Schooling kids at PragerU

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Sean Rameswaram: Today explained. A few weeks ago, tech reporter and 404 Media co-founder Sam Cole was scrolling blue sky. As I do, and came across this screenshot that Seth Kotler, who's a professor of history, had posted. My name is Seth Kotler. I'm a professor of American history at Millamite University in Salem, Oregon. And it was this very clearly like AI slop image of John Adams. John Adams from history. John Adams from history, the famous John Adams. Because I live in Oregon, I get posts from the Oregon Republican Party frequently. And they had been posting these AI-generated videos of the founders. And this one was a video that they posted of John Adams. I am John Adams, blunt, stubborn, and the indispensable voice for independence in the Continental Congress. And when I clicked on it and watched it, he said, He most certainly never said that, no. It just struck me as such a strange and absurd thing for someone to put in the mouth of John Adams. It's actually a catchphrase from Ben Shapiro, who is a conservative, like, right-wing influencer. Okay, forget about the disrespect. Facts don't care about your feelings. And at the end of the videos, and the videos are pretty short, they're a couple minutes, it says that they were brought to you by PragerU in partnership with the White House. And it says the White House is grateful for the partnership with Prager U and the U.S. Department of Education as part of the production of this series called The Road to Liberty.

Seth Kotler: We now are excited to launch today the Founders Museum, 56 signers of the Declaration, 20 key events of the American Revolution, and six ladies of the Revolution. And PragerU has been working diligently on creating videos. And when you use that QR code, you get to view the amazing pictures come to life telling their own stories. The full videos are these little vignettes, I would call them, of different revolutionary era figures. Good day, friend. I am Benjamin Franklin. I'm Thomas Jefferson, born on Virginia soil. You've no doubt seen my name. I made certain King George did not miss John Hancock. Almost like a puppet. It's like the mouths move, but the rest of their faces don't move a ton. My proudest title is always Patriot. Now the charge is yours. Guard liberty well. For once lost, it is lost forever.

Sean Rameswaram: These are part of like a museum exhibit thing in the white house um as far as I can tell uh I haven't gone there in person to see it but it's kind of just like a hallway in the white house where the walls have these paintings that i'm not even totally clear on whether those are eye or if they're like real paintings, but they might be real. And then they're showing like Revolutionary War portraits, things like that. And under them, they'll have this little like description and a QR code. And if you scan the QR code, that's what brings you to the PragerU videos. From now and on, we are going to remember our nation's history and it's really going to matter. And we're not going to let anybody have a nation with amnesia, certainly not America.

Sean Rameswaram: What is PragerU and how did they get into the White House? PragerU, which I only recently learned the U does not stand for university. It's not a university, which I knew, but I kind of thought they were maybe just calling it Prager University. It's PragerU. It's a nonprofit organization that makes conservative content. They really specialize in these short little videos that are like edutainment. They say on their website the mission is to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology, and edutainment. It gotten a name for itself over the years because a lot of the videos they talk about climate change and kind of the denialist bent Climate is a very convenient way for governments and institutions to get involved in nearly every aspect of a citizen life The science does not support that fear. They do quite a bit of what could be read as slavery, apologism. And now for a brief history of slavery. Here's the first thing you need to know. Slavery was not invented by white people. Here's the second thing you need to know. White people were the first to formally put an end to slavery. What radical Islam and the woke have in common? The two ideologies have distinctive rituals. Islamists shout, Allah, Akbar, and death to America. The woke shout, Black lives matter and I can't breathe. Islamists pray to Mecca. The woke take the knee. The CEO of PragerU has called it medicine for the mind. And how did they get wrapped up in the White House's business? PragerU and I would say this administration are aligned in quite a few ways. The preoccupation with wokeness, something that makes this story pretty interesting and timely right now is there are a couple of things that are happening simultaneously. So in March, Trump signed this executive order. He was calling for the dismantling of the education department. And that's something that Education Secretary Linda McMahon supports. And Linda McMahon was at the launch and spoke at the launch of these PragerU Road to Liberty videos at the White House.

