A press release from group states, "This fall in schools across America, students will be watching PragerU videos in their classrooms as states officially make PragerU an approved educational resource."
Despite its name, PragerU is not an accredited academic institution, nor does it issue degrees.
This combined with the new 'Slavery wasn't so bad' guidelines is just...
Personally I find the framing of "Umm actual it lifted the Negroes from their ignorant and idle state. It was to their betterment" truly vile. Black thinkers have been fighting against that trope for generations.
You can find a variant of that take in any Youtube video showing Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey On The Moon" that still allows comments. There's pretty much always a giant
reaction that involves mentioning mud huts and how they 
need to be grateful for whitey being on the moon because the future and humans interplanetary species and so on.
Universities should refuse high school diplomas from Florida tbh
As someone who went to high school here, yes. And that was long pre-desantis
Dude my Nephews out of Texas who are black were off spouting off lies those Charter schools lied to them to, about how slaves were sometimes paid, and that some slave owners were nice actually to the people they owned.
My partner sat them down and basically told them “thats bullshit, your school is bullshit, slavery is an unforgivable evil and anyone who makes excuses for it is evil”
Here’s how my high school US history class taught world war 2:
World War 2 started when Hitler and Stalin made an alliance and invaded Poland together because they were evil individuals. The Nazis invade and beat most of the rest of Europe to find more Jewish people to kill, and betray and start fighting Russia. The US has been out of the war but supplying weapons to the British, but when Japan suddenly out of nowhere bombed Pearl Harbor we joined the war, and after the D-Day invasion we liberated Europe with the help of the British. Then we liberated the places Japan invaded, and to end the war we used nuclear bombs, which killed less people than would’ve been killed if we invaded.
The closest we got to a materialist explanation of history was that making Germany pay reparations after WW1 was a bad idea and crashed their economy and that’s why Nazis happened.
The closest we got to a materialist explanation of history was that making Germany pay reparations after WW1 was a bad idea and crashed their economy and that’s why Nazis happened.
We sometimes hear that today and it's called "economic anxiety" to somehow justify or even excuse contemporary nazis
It is true, the US sort of played at being magnanimous with Germany but demanded full payment of war debts with interest from Britain and France whose ability to pay rested on what reparations they could wring from Germany, who in turn was expected to enact extreme austerity and wring the money out of its people (or borrow it from private US banks). The French invaded and occupied the Ruhr in order to claim in land, factories etc what reparations Germany couldn't pay in cash. There's a good deal written about this in Superimperialism by Michael Hudson.
Wait that last paragraph is really good though I feel like nobody ever learns that even if their education on how the war played out was much better than your school
World War I is like the only place where general education HAS to use historical materialism, cuz otherwise kids wouldn’t understand.
slaves were sometimes paid
Slaves did (very rarely) get paid (typically the equivalent of pocket change). Manumission did exist on the "charity" of a small number of slavers in the cases of a small number of slaves who they had "mercy" on, though typically I think how it went in the rare cases it was allowed was that a slave did work for their slaver and was permitted on their free time to have a job in town (where, because they were a slave, their options were both artificially and practically limited and they were paid much less than a white person or even a freed slave).
But to use this non-legalized ritual that describes a tiny minority of cases within a paradigm of industrialized exploitation as though it was a saving grace or even a mitigating consideration would be truly unhinged. Manumission did exist in the legal framework of Ancient Rome* as something of a right of a slave, so there it could be called a mitigation because it was actually a codified part of the system and not a quirk of the whims of some masters.
*I think there have also been similar practices elsewhere but I am not specifically aware of them and I don't think it existed in any form of Ancient Greece beyond the cases of "mercy".
Even in grade school the history books talking about slavery in ancient Rome spent a lot of undue time talking about the wonderful exceptions and the way some slaves freed themselves (thought gladiatorial combat or other Survivorship Bias means) to make it seem less fucked up.
Oh definitely, though I remember receiving emphatic stories also about some holiday in the Aztec Empire where slaves could free themselves via foot race for some reason.
This is just a guess, but on a continent without horses a guy who can run really fast is really useful to have around, and hard to keep as a slave if you want to make use of that skill
Well sometimes they did get paid a pittance in their off time, look up manumission. It was a ploy to get them to not kill themselves long enough to buy their own freedom.
