators ‘in college, high school, middle school and homeschools.’”

(H/t to @eyesontheright and @jaredlholt.)

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As states like Georgia and Florida seek to return to business as usual, they not only risk a new wave of coronavirus infections, they will begin driving people off the unemployment rolls, treating workers concerned about a possible trip to the ICU as indolent bums who lack “personal responsibility.”

All this suffering is necessary, say Republican politicians and pundits, to save “the economy” — a term with no actionable meaning in the lives of people who would rather save their lives. Fearless defenders of the supposed rights of an unborn fetus continue to call themselves “pro-life,” even as they make cold calculations on which lives have value according to their own bizarre criteria of marketability. Popular right-wing “intellectual” Ben Shapiro recently said this to a typically blank-eyed Dave Rubin: “If grandma in a nursing home dies at 81, that’s tragic and terrible. Also, the life expectancy in the United States is 80.”

After all the years of feigning outrage over the nonexistent “death panels” that Barack Obama had supposedly proposed to ration health care, the right wing is suddenly comfortable with sacrificing the elderly for the sake of economic prosperity — a phenomenon, by the way, that is disproportionately concentrated among the top few percent of income earners.

Cavalier disregard for the lives of their elders reveals that self-proclaimed “conservatives” are anything but that. No political party can call themselves the keepers of tradition if they are not willing to make sacrifices to save the lives of the elderly. Prioritizing life over money would require the American right to accept that their country is more than an economy, and that their religion of corporate capitalism is modern-day idolatry.

For a measurement of the absurd lengths these anarchists masquerading as conservatives will go to protect their claims, consider Dennis Prager — a popular talk show host who often leads his listeners through his studies of the Torah and the Bible. In defiance of all known traditions of Jewish and Christian ethics, Prager actually wrote, “The lockdown is the greatest mistake in the history of humanity.”

==

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-figures-are-making-unhinged-connections-between-coronavirus-and

Some of right-wing media’s most prolific climate deniers are using the disastrous effects of the coronavirus to promote their anti-climate agenda across multiple platforms.

These figures have reframed their usual climate attacks around the pandemic. Some have compared the (alleged) outcomes of the Green New Deal to the (real) impacts of the coronavirus, while others have claimed that both the coronavirus and climate change are being used by leftists to push a radical agenda.

Green New Deal

Perhaps the most shameful connection made between coronavirus and the Green New Deal came from Daniel Turner, a fossil fuel industry shill whose recent career has been bankrolled by Koch Industries. Making his debut in The Federalist**on March 13, with an article titled “How The Wuhan Virus Is Accomplishing The Green New Deal’s Goals,” Turner concluded that “coronavirus is a glimpse of the long-term pain a Green New Deal and environmental radicalism would inflict on America.”

Turner attempted to support this conclusion with false claims about the Green New Deal, claiming that, like the coronavirus, it would crush capitalism, put the “oil and gas industry into panic,” end travel, and control the population.

To add insult to blatant misinformation, he also stated that supporters of the Green New Deal should be “pleased” at what the coronavirus is accomplishing because “green activists don’t fret these casualties” and that “greens will rejoice” over the coronavirus’s disastrous effects.

Turner had previously pushed this narrative on March 11, again connecting the coronavirus and the Green New Deal to “more government control.”

Over the past year, Turner has made a habit of appearing in right-wing outlets to lie and fearmonger about the Green New Deal, and to promote climate denial in general. This is also not the first time he’s claimed that the Green New Deal is just a front for socialism. Since January 2019, he’s appeared on Fox News at least 12 times and on Fox Business at least 21 times, and written at least 40 op-eds for Fox News’ website.

The same day that Turner published his abhorrent piece in The Federalist, well-known climate denier Rush Limbaugh made a similar connection between the climate resolution and coronavirus on his radio show, stating that “If you want to know what the Green New Deal would look like, you're starting to see it”:

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rush is no stranger to lying about the Green New Deal; in August, he said that “the premise behind it is bogus,” and also said that “there is no man-made climate change.” He’s been echoing the same sort of misinformation during the coronavirus outbreak, even claiming that it’s been “exaggerated and ... lied about.”

