PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American people.
Streit’s company is involved in a big-money operation targeting children with neoconservative, pro-war, pro-business, pro-Israel messaging, attempting to indoctrinate them at their youngest and most impressionable age.
MintPress explores this increasingly powerful group, with ambitions to completely overhaul the American educational system.
Leave Our Kids Alone
You have probably seen a PragerU video. An estimated one-in-three Americans have. The billionaire-funded media machine is a powerful force on the American right, providing highly-produced conservative content attempting to push U.S. politics and society rightwards.
Recently, however, PragerU has set its sights on children, and is seeking to hijack the American education system. Since 2023, it has signed deals with ten states – Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah – to become an official education provider, supplying books, videos, and other content to schools across the United States. Students in New Hampshire, meanwhile, can earn credits by completing online PragerU courses. And with PragerU Español, it has plans to expand into Latin America as well.
Florida was the trailblazer in this phenomenon. As part of his Stop WOKE Act – a bill that sought to eradicate liberal ideology from public life – Governor Ron DeSantis partnered with the organization, identifying it as one that “aligned with the state’s revised civics and government standards.” PragerU now provides ultra-conservative “American values” messaging for use in grades K-12.
Florida’s post Stop WOKE Act curriculum now requires middle school teachers to instruct students on the benefits of slavery for black Americans, including that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
It has also rewritten the 1920 Ocoee Massacre – a pogrom that saw a white mob kill dozens of black residents and permanently ethnically cleanse the Florida town of its black population – as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
College students at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, meanwhile, can earn extra credit by taking a PragerU history course. This, despite the fact that, despite its branding, PragerU is not an accredited educational institution, let alone a university.
Oklahoma, however, has gone even further. Last year, the state’s superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, launched a controversial teacher evaluation test developed by PragerU to vet teachers for their ideology and filter out applicants considered insufficiently conservative. The plan even withheld teaching certificates from educators from what Walters described as “woke states.” Walters left his position to head the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative pressure group opposed to teachers unions.
Free Healthcare is Slavery, But Actual Slavery is A-OK
The PragerU content being shown to American schoolchildren contains a number of highly controversial viewpoints presented as common sense. Most “lessons” are presented in cartoon format, with one about the founding of America including an animated Christopher Columbus stating that slavery was “no big deal.” “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” he said; “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” Further justifying the enslavement and genocide of two continents, Columbus tells those watching that, “The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.”
Another video lesson grossly distorts the views of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, with an animated Douglas justifying slavery in America, stating that “the founding fathers made a compromise [supporting slavery] to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”
PragerU Kids videos also cover more contemporary issues. One video, titled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,” deals with the murder of George Floyd, whom the narrator describes as a “black man who resisted arrest.” The video claims that “violent protests” and “looting” were sparked by “false claims” of racist policing spread by unnamed “activists.” Mateo, a Los Angeles child, is aghast by protestors “threatening police,” or, as the video calls them, “protectors,” and decides to stand firmly in solidarity with the Blue Lives Matter movement.
Another educational resource approved for use in schools is a lecture called “Is Fascism Right or Left?” by controversial conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, in which he insists that, “Fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.” In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty for violating federal campaign financing laws.
Unsurprisingly for a conservative movement funded by fracking billionaires, PragerU also instructs children to reject the overwhelming consensus on climate change. However, it takes it to absurd levels, comparing the supposed oppression of climate skeptics to the living in Warsaw Ghetto, where upwards of 300,000 Jewish people were killed by the Nazis.
In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,” the titular character is fed propaganda at school about the disastrous impact of human-made climate change, only to have her eyes opened by her conservative parents. Ania is ostracized by the other children for merely expressing her concerns. Luckily, her grandfather Jakub gives her the strength to continue, by telling her about the Warsaw Uprising. “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” viewers are told.
On India, American children are told that the country benefitted greatly from British imperialism, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions,” and “gave” India its independence in 1947. “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” the video concludes, framing India’s problems as entirely down to their own backward culture, rather than centuries of direct rule and oppression.
Another video lambasts Canada’s free healthcare system and highlights the supposed dangers of socialized medicine, while extolling the for-profit privatized American system, despite it being by far the most expensive, comparatively, and having the worst outcomes of any developed country, according to international studies.
PragerU also sets its targets on Cuba, China, Venezuela, and North Korea as well, publishing videos demonizing those countries as authoritarian nightmare regimes in need of U.S. intervention.
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