State ed department partners with ultra right video provider
By Linda Hardman,
Legislative Chair, DWGC
South Carolina’s State Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver has announced a partnership with PragerU, a conservative, non-profit video organization, to provide content to be used as an optional resource for teachers in their classrooms. “We are thrilled to announce the addition of supplemental materials for South Carolina schools through this partnership. These resources will inspire our students, broaden their horizons, and help them thrive in and out of the classroom.”
As stated on its website, PragerU is an advocacy group and media organization that creates content promoting conservative viewpoints on various political, economic, and sociological topics. However, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, PragerU’s videos, billed as “Short Videos. Big Ideas,” have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right. The videos are hosted by conservative personalities—some who are mainstream conservatives like George Will, Steve Forbes, and Charles Krauthammer— but many others feature more extreme, hostile conservatives such as Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, and Jordan Peterson.
Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist who has made an extensive scholarly study of PragerU for the Data and Society Research Institutes, reports that PragerU frequently features the works of white nationalists such as Stefan Molyneux, who promotes his “scientific racism” theories of “natural law” which were used by early founders of the United States to justify the subordination of African slaves, Native Americans, and white women.
Patrick Kelly of the Palmetto State Teachers Association said, “Some of this content is nothing but opinion. It is not fact-based information.”
“PragerU is not an educational organization,” said Clifford Lee, the vice president of the Greenville County Education Association. “They’re a YouTube channel. I’m not here to tell students what to believe. I’m here to help them look at situations and information critically and then make up their own minds. The PragerU content doesn’t do that.”
Greenville County School District officials say they are still processing the new partnership between the state and PragerU.
Here are just a few of the video titles listed on their website:
- “New Study: the Happiest Women are Married”
- “Paganism at the Paris Olympics”
- “XX and XY Are Not the Same”
- “Freedom vs. Government: Which Side Are You On?”
- “Thoughts on Abortion, Sin, and God’s Will”
- “The Left Cares More About Race Than Class”
- “Affirmative Action is Humiliating”
- “Life Advice for the Next Generation”
- “Gender and the War on Common Sense”
- “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks”