Finally, a school as good as Trump University has coursework that is now available in New Hampshire public schools. Prager University videos are controversial tools now being utilized in NH public schools.
Prager University was founded in 2009 by Allen Estrin and talk show host Dennis Prager. Despite the name including the word "university", it is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees. It is a nonprofit advocacy group and media organization that creates content promoting conservative viewpoints on various political, economic, and sociological topics. Its website, offers a “free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.”
This not-for-profit organizations promotes propaganda with the goal of “rescuing” young people who have embraced liberal values.
I first looked at Prager’s “Cash Course” on financial management that is geared towards teens and young adults. It is a series of five 15-minute presentations. Whereas the NH legislature requires that a one-half credit course cover a six-month curriculum in the public schools, Prager offers the same half credit for a course that lasts one hour and fifteen minutes. This creates an alternative to entice parents and students to leave the public-school curriculum for an easier path to acquire academic credits in this non-academic “university.”
The founder of Prager University, conservative talk show personality Dennis Prager publicly advocates the use of the N-word, and he also made a statement recently “that if you hear claims that there are nooses on college campuses, it's African Americans who are putting them there.”
Two of the school videos are called “How to Embrace Your Masculinity” and “How to Embrace Your Femininity.” It Masculinity video advises young men to “seek financial independence, set career goals, and become critical thinkers.” The Femininity video advises young women to “make yourself pretty, embrace the idea of being a wife and mother, and try smiling.”
Nothing like a trip down gender stereotype “memory lane.”
The video that struck me the hardest was a cartoon of Christopher Columbus asking a group of young viewers, “Isn’t slavery better than death? No?” The cartoon Columbus also asserts that the native Indians were “far from peaceful”. Perhaps this is the origin of the De Santis slavery was good vocational training school of thought.
You can also peruse videos concerning climate change denial and promotion of imaginary racism in our criminal justice system, the non-existent gender pay gap, and anti-LGBTQ (which are ‘fake buzzwords’ in Prager-speak) if you’d like to broaden your min.
Prager materials are being utilized in Florida, Montana and Oklahoma. In fact, this year, Florida became the first state to accept Prager U as an official education vendor. NH Education Commissioner Edelblut proudly collaborated with Prager to help the school to convince other states to utilize their teaching materials.
Its videos received one billion views in 2018 even though Google’s You Tube placed twenty-one of Prager’s videos on restricted mode due to age inappropriateness. When Prager sued Google under the First Amendment to reverse their decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned their claim stating that “providing age-inappropriate material to young people is not protected speech.”
This “school” is not a flash in the pan. Prager receives much of its funding from hydraulic fracturing billionaire Titans Dan and Farris Wilks who sit on Prager’s board. Prager receives over $57 million in donations and spends 40% of it annually on Facebook advertisements, making it one of the ten largest political spenders on the Facebook platform in the country.
In short, Prager University is a lean and mean right-wing propaganda machine that is supported by billionaires seeking to deregulate the national economy, eliminate checks and balances in our government, and divert wealth to the super-rich.
Be on the lookout in New Hampshire for this and other ways that politicians are attempting to orchestrate the defunding and undermining of our public education system in the name of personal freedom and the dismantling of our governmental system of democracy.
