Controversy, Curriculum, and Conservative Media

When Dennis Prager enters the small convention room at his radio station in Los Angeles, he appears to replenish your entire house.

He’s 6-foot-4 and has a deep, commanding voice that has gained him thousands and thousands of listeners, even because it retains a slight, old-world Brooklyn accent. It’s early fall, and he’s sporting a blue striped shirt, a blue tie and darkish slacks. He chooses to sit down on the head of the desk, in entrance of a glass show case containing awards. This may find yourself being one in all his final interviews earlier than an harm would go away him hospitalized for months, simply as his media empire has change into extra influential than ever and able to form the minds of a brand new era of potential Republican voters.

Prager, 76, has simply completed taping an episode of the nationally syndicated Dennis Prager Present, which reportedly has greater than 2 million listeners. (At the present time’s episode coated the killing of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Minnesota’s ethnic research normal beneath Gov. Tim Walz.) The present is a part of Salem Media Group, which owns 95 radio stations and broadcasts Christian and conservative content material. Prager has been with Salem since about 2000, after having began on KABC in Los Angeles within the Eighties. The present’s tagline: “When Dennis Prager speaks, America listens.”

Prager appears stuffed with contradictions. He’s a Jewish particular person in Christian radio, a conservative in progressive California, a New Yorker on the West Coast and an individual who appears surprisingly cheerful regardless of his outrage on-air. In a typical episode, he rails in opposition to matters like legacy media, campus protesters and, in fact, Democrats. However off-air, he’s comfortable to speak about classical music and his fountain pen assortment. “I don’t gather previous ones, I solely purchase new ones,” he says, lighting up. He removes two from a pocket and locations them on the convention desk. “This one is made in Japan, and this one is made in Germany. Our two enemies in World Battle II make one of the best stuff.”

Although Prager is broadly recognized for radio, youthful conservatives and the conservative-curious may as a substitute know him because the co-founder of PragerU. Initially referred to as Prager College, the tax-exempt media group makes a speciality of five-minute movies selling “Judeo-Christian values,” as fundraising supplies put it. Its clips have amassed practically 10 billion views, in response to the group. Key to that success have been high-profile video hosts, aggressive advertising and marketing and enlisting Hollywood manufacturing expertise who, in response to PragerU’s management, are fed up with the business’s wokeness.

PragerU has lengthy been controversial, drawing reprimands through the years from the Southern Poverty Legislation Heart, GLAAD, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Human Rights Marketing campaign. Some critics, like Kansas State College researcher Adrienne McCarthy, argue that the group serves as a gateway to far-right extremism via the values it promotes. But the group has solely continued to develop, most just lately via children content material turning into obtainable to public schoolers in a quickly rising checklist of purple states.

In PragerU’s view, the youngsters content material teaches patriotism and different values that the left has ignored whereas obsessing over DEI and gender id. The group additionally believes that folks share its considerations in regards to the state of America’s lecture rooms. “There’s an urge for food for what we’re doing,” says Marissa Streit, PragerU’s chief govt officer. “There’s a nice awakening for fogeys and grandparents, the place they’re realizing that their kids are robbed of correct training.”

However to opponents, the movies are offensive in how they current every thing from slavery to local weather change to Black Lives Matter. Beth Lewis of Save Our Colleges Arizona argues that teaming up with states offers PragerU a “veneer of accreditation and credibility” when it’s actually “a well-funded, billionaire-backed scheme that sells harmful disinformation to our college students who won’t have instruments to discern reality from fiction.” (PragerU’s donors have included teams tied to the Wilks brothers, who’re fracking billionaires, for instance.) And he or she talked about one video specifically, about Christopher Columbus, that appears to be “saying slavery is not any massive deal.” PragerU has responded to such claims on its web site, saying, “PragerU by no means minimizes the evils of slavery. Our critics select to both ignore or lie about PragerU’s condemnation of slavery as an terrible a part of American historical past in these cartoons and lots of different items of content material.”

