1 day Ago
It takes a second to figure out what’s off about a Prager University children’s video explaining abolition. Then you realize the producers have made Frederick Douglass sound a little like John C. Calhoun.
“I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great — the making of the United States,” Douglass, an escaped slave, is depicted saying. Calhoun, our late defender of the “positive good” of slavery, couldn’t have said it better. But the really bold (or craven) part of the video is when this caricature of the famous 19th century abolitionist bashes modern-day civil rights activists.
Who, the video claims, all want to “abolish” the police. That takes a special kind of creativity, or something. But that’s what PragerU is designed to provide.
In the nonprofit’s 2023 biannual repo rt, the right-wing content creator (it's not really a university) says its five-minute videos are meant to “inoculate children against the woke and anti-American leftist narrative taught in most schools.” Inoculate, indoctrinate. You say potato .
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On Monday, Ellen Weaver — our radical, culture-war-obsessed state education superintendent — announced she’s invited PragerU into our schools to teach children social studies and science. A lot of people understandably had to stick their heads in refrigerators to keep their faces from melting off. Because here are a few of Prager’s greatest hits: Yeah, they’re a little hung up on the whole slavery thing.
Of course, the right’s playbook in recent years has been to argue against schools teaching racial history because it might make white kids feel bad (a courtesy not extended to children who don't practice Christianity, which Prager promotes incessantly). But at least Prager wraps up complex subjects in just five minutes for easily distracted minds. Louisiana and Florida are the sort of GOP-controlled states that already have signed up for Prager’s teachings.
Now Weaver wants these shock jocks to shape our young minds ...
or appease the parents in her base, who are convinced it’s the teachers who have gone crazy. Weaver, incidentally, may take a little friendly fire when folks figure out Prager blames slavery on the South, while basically arguing “everybody was doing it.” Really.
The trend on the right has been to attack schools for offering a fuller accounting of history, for telling our story from various perspectives as opposed to the jingoistic, whitewashed Lost Cause version schools used to teach. Well, Prager goes back to that old-fashioned pure patriotism, all the time. And it wants to push political messages from talk radio that no self-respecting teenager would otherwise be caught dead listening to.
It’s not subtle, either. “Make Men Masculine Again,” “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?” "Where Do You Want to Live? Red State or Blue State?" The video on “Illegal Immigration” is narrated by Tucker Carlson, the Russian apologist and former host of what The New York Times once called “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” Mind you, Fox News ran him off.
But Prager chose this guy, who once said immigrants make the country poorer and dirtier. Oddly enough, in “Fix Yourself,” the narrator says “Blaming others for your problems is a complete waste of time.” Or somebody’s entire political platform.
Weaver says this curriculum will be optional for teachers to use, but we’ll see if indoctrination remains an elective in South Carolina. State Rep. Jermaine Johnson, a member of the House Education Committee, says the Legislature probably can’t stop this since no money’s involved, but the messages about slavery not being that bad “is 100% indoctrination.
” “I was literally sick to my stomach watching these videos,” Johnson says. This is example No. 10,153 of elections having consequences.
Voters elected a woman who didn’t even qualify for the job until she got an advanced degree mid-campaign from Bob Jones University faster than they deliver your order at Chick-fil-A. So it’s little wonder she’s fine with a radical organization making videos that historians and scientists call misleading and problematic. But Prager even lampoons that.
When the Douglas caricature is asked why a nation founded on freedom allowed slavery to flourish for nearly a century, he says, “Sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem.” But nothing so complicated that Prager can’t explain it easily in just five minutes..
