[ The media group was just approved to spread its brand of
historical disinformation to classrooms in Florida, Oklahoma, and New
Hampshire.]
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PRAGERU’S PROPAGANDA IS NOW BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS  
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Robert McCoy
September 18, 2023
The Progressive
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_ The media group was just approved to spread its brand of historical
disinformation to classrooms in Florida, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire.
_

Dennis Prager, Gage Skidmore

 

In 2022, the conservative media organization PragerU launched PragerU
Kids
[[link removed]],
an online video series intended for K-12 students as a purported
antidote to leftwing indoctrination in schools. “Woke agendas are
infiltrating classrooms, culture, and social media,” PragerU’s
website says. “Is there anywhere that’s still safe for our
children? Yes! It’s called PragerU Kids.” 

This summer, Florida’s Department of Education approved
[[link removed]]
the organization’s videos for use, “at district discretion,” as
supplemental material in K-6 classrooms—perhaps an unsurprising
decision from a state that is currently waging a war on “woke
indoctrination
[[link removed]]”
(read: instruction about race and sexual orientation) in public
schools. Although Florida was the first to do so, at the time, PragerU
told
[[link removed]]
Fox News that “[m]ore states are coming on board.” Indeed, it has
since been reported that New Hampshire followed suit
[[link removed]],
with its board of education approving PragerU as an educational vendor
for a financial literacy course on September 14. Oklahoma has now also
announced
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a partnership with PragerU Kids to develop
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an Oklahoma-specific history curriculum.  

Among the material now greenlit in Florida and Oklahoma is Leo and
Layla’s History Adventures, a cartoon program intended for third
through fifth graders. The series follows the titular protagonists, a
brother and sister, as they time travel to seek the advice of
historical figures on developments within their school, community, and
social circle. Most episodes follow an encounter between Leo and Layla
and a renowned figure from the past, who offers
[[link removed]] the
show’s young viewers “lessons that teach the truth about Western
civilization.”

But Leo and Layla falls far short of these lofty aims, as PragerU Kids
appears less keen on creating a program that offers an honest glimpse
into the past than on warping it with selective omissions and
mythologizing, molding the historical figures depicted into vehicles
for rightwing messaging and cudgels in the modern conservative culture
war.

In one episode [[link removed]], for
instance, while watching the news, Leo and Layla hear about local
police abolitionists who “want the U.S. system torn down.” To
learn more about “abolition,” they time travel to 1852 to meet
Fredrick Douglass, who recounts his disagreements with fellow
abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and teaches the siblings the
virtues of compromise. Garrison, PragerU’s Douglass says, “refuses
all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get
what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” 

“We’ve got that type in our time, too,” Leo and Layla interject,
and Douglass admonishes them to avoid “radicals” like his
ex-friend Garrison, heeding only those “willing to work inside our
system.”

The video creates an impression of Fredrick Douglass as a staunch
anti-radical, committed to combating injustices only within the bounds
of the “system.” But nothing could be further from the truth.
While PragerU describes Douglass’s falling out with Garrison, it
curiously fails to mention his friendship with John Brown, who
influenced Douglass to look beyond mere moral suasion as a means to
oppose slavery. 

From his first meeting with Brown in 1847 onward, Douglass would later
write, “my utterances became tinged by the color of this man’s
strong impressions.” In 1849, Douglass said
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he would “welcome the intelligence tomorrow” that a slave revolt
was sweeping the South, and, in 1852, the year in which Leo and
Layla’s fictional visit is set, Douglass told
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a Pittsburgh crowd, “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a
dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” In
other words, Douglass’s political views at the time were practically
the opposite of those in his PragerU portrayal.

In another Leo and Layla episode
[[link removed]], the siblings consult
Benjamin Franklin during his tenure as ambassador to France on the
notion of “the American dream.” The diplomat tells the children
that, in 1780s France, most people are “stuck doing the same thing
their entire lives” due to hereditary titles within the ancien
régime; across the Atlantic in America, however, “individual
citizens determine the outcome of their lives.” When Layla notes
that, despite the absence of a monarchy or nobility in the United
States, some are still “born into better situations than others,”
Franklin holds that “the natural outcome from equal opportunity”
is that “some will always have less and some will always have
more.” 