Now that Republicans management the White Home, Congress and nearly all of state legislatures and public training is of their crosshairs, PragerU appears able to develop its affect even additional. It matches comfortably on this present conservative motion to deal with what’s taught in lecture rooms via laws, dad and mom’ rights teams and, most just lately, shifting to shutter the U.S. Division of Training. PragerU isn’t backing down. “They name us every kind of names,” Streit says. “It’s so mind-boggling to me.”

***

PragerU content material is so much about doom and gloom, just like the pressing want to avoid wasting Western civilization because of drag queen story hours and unlawful immigration. However the temper on the group’s headquarters is lighter. Throughout a latest go to to the workplaces in Los Angeles —”the stomach of the beast,” Streit likes to say — the CEO is sporting a pink blazer with a white prime and blue denims. Her workplace is vibrant and spacious, with gentle hardwood flooring, velvety chairs and a convention desk. There’s additionally an enormous closet, a full-length mirror and a desk with a digital camera setup close to it. A critic as soon as referred to Streit as “white Christian nationalist Barbie,” a comment Streit reposted on Instagram, mentioning to her followers (she now has greater than 100,000, and PragerU has greater than 2 million) that she is Jewish and her mom is from Morocco.

PragerU has Hollywood roots. The thought got here from Allen Estrin, Dennis Prager’s radio producer and a screenwriter who has taught on the American Movie Institute. The lads had been on an Indian Ocean cruise round 2009 with listeners of Prager’s present when two associates approached Estrin about beginning a Prager College, suggesting they “do one thing alongside the strains of Hillsdale,” Estrin recalled in a 2019 “Hearth Chat” PragerU video. (Hillsdale is a Christian faculty in Michigan that forgoes federal funding to keep away from anti-discrimination rules.)

Estrin crunched the numbers and determined it might take an excessive amount of effort and time. However he favored the concept of doing one thing instructional, so he pitched Prager in the course of the cruise: “Let’s create one thing on the web.” Estrin and Prager quickly set to work capturing five-minute web movies, a kind then nonetheless in its early days. (YouTube launched in 2005.)

Making movies wasn’t solely new to them. In 1993, the duo had made a 29-minute comedy quick, For Goodness Sake, made up of vignettes specializing in advantage. Airplane!‘s David Zucker directed, and the solid included Jason Alexander, Bonnie Hunt, Florence Henderson, Bob Saget, Cindy Williams and Eugene Levy. Zucker additionally put up cash for the mission, which they supposed to be a sequence pilot. It will definitely aired on Los Angeles public tv and was offered as a coaching video for companies and faculties. (For a 1996 sequel, they enlisted Trey Parker as director and Matt Stone as first assistant director, a yr earlier than the debut of South Park.)

At the same time as they centered on movies, the identify “Prager College” caught. An early model of the web site listed video titles as if a course catalog: economics, historical past, philosophy, political science and faith. The positioning had an choice to “enroll” and a “college” part. Some states require that an entity be formally authorised as a college to name itself one (recall the scrutiny Trump College confronted). By 2014, a disclaimer on the location famous it wasn’t really “an accredited educational establishment,” although it remained a nonprofit.

In 2011, Prager and Estrin introduced on Streit, whom they met via a household she had as soon as tutored in Hebrew. The workforce nonetheless felt Prager College wasn’t reaching sufficient viewers. “We had been violating a primary Hollywood rule,” Estrin stated in a 2021 documentary shot by The Day by day Wire. “It’s good to spend as a lot on advertising and marketing as you do on manufacturing.” So that they revamped the web site. In 2015, they rebranded as PragerU and started considering of themselves as not simply an academic entity but in addition a media firm. Movies grew to become extra clicky and provocative, with titles like Why I Left Greenpeace and What They Haven’t Advised You About Local weather Change. They introduced in youthful expertise, too, together with Charlie Kirk, the founding father of conservative pupil group Turning Level USA.

The rebrand labored. A 2015 video, on the virtues of the electoral faculty (which at the moment significantly favored Republicans), went viral, finally incomes greater than 66 million views. Themes began to emerge in PragerU content material: Police and capitalism had been good, socialism and political correctness dangerous, the consequences of local weather change had been debatable, and gender dysphoria went in opposition to biology.

