The company, the public broadcaster, announced last week that it would close after Congress voted to withdraw more than $500 million in federal funds from the organization. The announcement endangers local PBS and NPR stations across the country, providing news and educational content for children for nearly half a century.
Amid these divestitures of federal funds, the White House made its debut last month at its new founders’ museum exhibition: Prageru, a nonprofit that creates right-leaning educational shorts for adults and children. Education Secretary Linda McMahon introduced the partnership, followed by Prageru CEO Marissa Streit.
For the White House exhibition, Prageru produced an AI-generated video that tells the revolutionary narrative of the Founding Fathers. In one, one’s AI-generated John Adams borrowed a tagline from conservative expert Ben Shapiro and told the audience: “The facts don’t care how we feel.”
Since its inception in 2009, Prageru has become the sublime of the conservative educational media field, with their videos attracting millions of followers across social media. The organization helped launch media careers for right-wing figures like Candace Owens. Their popular videos elevate narratives that have been severely criticized for climate denials, Islamophobia and “misleading” of slavery.
Prageru's partnership with the Ministry of Education is not the first time a conservative content factory has worked with the government. Over the past few years, the organization has worked with states and principals across the country to make its educational materials widely available to public elementary school students and teachers.
Today, co-host Sean Rameswaram talked with Washington Post’s national education writer Laura Meckler about how Prageru works with states to bring its content to classrooms and that the organization is ready to fill the educational gaps the company provides for public broadcasting.
Below are excerpts of their conversation for detailed description and clarity. There are more in the full podcast, so listen Today, I explained Wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora and Spotify.
Who is behind Prageru? Like Mr. Prague? Mrs. Prague?
There is a Mr. Prague; it is Dennis Prager. He was a conservative talk show host and he started the whole thing. It was founded in 2009. His partner is screenwriter Allen Estrin, which you probably have never heard of. Their goals are indeed educational and political. They think the education system we have now is too free and these ideas are too dominant. So they will fight it.
But, at first, they were for college students and then began to expand to younger students in 2021.
Can you give us an example of a Prageru video that seems to explicitly try to provide a conservative narrative in response to previous liberals?
I think a good example is the New York Times project in 1619, which was designed to mark the 400th anniversary of the first slaves brought to the United States. The project of 1619 did focus on the American story and said it was essential to understand American history. Many conservatives opposed this – the idea of building American history in such a negative way. They said, “Why do we say that all the history of America is shaped by this? Why don't we talk about how we got rid of slavery? Why don't we talk about abolitionists? Why don't we talk about, you know, freedom and all the other things behind the revolution and all that.”
So that's the challenge of conservatism, and what we see in these prageru videos is the opposite of it in a subtle way. Christopher Columbus has a video where he is talking to some modern kids who basically say, “I heard bad things about you.” He said, “You have to judge me by the standards that were true at the time.”
The result of this video and other Prague videos is – I think it's arguably fair – minimizing the role of slavery, or we should focus on its role, or we should be frustrated by it from the past and try to look at it more, we should say, we can say, elevate the idea from American history.
If that's the name, which states are buying this kind of educational material?
About eight states have some kind of partnership with Prager U and remember that these partnerships do not require schools to use this material. It allows them to be approved content from the state. So it doesn't need it, but it puts it in the list of available materials and we're not sure exactly how much material is used.
That said, about a year ago, when we first reported this, six states had one or another partnership, including Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Montana, and Arizona. Then there's South Carolina and Idaho – maybe these aren't surprising [partners]- Since then, a partnership has also been established with Prageru. In Oklahoma, they are actually very excited about it. Now, Ryan Walters, a very controversial and very conservative education specialist in Oklahoma, recently said he wanted to use Prageru material to evaluate teachers from other blue states –
– Make sure they are not actually instilled with them – at least instilled from the left.
It sounds like Prageru has the attention of the White House, But the White House wants Back to the United States. So, are the states a key part of the Prageru program?
Well, I think the country is at the heart of the Prageru program. Although Donald Trump says very regularly that he wants to “return to the United States”, the truth is that education is already in the United States. It doesn’t mean there is no federal role, but you know, education is the responsibility of the state and school boards, so they are actually the people who decide whether the material is available.
[PragerU] They do have a lot of followers on their social media – millions of followers when you add everything together. I think last year, when we totaled, [roughly] More than 11 million cross-platform. So they do provide the material directly to the audience – anyone who wants it. None of these are secrets. This is very. They want people to watch these videos; they want people to get their content. They believe this is an important contribution to our overall culture and education. It's not the money you need to pay or something hidden.
Essentially, it's interesting to consider PRAGERU's advantages in state courses, even when the federal government just returned PBS to PBS. Do you think this is a coincidence?
whether. I don't actually think that the two decisions are directly related in any way – at least I know – but I do think that they may both reflect a larger worldview, which we see in this administration: working to eliminate what they call “wake ideology.”
They see that in many different places, they are pursuing it in a variety of different ways, both the pressure on the university, diversifying their faculty, [or] Whether it is providing funding to PBS and NPR, they think it is too free. All of these are examples of using federal government powers to try to reduce or change ideological institutions [with them]. This happens throughout the school where you prohibit conversations about race in classrooms in many different states. You are not allowed to talk about quotation “split topics”. [There is] There is concern that topics like slavery will no longer be properly taught, or the civil rights movement, or other all sorts of other things that fit all the elements of systemic racism in our country.
That is, we should not give it more power than having. If you go to most education in this country, most classrooms have teachers who do their best to introduce history reading. The best teachers are challenging their students to see it from multiple perspectives and learn more than one way to read history. I think if it is in “has [different] Ways to watch American history,” [then] I don't think that materials that are not true should have been taught. But I don't think that's much of the criticism of Prageru stuff. I think most of the criticism is the ideology behind it. But it’s not a bad thing to challenge students to think about things from multiple perspectives.