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Juneteenth Is Not a History Lesson We Can Afford to Forget
A PragerU video about the holiday is an example of how history can become propaganda.
Jun 23, 2026
Juneteenth celebrations in my town were lit. There were so many events I had a difficult time choosing which ones to attend. As a grandmother, I ended up at the event on the grounds of the Historic Harriet Barber house (circa 1875) in Hopkins, South Carolina, where my daughter and her 3-year-old son were drumming. The celebration was filled with spirited performances, great food, and camaraderie. Historical reflections centered on the origins of Juneteenth, commemorating June 19, 1865, when African-descended people who were enslaved in Texas finally learned of their freedom—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had officially declared them free. Many gave shout-outs to African American ancestors for all of their visions, sacrifices, and accomplishments. It was a joyful space.
While we are still in the Juneteenth celebratory spirit, we should not sleep, lest it will be another two-and-a-half years when we wake up and realize that our freedom has been lost through a series of recent institutional white supremacist political maneuvers such as: weakening voting rights; attacks on Black political districts, and bans on African American studies.
In his classic 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, warned Black people not to believe the lies taught in school that are full of distortions, intentional inaccuracies, and omissions. He also warned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation. Nearly 100 years later, we are still facing the revision and erasure of Black history.
For example, PragerU—a conservative website that promotes conservative viewpoints via digital media—has produced a series of edu-tainment videos full of revisionist historical distortions and half-truths.
Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told.
One video, "The Inconvenient Truth About Juneteenth," is narrated by a young Black man, Xaviaer. In the 56 second TikTok-style video, the narrator presents himself as an “influencer” and is casually walking down the street, iced coffee in hand, as he opines that Black folks are mentally enslaved for believing the conventional story about Juneteenth.
Immediately, evoking the name of Rosa Parks, Xaviaer signifies that Rosa should have made the viewers sit in the front of the bus and take a history class. The cleverness of the misinformation, though, is apparent when he says that Democrats kept Black people enslaved two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This slight of hand fails to clarify that the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties switched around 1870. Before that time, Republicans controlled the government and used its power to protect Black people who were formerly enslaved and guarantee their civil rights during Reconstruction. Most Democrats, particularly in the South, opposed many of these efforts. However, as the nation shifted its attention toward economic growth and industrial expansion, support for Reconstruction began to wane. Many Northern Republicans became less willing to invest political capital in protecting Black rights in the South.
By the mid-to-late 1870s, the Republican Party had largely retreated from its commitment to reconstructing Southern society and safeguarding the rights of African Americans. Following the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, White Democrats regained political control across much of the region and systematically dismantled many of the gains Black people had achieved during Reconstruction. Over the following decades, political allegiances gradually shifted, and by the mid-20th century, many African Americans increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly as it became more supportive of civil rights initiatives.
Xaviaer concludes "The Inconvenient Truth about Juneteenth" by admonishing Black people for referring to Juneteenth as a Black Independence Day. He argues that the political left has repackaged the holiday through what he characterizes as a segregationist lens. He adds a mocking remark, suggesting that if viewers truly believe Juneteenth is a separate Black Independence Day, he does not want to see them "twerking on a boat" on the Fourth of July—not resisting the urge to slide in a stereotype.
The comment is intended to be humorous, but it serves a deeper purpose. By ridiculing those who celebrate Juneteenth, the video dismisses the historical reality that many enslaved African-descended people were excluded from the freedoms celebrated on July 4, 1776. Rather than engaging this historical contradiction, the video substitutes mockery for analysis and caricature for historical understanding.
From a critical perspective, Black people should not be getting history lessons from social media influencers, political propagandists, or organizations masquerading as educational institutions. History is too important.
Fortunately, other scholars have challenged the distortions and omissions that permeate traditional historical narratives. While Dr. Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro remains one of the most important warnings about the dangers of accepting history uncritically, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, exposed how textbooks sanitize and distort the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States intentionally centers the experiences of people who were oppressed, marginalized, and excluded from dominant historical accounts.
Misinformation is not merely about getting facts wrong. It is about shaping how people understand themselves, their communities, and their possibilities. Dr. Carter G. Woodson once reflected that it took him 20 years after earning his doctorate from Harvard University to recover from what he described as his intellectual conditioning. James Baldwin similarly observed that it took years to free himself from the myths and falsehoods he had been taught about race, history, and human worth.
The stakes are especially high when misleading narratives are packaged in entertaining videos designed to reach young people. And by the way, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, cautioned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation.
Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told and the understanding of the need to seek truth from credible sources.
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What the Right-Wing AI-Slop Machine Gets Wrong About Frederick Douglass
One hundred and fifty years ago to the day, Frederick Douglass gave his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” a radical speech that refutes MAGA attempts to co-opt him.
Apr 14, 2026
Prager U—a producer of right-wing “educational videos” founded by conservative radio host and edutainment entrepreneur Dennis Prager—has recently been in the news regarding its “America at 250” initiative, a collaboration with the Trump White House well described by The New Yorker as “Serving AI Slop for America’s Birthday.” The initiative is one of many administration efforts to conscript this year’s July 4 celebration in its culture war against the left, a war, announced by President Donald Trump back in March 2025 with his Executive Order 14253, cynically named “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
It seems particularly appropriate to reflect on the MAGA effort to promote historical misunderstanding today, the 150th anniversary of one of Frederick Douglass’ most important speeches, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” For Prager U first made headlines back in September 2021, with the posting of an animated video entitled “Leo & Layla’s History Adventure with Frederick Douglass.” While Prager is a stridently anti-“woke” enterprise, purveying a manifestly whitewashed historical narrative, this video was particularly notable, and outrageous, because it featured Douglass, the ardent Black abolitionist and radical Republican, as a self-righteous extoller of caution and celebrant of American Greatness. Like Trump’s “1776 Commission Report,” published that same year within weeks of the January 6 insurrection, Prager sought to co-opt Douglass (and also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.) rather than to ignore him, all the better to promote its right-wing conception of “patriotic history.” Prager did this in a particularly insidious way.