Alex Epstein, author of the book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,which argues that the “overall impact of using fossil fuels is to make the world a far better place,” picked up on the egregious connection between the Green New Deal and coronavirus in a March 16 tweet. He told his followers:

Epstein has produced five videos featuring climate denial with Prager U --a right-wing, propagandist online video resource -- including one in which he lies about the Green New Deal. Perhaps more dangerously, his controversial (and flat out wrong) ideas are being promoted by Chevron:{ to push back on climate activism against the oil industry. In the past, he’s appeared on }Fox News:{, }:Fox Business:{, }BlazeTV:{, and the }Rubin Report:{.:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"/maxresdefault.jpg):{.}:

These climate deniers love to fantasize about the supposed bad outcomes of the Green New Deal, despite the fact that it will have positive climate impacts -- it will help fight climate change and inequality, while reducing the reliance of harmful fossil fuels that are contributing to these very issues in the U.S.

Leftist policies and government control

Claims that climate action, especially as embodied by the Green New Deal, is just a front for more government control over our lives are popular among right-wing media figures, and they’ve also been invoked when talking about the coronavirus.

On March 16, The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowlesdid just this, calling the responses to both climate change and coronavirus a “panic” and arguing that these issues are “simply being used to push through all the leftist policies that the left really, really wants.” He specifically referred to efforts “to pump up the Wuhan virus panic,” and he misrepresented climate science multiple times.

[vid]

Knowles is perhaps best known for being too unhinged even for Fox News; after he shamefully called Greta Thunberg a “mentally ill” child on a September appearance on The Story with Martha MacCallum, the network apologized for his “disgraceful” comment and stated that it had no further plans to book him. But he apparently still fits in perfectly at the cesspool of hatred and bigotry that is The Daily Wire.

Not to be outdone by Knowles, National Review’s Kevin Williamson invoked fascism when discussing climate change.Although he didn’t claim that the coronavirus is a false crisis, like some of his other right-wing colleagues, Williamson insinuated that both the left and the right are using the pandemic to push their respective “agendas.”

The great American longing for a generation-defining crisis — Pearl Harbor envy — is strange and enduring, and it shapes thinking on both sides of the great sociopolitical divide: On the left, global warming is the Third Reich, the so-called Green New Deal is the moonshot, and whatever unnecessary immiseration and chaos is unleashed by the fantasies of progressives are only sadly inevitable casualties on the beaches of this new Normandy. On the right, it’s an Islamic caliphate, the coming civil war (there’s always one), the nation’s being overrun by hordes of Spanish-speaking people, or — it is almost a relief to consider it — Armageddon itself. With everything from right-wing survivalist novels to ironic hipster zombie shows, we have been preparing ourselves, in our low-impact way, for just such an eventuality.

And in the plague, we see whatever we want to see: the need for a universal health-care system and paid leave, the need for a wall and for severing our relations with the Chinese.

An op-ed in RT (the state-run outlet formerly known as Russia Today) also made the government control point-- and also included a reprehensible attack on children concerned about climate change. Titled “What do the coronavirus & Greta Thunberg have in common? They’re both great for the planet,” the author writes:

Airplanes are grounded. Roads, deserted. The skies are clear and fish swim once again in Venice’s canals. Covid-19 has achieved in three short months what Greta Thunberg and her ilk could only dream of.

…

But climate hysteria has been relegated to the back pages by coverage of Covid-19. Thunberg and her devotees can find some silver linings though: not only does she not have to return to school (nice timing, G), but the virus has helped Mother Earth recover in ways that screaming, crying, and gluing themselves to trains never could.

…

But once things are back to normal, the environmental debate will likely start anew. This time, the Greta Thunbergs of the world can point to the current, virus-induced environmental uptick as proof that we can – when push comes to shove – give up our carbon addiction. However, remember that if your leaders are serious about meeting the climate goals they promise to, the lifestyle changes they ask of you will need to be enforced with the machinery of the state.

The author insinuates that “extreme measures” being taken to stop the spread of coronavirus are what “environmental crusaders” really want in pursuing their climate change goals.

The Russian government-backed RT has posted misleading climate videos on YouTube and has generally sown misinformation through its platform.

The government control idea has also been espoused by fringe, far-right YouTubers. One YouTuber, who has over 360,000 subscribers, produced anearly 18-minute video saying that coronavirus and climate change are both propaganda and that both of these “scaremonger” stories are being pushed by “globalist-backed” agendas that allow “governments to crack down on the public in various ways.” YouTube, which has a huge problem with climate change misinformation on its platform, has not tagged the video as pushing a climate falsehood.

