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PragerU is a right-wing propaganda machine. And it’s coming for your children.
The group co-founded by right-wing radio host Dennis Prager produces slick, cartoonish videos intended to turn kids into conservatives.
PragerU is short for Prager University, though it isn’t a school and doesn’t confer degrees.
Its list of contributors is a who’s who of the worst people on the internet: Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Kirk, Steven Crowder, Candace Owens, and Michael Knowles.
PragerU’s web presence is a mix of lies, twisted logic, and are you f*cking kidding me with this?
Climate change is no big deal to PragerU. Last October, it tweeted, “The climate is always changing—it has always been this way, long before humans were here.”
Apparently it believes that the record heat, storms, floods, and wildfires are just a coincidence that have nothing to do with carbon emissions. It also likes to promote fossil fuels, which is unsurprising given much of its seed funding came from far-right fracking billionaires.
PragerU really, really hates it when people demand equality. Unless they’re white. It recently published a video complaining about the “rising tide of racial hatred towards white people.”
PragerU has claimed that it’s racist to teach kids about the impacts of slavery and systemic racism. It once insisted, falsely, that women aren’t paid less than men for the same work, because if they were, no company would hire men.
This summer, Florida rewarded PragerU’s efforts to teach kids that slavery wasn’t so bad by approving use of its videos in public schools.
PragerU is on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Telegram, Rumble, and X (formerly known as Twitter). TikTok permanently banned it in 2021.
PragerU has millions of followers and subscribers across these platforms.
All those eyeballs translate into tons of cash. Records show that in 2021, it raked in $56 million, over $13 million of which it funneled back into marketing its content, primarily on Facebook and Google.
Dirtiest Delete
PragerU gets away with a lot of nonsense. But one video about Robert E. Lee proved to be a bridge too far.
The video argued for preserving statues of the Confederate general because he crushed John Brown’s attempted slave rebellion, believed that Black people were better off being slaves than living in Africa, opposed freed slaves’ right to vote, and took up arms against his country to preserve slavery.
It deleted the video and the Xeet. But the internet remembers.