Can’t wait for the PragerU Trigonometry Course where students have to use the Pythagorean theorem to find why black people are inferior to white people
"Why are some people better than others? The Pythagorean theorem allows us to measure the sides of a triangle and make important inferences. Some sides are greater. Some are lesser. Greater. Lesser. Obvious. Children don't learn this in school but the equilateral triangle is the least common triangle. Why is that? Because - quite clearly - equity is a fool's errand..."
We are only 3-5 years away from Dennis Prager saying this verbatim
Teaching students geometry to measure the shape of white peoples' superior skull (it's shape allows for maximal brain volume)
You could move to Florida and be the best infectious disease specialist there because you are the only one trained to understand evolution is real
So this is illegal right? It's illegal to pose as an academic institution, right?
Completely ignorant to what changes have happened since, but schools in Arkansas and Virginia were closed by the state to resist integration as there was no requirement to provide education.
I imagine part of the way this has been prevented since is some sort of legislation, but it's also America so who knows
brb, turning my McDojo karate school into a university that shows Prager U.
I assume they hide behind some bullshit about how they never explicitly say what the U stands for and they're not responsible for people assuming it stands for university.
This is America lmao
If you have enough money and influence, you can do whatever the fuck you want (as long as you don't fuck over other rich and powerful assholes)
I wonder what kind of children this will actually produce, I doubt it's going to work out indoctrinating the kids like they want it too, especially in Florida where climate change will likely be felt sooner and worse than elsewhere, and the incredible conservative upswing seen there, which I assume gets a lot of heft from old retirees, runs up against reality, voters die off, their goals for a better society continue to fall short despite immense effort and fundin- these kids will have been instilled with an ideology that will give them immense whiplash when confronted with the material world around them, I imagine.
there are people that go beyond high school curriculum, formally or informally, but there are lots of people who just passively accept what they learned k-12 at face value.... especially when it comes to social sciences like history, economics, government. but other areas as well, like biology.
as an example, i was part of an informal panel interview for a science education position at an outdoor school. among the applicants, there was a younger person. public k-12. super affable, had some great ideas for engaging kids. B.S. and M.S. at a smaller school i hadn't heard of, but who cares. it didn't sound like a religious school, and her credentials were in biology and science education. as we went through our questions, one of the slightly-older-than-me, been-there-longer just said, "about how old is the planet?" i remember thinking, "lol, ok dude. totally unnecessary, she's obviously not a crazy person." and then i looked at her face, and she was caught. she said it was up for debate, but she believed it was under 10,000 years old.
i approached my colleague later to thank him asking a question i never would have thought to. he just shrugged and said, "they're everywhere. at least they don't lie when asked directly." i looked up / investigated the school that awarded the B.S. and M.S. later and it was definitely a religious institution that had a vague sounding name... and the public school district/area she was from, it wouldn't be surprising to learn they have science teachers who say shit like "evolution is a theory, like intelligent design." and the sad thing was, i don't think this person was operating in bad faith. they just had been lied to by the institutions they were raised to trust.
to me, public education is a critical component of any political project. reactionaries having control of it is a massive L and the damage cannot be overstated.
public education is a critical component of any political project. reactionaries having control of it is a massive L and the damage cannot be overstated
Another reason why the apathy for voting on the left is a terrible take. Your standard-issue dogshit imperialist Democrat is at least a bulwark against stuff like teaching a generation that slavery was job training, actually.
It's hard enough to bring people around to opposing capitalism. It's not going to be easier if we have to re-teach them an entire high school curriculum first.
The apathy for voting in the left stems from the fact that we keep voting and yet this keeps happening. Most people on the left vote. They vote more often than your average American. They just do not advocate for voting. Voting for Democrats does not stem the tide and increase of religious education, particularly when those Democrats continue to push for 'public-private partnerships' and private school voucher systems.
They are not your friends, their kids do not go to the same schools as yours, and they do not actually care as long as they get elected.
Not to mention their fetishism for 'reaching across the isle' bi partisan bullshit.
Another reason why the apathy for voting on the left is a terrible take.
Apathy in general is a tool that benefits the status quo. Flush that ideological shit.
You shouldn’t vote for the Dems, some American leftists really take the using every tool in your belt and run with it.
to me, public education is a critical component of any political project
Agreed, and that's why I see any "fuck public education; Mrs. Meanface was mean to me years ago and therefore teachers deserve to suffer" take to be wrecker shit.
voters die off,
people been saying this since Nixon. Amerikkka's fascism is a reaction to its hegemonic decline, not the product of the fever dreams of old people. In 40 years people will be saying "all we need to do is wait for people like president Nick Fuentes to die." No. We need to take action.
