On Oct. 24 the Idaho Department of Education announced — and appeared to encourage — a new option for Idaho public schools: “supplementary resources from PragerU Kids, available for use free of charge.”
Gee, that sounds wonderful. So what’s the catch?
If you get the impression, which you easily could get from the state news release, that PragerU is just a milquetoast, academic, centrist, nonideological supplier of educational materials, think again. Here’s where it helps to take a national view, because PragerU has become familiar — and highly controversial — in other states.
First some background: Dennis Prager is a conservative radio talk show host, not an academic, and “Prager University,” founded in 2009 as a nonprofit, is not a school and does not have a campus. It is a large-scale operation, one of the biggest “political spenders” on Facebook. The Los Angeles Times reports, “The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times.”
Where does the money to do this come from? The core funding was from Texas billionaire brothers Dan and Farris Wilks, who made their bucks in fracking, and may be familiar to Idahoans who recall their purchase of tens of thousands of acres of land in Idaho and the subsequent cutoff of access in much of it. If you were wondering about an Idaho connection to PragerU, there you are. (Prager has said he no longer receives money from the Wilks brothers.)
So where else has the (abundant) money come from? Here’s one small example. In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, “A Hungarian education foundation paid Dennis Prager $30,000 in public funds for two appearances during an August youth festival where he and Fox News host Tucker Carlson touted the country’s far-right stances on the media, immigration and LGBTQ issues, according to a contract obtained by Hatewatch.”
Prager, in turn, has called the SPLC “a hate group on the left.” Not exactly a love fest there.
A year ago Forbes magazine, no liberal agitator, said: “PragerU, a nonprofit known for producing short and often controversial videos promoting conservative viewpoints of different civic topics, had its content approved for use in Oklahoma’s public schools Tuesday, about a month after Florida adopted the use of the content in its own classrooms, prompting backlash over its presence in public classrooms.” Backlash is a mild way of putting it.
Sociologist Francesca Tripodi studied Prager and concluded with a warning that, “the implications of creating a dense network of extremist thinkers allows for those who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic. Leveraging the thoughts of someone like Stefan Molyneux can have disastrous consequences considering that Molyneux regularly promotes ‘alt-right’ ‘scientific racism’ on his own YouTube shows.”
One very popular video (watched 11 million times) from conservative Candace Owens is called “Playing the Black Card,” in which she says, “The Black card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you have never been oppressed. With the Black card you can sell books full of indecipherable prose because with a card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense?”
The PragerU YouTube channel has featured a video showing Christopher Columbus saying slavery was no problem and George Floyd was simply a “Black man who resisted arrest.”
Even the Weather Channel has blasted PagerU’s take on the environment and climate change as “misinformation.”
The Media Bias Fact Check site gives PragerU a rating of low credibility: “Overall, we rate PragerU Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, promotion of propaganda, the use of poor sources who have failed fact checks, and the publication of misleading information regarding immigration and climate change.”
And there is much, much more. Look ’em up online or on the Idaho Education News website: idahoednews.org. You have to wonder if the state’s top education office did.
It’s coming soon, very possibly, to your child’s classroom.
So, in the interest of fairness and balance, when does Bernie Sanders get to run a video series in Idaho schools?
Stapilus is a former Idaho newspaper reporter and editor who blogs at ridenbaugh.com. He may be contacted at stapilus@ridenbaugh.com.