“Leo” and “Layla” are two white kids innocently watching TV when a newscaster reports on “angry” (obviously BLM) protesters demanding the abolition of the police. Leo, put off by a math teacher who strangely teaches about “systemic injustice,” then asks his older sister: “Why is everyone so angry? Are they burning a car? What does abolish even mean?” Seeking to understand, the siblings enter a time machine, where they are immediately greeted—“welcome to 1852!”—by a dapper Frederick Douglass eager to school the innocent children and restore their abiding reverence for all things American.
Douglass proceeds to explain “abolition” by informing the kids that he was himself once a slave, and when they ask him how he dealt with his unenviable situation, he replies: “It was very hard, and I was often sad. I taught myself to read and write... knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom... [and] today I am a free American, fighting for all to be free.” When the children express confusion about how the “founding fathers” could have reconciled slavery with the idea that “all men are created equal,” Douglass reassures them: “Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong... They wanted it to end, but... made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.” Noting that abolition would have alienated the Southern plantocracy, he explains that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.”
Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence.
When the naïve students fret about hypocrisy, Douglass explains further: “Sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem, and complicated problems take time to solve... big problems need to be approached very carefully.” He then delivers the coup de gras: “Have you kids heard of William Lloyd Garrison? He’s an abolitionist like me, and he and I used to be friends, but we aren’t any longer... William refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” He then explains that he is “trying to work for change inside the American system, and that “our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.” Douglass then warns the kids to avoid people like Garrison, radicals who “don’t just want slavery abolished, but the whole American system.”
The video obviously centers on a tendentious reading of Douglass’ famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” that completely ignores the way Douglass brilliantly shifted back and forth in that speech between identification with his white audience and harsh challenge to it:
But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.
In his speech Douglass embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of 1776. But he did not say that the American system was “wonderful,” and indeed he committed himself to working with other abolitionists to radically change the system. And while he did break with Garrison, his former mentor, believing that the Constitution—if properly interpreted to support radical abolition, a big “if”—was a “glorious liberty document,” he also clearly believed that its promise had yet to be redeemed, and could only be redeemed through a broad-based and uncompromising abolitionist movement. Far from disparaging Garrison’s radicalism, Douglass actually literally extols it in his closing words: “In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:
God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore...
Douglass’ 1852 speech, a brilliant reclaiming of the “spirit of ’76,” was no kind of celebration. It was a subtle but nonetheless powerful disruption of celebration, and an invitation and incitement to radical action. And what Douglass says in it was perfectly consistent with the equally famous and more radical words that he would utter a few years later, in his 1857 speech “On West India Emancipation”:
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
These are not the words of a man who believed that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.” They are the words of a man who believed, to the contrary, that slavery would not end until it was politically and militarily defeated.
Douglass, like his Radical Republican allies, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, vigorously supported the Union in the Civil War precipitated by Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and the wave of secessions that followed it. But he did this not to vindicate the greatness of the Constitution or to preserve the existing American system, but to effectuate a radical democratic and in some ways revolutionary transformation of the American system. And the policy of Reconstruction he supported involved nothing less than such a transformation, upending the Southern plantocracy, redistributing property and opportunity to emancipated former slaves, and enforcing Black civil and political rights. He made this clear during the war in a July 4, 1862 speech entitled “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” and he made it even clearer in the substantial essay he published after the war, in the December 1866 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Reconstruction.”
But perhaps the clearest statement of this theme is to be found in Douglass’ “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” delivered, at the dedication of the much-heralded Freedmen’s Memorial, on April 14, 1876, the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Historian David Blight opens his magisterial Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, with Douglass’s delivery of this speech, pointing out that the dedication had been declared a national holiday; that the event was attended by “a distinguished array of guests” that included President Ulysses S. Grant and many members of Congress and the Supreme Court; and that the entire event held a special meaning for the “huge crowd, largely African-American,” who were present not simply to commemorate Lincoln’s role in Emancipation, but to celebrate a Black-financed and produced monument whose dedication featured the most prominent Black man in the country.
As in his more famous 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” delivered as abolitionist sentiment was picking up steam, Douglass begins this speech in a spirit of civic communion. Invoking “the sentiment of gratitude and appreciation,” he reminds his audience of the history that made the Freedmen’s Memorial possible:
I refer to the past not in malice, for this is no day for malice; but simply to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves, and to congratulate all upon the contrast between now and then; the new dispensation of freedom with its thousand blessings to both races, and the old dispensation of slavery with its ten thousand evils to both races—white and black.
Yet he then proceeds to note that “truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”
In a speech whose overall purpose is the celebration of a vision of multiracial and universal citizenship, a vision that still remained far from realization, Douglass—the fugitive slave who had become both symbol and tribune of liberation—refuses to erase the very divisive question of race and racial identity. He insists that Lincoln “was preëminently the white man’s President,” and proceeds to outline the many ways, over time, that Lincoln had prioritized the Constitution, and the Union, over abolition, and the emancipation of Black Americans:
The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preëminence in this worship at once full and supreme... You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect; let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But... in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion... we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.
