Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew [...]]]>
Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts remarked to interviewer Mark Levin on Sunday, “The problem is that the educational establishment don’t believe in great men and women any longer. They see for ideological reasons of their own, and the idea that no one is greater than anybody else, and so they won’t teach about heroes.”
History bereft of humans — both heroes and villains — is pretty hollow, so PragerU fills a big hole.
Founder Dennis Prager testified before a Senate committee last summer about his purpose in creating the videos and dedication to defending free speech in America.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media treats PragerU like an insect being dissected in a high school biology class, analyzing the details at length while missing the big picture. That’s what appeared in the New York Times Sunday front page article titled, “It’s Fox News for Teenagers, in Short Videos.”
That title makes the PragerU videos sound dumbed down which they definitely are not. The most recent edition, from January 6, features a discussion by Brit Niall Ferguson about the life and influence of Margaret Thatcher, a piece suitable for an educated adult desiring a brief refresher on the unique prime minister.
Still, the article provides history I didn’t know, one example being that Dennis Prager initially envisioned a traditional college but a brick-and-mortar edifice would have be prohibitively expensive.
The Times article was reprinted elsewhere, so click freely on the link following to read the whole piece:
]]>Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time, New York Times, January 4, 2020
BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera.
He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the game was on.
“How many genders are there?” Mr. Witt asked before turning and staring deadpan at the camera. Some people laughed and walked away. Most, knowing the camera was rolling, engaged.
“As many as you want?” a recent Ph.D. student responded, a little confused to be confronted with this question.
After some of the footage was edited in the back of an S.U.V. in a parking lot nearby, the video headed to Prager University, a growing hub of the online right-wing media machine, where Mr. Witt is a rising star and the jokey, Ray-Ban-wearing embodiment of the site’s ambitions.
Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.
The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.
Mr. Witt, 23, said he was raised in a relatively liberal home by his mother, and when he arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was already leaning conservative. But he found his zeal for the culture war on campus. One of his classes offered students extra credit for going to a political protest. Mr. Witt submitted that he would go to a nearby speech hosted by the right-wing star Milo Yiannopoulos. The teaching assistant told him that would not count, he said.
He was frustrated, feeling lonely and at home watching videos on YouTube. The site prompted him with a bright animation made by PragerU. He can’t remember the first video he saw. Maybe railing against feminism, he said.
“I must have watched every single one that night,” Mr. Witt said. “I stopped going to class. Pretty much all the time I was reading and watching.”
He did not graduate from college.
The videos are five minutes each, quick, full of graphs and grand extrapolations, and unapologetically conservative. Lessons have titles like: “Why Socialism Never Works” (a series), “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”
To the founders and funders of PragerU, YouTube is a way to circumvent brick-and-mortar classrooms — and parents — and appeal to Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
Mr. Prager sees those young people as more indoctrinated in left-wing viewpoints than any previous generation, but also as more curious about the right. For these teenagers, consuming conservative content is a rebellion from campus politics that are liberal and moving left.
“We find more of them are open to hearing an alternative voice than many of their elders,” Mr. Prager wrote in an email. “Many suspect they have been given only one view, and suspect that view may often be absurd.”
The way PragerU presents that “alternative voice” is in the measured tone of an online university, carefully avoiding the news cycle and President Trump. That is part of its power.
“They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.
PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution.
“PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black.
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.
On PragerU’s website, there is little differentiation between its video presenters. So the late Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer appears on the same page as Michelle Malkin, the commentator who has defended overtly racist elements of the right. There’s Bret Stephens, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host; George F. Will, the anti-Trump conservative commentator; and Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. For a teenager approaching the site, each headshot in the same size circle, it would be hard to tell the difference between them all. (Continues)
Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today [...]]]>
Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today that starts with what young people are taught. As he remarked, “The university has substituted indoctrination for education.”
The Left fears unrestricted speech from conservatives and moderates, so it has trained a victim class of overly sensitive liberal young people by posing any disagreement as an attack on their superior values and probably racist in some way.
Unfortunately the demand for politically correct speech doesn’t stop at the campus; instead the silly and distracting rules of the left have permeated our society up and down.
The Fox News segment begins with part of the movie trailer, then gets to the interview at around 1:35 in the video following:
]]>MARTHA MacCALLUM: Dennis Prager joins me now. Radio host of the Dennis Prager Show. Dennis, great to see you. Thank you for being on tonight.
DENNIS PRAGER: Great to be with you. Thank you.
MacCALLUM: So, I mean, just watching that trailer. And I watched, you know, pieces of the film today. It is so disturbing that we’ve gotten to a point where you can’t have these discussions on college campuses, which is exactly the place that you should be having them. When Art Laffer gets shut down — you know, the designer of the Laffer curve and the Reagan economy — you just have to wonder, what is so deeply upsetting and controversial about Art Laffer?