Right wing-outlets, especially Fox News, have used a lot of misinformation when talking about the coronavirus. It’s no surprise that they’re also using favorite climate denier arguments within the discussions.

==

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/02/20/youtube-promoting-kochs-climate-change-denial-network

YouTube’s two billion monthly users are being subjected to climate change denial, even after its parent company, Google, committed to fighting harmful misinformation about science.

A report published by the nonprofit activist network Avaaz details the wide reach of this climate disinformation and points to dozens of companies and even multiple environmental organizations that advertise on videos that deny the existence of manmade climate change. Money from these ads goes to the videos’ creators, incentivizing the production of climate disinformation.

YouTube’s algorithms promote videos that feature climate change denial, most prominently by way of its “Up Next” feature. Seventy percent of the time users spend on YouTube is driven by the company’s recommendations. Climate misinformation content pops up in YouTube searches for the terms “global warming,” “climate change,” and “climate manipulation.”

Of the four egregious anti-climate science videos analyzed in depth by Avaaz, three feature men who are, or have been, part of the climate change denial network spearheaded by billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch. This Koch network, which includes think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Property and Environment Research Center, and the CO2 Coalition, has been the subject of much reporting, but its reach into YouTube, the preferred platform for U.S. teenagers, has been less thoroughly examined.

Multiple videos highlighted by Avaaz were created by PragerU, a right-wing content producer that publishes disinformation on an array of topics including climate science, racism, and free-market capitalism and is funded by the 501(c)(3) Prager University Foundation. The group itself has not received direct donations from Koch’s family foundations in the past several years, but it has gotten money from DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund sponsor used by Koch to disperse donations (over $55,000 since 2017), and larger amounts from foundations run by Koch network donors the Wilks brothers (close to $3.3 million from two family foundations since 2015), and from Koch network donors the Bradley Foundation and Bradley Impact Fund(nearly $1.1 million since 2015).

“No significant warming in the 21st century”

PragerU’s video, “What They Haven’t Told You about Climate Change,” features a climate change denier who is affiliated with Koch-funded think tanks. Patrick Moore, who has been an energy and climate adviser at the Heartland Institute and chairman of the board of the CO2 Coalition, falsely claims in the video that there has been “no significant warming in the 21st century.”

The Heartland Institute, which once received funding from ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute, hasn’t gotten direct donations from Koch’s family foundations in recent years, but DonorsTrust and sister nonprofit Donors Capital Fund combined to give the institute over $10.6 million from 2014-18. The family foundation of billionaire GOP mega-donor Robert Mercer gave close to $2.6 million during that time period, and other Koch network donors such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation ($354,000), the Bradley Impact Fund ($211,000), and the Searle Freedom Trust ($150,000) also contributed.

The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying group for oil makers including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Koch Industries, donated $75,000 to the Heartland Institute in 2017. Two executives of Flint Hills Resources, a subsidiary of Koch Industries that produces oil and petrochemicals, are members of the group’s board.

The Heartland Institute’s climate disinformation campaign does not stop at the U.S. border. A new investigation by the European investigative nonprofit Correctiv reveals that the Heartland Institute is supporting climate change deniers in Germany and is working with a YouTube personality affiliated with the far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland.

The CO2 Coalition received over $50,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Charles Koch Institute from 2016-18. Three other Koch network foundations have contributed larger sums since 2016: the Sarah Scaife Foundation ($417,000), the Mercer Family Foundation ($320,000), and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation ($175,000).

U.N. climate models “flawed by design”

Patrick Michaels, previously the longtime director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science, is currently a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), where he focuses on climate at its Center for Energy and Environment. Cato shuttered its Center for the Study of Science in May 2019 after Michaels left. According to Michaels, “They informed me that they didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business.”

In a clip from a Fox News interview, titled on YouTube as “The truth about global warming,” Michaels claims that all but one of the United Nations’ 32 climate models are “flawed by design to vastly over-predict warming,” a statement Avaaz says is misinformation.

The Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Charles Koch and had the late David Koch on its board of directors, is funded by numerous Koch network donors, including the two Koch foundations, which gave $9.3 million from 2014-18. Since 2014, Cato’s donors include:

The two Koch foundations gave CEI $288,000 from 2014-17. DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund combined to give nearly $3.9 million to CEI since 2014, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust have all contributed over $1 million since then.

The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers gave $95,000 to CEI from 2015-17, and another industry trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, has donated $70,000 to CEI since 2015.

“No evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor” in climate change

AnotherPragerU video, “Climate Change: What Do Scientists Say?” features Richard Lindzen, a former senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science. Lindzen claims, “There is no evidence that CO2 emissions are the dominant factor [in climate change],” which is decidedly false.

In 2017, Lindzenwrote a letter to Trump urging him to back out of the Paris Climate Agreement, claiming that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Twenty-two current and former faculty members at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Lindzen had been a professor, then wrote to the president to make it clear they did not share Lindzen’s views.

The Advertisers

Avaaz found over 100 advertisers on climate disinformation videos. Many are major brands such as Samsung, L’Oréal, Decathlon, Danone, Warner Bros. One in five ads came from green or ethical brands including Greenpeace International, WWF and Save the Children. A number of the advertisers told Avaaz that they were unaware their ads were running on these videos and financially supporting their creators.

To stem the spread of falsehoods and misinformation around climate change, Avaaz recommends that YouTube:

“Avaaz believes that YouTube has the opportunity to be a trailblazer in the fight against misinformation…” reads the report. “Now is the time for YouTube to act more systematically and more urgently to implement solutions, like the recommendations described above, to ensure this new decade is not plagued by the disinformation problems started in the last one.”

“Similarly, advertisers must both ensure that they follow through on their own corporate social responsibility commitments and track what kind of content their advertising revenue is inadvertently funding.”

YouTube says that to combat misinformation, it removes content that violates the company’s Community Guidelines. However, false information doesn’t violate the guidelines unless it includes hate speech or harassment, incites violence, or is a scam.

The following statement from a YouTube spokesperson to CMD explains other ways it attempts to reduce the spread of misinformation:

We can’t speak to Avaaz’s methodology or results, and our recommendations systems are not designed to filter or demote videos or channels based on specific perspectives. We’ve significantly invested in reducing recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation, and raising up authoritative voices on YouTube. In 2019 alone, the consumption on authoritative news publishers’ channels grew by 60%. As our systems appear to have done in the majority of cases in this report, we prioritize authoritative voices for millions of news and information queries, and surface information panels on topics prone to misinformation–including climate change–to provide users with context alongside their content. We continue to expand these efforts to more topics and countries.

About Alex Kotch

Alex is an investigative reporter based in Brooklyn, New York, and a contributor for the Center for Media and Democracy. A campaign finance expert, Alex helped launch money-in-politics website Sludge, and his work has been published by more than two dozen media outlets including International Business Times, The American Prospect, The Nation and Vice.com.

All articles by Alex Kotch

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Parker Molloy did a deep diveinto PragerU, which may be the biggest right-wing media enterprise this side of Fox News. Behind a very thin veil of respectability is some of the wildest propaganda you will ever see.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/prageru-relies-veneer-respectability-obscure-its-propagandist-mission

Despite the name, Prager University is not, to quote from the disclaimer pasted on the bottom of its homepage, “an accredited academic institution” -- nor does it “offer certifications or diplomas.”

Despite its claim that its videos are being “censored” by social media platforms, the site boasts that those samevideos have racked up more than 2.45 billion views across YouTube and Facebook.

Despite -- once again, quoting from its homepage -- being “a place where you are freeto learn,” it’s liable to leave you misinformed.

And despite being built upon this absurd collection of contradictions, PragerU is arguably one of the most influential right-wing propaganda networks put into motion since Fox News.

A 2018 BuzzFeed report told the story of one high school student whose political views did an about-face over the span of just a couple of months of watching PragerU videos. A PragerU brochure makes bold-yet-believable claims about its viewing demographics and its ability to sway their political leanings, noting that more than 60% of its YouTube viewers are under the age of 35 and 70% of surveyed viewers said a video had changed their minds. A March 2018 Mother Jones article called PragerU a “Right-Wing YouTube Empire That’s Quietly Turning Millennials Into Conservatives,” and the Los Angeles Times recently said PragerU was “having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.”

One could also argue that unlike websites like Breitbart, The Daily Caller, or The Daily Wire, which have well-earned reputations as hyperpartisan cesspools of misinformation,PragerU has been able to mostly avoid such stigma-- even though it shares a number of key associations with those sites.