In his speech, Douglass recounts the many ways that Lincoln was despised, both by defenders of slavery who thought him an abolitionist, and by abolitionists who thought him too willing to compromise with the defenders of slavery. He describes Lincoln’s assassination as an awful crime against a great man and against the freedom that Lincoln’s presidency ultimately symbolized.
And while refusing to ignore Lincoln’s flaws, Douglass insists that “we”—he is referring here to Black Americans like himself—“We were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him... by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”
Recalling his joy upon learning of Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” his pride at the masses of Black soldiers that Lincoln had eventually mobilized to serve in the Union Army, and his determination to continue the struggle for freedom that Lincoln had advanced through his leadership in the Civil War, Douglass closed his oration with a sober appreciation of the fact that Lincoln’s very limits had perhaps been the very source of his strength. Noting that Lincoln “shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race,” and that this had long made him an uncertain ally and sometimes even an opponent, Douglass concludes:
Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful coöperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen... The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time...But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.
As Blight observes: “Douglass employed a stunning level of directness for such a ceremony... In the rhetorical twists and turns of this complex speech, Douglass had one overriding target—the declension and betrayal of Reconstruction in the South by the federal government.” Speaking only months before the Declaration’s July 4 centennial anniversary, Douglass well understood how vulnerable was the halting progress achieved by Reconstruction. Indeed, within a year, the infamous Compromise of 1877 was effected, Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated president, and federal troops were finally withdrawn from formerly Confederate states, sealing the death of Reconstruction, a wave of racist violence and intimidation, and the resumption of white supremacy.
And so Douglass, on April 16, 1888—almost 12 years to the day of his Freedmen’s Monument speech—delivered another speech in the nation’s capital, describing the indignities and oppressions of the Jim Crow system as a betrayal of the promise of Reconstruction, and declaring that “I Denounce This Emancipation as a Tremendous Fraud.”
We are now living through another tremendous fraud—a Trump administration intent on destroying the rule of law, an independent civil society, and the safeguards that protect free and fair democratic elections, all in the name of an increasingly hollow vision of “American Greatness” resting on what David Blight and James Grossman have rightly called a “brutish assault on history.”
Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence; and that if American greatness means anything, it means the example of figures like Douglass, who persistently fought against both injustice and the celebratory cant typically invoked to reinforce it. And as we prepare ourselves for the ostentatious displays of patriotism that Trump has planned for us this coming July, we can do no better than to recall what Douglass said about an earlier July 4: “To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”
Thanks to Bob Ivie for his helpful comments on this essay.
An earlier version of this piece referred to "William Sumner" as an ally of Frederick Douglas. This has been corrected to Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator.
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Trump Ed Dept. Partners With Right-Groups to Spread White-Washed Civics Lessons in 'Schools Across the Nation'
One civics education advocate said the program, which will push schools to teach history content written by PragerU, Hillsdale College, and Turning Point USA, "smacks of authoritarianism."
Sep 18, 2025
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop and spread what it claims is “patriotic education”—but which critics worry is nothing less than ahistorical propaganda—in American "schools across the nation."
Earlier this week, the Trump administration redirected $137 million initially meant for programs aimed at minority students toward what it described as "American history and civics education."
Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced Wednesday that the money will be directed toward discretionary grants aimed at K-12 schools alongside the announcement of new civics curriculum and programs being drawn up by the 250 Civics Education Coalition—a consortium of more than 40 right-wing groups. The goal, McMahon said, was to advance education that "emphasizes a unifying and uplifting portrayal of the nation's founding ideals" in advance of the nation's 250th anniversary in 2026.
It is not Trump's first crack at instilling the nation's youth with a "patriotic education." In the waning days of his first term in office, Trump unveiled the 1776 Report, which, education columnist Jennifer Berkshire recently noted in The Baffler, "was widely panned by actual historians for its worshipful treatment of the Founding Fathers, its downplaying of slavery, and its portrayal of a century-old 'administrative state' controlled by leftist radicals."
While little has been publicized yet about what McMahon's new endeavor will look like in practice, it is known the kinds of people and organizations who will be crafting it. The civics initiative is being led by the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA-aligned think tank that has been responsible for staffing Trump's second administration and has received over $1 million from his political action committee, the Save America PAC. Until 2023, McMahon herself served on the board of AFPI.
In 2022, the group presented a piece of model legislation for a "Civics Course Act" to be introduced in states. It included requirements for students to spend ample time studying the nation's founding documents and figures while banning the teaching of what it called the "defamatory history of America’s founding," which suggests that slavery or inequality are in any way inherent to the nation's institutions.
It also banned the concepts of "systemic racism" and "gender fluidity" and forbade teachers from giving students course credit for engaging with "social or public policy advocacy."
Also included in the coalition is Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school in Michigan that has proposed its own K-12 curriculum, which Vanity Fair notes "has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony."
Another participant is PragerU, the overtly partisan and often factually loose YouTube channel that has been tasked with creating children's educational content in nearly a dozen red states.
The group has produced content venerating figures notorious for practicing slavery, like colonist Christopher Columbus and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Its videos have argued, among other things, that climate change is a myth, that European fascism was a "far-left" ideology, and that Israel has "the world's most moral army."
The pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA will also be involved in crafting the curriculum. Its longtime leader, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in Utah last week, went on a crusade last year to, in his words, "tell the truth" about Martin Luther King Jr., whom he described as "an awful person," while claiming his signature achievement, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was a "huge mistake."
An offshoot of Kirk's group, Turning Point Education, said Kirk's assassination has increased its resolve to promote a "God-centered, virtuous education" in US public schools.
The 250 Civics Education Coalition has not yet published a curriculum. But according to the Department of Education, it will be rolling out "a robust programming agenda" over the next 12 months.
During Trump's second term, he has undertaken an effort to purge federal museums and national parks of what one executive order called "improper ideology," which has resulted in the erasure of exhibits and monuments to Black and Native American history. Last month, he lamented that the Smithsonian Museum focuses too much on "how bad slavery was" and ordered a review of the museum's content.
Federal websites, meanwhile, have systematically eliminated many pages that acknowledged the accomplishments of nonwhite historical figures or important events in women's and LGBTQ+ history.
Critics in the education world view Trump's effort to use grants to induce them to adopt his preferred curriculum as an illegal effort to propagandize children.
"The law is clear," said education historian Diane Ravitch in a blog post. "Federal officials are prohibited from seeking to influence or direct curriculum in any way."
Since 1970, the federal government has been barred by law from "any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum" of public schools.
"Civic education is and must be non-partisan," said Ted McConnell, the executive director of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools. "While the funding is long sought, this is the wrong approach and smacks of authoritarianism."
Update: This piece has been slightly updated to better clarify what is understood about the nature of the civics initiative.
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Oklahoma Screening Teachers From California, New York for 'Radical Leftist Ideology'
"This MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage," said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.
Aug 20, 2025
Teachers from California and New York seeking work in Oklahoma will be required to pass an "America First Test" designed to weed out applicants espousing "radical leftist ideology," the state's public schools chief affirmed Monday.
Oklahoma—which has a severe teacher shortage, persistently high turnover, and some of the nation's worst educational outcomes—will compel prospective public school educators from the nation's two largest "blue" states to submit to the exam in a bid to combat what Superintendent for Public Instruction Ryan Walters calls "woke indoctrination."
"As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safeguarded from the radical leftist ideology fostered in places like California and New York," Walters said in a statement Monday.
Walters told USA Today that the test is necessary to vet teachers from states where educators "are teaching things that are antithetical to our standards" and ensure they "are not coming into our classrooms and indoctrinating kids."
However, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten warned in a statement Monday that "this MAGA loyalty test will be yet another turnoff for teachers in a state already struggling with a huge shortage."
The exam will be administered by Prager University—also known as PragerU—a right-wing nonprofit group which, despite its name, is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees.
While all of the test's 50 questions have not been made public, the ones that have been published run the gamut from insultingly basic—such as, "What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?"—to ideologically fraught queries regarding the "biological differences between females and males."
PragerU's "educational" materials are rife with false or misleading information regarding slavery, racism, immigration, the history of fascism, and the climate emergency. Critics note that the nonprofit has received millions of dollars in funding from fossil fuel billionaires.
PragerU materials also promote creation mythology over scientific evolution and attack LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender individuals, calling lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare "barbaric" while likening its proponents to "monsters."
In one animated PragerU video, two children travel back in time to ask the genocidal explorer Christopher Columbus why he is so hated today. Columbus replies by asserting the superiority of Europeans over Indigenous "cannibals" and attempting to justify the enslavement of Native Americans by arguing that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed."
Closer to home, PragerU's curriculum aligns with so-called "white discomfort" legislation passed in Oklahoma and other Republican-controlled states that critics say prevents honest lessons on slavery, the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and enduring systemic racism.
The law has had a chilling effect on teachers' lessons on historical topics including the 1921 Tulsa massacre, in which a white supremacist mob backed armed by city officials destroyed more than 35 city blocks of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street," murdering hundreds of Black men, women, and children in what the US Justice Department this year called a "coordinated, military-style attack."
Responding to Oklahoma's new policy, University of Pennsylvania history professor Jonathan Zimmerman told The Associated Press that "instead of Prager simply being a resource that you can draw in an optional way, Prager has become institutionalized as part of the state system."
"There's no other way to describe it," he said, adding, "I think what we're now seeing in Oklahoma is something different, which is actually empowering Prager as a kind of gatekeeper for future teachers."
Oklahoma is not the only state incorporating PragerU materials into its curriculum. Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Texas have also done so to varying degrees.
Weingarten noted Walters' previous push to revise Oklahoma's curriculum standards to include baseless conspiracy theories pushed by President Donald Trump that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Walters also ordered all public schools to teach the Bible, a directive temporarily blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in March. The court also recently ruled against the establishment of the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
"His priority should be educating students, but instead, it's getting Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians to notice him," Weingrarten said in her statement.
Cari Elledge, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, called the new testing requirement "a political stunt to grab attention" and a distraction "from real issues in Oklahoma."
"When political ideology plays into whether or not you can teach in any place, that might be a deterrent to quality educators attempting to get a job," she added. "We think it's intentional to make educators fearful and confused."
California Teachers' Association president David Goldberg told USA Today that "this almost seems like satire and so far removed from my research around what Oklahoma educators need and deserve."
"I can't see how this isn't some kind of hyper-political grandstanding that doesn't serve any of those needs," he added.
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State Takeovers of Schools Are Not the Answer to Educational Inequality
Too often, they are an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.
Aug 10, 2024
The state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the eighth-largest public school system in the United States, is entering its second year.