Notably, however, PragerU’s rendition of Franklin fails to address
Layla’s observation: that true equality of opportunity has yet to be
achieved in the United States, where the playing field is stacked
against those born into less wealth. Surely, in reality, Franklin, who
held some fascinating ideas
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about the public’s right to regulate “superfluous” private
wealth and inheritance—going so far as to propose amending
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Pennsylvania’s constitution so the state could “discourage” the
“enormous Proportion of Property vested in a few
Individuals”—would have offered a more thoughtful response.

In perhaps the most controversial episode
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children seek clarification about the contested legacy of Christopher
Columbus from none other but the Genoese navigator himself. When the
young time travelers question the cartoon Columbus about his brutal
enslavement of Native Americans, he shrugs off the charge. Slavery is
“as old as time” and “better than being killed,” he says,
before asking, “how can you come here to the fifteenth century and
judge me by your standards from the twenty-first century?”

The episode overlooks the fact that, even among his contemporaries,
Columbus was regarded
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ruthless tyrant. On Hispaniola, a governership marked by maiming and
torture of Spanish colonists led Columbus to be removed from his post
and arrested by the Spanish monarchy. “Even those who loved him had
to admit the atrocities that had taken place,” Spanish historian
Consuelo Varela told
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Guardian after colonial testimonies about Columbus’s reign came to
light in the early 2000s. This is not even to mention, of course, the
well-documented horrors
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on the Native American population, whose perspective PragerU
presumably felt was not worth including in the Leo and Layla episode.

The series, at times, blurs the line between history instruction and
religious proselytizing, with some episodes dedicated to Biblical
figures like Moses [[link removed]] and
to other religious figures like Mother Teresa
[[link removed]]. 

A similar saintly glow is painted around Ronald Reagan, who extols the
virtues of Reaganomics in the first Leo and Layla episode
[[link removed]]. “You’re amazing Mr.
Reagan! You saved everyone’s lives and made them better at the same
time,” Leo decisively exclaims: a statement that only holds true if
one’s definition of “everyone” excludes those impacted by the
Reagan Administration’s union busting
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mishandling of the AIDS crisis
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foreign policy in Central America
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and those for whom the benefits of “trickle-down” tax cuts for the
wealthy never
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trickled down, to name a few who might object to Leo’s sentiment.

While Leo and Layla is a show about history, or at least PragerU’s
version of it, an entire episode
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smearing renewable energy—flying in the face of both the cartoon’s
typical format and the scientific consensus. Rather than time
traveling to meet a historical figure, Leo and Layla teleport to meet
their uncle, a fictional environmental scientist, at a windmill farm.
The siblings are told that they have been misled about solar and wind
power, which, he says, actually damages the environment. “Look
around you,” their uncle says, gesturing to the surrounding
windmills, “does this look natural to you?” This unfounded message
becomes explicable—but no less troubling—when one considers that
PragerU is a notorious purveyor of climate denial, which was propelled
in no small part by the funding
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of fracking industry billionaires. 

When the news broke that Florida had approved PragerU as an
educational vendor, Marissa Streit, the CEO of the rightwing media
organization, told
[[link removed]] WESH,
“We want our kids to accomplish academic excellence without it being
laced with political narratives. Kids should be learning without being
indoctrinated with left-wing propaganda.” 

But PragerU’s founder and namesake, Dennis Prager, embraces
characterizations of the group’s content as indoctrination. At this
year’s Moms for Liberty summit, the Miami Herald reports
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Prager conceded [[link removed]]
that accusations of “indoctrinat[ing] kids” are “true,”
saying, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair
statement. But what is the bad of our indoctrination?” 

The effort to introduce PragerU content into public schools highlights
what media critic Eric Alterman once observed as a conservative
propensity to “work the ref
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accuse neutral institutions of harboring a leftwing bias in order to
push that institution to the right. In this case, PragerU’s
“anti-woke” Republican proponents seek not only to scrub schools
of what they (falsely) deem pernicious leftist influences—which is
troubling enough in itself—but also to teach rightwing dogma. As a
result, this coming school year, students could potentially be taught
junk history like Leo and Layla rather than material that engenders
actual engagement with the reality and complexity of the past. 

That, to answer Dennis Prager, is “the bad” of PragerU’s
“indoctrination.”

Robert McCoy is a former editorial intern at The Progressive.

A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good! Since
1909, _The Progressive _magazine_ _has aimed to amplify voices of
dissent and voices under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal
of championing grassroots progressive politics.

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