Linda McMahon: It is one thing to learn cursive and read the Declaration of Independence, as every student should, I think. But it is another to grasp why 56 men risk everything for what it said and to love as they did in a way that inspires our sacrifice.

Sean Rameswaram: So she's kind of throwing her support behind it. It's something that conservative groups have been complaining about or accusing the Department of Education of for a long time, saying that they're using taxpayer money to indoctrinate children. So this concern that kids are consuming content that is somehow woke leftist indoctrination has been longstanding. And then PragerU comes in and says, hey, we have lots of content that is fighting the woke mind virus of today. And you can use it in your schools. What are they trying to do with these videos? What are they trying to say about U.S. history, if not accurate things about what historical figures may have actually said? So I talked to Seth about this and asked him what he made of this as a historian.

Seth Kotler: The main focus seems to be organized around the idea of this kind of monochromatic depiction of who these people are. That they're all just admirable and wonderful because they're patriots. And so occasionally it will introduce some more complexity into the story, like, for example, the video about William Whipple from New Hampshire, where they note that he, because he believed in the foundational principles of the American Revolution, he freed his slave. In my letters, I shared my hope that slavery would end. And so I myself freed Prince, who was my own servant. How could I fight for liberty and deny it at home? And that is true. They don't mention that William Whipple was a wealthy, important person in New Hampshire because he made a killing in the slave trade. And they also don't mention that Prince Whipple, the man who he claimed to own, had to petition for his freedom. And that William Whipple didn't grant that petition and didn't grant freedom to Prince Whipple until, I believe it's 1781 or 1782. 1782, Prince Whipple protested for his freedom and fought for his freedom. And so by not including that in the story, it just turns William Whipple into a great guy who just did the right thing and erases Prince Whipple and his activism that he did along with other enslaved people in New Hampshire.

Sean Rameswaram: So just it gives, I assume it's intended just to make people just feel lots of good feelings and positive thoughts about the men whose names are on the Declaration of Independence and not to ask any deeper or further questions about all of the complexity of that moment and of the Patriot movement. I'm all in favor of people feeling a sense of connection and identification across time with people in the past. But that connection and identification, for it to be meaningful, has to have some degree of complexity to it and a sense of both how these people in the past are recognizable to us, but also how they're quite different from us. And that to me is what studying history is all about, is trying to understand that how both of those are always in operation. And what this does is it just collapses any of that gap between the present and the past and just turns these people from the past into people who we can just unquestioningly and unproblematically just celebrate and love.

Sean Rameswaram: That was Seth Kotler, history professor at Willamette University. You also heard from reporter Sam Cole, 404media.co. We've been talking about PragerU and the White House, but they've really set their sights on the states. And we will, too, when we're back on Today Explained. Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it extremely powerful adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model According to Adio Adio takes less than a minute to set up and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes so that you can focus on what matters, building your company. You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to attio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com slash todayexplained.

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Sean Rameswaram: AI John Adams' debut at the White House is not PragerU's first time partnering with the government. Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler has been following PragerU's partnership with states for a couple years now. Well, we first heard about this when states were starting partnerships with PragerU to bring that content to K-12 classrooms. And it was already, you know, under being criticized, you know, well over a year ago with people saying that this content was essentially biased in a conservative direction. And there were concerns about this content coming into public school classrooms.

Laura Meckler: Who's behind PragerU? Is there like a Mr. Prager, a Mrs. Prager? There is a Mr. Prager. It's this guy. A mister? Yes. It's always a mister. It's a Dennis Prager. He's this conservative talk show host who started this whole thing. We live in the post-order universe known as the post-Christian, and I'm Jewish, so I'm not speaking even as a Christian. But it's a post-Christian world, and Christianity, rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Judeo-Christian values, represented order. It was founded in 2009. His partner was the screenwriter named Alan Estrin, who you may not have heard of. But, you know, their goal really was, you know, both educational and political. You know, 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.