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 ascurrent 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’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 G**eorge 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 Malkintitled “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” wasevidence 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.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/heres-how-an-obscure-california-conservative-commentator-is-indoctrinating-a-new-generation-of-right-wingers/

no lnx

Here’s how an obscure California conservative commentator is indoctrinating a new generation of right-wingers

The Economist magazine with Donald Trump on title page.]

Written by Alex Henderson August 23, 2019

Los Angeles native Larry Elder — a libertarian/conservative firebrand, African-American talk radio host/author and the self-described “Sage from South-Central” — has often cited Dennis Prager as his mentorand described him as a key factor in his career in right-wing media. The “mentor” part is important, as the 70-year-old Prager has set out to be exactly that to younger people on the right. And the Los Angeles’ Times’ Evan Halper, in an in-depth article, describes the ways in which Prager has been indoctrinating right-wingers of the future via his L.A.-based Prager University.

PragerU, as Halper notes in his piece, isn’t literally a university. Rather, it is a collection of short online propaganda videos addressing topics ranging from the economy to multiculturalism to climate change. And the goal is to indoctrinate right-wingers who are 30, 40 or 50 years younger than him.

Bradley Devlin, a leader of the College Republicans at UC Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, told the Los Angeles Times that PragerU is viewed as a learning tool among young conservatives on campus.

“People watch these videos in between classes,” Devlin told the Times. “They watch them on the line at Starbucks. They point out the unsustainability of leftism and intersectionality and the false promises of the left.”

Prager viewed himself as a right-wing “educator” long before he started PragerU in 2009. Elder is now 67, and Prager took him under his wing back in the 1980s (Elder sounds like he’s talking about an older brother when discussing his relationship with Prager). But in the digital age, Halper explains, PragerU has given Prager a chance to reach out to Millennials via social media and let them know when a new video is available.

Halper notes in his piece that PragerU has more than his share of critics, who view many of thevideos as wildly misleading. For example, the Weather Channel has described PragerU’s videos on climate change as “a course in climate misinformation” (Prager is a climate change denierdespite a mountain of evidence from scientists all over the world showing that climate change is a painful reality).

Another critic is Tara McGowan, chief executive of the nonprofit Acronym — which advises liberals and progressives on digital outreach. McGowan, in Halper’s article, is quoted as saying that PragerU is “a sophisticated campaign to indoctrinate young people. The amount of money they are putting behind it is alarming and significant. They seem to have created a savvy way to push an ideology onto an audience and get a tax break in the process.”

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/07/30/youtube-video-suggestion-algorithm-climate-science-denial-study

no lnx vid

Back in 2015, if you’d searched YouTube for information about climate change, the videos offered up might have left you with a warped sense of the state of climate science and the degree of scientific certainty that people are heating the world’s climate, a new study published in the journal Frontiers in Communication suggests.

That year was, at the time, the worst year on record for U.S. wildfires, including California’s Butte fire, which burned 900 buildings. It was the year when Pope Francis issued an encyclical urging rich countries to ward off climate change. And, for the first time in over 800,000 years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere crossed 400 parts per million on average in 2015.

It was also a year when YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm — which has become central to controversies over the rise of white supremacism and far-right extremism online — served up an unusually high number of videos in response to climate-related keywords that fell outside of the scientific consensus on climate, the new study concludes.

“Searching YouTube for climate-science and climate-engineering-related terms finds fewer than half of the videos represent mainstream scientific views,” study author Dr. Joachim Allgaier, senior researcher at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany said in a statement about his findings.

“It’s alarming to find that the majority of videos propagate conspiracy theories about climate science and technology,” he added.

Misinformation researcher John Cook developed the Fact-Myth-Fallacy framework for battling myths about climate science and other topics.

Letting Nonsense Flourish

That pattern developed as YouTube rose to new heights of popularity, both in the U.S. and worldwide. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults, and 94 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds, report watching YouTube — and one-fifth of Americans described YouTube as “very important” for “understanding things happening in the world,” according to a November 2018 Pew Research Center study.

YouTube, where videos are generally less than 15 minutes long, relies heavily on keeping viewers watching longer with its “Up Next” sidebar — a feature responsible for over 70 percent of the time people spend on the site. That makes the selection of recommended videos, chosen by a proprietary algorithm, both important and — when it comes to factual information — very politically charged.