Across the time of the 2016 election, PragerU was removed from the one increasing right-wing media firm, even in Los Angeles, the place the Breitbart Information Community (then run by Steve Bannon) and Ben Shapiro’s The Day by day Wire additionally had been primarily based. However whereas different websites centered on the MAGA speaking factors du jour (suppose Hillary Clinton’s emails), PragerU didn’t hitch its wagon to Trump, barely mentioning him throughout his first administration. For one, as a 501c3, PragerU legally should avoid political exercise. And Prager himself had in 2011 referred to as Trump “unfit to be a presidential candidate, not to mention president,” although he subsequently wrote in 2016 that voting for Trump over Clinton was “political chemotherapy wanted to stop our demise.”

Anthony Curtis, who labored there as director of main items in 2020 and 2021, explains the management’s considering as, “Hear guys, we’re not right here to have interaction within the each day controversy. … We’ve to keep up our credibility.”

Nonetheless, loads of political pundits and Trump backers appeared in PragerU movies. These “presenters” included Kirk, Shapiro, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Supreme Court docket Justice Clarence Thomas did a video on braveness. Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy appeared in a number of movies, as did Pete Hegseth, now the secretary of protection, and Tulsi Gabbard, now the director of nationwide intelligence. From the leisure world, the checklist consists of the standard who’s who of Hollywood’s small contingent of outspoken right-wingers, like Zucker, Kirk Cameron, Samaire Armstrong and Kevin Sorbo. Rob Schneider sat for an interview about “how comedy may help save the West.” Adam Carolla and Drew Pinsky made appearances, too.

Such personalities are essential to PragerU’s success, says John Knefel of Media Issues for America, a left-leaning watchdog group. In PragerU clips, the personalities aren’t as “overtly frothing” as they may be on their very own platforms, he says. “What’s being introduced is right-wing propaganda that has this veneer of ideological neutrality, however the truth is it’s performing as a gateway to enter into these different MAGA fever swamps.”

Funding for these star-studded movies got here from teams related to rich Republican megadonors, together with Dan and Farris Wilks, Sheldon Adelson, Lee Roy Mitchell, Bernard Marcus and Betsy DeVos. PragerU’s most up-to-date publicly obtainable tax submitting, for fiscal yr 2023, listed greater than $68 million in income, double the quantity from simply three years earlier. PragerU hit a billion video views in 2017. It took lower than 4 extra years to get to five billion, in 2021.

PragerU determined it was time to develop its viewers.

***

Streit was born in Los Angeles and moved to Israel when she was younger. She served within the Israel Protection Forces and later was director of operations on the Israeli-American Council, a nonprofit that helps Israeli Individuals. She says she additionally taught at and ran a personal Jewish Ok-8 faculty and has a grasp’s in training. She initially labored for PragerU out of her kitchen. Now the operation consists of about 150 folks throughout two flooring in L.A., with workplaces for advertising and marketing and social media and 6 manufacturing studios that prove upward of 40 items of latest content material every week. Wherever you look, there are American flags and depictions of Abraham Lincoln, Dennis Prager and the Founding Fathers. PragerU additionally has a smaller workplace in Florida.

The Los Angeles dwelling base has enabled PragerU to recruit from the leisure business, which could possibly be why its modern movies look extra Netflix than Cato Institute. “We get to rent the those that Hollywood repulses,” Streit says. “Should you’re a white male in Hollywood, you might be really advised that it is best to shut up and never discuss till everyone else that wins sufferer bingo speaks forward of you.” PragerU attracts “individuals who can’t go away California however don’t wish to be crushed up like that each single day at work,” she says. That’s to not say the group is just white males, she provides. “There are lots of people of colour who don’t wish to be in these environments.” PragerU host Xaviaer DuRousseau, whom The New York Occasions just lately profiled as a “conservative star,” and Amala Ekpunobi, who left PragerU in 2023, are Black.

