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—

teaches children that “the Founding Fathers never intended for church and state to be completely separate. They saw religion, specifically religions based on the Bible, as indispensable to the moral foundation of the nation they were creating.”

Reviewing the videos provided in the South Carolina- specific document reveals some that are obviously and explicitly aimed beyond history content at making specific and ideologically-biased points about contemporary issues like the protests against police brutality, instruction about “activism” in schools, and other hot-button culture war issues.

This is particularly striking as Weaver, herself, has introduced the idea of “woke” or “leftist” indoctrination in schools to mainstream South Carolina school policy discussions in an unprecedented way, with the argument that schools should be teaching reading and math, not “ideology.”

PragerU’s revisionist take on civil rights leader Frederick Douglass provides a window into the real purpose of the materials.

A video about Frederick Douglass, included in a list aligning the PragerU materials with South Carolina standards, starts with students watching a newscast critical of contemporary protests against police brutality, and continues with the students complaining about being required to be “activists” by a math teacher at school. (This is particularly striking in light of Dennis Prager’s comments about campus hate speech.) “That’s weird,” says Layla, one of the students, “Isn’t math class supposed to be for math?”

This plays into a common anti-public school narrative that schools are indoctrinating students into “social justice activism,” yet this video and others reviewed for this article are full of subjective and ideologically-based content that go far beyond the academic standards they’re supposedly helping to teach.

To “get to the bottom” of why protesters are calling for “abolishing the police,” the students travel back in time to meet a cartoon Frederick Douglass in 1852. The video’s version of Douglass makes a point of telling the students that “slavery has existed everywhere”— which glosses over the position of many historians that the type of chattel slavery practiced in America during Douglass’ lifetime was unique in world history. Cartoon Douglass goes on to explain the existence of slavery in America by saying, “The founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great”. Cartoon Douglass goes on to say that the system to “end slavery gradually” set up by the founding fathers is “working” in 1852.

This is a bizarre take on Douglass, who famously argued that the Declaration of Independence was “the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's destiny,” but in the same speech also said,

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America!

In that speech, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Douglass explicitly criticizes exactly the argument that PragerU is putting in the mouth of his cartoon doppelganger. Americans can’t lean on the history of the Declaration or the founding, he says, when they are enslaving people in the present.

Cartoon Douglass goes on to falsely claim that the United States was the first country to attempt to abolish slavery and that slavery was going on throughout the world while it was happening in America. (In fact, Denmark banned the import of slave labor in 1803, five years before the US did so— after which the US still allowed slave trading in the colonies for six more decades— while Britain banned the import of slave labor three years earlier. Brazil abolished slave trading in 1858. The US did not fully abolish slavery until the end of the Civil War, and it is debatable whether anything but war would have led to that outcome at that time.)

Cartoon Frederick Douglass makes some questionable claims to help kids feel more comfortable with the history of slavery in the United States.

Cartoon Douglass goes on to criticize abolitionist (and Douglass’ real-life friend) William Lloyd Garrison for wanting to abolish slavery too quickly, in a clearly intentional parallel to the video’s criticism of contemporary protests. (“His approach is called radical,” Cartoon Douglass says. “That means a complete, fundamental change of everything.” The kids agree Douglass’ supposedly gradualist approach to abolition is “better”.)

“So, you’re trying to work for change inside the system,” says one of the children.

“Precisely,” says Cartoon Douglass. “Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”

The kids agree. “We even had a black president. Two terms!” says Layla.

“It’s good to listen to activists who want to improve things,” says Cartoon Douglass. “But they have to work inside our system. And they have to understand that change requires patience and compromise.”

Of course, the historical Frederick Douglass did not wait patiently for someone to free him or for the Founding Father’s allegedly gradualist plan, to end slavery by allowing slavery, to take shape. In his memoir— which Weaver read from during an address to state librarians last summer that was largely focused on browbeating them for believing the state was banning books (it was)— Douglass repeatedly and physically battles a slave overseer, breaks the law to learn to read and write, and ultimately breaks the law again to escape from his masters to the North to obtain his own freedom, where he makes many speeches about how he broke the law and continues to do so simply by being free.

The historical Douglass also openly praised John Brown, who was executed by the US government for a violent raid on Harper’s Ferry intended to liberate enslaved Black Americans. To suggest that he would never be in support of activists who do not “work inside our system” is frankly ridiculous, and in this context appears to be deliberately misleading propaganda.

Weaver likely knows exactly what she’s doing.

It’s difficult to believe Weaver doesn’t know how controversial PragerU’s videos are. The one about Douglass, in particular, drew widespread criticism when other Republican-dominated states began to adopt the company’s materials.

And the Douglass video isn’t alone. According to NPR, “Educators have voiced alarms about the tone and accuracy of some of PragerU's videos, such as one that features an animated Christopher Columbus saying: ‘Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don't see the problem.’” And according to NBC News, “Columbus insists it is ‘estupido’ to judge him by modern moral standards.”

Streit states in the interview that that no one is “required” or “mandated” to use the PragerU standards in South Carolina, but of course the truth of that will be in whether district officials, now that the materials have the approval of the Department— at a time when a new state regulation also makes it much more difficult to find classroom materials— require that teachers use them.

And, of course, the idea that it’s okay to include controversial material as long as it’s optional undermines the convoluted logic of Weaver’s own book censorship regulation, which replaces individual parental decisions about which books students should read with state-level restrictions on books for all students, regardless of individual family preferences.

In any case, the fact that Weaver would formally partner with PragerU only a few months after, controversially, effectively banning AP African American studies for many South Carolina students, demonstrates that the goal here is not to make teachers’ lives easier (I don’t know any teachers who were clamoring for weird ahistorical cartoons to help teach history or other subjects), but to signal that she is a champion of rightwing culture war positions that most South Carolinians do not support based on recent polls.

In a zeal for creating a counternarrative to the uncomfortable truth that slavery was a central part of life for many Americans, and the even more uncomfortable truth that the legacy of slavery continues to echo in documented systemic racism, the movement that PragerU represents is willing to make apologies for slavery and to rewrite historical fact.

And even if, as Weaver has claimed, South Carolina schools are subject to the kind of “woke nonsense” she keeps declaiming (without ever giving specific examples), the solution to left-leaning bias would obviously not be radically right-leaning bias. It would be an attempt to deal fairly and accurately with history, while recognizing that new information and changing analyses are a part of the practice of history.

While Weaver keeps paying lip service to do doing these things— most recently through a Martin Luther King, Jr. writing contest— she is ignoring the reality of what leaders like King and Douglass actually said. They didn’t preach gradualism, and King in fact spoke repeatedly and passionately against gradualism, going so far as to write a book called Why We Can’t Wait, and arguing in “A Letter From Birmingham Jail” that the “white moderate” who counseled Black Americans to “wait” for social justice was perhaps a greater enemy that white supremacist terrorists, writing,

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

If Weaver and PragerU reject King’s or Douglass’ actual words and positions, that’s their right, but the fact that they are engaged in a campaign of dishonesty about what those words and positions were speaks volumes about the quality and true purpose of these materials.