“The massive ‘library,’ generated by users with little editorial oversight, is bound to have untrue nonsense,” Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen explained in an April investigation into YouTube’s internal decision-making. “Instead, YouTube’s problem is that it allows the nonsense to flourish. And, in some cases, through its powerful artificial intelligence system, it even provides the fuel that lets it spread.”

YouTube’s recommendations, created by that algorithm, have had profound cultural impacts and have been cited as factors in the rise of the anti-vax movement opposing childhood vaccination, the spreading of white supremacist ideology, andeven a surge in the number of flat Earthers.

When it comes to climate change, YouTube has also amplified views that fall outside of the scientific consensus, the new research shows.

'Straightforward Conspiracy Theories'

The study examined a group of 200 YouTube videos and compared them against the scientific consensus on climate change, using the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) stance as a benchmark.

The 200 videos reflected the results of searching for 10 different keywords related to climate change, using the online anonymization service Tor to prevent prior views from influencing the search results. Most of the searches were conducted in 2015.

“Unexpectedly, the majority of the videos in the sample (107 videos) supports worldviews that are opposing scientific consensus views: 16 videos deny anthropogenic climate change and 91 videos in the sample propagate straightforward conspiracy theories about climate engineering and climate change,” the study concluded.

Those outside-of-the-mainstream videos attracted virtually the same number of views as the videos presenting information that was scientifically grounded, the study adds, noting that out of the roughly 34 million views attributed to those 200 videos, those supporting mainstream climate science positions racked up just 2,294 more views than those opposed.

[Screen shots of climate science denial videos on YouTube.

“The way YouTube search algorithms work is not very transparent,” Allgaier continued. “We should be aware this powerful artificial intelligence is already making decisions for us, for example, if you choose to use ‘auto-play.'”

The search terms used in the study included not only “climate,” “climate change,” and “global warming,” but also “chemtrails” and “climate hacking,” which the study described as “terms that are often used by opponents of mainstream science.”

In some cases, conspiracy theorists advised their followers to adopt scientific language to make it harder for listeners to identify them as representing fringe views, the study said.

“From their point of view this strategy also has the advantage that ‘chemtrailers’ can now jump on the bandwagon when there are actual scientific discussions and events addressing technical options of artificial climate modification or manipulation,” Allgaier wrote.

DeSmog has previously covered the ways that YouTube and its algorithm have benefitted climate science denial.

“Despite the clear errors, the video has gathered more views than any other climate science denial clip on YouTube,” Graham Readfearn reported in February, describing a PragerU video by Canadian lobbyist and fossil fuels advocate Patrick Moore that claims there has been “no significant warming trend” in this century. “A search on YouTube for the most viewed “climate change” videos has Moore’s effort ranked 13th — searching for “global warming” has it ranked 19th. But where the problems really start, are when YouTube’s 'up next' algorithm takes a guess at what you might want to watch next after seeing Moore’s video.”

Noted climate science denier Steven Goddard (a pseudonym for Tony Heller) was not pleased with YouTube's changes to fight misinformation on climate change.

YouTube has defended itself in numerous controversies surrounding its video recommendations by citing the principle of freedom of speech. It also recently said that it will also make some effort to promote more credible videos.

“Over the last year we’ve worked to better surface credible news sources across our site for people searching for news-related topics,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Guardian, “begun reducing recommendations of borderline content and videos that could misinform users in harmful ways, and introduced information panels to help give users more sources where they can fact-check information for themselves.”

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:{:{CNN pro-Trump commentator Steve Cortes:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}: stars in a new PragerU video rewriting Trump’s comments about Charlottesville}:

mma 819

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https://thinkprogress.org/trump-believes-google-is-trying-to-rig-the-election-project-veritas-video-cb82f03caee3/

During a 45-minute monologue on Fox Business Wednesday, President Donald Trump vented his concerns about tech companies like Twitter and Google, going so far as suggesting that he believes they are “trying to rig the election.”

Trump complained that Twitter was somehow preventing him from gaining more followers on the platform, including claiming that random people have told him they’re somehow unable to “join” him on Twitter. He made the same claim back in October (even though his follower growth was actually increasing at the time), and this spring, he reportedly voiced his frustration when Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey visited the Oval Office. Dorsey tried to reassure the president that the followers he had lost were bots and spam accounts.

