South Carolina Partners with PragerU

Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver announced the formal partnership today on the controversial edutainment producer's website

Note: this piece has been updated throughout to clarify language and add additional examples.

As you know, American history is full of triumph, tragedy, and I think most of all the word I think of is resilience.

-Ellen Weaver, interview with PragerU CEO Marissa Streit (September 16, 2024)

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

-Frederick Douglass, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”

A special pop-up video on the home page of the controversial right-wing content creator PragerU’s website now announces “PRAGERU NOW IN SOUTH CAROLINA SCHOOLS.”

The announcement image features South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver standing with PragerU CEO Marissa Streit. Clicking on the image will take you to a twenty-minute interview between Weaver and Streit.

The pop-up shows Weaver next to PragerU’s CEO.

The video primarily promotes a document (originally available as a link on the same page) which claims to tie PragerU videos to South Carolina educational standards. (In fact, the number of videos is fairly small, and many of the “alignments” feature a yet-to-be released series called Unboxed USA). Streit states in the video that the document was “jointly created,” and Weaver acknowledges that Department of Education employees had some role in creating it. (Note: The document as it appeared when I wrote this article is also archived here. At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access the document directly from the South Carolina Department of Education’s website, and a search of the site for the term “PragerU” returned no results. However, as of today, 9/17, Superintendent Weaver has shared at least one of the PragerU videos on her official Facebook page.)

What is PragerU?

PragerU is a controversial “edutainment” nonprofit (at least initially funded in large part by two oil billionaires) which provides politically-loaded “instructional materials” for students of all ages. Some of its content has been blocked on platforms like YouTube and Google Play (for violating hate speech policies), and lawsuits by the group to have its content reinstated have been dismissed. As an NPR piece recently stated,

The group markets its thousands of videos as nonpartisan explorations of big ideas. But that's a misleading framing, according to Eliah Bures with the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Right-Wing Studies.

"It's always tilted relentlessly in a single ideological direction," said Bures. "You would come away from it thinking that the position that's just been laid out is the only one that reasonable, sane people could ever possibly hold."

A disclaimer in fine print at the bottom of the website reads, “PragerU is not an accredited university, nor do we claim to be. We don’t offer degrees, but we do provide educational, entertaining, pro-American videos for every age.”

PragerU has at times claimed that its “edutainment” content is nonpartisan, which is a strange claim in light of the fact that it was founded by proudly conservative talking head Dennis Prager. (Prager has come under fire for, among other things, falsely claiming that examples of campus hate speech— such as hanging nooses on campus— were basically false flag operations by Black students.) Contributors to the site include Tucker Carlson (who recently hosted a Nazi apologist on his podcast), Brexit party leader Nigel Farage, and arguably more moderate conservatives like George Will.

The group’s website prominently features videos with titles like “Is Maoism Coming to America?” (featuring James Linsday) and Dennis Prager’s “Thoughts on Abortion, Sin, and God’s Will”. According to The Guardian, “Other PragerU videos about the climate crisis make various false claims: they depict solar and wind power as environmentally dangerous, liken environmental activists to Nazis and claim recent record-breaking heat is just part of the natural weather cycle.”

One of the videos The Guardian seems to have reviewed can be found here, in which a cartoon scientist tells children about “how negative wind and solar are for our natural environment”. While it’s true that, as the scientist points out, wind turbines do kill birds, the video argues that “green” energies are somehow more harmful than nonrenewable energy sources like coal; again, the ideological position seems to outweigh the intent to educate children. As a resource from the Yale Center for Environmental Communication points out, wind is actually about as efficient as coal, but has an added advantage: “Comparing renewable energy with fossil fuels isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, because renewables don’t use fuel.” And wind and solar don’t have the “conversion losses” that come with burning coal.

A less ideologically-biased education might include students exploring the different perspectives of various credible scientists, environmentalists, business leaders, and political leaders, to start to explore the complexity of issues like climate change. That doesn’t seem to be PragerU’s goal; instead, it is merely a rebuttal to the supposedly “liberal” position that climate change is real, almost certainly influenced by human activity, and the kind of “existential threat” another PragerU video goes to great lengths to argue is silly and overblown.

Prager himself appears in the first video on the South Carolina document, wherein he explicitly compares US founding documents to the Christian trinity of “the Father, the son and the holy spirit” and the Jewish trinity of “God, Torah, and Israel”. As Paul Bowers points out, another of Prager’s videos, entitled “If There is No God, Murder Isn’t Wrong” is linked directly to the South Carolina-specific document. Prager claims that all of Western culture is based on moral values which can only be “objectively true” for people who believe in a “Judeo-Christian God”.

In another video, John Eastman— the lawyer now most infamous for trying to help former president Trump overturn the 2020 election—