Obama leaned on this "old people ideas dying off" trope hard in his interview (well, softball-catching session) with Hasan Minhaj
here it is with Hasan and BoyBoy reacting
the guy is weird to watch nowadays, you see right through his rhetorical tricks. he's still got skills but not as sharp as he was in office. and completely hollow inside
That hollow feel seems to make sense if you imagine a guy with a gun pointed at Michelle off camera.
Or maybe hes eyeing all the cash off screen idk
There are countless state secrets his family would get killed for him leaking, but his conservative bullshit is pure, self-motivated grifting as far as I've ever heard, along with an upper-class sense of snobbish propriety that might in some measure be genuine.
along with an upper-class sense of snobbish propriety that might in some measure be genuine.
His "fuck you, I'm rich, see you later, suckers" selfies taken after he left office while on his very long vacation seemed to come from his own heart.
You don't think that fascism is just the American norm? I feel like fascism has been present long before our current post ww2 decline. I feel like the boomer brain that is so ubiquitous was a reaction to not just the late 70's depression l, but was a reaction to minorities finally coming to the table and demanding agency and a piece of the social safety net. Corporations convinced the white majority to rip down the safety net rather than share it with the unworthy.
idk, there are some places where citizen border patrols (death squads) are a thing, and informal sundown towns and such, but in general I think it's really difficult to call Americans fascist rather than just immensely sympathetic to fascism in virtually every respect. Fascism is very active and Americans tend to be passive.
You can't call all Americans fascist but I think the system is fascistic. It's a government for corporations controlled by corporations. With a group that is held above others. While the othered group is persecuted. And a strong vein of patriotism and a huge military.
I don't think that that's giving an adequate account of the more peculiar elements of fascism, since all of what you said applies pretty well to Britain in 1600 (and at many other points, but you get my meaning). In fact, the explicit and codified white supremacist ideology of Britain at the time would make it fit those parameters much more snugly than contemporary America.
One of my personal points of emphasis, as you can see by implication in my comment, is that America has a very low paramilitary presence outside of specific places, and paramilitarism, especially in the form of "right wing death squads" has historically been a fascist hallmark. The vast majority of America does not have civilians with weapons banding together to violently purge "undesirables" (not necessarily racial minorities, see early fascist Italy), that duty has been handled by police since the days they were mainly slave catchers. The closest analogue within the police are the Sheriff's Deputy gangs in places like LA, along with border patrol collaborating with enthusiasts who prowl around looking for brown people to shoot. These are all still very localized and happen far, far away from the vision of the vast, vast majority of the population. It is also spreading, see Florida, but I would readily agree that America is becoming fascist in a recognizable fashion.
You can consider my thinking to be too cargo cult, but I think it's helpful as a heuristic to distinguish fascism from right-neoliberalism (and classical liberalism, going back to the Britain part).
the potential saving grace is that kids hate school and think teachers are full of shit. hopefully it backfires and makes the kids reject conservative ideas out of spite and rebellion
Kids may think teachers are full of shit in some ways, but they don't think teachers are outright lying to them about basic stuff in the curriculum. I think back to my most hated teachers and it would have never occurred to me to think they're just making up something like why the Civil War was fought, especially if the textbook says it, too.
Yeah they might be jumping the shark a bit here. This is just not how the mass of right-wing voters are created in our society - even Boomers, although they may be directed in specifics by media propaganda, it’s not the media or any kind of indoctrination as such that originally sent them right. If liberal capitalism cannot reward people economically it’s not going to create any martyrs. I suppose if PragerU managed to incorporate their ideas into the curriculum in an especially subtle way they might be able to spread some brain worms among the kids. But my suspicion is, they’re just not that fucking smart. And if there is any effect, it will be to further deligitamise US ideology in the eyes of the youth.
If you’ve seen their videos, thankfully it’s the kind of shit most kids will reflexively reject just because of how it’s being told to them
It's a little catchy. I could totally see a child believing it. It's guys with ties on, flannel shirts, and glasses telling the audience that God does everything for a reason and fucking up basic science.
I can only imagine it will produce an even more disaffected, disinterested youth and I can't blame them. Kids are all online, even when I was a kid ideology came from TV and radio and shit, not school
these kids will have been instilled with an ideology that will give them immense whiplash when confronted with the material world around them, I imagine.
