Responses to PragerU are never as pithy as the original content - let alone as heavily marketed. And while there are any number of well-crafted video essays pointing out the lies and inconsistencies that predominate in PragerU's videos, the nature of this kind of methodical breakdown usually produces 20-minute-long, detailed videos - in response to PraguerU's casual 5 minutes. And with recent ventures into right-wing children's animation, that effort is getting all the more frightening…īut how do people who dread what that means for the future of America and the world push back? For a long time the answer was response videos (see above). PragerU is successfully pulling millions of Americans further Right. With videos presented by Dennis Prager and basically every prominent conservative online - Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Candace Owens, etc. According to polling, around 1 in 3 Americans online have seen PragerU's content, and around 70% of PragerU viewers report having changed their minds on at least one topic as a result of PragerU. How PragerU Lies to You More often than not, their videos actually ignore scientific work on the issues they discuss, preferring to rely on hollow appeals to common sense in order to attack Black Lives Matter, feminism, critical race theory, COVID mitigation, single-payer healthcare, climate science, world history, and much more. While their videos are framed as works of rational, academic thought - they even provide study guides and other resources for educators and parents who want to use them for "educational" purposes - they are anything but. Those charts capture the true ethos of PragerU.
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Thanks to tens of millions of dollars in backing from the likes of fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks - much of which goes to promoting their content on Facebook - PragerU is able to produce slick videos full of animated sequences and official-looking graphs that tend to lack labels, data, and meaning.
Twelve years, hundreds of videos, 2.9 million subscribers, and more than 5 billion views later, PragerU has become a force to be reckoned with in the sphere of political YouTube. And while the extent to which they've reached their target demographic of college-aged kids is questionable, they have certainly found an audience. With the eye-rolling tagline "give us five minutes, and we'll give you a semester," Prager and Estrin set out to make pithy, digestible, hyper-simplified videos to counter the left-leaning politics they saw as dominating college campuses. Another year would pass, along with the inauguration of President Barack Obama - before Prager got together with his producer Allen Estrin and decided to test the waters of YouTube themselves, launching their YouTube channel PragerU - short for Prager University - in 2009. Mike Gravel - Rock - Meanwhile, Dennis Prager was hosting his talk radio show and endorsing John McCain for president. But his bizarre claim to Internet celebrity, combined with his confrontational debate performances, planted a seed that would sprout into something even stranger more than a decade after the fact. Gravel managed to earn just 404 votes in New Hampshire's primary. But it was weird enough to catch some viral heat in the early days of YouTube and ended up making an appearance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Was it profound and inspirational with a cutting political message? Nope. The most iconic of the lot, "Rock," featured Gravel staring wordlessly at the camera for a full 70 seconds before picking up a large rock and throwing it into a lake in the background - followed by an additional minute and change of the former senator walking off into the distance.
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Mike Gravel - On Other Candidates and War But where Gravel 2008 really made a splash was in a series of surreal campaign ads. While Dennis Prager continues to promote supply-side, "trickle-down" economics - AKA Reaganomics - after decades of demonstrated failure and has worked to spread "skepticism" about the 2020 presidential election results, Gravel has espoused his belief that "9/11 was an inside job," and pushed to build a 4-square-mile teflon Dome to house "Denali City" during his tenure as Senator.īut what really makes these two men at once so alike and so distinct is their unlikely roles as Internet icons.ĭuring his 2008 presidential campaign, Gravel made headlines from the debate stage by calling out his Democratic colleagues for their complicity in upholding America's military empire and the military-industrial complex - accusations which Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden laughed off in exaggerated displays. Both men are known for taking shots at Democrats, and both men have endorsed some fringe ideas in their time.
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