Trump is reportedly preoccupied by the fact former President Barack Obama has more followers on Twitter.

“It’s amazing I won the election, because you saw what happened yesterday with Google,” Trump said on Fox. “Google is totally biased to the [Democrats]."

Host Maria Bartiromo tried to clarify that they were talking about a Project Veritasvideo, released Monday, in which a “Google insider” allegedly made comments about avoiding a similar situation as what happened in 2016.

“They’re trying to rig the election! That’s what we should be looking at,” Trump insisted.

He went on to suggest “they should be sued” because of their alleged bias, suggesting that a Google executive expressed “hatred for the Republicans” this week.

Like all Project Veritas videos, the latest undercover video is heavily edited, exaggerates the seniority of the target, and distorts her words to try to fit a conservative conspiracy theory. Specifically, the video claims that Google is trying to affect the 2020 elections to “prevent” thenext “Trump situation.” Even with the context left in the edit, it’s clear she is discussing foreign interference in the election.

The target of the video, Jen Gennai, responded to the video in a Medium post. “Project Veritas has edited the video to make it seem that I am a powerful executive who was confirming that Google is working to alter the 2020 election,” she wrote. “On both counts, this is absolute, unadulterated nonsense, of course.”She confirmed that she was discussing Google’s very public work to protect from future election interference.

As U.S. intelligence and special counsel Robert Mueller’s report have made clear, the Russian government interfered in the election to help Trump. The president has welcomed foreign interference in the 2020 election.

Trump says he’d collude to win in 2020, after years of claiming ‘no collusion’

As Google’s “Head of Responsible Innovation,” Gennai explained that she doesn’t even work on any of the products or topics the undercover spy baited her into discussing in a casual conversation held under false pretenses. “I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.”

The Project Veritas video dropped a day before Maggie Stanphill, Google’s director of user experience, testified Tuesday to the Senate Commerce subcommittee on technology. Republicans on the committee grilled her about whether Google uses “persuasive technology” to try to influence users’ political views.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), in particular, accused Google of censoring conservatives, citing the Project Veritas report. “Do you think it’s Google’s job to ‘prevent the next Trump situation’?” he asked.

Stanphill rejected the various claims from the report. “We build for everyone, including every single religious belief, every single demographic, every single region, and certainly every political affiliation,” she responded. Cruz refused to believe the company was unbiased.

Simultaneous with Trump’s rant on Fox Business Wednesday morning, Fox News was interviewingDennis Prager, founder of the site PragerU. Prager has sued Google,claiming that it has censored its conservative videos on YouTube. Last year, a federal judge tossed out a nearly identical PragerU suit, noting that as a private company, YouTube can make its own decisions about how to regulate content on its site. Prager insisted that all the major tech platforms simply hate conservative content, taking no responsibility for the hateful people and views that have been featured in PragerU videos, including various racist and anti-LGBTQ messages.

What appears to be happening is that some conservatives are massively distorting tech companies’ attempts to protect against foreign election interference or restrict the distribution of hateful views, stirring up conspiracy theories that the companies are demonstrating blanket bias against conservatives. The president then repeats these totally unfounded accusations on national television as if they are fact. They are not.

#BIG TECH, #DONALD TRUMP, #FOX BUSINESS, #FOX NEWS, #GOOGLE, #POLITICS,#PROJECT VERITAS, #TED CRUZ, #TWITTE

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aha-ish a variant on zero sum?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/legal-scholar-tracks-down-the-bizarre-origins-of-the-right-wing-phrase-justice-kavanaugh-used-in-a-new-opinion/

no lnx

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was appointed the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump for one clear purpose: to fortify the majority of conservative justices than can protect the right-wing agenda through the judicial branch.

And while there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Kavanaugh will be a dutiful player in this role, there always remains a possibility that a justice will go rogue once appointed and fail to follow the wishes of the party behind his or her nomination. But in a new majority opinion announced on Monday, joined by the other four Republican appointees on the court, Kavanaugh sent a clear signal that he’s a party man to his core.

The decision came in the case of Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, where the court was faced with the question of whether a public access television channel is a state actor and thus bound by the First Amendment. The five conservative justices said the non-profit organization functions as a private actor in its role and is therefore not hampered by the Constitution, while the four liberal justices disagreed.