Armed with manufacturing expertise, and seed funding from enterprise capitalist David Blumberg, whom Enterprise Insider as soon as profiled beneath the headline, “He’s homosexual, believes in God, and voted for Donald Trump,” PragerU Children launched in 2021. There at the moment are a couple of dozen reveals for 3 age classes. Otto’s Tales, for kindergartners via second graders, is a storytime present through which host Jill Simonian reads books about “American monuments, holidays and neighborhood helpers” over an animated model of the story. Unboxed, USA, for third- to fifth-graders, teaches about state historical past by having children open containers and guess the state primarily based on what’s inside. For sixth grade and up, How To purports to show life abilities, like managing cash. PragerU’s critics argue that even such seemingly nonpartisan content material has a conservative bent. Media Issues has argued that the monetary literacy sequence “Money Course” mocks taking over pupil debt to attend a “big-deal drama faculty,” which it hyperlinks to Republican assaults on larger training.

PragerU had lengthy tried to attach with educators, however now the nation had modified. A 2022 Pew Analysis Heart survey discovered that almost all of Republicans stated Ok-12 faculties had been having a destructive impact on the nation, whereas nearly all of Democrats stated the other. In spring 2023, New York journal counted 71 Republican faculty payments in 28 states. “One of many issues that unifies all this stuff is … a really highly effective narrative that public faculties in America have been taken over by some form of radical leftist ideology,” says Adam Laats, a professor of training and historical past at Binghamton College. “The details of the matter are, that’s simply not true.”

So when PragerU began courting state training officers for partnerships, these officers probably noticed it as a win-win. “It’s low-hanging fruit for an formidable superintendent in a conservative space to say, ‘Hey, look, we have now put this on the authorised checklist,’ ” Laats says. “It’d seem like it has a huge impact, even when it has a not measurable and possibly not very important impression.” The reveals had been already obtainable without spending a dime on PragerU’s web site. However to PragerU, state approval meant lecturers couldn’t be punished for utilizing the content material, and it may make it simpler for lecturers to entry the assets via official training portals that they used for issues like lesson planning and grading.

The primary state to announce a deal was Florida, then on the heart of the curriculum tradition wars because of its 2022 “Don’t Say Homosexual” regulation and the Could 2023 growth of that regulation. “Drumroll … PragerU Children is now an authorised curriculum in Florida faculties,” PragerU’s Simonian stated in a reside broadcast in July 2023.

Subsequent got here Oklahoma, adopted shortly by New Hampshire, which introduced PragerU Children to a brand new degree by enabling college students who took the group’s monetary literacy module to get faculty credit score via an current state program referred to as Be taught In all places. New Hampshire’s training commissioner, Frank Edelblut, tells THR he’s conscious of the opposition. “If the scholars are studying, we don’t care the place they study, we simply care that they study,” he says. Extra states adopted: Idaho, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arizona, Montana and Texas. Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters stated in that state’s announcement that he had used PragerU supplies as a historical past instructor. “You’re really telling historical past the best way it was,” Walters stated. “The left for thus lengthy has managed the narrative.”

The scope of the partnerships varies. New Hampshire makes credit score obtainable, whereas Arizona hyperlinks PragerU content material on the state training web site. The Texas association is much less clear. PragerU introduced it was “now in Texas” and “on the authorised vendor checklist.” (A Texas Training Company spokesperson stated in an announcement, “Prager U has not been authorised by both the Texas State Board of Training (SBOE) or the Texas Training Company (TEA) as an educational supplies supplier.”)

Tom Horne, the Arizona superintendent and a Republican former state legal professional basic, tells THR he encountered some opposition even in his household. “My youngest daughter’s very liberal,” he says. “She wrote me, ‘How will you put up Prager movies? They’re for slavery.’ So, I despatched her about 10 of their movies that had been historic movies, fully goal, there was no ideology in them in any respect, and I by no means heard one other grievance from her.” Whereas lecturers don’t have to make use of the movies, he says, “I would definitely encourage it.”

***

A politically left-leaning highschool instructor in deep-red South Carolina, Clifford Lee, discovered in regards to the PragerU partnership from the South Carolina Training Affiliation, the place he has been a board member. He wrote to the superintendent and his state legislators to voice opposition. He believes the fabric can’t be trusted and that content material ought to train college students to suppose, not do the considering for them. “They hijack my legitimacy, they hijack my relationships that I’ve had with my college students,” he says. He by no means heard again from the legislators or the superintendent, he says, so he took it upon himself to induce co-workers to not use the movies. “The stakes are too excessive to let this go unchallenged,” he says.

Lee isn’t the one one pushing again. Individuals United for Separation of Church and State launched a probe into the Florida and Oklahoma partnerships. In New Hampshire, Cinde Warmington, who was on the state’s govt council and ran unsuccessfully in 2024 within the Democratic main for governor, requested the state legal professional basic to look into whether or not PragerU broke the regulation by calling itself a “college.” (The AG stated it didn’t.) In Louisiana, lawmakers launched a decision urging the state to bar “edu-tainment kids’s movies which are discriminatory and anti-Semitic,” citing PragerU. The proposed decision died.

Opponents argue that moderately than train details, PragerU movies illustrate already-drawn conclusions to unfold a problematic agenda. “It’s merely propaganda,” says Kevin Kruse, a Princeton professor of historical past and director of undergraduate research. “PragerU begins with sure conclusions it has and works backward via historical past to attempt to cherry-pick proof that helps this,” he says. “It’s bad-faith motivation, doing dangerous historical past, to attract dangerous conclusions.”

Knefel of Media Issues and colleagues watched each PragerU Children video and launched a September 2023 report. A number of the clips they discovered most troubling got here from the animated present Leo & Layla’s Historical past Adventures, for elementary schoolers, through which siblings time-travel to satisfy historic figures. In a single they highlighted, a cartoon Booker T. Washington says slavery has “been a actuality in every single place on the earth” however that “America was one of many first locations on Earth to outlaw slavery” and “future generations are by no means liable for the sins of the previous.”

In one other clip they discovered regarding, an animated Christopher Columbus says the place he found “wasn’t precisely a paradise of civilization, and the Native folks had been removed from peaceable.” This Columbus provides some tribes had been “vicious, warring cannibals,” that “being taken as a slave is best than being killed, no?” and that, whereas he’s glad the attitude has modified sooner or later, to “decide me by your requirements from the twenty first century” is “estupido.”

The extent to which lecturers are literally utilizing the fabric is unclear. When a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma Metropolis reached out to highschool districts within the state, they typically responded that they weren’t. In New Hampshire, an training division spokesperson advised THR that 19 college students have accomplished PragerU’s monetary literacy course and acquired certificates, and 43 had been enrolled. The state has about 54,000 public faculty highschool college students.

Streit says she doesn’t have numbers on what number of lecturers are utilizing the content material, and that as “a freedom junkie,” she doesn’t wish to be “hovering over” folks. “I don’t suppose Scholastic tracks each guardian and instructor that makes use of their product, however does that imply that Scholastic isn’t within the lecture rooms?”

***

On a Tuesday morning in November, precisely per week after the presidential election and a few weeks after talking with THR, Dennis Prager fell at his dwelling and was rushed to the hospital. Medical doctors decided he had injured his spinal twine, impairing his respiratory. The Cedars-Sinai intensive care unit positioned him on a ventilator. It was doable he would by no means stroll once more, simply as PragerU’s affect appeared greater than ever.

For months, PragerU has launched well being updates, together with one in February to say that Prager was speaking and consuming however couldn’t transfer from the shoulders down. In a March video replace, his son David Prager, the group’s chief growth officer, shared a voice recording from his father that stated, “I intend to return on the radio.” Quickly after, Salem introduced he could be again on-air in June, although the corporate stated it had given his previous time slot to Charlie Kirk, the previous PragerU presenter who has change into a number one MAGA-world character. Then there was a setback. In Could, PragerU stated Prager had made it dwelling however caught pneumonia and returned to the hospital. “That was a critical step again,” Estrin stated in an replace whereas including that Prager was once more on the trail to restoration. Salem delayed his return date and has not given a brand new one.

If Prager returns, he’ll achieve this in an atmosphere that appears completely different from the one he left in November, one which’s arguably extra favorable to his trigger, but in addition extra crowded than ever. His son stated within the March well being replace that it was not time for complacency. “Individuals suppose we’re getting into this golden age of conservatism,” he stated. “Should you don’t maintain combating when it’s the golden ages, it would come again to the darkish ages.”

This story appeared within the Could 21 problem of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click here to subscribe.