Many of them may reject the
driven ideology but find 
nazi takes more based and appealing in lieu of knowing much else.My sister is a school librarian and nothing is quite like the stories I hear from her to dispel the zoomers are going to save us saviorism
What have you heard?
I can't say I've had too many uplifting experiences myself, but since it's not directly your account, may be opsec-safe to share.
It’s a private school.
Off the top of my head:
Bottom of the barrel N word humor.
Back in like 2017 you had the pewdiepie debacle. Another notable event that year being some speaker at a MUN event turning out to be a massive pedo and getting arrested after fleeing from the Indian police trying to cross the border into Nepal. I think he made it and got to rot in a Nepalese jail instead. What he was doing in India I have no idea.
The civics class has a textbook called “totalitarian regimes” or something with Hitler and Stalin plastered all over the cover, I think Mao makes a cameo as well. Yes the kids swallow everything whole and think they’re geniuses for regurgitating the contents.
Half the male student population is some variant of libertarian randite.
There are these two little “””ironic””” Nazi gremlins, sieg heiling, Hitler loving, the whole package. They go around terrorizing minority students. One of them got shoved down a staircase and broke his arm after trying their bullshit on the wrong person. Guy who did it got expelled and the school held this whole “counseling session” thing where they basically blamed minority students for bringing it onto themselves and how violence is never ok. The Nazi kids got off scot free with an apology from the school. They went on to stab someone with a compass and the admin tried to cover it up. A history teacher sent out a mass email to the parents naming them and said it was the worst bullying she’d seen in like 30 years of teaching. She was fired before the day was out and the Nazi kids got another apology from the school for being subject to “mental trauma”. Another teacher made some comment in class about how fucked everything was, word got out and they were fired pretty soon after as well. Another apology from the school for being “re traumatized”. Reactions from the white students stemmed from not giving a fuck to tacit support to “oh that’s too bad sweaty, but by going after them we would become the real Nazis.”
This is a school that can’t shut the fuck up about it’s DEI department. Just another reminder that the only thing a private school cares about is money and reputation.
This is also in a solidly blue state and city, not some backwater conservative Anytown.
Leftists, please rid yourselves of any pretensions that Gen Z is some sort of based communist generation and not like every other American. Reactionary politics is not an “old people thing” and it’s alive and well in the zoomers. Yes the situation is more precarious but the American left is an absolute farce compared to even Europe and the idea that dire economic straits in and of themselves would somehow lead to spontaneous revolution was debunked by, I don’t know, the entire 20th century. The zoomers are not going to save us.
It’s a private school.
I'm already afraid.
Bottom of the barrel N word humor.
I'm relieved I only sometimes have to hear that myself.
Back in like 2017 you had the pewdiepie debacle. Another notable event that year being some speaker at a MUN event turning out to be a massive pedo and getting arrested after fleeing from the Indian police trying to cross the border into Nepal. I think he made it and got to rot in a Nepalese jail instead. What he was doing in India I have no idea.
I remember that too.
when Andrew Taint really took off, it sent shockwaves through my district too. I'm talking 
spoiler
"joking" about (CW: sexual violence) "chokefucking feeemales into submission,
" often with a specific name in mind where I had to weigh whether that counted as a threat to the person being talked about and whether I wanted to deal with another
getting enraged at me for even bringing it up.The civics class has a textbook called “totalitarian regimes” or something with Hitler and Stalin plastered all over the cover, I think Mao makes a cameo as well. Yes the kids swallow everything whole and think they’re geniuses for regurgitating the contents.
I'm glad I don't teach Civics because public school curriculum mandates aren't much better there.
Half the male student population is some variant of libertarian randite.
I see that shit mostly in college, and I can only hope that the influencer chuds in these kids' life don't have a lifelong grip on them.
There are these two little “””ironic””” Nazi gremlins, sieg heiling, Hitler loving, the whole package. They go around terrorizing minority students. One of them got shoved down a staircase and broke his arm after trying their bullshit on the wrong person. Guy who did it got expelled and the school held this whole “counseling session” thing where they basically blamed minority students for bringing it onto themselves and how violence is never ok. The Nazi kids got off scot free with an apology from the school. They went on to stab someone with a compass and the admin tried to cover it up. A history teacher sent out a mass email to the parents naming them and said it was the worst bullying she’d seen in like 30 years of teaching. She was fired before the day was out and the Nazi kids got another apology from the school for being subject to “mental trauma”. Another teacher made some comment in class about how fucked everything was, word got out and they were fired pretty soon after as well. Another apology from the school for being “re traumatized”. Reactions from the white students stemmed from not giving a fuck to tacit support to “oh that’s too bad sweaty, but by going after them we would become the real Nazis.”