But legal scholar Michael Dorf of Cornell University, who blogs at Dorf on Law, pointed to one peculiar bit of phrasing Kavanaugh used in authoring the majority opinion that is worth examining:

It is sometimes said that the bigger the government, the smaller the individual. Consistent with the text of the Constitution, the state-action doctrine enforces a critical boundary between the government and the individual, and thereby protects a robust sphere of individual liberty. Expanding the state-action doctrine beyond its traditional boundaries would expand governmental control while restricting individual liberty and private enterprise. We decline to do so in this case. [Emphasis mine]

On Twitter, Dorf noted out that the phrase in bold is not obvious, and its origins were left unclear.

“I never heard anyone say this, and the opinion provides no citation, so I Googled it and found the Twitter feed of the Ayn Randian Atlas Society,” he wrote. “But what is the origin of this saying?”

He continued:“It appears to be an aphorism coined by a libertarian talk show host named Dennis Prager(who originally referred to ‘citizen’ rather than ‘individual’). Various libertarian candidates for office have used the phrase, with or w/o attribution.”

Kavanaugh’s choice to use this phrase with no citation or discussion of its origins suggests two equally troubling possibilities: He was trying to conceal the blatantly right-wing nature of its origins, or he is so steeped in right-wing ideology that he assumes conservative truisms are essentially uncontroversial.

But as Dorf argued, there’s nothing obviously true about this claim; in fact, a little reflection shows that at least a simplistic understanding of the assertion is plainly false.

“The claim is false insofar as it asserts a linear relationship between the size of government and the ability of individuals to flourish. Ask Hobbes how well individuals do when one shrinks government down to nothing,” he explained. “The claim conflates government’s size and its reach. Govt could be large in terms of taxes or spending/GDP ratio but small in its intrusion on people’s lives. Welfare states need not be and generally have not been totalitarian states.”

The incident demonstrates a larger issue that deeply concerns me about the court. While discussion about the ideological divides on the court is common, I think it’s often underestimated the significant role the justices’ information diets — where and how they consume news, in particular — affects their world views and the rulings. To put it bluntly, I fear that the conservative justices, in addition to having ideological biases just like anyone else, consume Fox News disinformation and related propaganda regularly that gives them a distorted view of the world.This one opinion shows how unsophisticated slogans can fester in the mind and potentially influence major decisions. If the right-leaning justices rely on the cesspool that is conservative media to make their judgments about the world, especially at a time when conservative media is increasingly disconnected from reality, we should be deeply concerned about where the court will take the country.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/candace-owens-departs-turning-point-usa/

Conservative activist Candace Owens has departed from her role at right-wing youth organizing group Turning Point USA as communications director to focus on her gig at Dennis Prager’s “Prager U” and to work on her own spin-off movement and book.

“I am both excited and sad to announce that I will be officially moving on from my role as Communications Director for Turning Point USA,” Owens wrote in an Instagram post yesterday evening. “My dream has always been simple— to wake up black America—To turn the lights on within a community that has been used and abused by the Democrat party for decades.”

She continued, “With the#BLEXIT movement, the Candace Owens podcast, and my upcoming book— I no longer feel I can be a dedicated communications director to an organization that is rightfully growing rapidly.”

Owens said that she will still be speaking at TPUSA conferences and will continue to chair TPUSA’s annual Black Leadership Summit.

In 2017, Owens began her career under the moniker “Red Pill Black” on YouTube. Her videos reached viral success and she worked her way to guest slots on Alex Jones’ Infowars outlet, going as far as to appear in-studio with Jones for a co-hosting feature. With her message that black Americans have been taken advantage of by Democrats, she eventually landed the role of Turning Point USA communications director and became a semi-regular guest on Fox News. Last year, Owen was given a major thrust into the public consciousness when rapper Kanye West tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”

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In recent months, Owens has started a podcast with Prager’s digital outlet called “The Candace Owens Show” and launched the “Blexit” movement, which encourages black Americans to step away from the Democratic Party and join the Republican ranks. She also appeared on Capitol Hill last month at a hearing on the threat of white nationalism in America, where she managed to derail what was planned to be a serious domestic terrorism discussion. Owens insisted that the Southern Strategy—the Republican Party’s well-documented post-Civil Rights Act plan for building power by exploiting racial resentment among Southern white voters—was a “myth,” a ridiculous and ahistorical claim she got from a Prager U video.

Tags: Candace OwensPragerUTurning Point USA

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