State-appointed superintendent Mike Miles is celebrating the occasion by touting state test score results that show preliminary improvement in student achievement. Other leaders in education across the country are paying close attention to Miles’ tactics to see if they’re effective enough to implement in their own schools.
Since 1989, over 100 school districts across the U.S. have been subjected to state takeovers, in which the state seizes control of low-performing or financially struggling school districts, replacing their locally elected school boards. This is done with the goal of dramatically improving the district’s academic or financial performance. State takeovers are difficult to neatly describe because they vary from place to place depending on the policies that the state-appointed board and superintendent decide to implement. But they are overwhelmingly ineffective.
Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students.
A 2021 study done by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia analyzed over 100 state takeovers between 1989 and 2016. It found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.” In fact, it can take years for schools to return to their previous levels of academic achievement after a takeover.
Beyond that, takeovers are emblematic of a worrying trend in education that extends beyond Houston and hurts low-income learners and students of color most.
The study also showed that state takeovers disproportionately target districts with higher concentrations of low-income and nonwhite students, regardless of academic achievement. But another study revealed that majority-Black districts rarely see financial improvement in the years following a takeover.
The Brown study also found that takeovers tend to happen in states with both a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature. This should be really alarming given the fact that those same states are also passing legislation like requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms and restricting the discussion of race, sex, and gender in schools.
HISD is no different.
As of 2022, almost 80% of HISD students were considered economically disadvantaged, and the overwhelming majority were students of color. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, but state takeovers exacerbate education inequality for low-income and minority students. Too often in conservative states, they disrupt existing communities and feed students subpar and radicalizing material.
In 2019, out of HISD’s almost 300 campuses, just one school’s repeated failure to meet state standards allowed the Texas Education Agency to take over the entire district. HISD had managed to fight off takeover for four years.
During that time, their academic accountability scores improved. In 2022, the district received a high B, performing better than several other districts in the state, and Phillis Wheatley High School, the 97-year old historically Black campus that had triggered the state takeover law, improved its score to a passing 78.
Last year, the Texas Education Agency took over anyway, appointing a nine-person board of managers and Mike Miles, formerly the very controversial superintendent of Dallas ISD, to transform the Houston public school system.
As a result of the takeover, the Texas Education Agency implemented a scripted curriculum in HISD schools. This past year, Miles had to reassign a group of teachers to review the provided curriculum, which was found to be riddled with errors and inappropriate content, including ChatGPT-sourced material. He also faced backlash after it was revealed that students were being shown videos questioning human-caused climate change from the conservative Prager University Foundation.
Now, the Texas Education Agency is offering all school districts in the state $60 per student to teach a new curriculum that contains extensive biblical references. For students in Texas schools, culture war politics are increasingly invading education, and districts taken over by the state have no choice but to teach its curriculum.
There are several other problems with the HISD takeover: 28 schools faced the most radical reforms this year, and an additional 57 were brought into the new system but didn’t experience some of the larger structural changes.
State requirements for certified teachers, deans, and assistant principals were waived to ease the hiring process, while veteran teachers had to reapply for their positions, with many not offered the chance to return.
A militaristic learning environment was enforced, with teachers forced to rush through timed and scripted lessons and students made to participate approximately once every four minutes. When students had to use the restroom, they had to carry a large traffic cone as a hall pass, which many felt was humiliating and dehumanizing.
Libraries were converted into “team centers” that housed both students who finished their lessons early and students with discipline problems made to watch their lessons virtually, while librarians were let go and, in several cases, shelves emptied.
All of these reforms have led to a budget deficit of almost $200 million for this year and a projected shortfall of over $500 million for next year that Miles is attempting to make up partially through the cutting of special education and wraparound specialists, who help students dealing with homelessness and hunger. Many have questioned the long-term financial feasibility of the takeover.
On August 8, the district’s state-appointed board of managers will decide whether or not to put its proposed $4.4 billion bond, which it says will be put toward renovating facilities and improving school safety, among other promised improvements. Opponents to the takeover, including the American Federation of Teachers, have spoken out against the bond, citing their lack of faith in Miles and embracing the rallying cry “No trust, no bond.”
Meanwhile, Miles seeks to implement a pay-for-performance model, where teacher pay—and continuing employment—will be tied to standardized test scores and evaluations. For now, he’s settled for raising teacher pay, but only for the 28 schools required to follow the new model, and only for those teachers whose grades and subjects are tested on state exams. Furthermore, teachers can only benefit for as long as they manage to stay employed at those schools.
This past year, teacher turnover was almost double its usual rate, as teachers and administrators both opted to resign in protest to the reforms and were not asked back throughout the year.
It is possible that some of Miles’ practices are worth considering, but a year of teacher, parent, and student responses only support the growing body of evidence that show that takeover is not the way to go about it. Protests and student walkouts against the takeover continued until the end of the school year, with community members complaining that their concerns have been repeatedly ignored or dismissed.
We can all acknowledge that educational inequality is a major issue, and change is necessary. But a takeover is not the answer. Too often, it is an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.
Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students. According to a 2018 Rutgers study, Texas needs to spend $12,000 more per student to bring its poorest students up to national average outcomes.
We owe it to all of our students to find effective and sustainable reforms that center their needs. Education should not be a power struggle. Instead, it should be a way to uplift and empower communities and to help give students the start that they need to succeed in life.
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Florida Isn’t Teaching Its Students About the Climate Crisis Threatening the State’s Survival
Instead, its “education” department has approved a series of right-wing videos from Prager U, which draws much of its funding from some of the country’s biggest frackers.
Aug 15, 2023
On the list of crazy weather records this overheated summer, it’s possible that the single most extreme might have been a 101.1°F temperature measured by an ocean buoy at Manatee Bay in Florida in July. That appears to be the hottest temperature ever measured in the ocean; it’s in a murky and shallow stretch of the Keys, but across the entire Gulf coast temperatures are truly astounding. The average for the Gulf of Mexico this week is more than 88°F , crushing the average for the date across the last three decades by two and a half degrees; God forbid a hurricane gets loose in there any time soon. Coral reef researchers were reporting “100% mortality” at sites in the Keys.
So you would think that as Florida students return to school this fall, studying up on climate change would be a no-brainer—if physics and chemistry usually seem a little abstract, nothing could be more immediate than an ocean running at Jacuzzi temperatures. There’s so many ways you could study it, from the youngest students to high school seniors, and it would bring everything from history to economics alive. Some of it might be sad—I was deeply moved by this Diana Nyad piece about swimming in the ocean she’d known since she was a girl now that it was 100°F. But I was fascinated by her writing—read this one paragraph and think about the different directions a talented teacher could take it:
At age 9, after the Cuban Revolution, I searched the horizon to catch a glimpse of Cuba, this suddenly forbidden island. My mother pointed out across the ocean and said to me: “There. Havana is just across there. It’s so close that you, you little swimmer, you could actually swim there.” Later, after five attempts over 35 years, I finally did make that crossing. But I couldn’t have made that swim last month. In such hot water, the body heat I’d generate from the duress of the effort—a continuous 52 hours and 54 minutes—would quickly lead to overheating and failure. And danger. Hyperthermia would conquer even the strongest of wills.
But that’s not what Florida students will necessarily be studying this year. Instead, the state’s “education” department has approved a series of right-wing videos from Prager U, which draws much of its funding from some of the country’s biggest frackers. And they’re getting their money’s worth: The videos that Prager sends out explain, for instance, that “the planet has heated up and cooled since prehistoric times, even without the burning of fossil fuels.” Which, duh, but this time it’s—as every part of the scientific community agrees—because of the burning of fossil fuels. In one video, a Polish girl tries to explain to her classmates that like solar and wind energy that clean energy is in fact “unreliable, expensive, and difficult to store.” Which is no longer true: it’s now the cheapest power on the planet. By all accounts, Gulf neighbor Texas survived its epic heatwave earlier this summer precisely because it had so much solar and so many batteries hooked to its grid.
It’s not enough to carry water for the fossil fuel industry; the carriers would also like to imagine themselves as brave fighters against Nazism. To call it all shameless barely begins to scratch the surface.
The most obnoxious part of the Prager videos, though, is the preening they engage in. The Polish girl’s grandfather tells her not to worry that her friends think she’s old-fashioned for wanting to stick with coal; he compares her stand with the bravery of the Warsaw uprising. As a narrator explains, “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky and that it always takes courage.”
It’s not enough to carry water for the fossil fuel industry; the carriers would also like to imagine themselves as brave fighters against Nazism. To call it all shameless barely begins to scratch the surface. And the ugliness of it all is really amazing. According to Politico, a PragerU video about a child in Africa features a narrator calmly attacking solar and wind because “their batteries break down and become hazardous waste” and because it’s risky “to rely on things like wind and sunlight, which are not constant.” I have spent a fair amount of time in rural African communities which got power only because cheap solar became available, talking to kids who for the first time ever have light to read by at night. As one father in Cote d’Ivoire told me, “You can feel the effects with their grades now at school.”
But not in Florida’s schools, where anyone who watches this Prager nonsense will emerge dumber than before. And that’s galling, since the Sunshine State, throughout the lifetimes of these students, will need to be making a series of good decisions if it’s going to survive in anything like its present form. Already, for instance, major insurers are pulling out of the state; Newsweek reported that its residents might soon be “uninsurable.” But instead of starting to prepare students for the real world, the state will let them bathe in the warm water of denial.
Happily, there are educators at work in the state, and making a difference. Florida weatherman Jeff Berardelli may be the best example. From his post at WFLA, and across social media, he’s been telling the story of this summer in straightforward and useful terms. He gave an interview recently where he explained his thinking:
My job is to educate people about what I know, right? I live at the intersection between weather and climate, and specifically extreme weather and climate change. That’s my specialty. So, there are certain events that are going to take place and have been taking place that are going to be pretty alarming and I think it’s my job as a scientist, the person who kind of lives at the intersection of both of those things, to put it into context and give people perspective on it.
These are good teaching opportunities, these moments, when extreme things happen, they allow me to kind of educate people on the latest science, the latest studies… the latest facts about how climate change is impacting our extreme weather… My role is to act as both the scientist and also a communicator, because that’s exactly the field that I’m in.
This is not radical thinking, it’s not agenda-driven, it’s not partisan. It’s precisely the kind of teaching we used to take for granted in America.
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What Florida Students Could Learn From PragerU Kids
The state has just approved children’s content from an offshoot of right-wing propaganda organization PragerU, reflecting and potentially accelerating the state’s hard conservative turn.
Jul 28, 2023
A cartoon Booker T. Washington distorting the history of the Civil War. A narrator explaining that embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw Uprising. An instructional video telling girls that conforming to gender stereotypes is a great way to embrace their femininity. A dramatization of the supposedly civilizing, benevolent era of British colonial rule in India.