Yeah we got some resident "wolfpack" Hitler Youth around here too, and there really isn't much that can be practically done about them, no matter what the laws say about hate speech (they're also the resident bullies, so they know how to push just enough without doing something punishable).
Your private school experience definitely sounds worse, though. I couldn't handle that. At all.
This is a school that can’t shut the fuck up about it’s DEI department. Just another reminder that the only thing a private school cares about is money and reputation.
This is also in a solidly blue state and city, not some backwater conservative Anytown.
This is familiar to me, too. Out of towners may assume I live in some liberal woke dream world where everyone hugs trees and throws flowers, but no, it's pretty chuddy, especially if the unhoused are involved.
Leftists, please rid yourselves of any pretensions that Gen Z is some sort of based communist generation and not like every other American. Reactionary politics is not an “old people thing” and it’s alive and well in the zoomers. Yes the situation is more precarious but the American left is an absolute farce compared to even Europe and the idea that dire economic straits in and of themselves would somehow lead to spontaneous revolution was debunked by, I don’t know, the entire 20th century. The zoomers are not going to save us.
For all our sakes, I do hope you're wrong there.
To be honest this zoomer are going to save us narrative was spread by millennials, as copium. There is a massive pipeline/industry that is aimed at turning boys into hitler youths and tech/libertarian bros.
There's almost nothing "influencer" on the left that isn't drowned out by the bigoted, greedy, grifty shit pushed by the right.
Yes, I remember when I was a young teen there was always a push for me adopting right wing viewpoints, it was very targeted.
God I miss having optimism for the future. President Xi I am begging you, please liberate us
Replied to UlyssesT you can see some below. There’s plenty of mundane stuff as well but I picked out the choice bits.
An interesting thing about Florida is that it has a comparatively high proportion of deeply alienated youth, partly due to the state being such a retirement haven, though in practice I think the most observable effect of that is more hard drug use among young people. It could lead to an anarchist-ish backlash to this new crusade, though.
There's a lot of drugs in The Villages. It's another "rules for thee and not for me"
thing.
"Climate change is becauze of jews and liberals" is already a thing people unironically say. It's over.
I do not share your optimism.
This will produce the same kind of children that the Ukrainian change in educational curriculum post-maidan created.
Jesus may come in the form of record-breaking hurricanes, you just have to ride the wind
Not directly related but has anyone else seen ads on YouTube for the PragerU Kids channel? Fucking bleak.
Anyway, marg bar Florida.
China is going to kick America's ass and it will deserve it. China's kids get to learn programming languages while American kids get kissed with lies over how they deserve special treatment for being white. They are going to utterly lobotimize some future white men in gen alpha that they intend to "help".
If only blue states would actually get their shit together so they can at least have the satisfaction of kicking red state ass too, but they're hopelessly complacent.
I saw a Tuttle Twins propaganda video about Cuba recently. They made the sky blood red and collectivized the grandma's wheelchair.
I mean, that is directly related, they're literally pushing this on middle school and elementary kids, not just high schoolers.
I’m also a published* cryptozoologist PhD
*I had a website on angelfire
If y’all haven’t listened to The Audit’s most recent series on PragerU I can’t recommend it enough. Fuck these people.
Which show is that? I see a ton of different podcasts with the name "the audit"
The one by Dave Anthony and Josh Olsen, of The West Wing Thing and The Dollop.
The Lever is part of David Sirota's outlet. He was
speechwriter. Kind of a 
but I do support his work. It's something and I'm glad it helps produce leftish content.
Truly bizarre decision. A lot of the culture war stuff they've been pushing recently is not only unpopular, it's unpopular with most Republicans.
The problem with that is that republicans will vote for republicans no matter what.
They're hoping in 10 years it'll be less unpopular with a new cohort of Republicans
This is seriously fucked. If you aren't familiar with how utter shit PragerU is, potholer54 has a great video on it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIwKhX-1gZQ
i think i can learn to love it
