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.
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.
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.
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You shouldn’t vote for the Dems, some American leftists really take the using every tool in your belt and run with it.
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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.
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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.
yes
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).
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Didn't Pewdiepie quit a while ago?
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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.
“The Left is trying to steal your penis!”
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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
Also interested in some stories
Replied to UlyssesT you can see some below. There’s plenty of mundane stuff as well but I picked out the choice bits.
"Climate change is becauze of jews and liberals" is already a thing people unironically say. It's over.
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.
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I do not share your optimism.
This will produce the same kind of children that the Ukrainian change in educational curriculum post-maidan created.