These are just some of the episodes of PragerU Kids—an offshoot of right-wing propaganda organization PragerU—that Florida has just approved for use in its public school classrooms, reflecting and potentially accelerating the state’s hard conservative turn.
“The state of Florida just announced that we are now becoming an official vendor,” said PragerU CEO Marissa Streit in a video heralding the news. She claimed that schools have “been hijacked by the left” and “used by union bosses” to pursue an agenda “not for our children.”
PragerU’s infiltration of school curriculum comes as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wages a statewide offensive against public education at every level.
“We are just getting started—additional states are signing up,” Streit added.
In a Meta ad, PragerU Kids highlighted that teachers can use its materials “without repercussions,” signaling that the organization likely fears parents outside of conservative echo chambers could find the videos offensive and inappropriate for the classroom.
PragerU’s infiltration of school curriculum comes as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wages a statewide offensive against public education at every level. Florida recently adopted new classroom guidelines that mandate teachers tell students that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” Earlier this year, DeSantis staged a hostile takeover of public liberal arts school New College, installing anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo on the board of trustees; the college has recently seen a “ridiculously high” number of faculty members leave the school.
Here’s what Florida’s latest salvo against public education actually looks like.
PragerU Kids Curriculum
PragerU Kids videos are a mix of animated and live-action shorts, broken up into different recurring series. Some are more overtly political than others, but the roughly 350 videos on the outlet’s YouTube channel seem largely intended to push a right-wing agenda to one extent or another. Now, any of them could be shown in public school classrooms throughout Florida.
Around the World or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Status Quo
In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,”—part of PragerU Kids’ “Around the World” series—the titular character learns about climate change in school, only to have her eyes opened by her parents, who are helpfully equipped with decades of climate denialist talking points. Ania soon becomes a denialist herself and is ostracized by her peers, who “barely talk to her any more.”
She finds comfort in history, however, as the video analogizes her situation with one of the most famous antifascist acts of resistance in memory. “Grandfather Jakub tells her about the Warsaw Uprising, when the city’s Jews fought back against the Nazis,” the narrator says.
“Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” the narrator concludes.
Closer to home, “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue” is anti-Black Lives Matter, pro-cop propaganda. The video describes a Mexican immigrant family that moved to Los Angeles and had their lives upended by the death of George Floyd, whom the narrator characterizes as “a Black man who resisted arrest.”
“Activists claimed that police were targeting the Black community and purposefully killing unarmed Black men,” the narrator says. “As the false claims of racial targeting spread, so did the anger and violence.”
Mateo develops fondness for his school’s “resource officer”—a euphemism, though one not unique to PragerU Kids—and comes to view the cop as “as a guide, a mentor, and a protector, not how he has seen police characterized in the news, as mean-spirited bullies.”
PragerU Kids has other lessons to teach about the world, often steeped in colonialist apologia and market fundamentalism. In “India: Priya Overcomes Adversity” a narrator explains that under Britain’s colonial rule, “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” referring to the county’s caste system. The video frames India as a backwards land that benefited from the British, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions.” The narrator describes India being “given its independence,” rendering the country the beneficiary of British benevolence, rather than the victor in a struggle to overthrow colonial rule.
The video’s description further reveals the purpose of the narrative—to downplay existing oppression by contrasting it with a distorted version of history. “Young people may think that discrimination is worse than ever, but they'll gain perspective,” the caption promises.
PragerU Kids also finds much to praise in the settler-colonialist state of Israel. In “Israel: Shira Prays for Peace,” the country is presented as “the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations.” In fact, multiple human rights organizations and experts have determined that Israel is an apartheid state that systematically oppresses and dispossess Palestinians as a matter of practice and law.
Another entry, “Canada: Marcel Makes a Sacrifice,” is an eight-minute hagiography of the for-profit U.S. health care system, and it repeats the same conservative talking points about the dangers of so-called socialized medicine that have been used for decades.
Leo & Layla: Lessons in Collective Forgetting
Another series sees animated characters Leo and Layla traveling back in time to learn from historical figures. In one episode, the pair discuss slavery with a fictionalized Booker T. Washington.
“I hate that our country had slavery,” Layla says. “Mr. Washington, sometimes do you ever wish you could have lived somewhere else? Like a different country?”
“That’s a great question, and I hate slavery too, but it’s been a reality everywhere in the world,” Washington responds.
The overriding theme of Leo and Layla’s adventures—and PragerU Kids in general—is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated through a rigorous disavowal that the past plays any role in ordering the present.
The fictional Washington then elides the reality of the U.S. Civil War by adopting the passive voice. This flattens the process through which enslaved people freed themselves—alongside the Union Army—into an undifferentiated joint venture of the entire country.
“America was one of the first places on earth to outlaw slavery,” Washington says, getting the timeline completely reversed. “And hundreds of thousands of men gave their lives in a war that resulted in my freedom.”
“When you put it that way, it totally makes sense,” Leo responds.
Washington’s comforting account of history adds up to a conclusion squarely in line with DeSantis’ anti-critical race theory agenda. “Future generations are never responsible for sins of the past,” Washington reassures the children.
“OK I’ll keep doing my best to treat everyone well and won’t feel guilty about historical stuff,” Layla responds, now absolved and innocent.
PragerU Kids’ anti-anti-racism project includes a predictable deradicalization of Martin Luther King Jr., whom Leo and Layla travel to meet.
