The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced last week that it would shut down after Congress voted to claw back over $500 million of federal funding from the organization. The announcement imperils local PBS and NPR stations around the country that have provided news and educational content for kids for nearly half a century.
Amid the stripping of these federal funds, last month, the White House debuted a new educational partner at its launch event for its new Founders Museum exhibit: PragerU, a nonprofit organization that specializes in creating right-leaning educational short videos for adults and children. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon introduced the partnership, followed by PragerU CEO Marissa Streit.
For the White House exhibit, PragerU created AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers delivering patriotic accounts of the Revolution. In one, an AI-generated John Adams borrows a catchphrase from conservative pundit Ben Shapiro and tells the viewer, “Facts do not care about our feelings.”
Since its founding in 2009, PragerU has become a juggernaut in the conservative educational media space, with their videos reaching millions of followers across social media. The organization has helped launch the media careers of right-wing figures like Candace Owens. Their popular videos elevate narratives that have been sharply criticized as climate denialist, Islamophobic, and “misleading” about slavery.
PragerU’s partnership with the Department of Education is not the first time the conservative content mill has partnered with the government. Over the past few years, the organization has partnered with states and superintendents throughout the country to make their educational material widely available to public school children and teachers.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Laura Meckler, national education writer for the Washington Post, about how PragerU partnered with states to bring its content to the classroom and if the organization is poised to fill the educational void left by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Who’s behind PragerU? Is there, like, a Mr. Prager? A Mrs. Prager?
There is a Mr. Prager; it’s Dennis Prager. He’s a conservative talk show host who started this whole thing. It was founded in 2009. His partner was the screenwriter named Allen Estrin, who you may have never heard of. Their goal really was both educational and political. They viewed the educational system we have now as being too liberal and too dominated by those ideas. So, they were going to counter it.
But, at first, they were for college students, and then, in 2021, it started to expand into younger students.
Can you give us an example of a PragerU video that seems to be explicitly trying to provide a conservative narrative in response to a preexisting liberal one?
I think a good example is the New York Times 1619 project, which was published to mark the 400th anniversary of the first slaves brought to what became the United States. The 1619 project really centered slavery in the American story and said that this was an essential to understanding American history. And a lot of conservatives objected to that — to the idea of framing American history in such a negative way. They were saying, “Why are we saying all of American history is shaped by this? Why not talk about how we got rid of slavery? Why not talk about abolitionists? Why not talk about, you know, freedom and all of the other things that were behind the Revolution and all of that.”
So that was the conservative pushback, and what we see in these PragerU videos, in sort of subtle ways, is a bit of a counter to that. There’s a video with Christopher Columbus, who is talking to some modern-day kids who are saying, basically, “I heard bad things about you.” And he says, “You have to judge me by the standards that were true at the time.”
The upshot of this video and other Prager videos is to — I think it’s fair to say — minimize the role of slavery or how much we should focus on it or how upset we should be about it from our past and to try to look on more, shall we say, uplifting ideas from American history.
What states are buying into this variety of educational material, if you can call it that?
There are about eight states that have some sort of partnership with Prager U, which — keep in mind — that these partnerships do not mandate that schools use this material. It makes it available to them as approved content from the state. So, it doesn’t require it, but it puts it on a list of available material, and we’re not really sure exactly how many are using it.
That said, about a year ago, when we first reported on this, there were a half dozen states that had partnerships of one sort or another, which included Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Montana, and Arizona. And then South Carolina and Idaho — maybe those are less surprising [partners]— have since formed partnerships with PragerU as well. In Oklahoma, they actually are quite excited about it. Now, Ryan Walters is the very controversial and very conservative education commissioner in Oklahoma, and he actually recently said that he wants to use PragerU material to evaluate teachers who are coming from other blue states—
—to make sure that they are, actually, not bringing indoctrination — at least indoctrination from the left — with them.
It sounds like PragerU has the attention of the White House, but the White House wants to give education back to the states. So, are the states a crucial part of the PragerU plan?
Well, I think the states are the heart of the PragerU plan. Despite the fact that Donald Trump says on a very regular basis that he wants to, quote, “return education to the states,” the fact is that education is already at the states. Doesn’t mean there’s not a federal role, but you know, education is run by states and school boards, so they are really the ones who decide whether this material is available or not.
[PragerU] does have quite a few followers on their social media — millions of followers when you add it all up together. I think last year, when we totaled it, it was [roughly] over 11 million across platforms. So, they do make their material available directly to viewers — anybody who wants it. None of this is secretive; this is very much out there. They want people to see these videos; they want people to get their content. They think it’s an important contribution to our overall culture and education. This is not something that you need to pay money for or that’s being hidden.
It’s funny to think of the preponderance of PragerU in state curriculum or even just online at the same time as the federal government just defunded PBS, essentially. Do you think that’s a coincidence?
Yes and no. I don’t actually think these two decisions are directly related in any way — at least that I’m aware of — but I do think that they maybe both reflect a larger worldview, which we very much are seeing from this administration: an effort to stamp out what they would call “woke ideology.”
They see that in lots of different places, and they’re going after it in all sorts of different ways, whether it be pressure on universities to diversify their faculty, [or] whether it be defunding PBS and NPR, which they think are overly liberal. All of these are examples of using the power of the federal government to try and essentially diminish or change institutions that are not ideologically aligned [with them]. And that has happened across schools where you saw bans on conversations about race in classrooms in a bunch of different states. You’re not allowed to talk about quote-unquote “divisive topics.” [There is] a lot of concern that topics like slavery were not going to be properly taught anymore, or the civil rights movement, or all sorts of other things that get at the various elements of systemic racism in our country.
That said, let’s not give it more power than it has. If you go to most education in this country, most classrooms have teachers who are doing their best to present a fair-minded read of history. The best teachers are challenging their students to look at it from multiple points of view and to understand that there is more than one way to read history. And I think that if it’s presented in the context of, “There are [different] ways of viewing American history,” [then] I don’t think that material that isn’t factual should be taught. But I don’t think that’s most of the criticism of the PragerU stuff. I think the criticism of most of it is the ideology behind it. But if students are being challenged to consider things from multiple points of view, that’s not a bad thing necessarily.