Laura Meckler: How would you like to learn a lot in a short amount of time? A major infusion of knowledge in, say, five minutes? Sound like something that might interest you? If so, you've come to the right place. But at first they were for college students. And then in 2021, it started to expand into younger students. Your son is watching something, but you think it must be fine. You know it's only kid shows, so you have some peace of mind. But as you eat the roasted goose, your little sport insists. Hey, Dad, did you know America is racist? Your mind goes numb. Your child is being filled with lies. The babe you once held dear. But in that shocking moment, a man pops into frame. Could it be George Washington here to save your child's brain? He snatched the screen and changed the thing. The something that is true. It's an app with shows for kids. They call it PragerU. Can you give us an example, like, of a PragerU video that seems to be explicitly trying to provide a conservative narrative in response to maybe a pre-existing liberal one?

Laura Meckler: Well, I think a good example is like the New York Times 1619 Project, which was published to mark the 400th anniversary of the first slaves brought to the, well, became the United States. And, you know, the 1619 Project really centered slavery in the American story and said that this was like an essential to understanding American history. And a lot of conservatives, you know, objected to that, that 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, a bit of a counter to that. So like, you know, there's a video with Christopher Columbus. Don't be alarmed, sir. Who is talking to some modern day kids. What? You from the future? How'd you guess? Who are saying basically, I heard bad things about you. I'm sorry, Mr. Columbus, but I heard at school that you spoiled paradise And you brought slavery and murder to peaceful people Caramba! Those are some accusations And he says Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world Even amongst the people I just left Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don't see the problem You have to judge me by the standards that were true at the time How can you come here to the 15th century and judge me by your standards from the 21st century? For those in the future to look back and do this is well estupido

Laura Meckler: The upshot of this video and other Prager videos is to I think it fair to say minimize the It stupid educational material, if you can call it that? There are about eight states that have some sort of partnership with PragerU. We should keep in mind that these partnerships does not mandate that schools use this material. It sort of makes it available to them through as sort of an approved content from the state. So it doesn't require it, but it sort of puts it on a list of available material. And we're not really sure exactly how many are using it. That said, it's like 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, 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.

Laura Meckler: Thank you, PragerU, for giving kids a shot to live up to their God-given potential. Thank you very much. I mean, it sounds like PragerU has the attention of the White House, but the White House wants to, like, give education back to the states. So are the states, like, a crucial part of the PragerU plan? Well, I think the states are the heart of the PragerU plan. Most education, I mean, despite the fact that Donald Trump says on a very regular basis that he wants to, quote, return education to the states. We're going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs. The fact is that education is already at the states. It 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. I mean, they do have quite a few followers on their social media, millions of followers when you add it all up together. So I think last year we totaled it. It was about over 11 million across platforms. So they do make their material available directly to viewers, anybody who wants it. So, I mean, they're very much none of this is secretive. You know, 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.

Laura Meckler: So this is not something that you need to, like, pay money for or that's being hidden. You know, it's it's very much available. It's funny to think of the preponderance of PragerU in maybe state curriculum or even online at the same time as the federal government just defunded PBS, essentially. Do you think that's a coincidence? Well, yes and no. I mean, 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 they maybe both reflect a larger worldview, you know, which we very much are seeing from this administration, a effort to stamp out what they would call woke ideology. And 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, whether it be, as they say, defunding PBS and NPR, which they think are overly liberal. I mean, all of these are examples of using the power of the federal government to try and, you know, essentially diminish or change institutions that are not ideologically aligned. And that has happened across schools where you saw, you know, bans on conversations about race in classrooms in a bunch of different states past these. You're not allowed to talk about, quote unquote, divisive topics. and 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.

Laura Meckler: That said, let's not give it more power than it has. If you go to most education in this country, most classrooms, you 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 that there are different ways of viewing American history, and I don't think the material that isn't factual should be taught, but I don't think that's really the criticism of most of the PragerU stuff. I I think the criticism of most of it is the ideology behind it, the emphasis they put and that sort of thing. So, you know, if students are being challenged to consider things from multiple points of view, then that's not a bad thing necessarily.

Sean Rameswaram: Laura Meckler, WashingtonPost.com. Our show today was produced by Gabrielle Burbay, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, mixed by Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Welcome back, Laura. I'm Sean Ramos from This is Today Explained.