“My parents… taught me that racism, thinking people are better than or lesser than because of skin color, is wrong and to hate the wrong but never the wrongdoer,” the fictional King tells the kids.
“Wow. That’s so noble,” Layla responds, in an inadvertent but tellingly condescending way.
“My Christian faith directs me to love my neighbors, even when they act in ways I don’t like, and that’s always helped me remain peaceful,” King replies.
Like in the “Around the World” segments, Leo and Layla also have ample opportunities to promote Western chauvinism.
“What’s up with the face?” Layla asks her brother at the beginning of their Christopher Columbus episode. “You look stressed.”
“I’m just doing some research,” Leo responds. “Was today weird for you?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?” Layla says.
“Columbus Day,” Leo says.
“Or Native American Day, or Indigenous People’s Day—it’s weird, right?” Layla replies.
The kids then discuss how their teachers and peers got into arguments about whether Columbus should have his own holiday.
“The side against Columbus says he was a really mean guy who spread slavery, disease, and violence to people who would’ve been better off if he’d never gone to the new world,” Leo says. “The side for him says he was a really courageous guy who loved exploring, inspired generations, and spread Christianity and Western civilization to people who really benefited from new ways of thinking and doing things.”
When the two kids meet Columbus, he assures them that he was justified in his violence against Indigenous people.
“The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful,” he tells them.
Like the fictional Booker T. Washington, Columbus naturalizes slavery and the slave trade as something that happened everywhere.
“Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” Columbus says.
“Well, in our time we view slavery as being evil and terrible,” Layla corrects him.
“Ah. Magnifico! That’s wonderful,” Columbus responds. “I am glad humanity has reached such a time. But you said you’re from 500 years in the future? How can you come here to the 15th century and judge me by your standards from the 21st century?”
As this episode shows, the overriding theme of Leo and Layla’s adventures—and PragerU Kids in general—is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated through a rigorous disavowal that the past plays any role in ordering the present. If historical wrongs committed by white people in the United States or Europeans must be acknowledged, we must teach that those injustices were undertaken with good intentions. Even more importantly, the past must remain firmly in the past, lest Leo and Layla lose their innocence and be forced to confront continuities of domination.
How To: Instructions in Conformity
Another series, called “How To,” instructs kids on the proper ways to conform to society’s expectations of them, or to repress any unease that results from a sense that power is unequally distributed.
“Most gender stereotypes exist because they reflect the way that men and women are naturally different,” a presenter tells the viewers in “How to Embrace Your Femininity.”
“And those differences aren’t bad,” she continues. “Men and women complement each other and create a well-balanced family and community. So don’t let anybody tell you it’s bad to fit stereotypes.”
In “How to Be a Victor and Not a Victim,” students learn that “people all around the world who have encountered great setbacks have gone on to overcome them, whether it’s poverty, disease, discrimination, or all of it combined.”
That, PragerU Kids says, is the mentality of winners. “Victims on the other hand, don’t believe that personal growth is possible,” the presenter—who, it should be noted here, is Black—instructs the kids.
“Or, even worse, don’t believe it’s needed,” he continues. “Victims are often so busy blaming everything and everyone else for their problems that they don’t stop to think about how their own growth can make things better.”
Other Outlets Chase Dennis Prager’s Model
Other conservative media outlets are attempting to expand their footprint to include children’s programming as well. The Daily Wire, one of the most openly pro-violence and virulently anti-LGBTQ outlets in right-wing media, last year announced a “$100 million commitment to develop entertainment for kids that parents can trust.” Also in 2022, Charlie Kirk launched Turning Point Academy, an affiliate of his extremist-aligned Turning Point USA, which similarly targets elementary school-aged children and defines itself as “an educational movement that exists to glorify God.”
PragerU Kids has a head start on these other outlets, and its curriculum reflects the far-right ideology of Dennis Prager, the organization’s founder. Prager has a long history of making offensive comments, including promoting an anti-gay conspiracy theory about the murder of Matthew Shephard, instructing married women to have sex with their husbands even if they don’t want to, and lamenting that he is socially constrained from using a racist anti-Black slur.
Prager’s recent comments about education are also instructive. “If you see a noose on a college dorm of a Black student, the odds are overwhelming that the noose was put there by a Black student,” Prager said in April 2022.
The goal is to render history and its inheritances invisible, inert, and incapable of inspiring young people to seek a more equal and more just world.
“What has any fifth-grader done to have made the world better because he or she is in it?” he asked last September.
Critics tell him, “‘You indoctrinate kids’—which is true,” Prager said this month. “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.”
PragerU Kids is the newest vehicle for that indoctrination, but Prager also seeks to downplay that very project by presenting his curriculum as ideologically neutral, as he illustrated on his radio show in discussing Florida’s adoption of his product.
“To have responsible—it’s not even right-wing, it’s just responsible,” he said, describing PragerU Kids. “Look at our materials.”
Looking at those materials makes PragerU Kids’ mission clear. Discrimination? Oppression? Structural inequality? These forces either don’t exist, or they’re the fault of the individual who hasn’t sufficiently adopted the rise-and-grind mindset that their more successful peers have.
What this all amounts to is painfully obvious, though perhaps not to the Florida children who will be forced to consume this right-wing propaganda while in a public institution. The goal is to render history and its inheritances invisible, inert, and incapable of inspiring young people to seek a more equal and more just world. PragerU Kids is looking to expand that mission to more states. Now it’s the public’s turn to respond.
Sophie Lawton & Jack Wheatley contributed research to this piece.
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