PRAGER: What’s deeply upsetting is that the man is not on the Left. That is all it takes. It’s unprecedented in American history that there is a such a large percentage of young people — or, of that matter, old people — who believe the First Amendment needs to be changed. And those are the polls. About 50 percent of millennials believe that the First Amendment should be modified to ban hate speech. But of course, the whole point of free speech is that what you consider hate speech is irrelevant. What I consider hate speech is irrelevant.
When I was a kid, Nazis — real Nazis — what I mean “real” is not people who were called Nazi by the Left because they don’t agree with them. I’ve been called “Nazi,” and I’ve devoted my life to Judaism and to the Jewish people, and write a Torah commentary, and built a synagogue. And I’ve been called a Nazi. Google has an email that declares Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Prager U — my website, Prager University — Nazis.
But real Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, where there were Holocaust survivors, because they’re such cruel human beings, these Nazis. Jewish groups and liberal groups all said, “Of course. In America, even real Nazis can march in a Jewish neighborhood.” That’s America.
It’s changed, and that’s the first time in American history that this is the case. And it started at the university. That’s what this film is about.
MacCALLUM: You say that it’s dangerous to send your kids to American universities.
PRAGER: That it’s what to send your kid to university?
MacCALLUM: That it’s dangerous.
PRAGER: What was the word? Oh, “dangerous.” Well, I have a very good motto on this. Sending your child to college is playing Russian roulette with their values. And I mean it. I’m not happy about it. I love the life of the mind.
I went to Columbia. I love intellectual work. I read and I write. But the university has substituted indoctrination for education.
MacCALLUM: What do you think — you know, we talk about triggers a lot, right? Triggers that send people into safe spaces. But what do you think triggered this? You know, when you try to sort of trace back the anthropology of how we got here, where do you think it begins?
PRAGER: Well, my theory is that there is a huge distinction — a gulf — between liberal and left. Liberals and conservatives agree on far more than liberals and leftists do. But liberals don’t want to acknowledge this because they’re afraid to. But this emanates from the Left. The Left, from Lenin to the present-day university anywhere on earth has never countenanced free speech. So, wherever it gains power — and there’s nowhere it has more power than at the university — it suppresses free speech because it can’t deal with free speech. We might actually prevail if we’re allowed to speak.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. I mean, if you — you know, if you are — if you feel strongly enough about your arguments, you should never be afraid to have someone present the other side because you shouldn’t worry that they’re going to able to poke holes in it because you feel so strongly about what you believe.
I want to ask you about something that happened today. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito wrote an opinion that he was defending — National Review went after a climate scientist named Michael Mann for his hockey stick theory. And National Review said, essentially, that the methodology that he used was debunked, in their opinion, in their analysis. And they tried to get that overturned, and the Supreme Court said they’re not going to hear that case. And Alito wrote a very passionate defense of freedom of speech on this. What are your thoughts on that?
PRAGER: It’s depressing to think that, if this did go to the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t be 9-0, as I said I have no issue — I mean, obviously, I don’t agree on everything liberals believe, but they’re my allies. And liberals need to understand, we are your allies on free speech. That’s why there are so many liberals in our documentary because this is a unity between us. This is a very serious thing that is happening. If so many young people think, “Oh, well, what I think is hate speech, that should be banned” — 2,000 demonstrators against Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley last week? I mean, my God. They can have the furthest radical leftist show up and we don’t do that.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. Dennis Prager. “No Safe Spaces” is the film. I recommend everybody watch it. Thank you very much.
PRAGER: December 6th, goes national. Nosafespaces.com.
Prof. Robert Epstein has warned against Google’s use of its Search function to influence voters [...]]]>
Prof. Robert Epstein has warned against Google’s use of its Search function to influence voters to embrace the liberal side.
Last July, the Senate held a hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines where Dennis Prager testified that Youtube (owned by Google) had restricted access to 56 of PragerU’s 320 five-minute videos that explain history and politics to young people because schools have become so deficient.
Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has accused Google of improperly working with Red China, including “the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military.”
On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Floyd Brown, co-author of the new book Big Tech Tyrants.
Brown says he is “terrified” at the unbridled power of Big Tech — as well he should be.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: So you’d think that we’d have a free press in this country — we’re guaranteed it in the Bill of Rights, but it’s not exactly free anymore. Big tech controls it and the tech companies are doing everything they can to shape the narrative, the storyline around impeachment.
For example, Facebook and YouTube, which control a much larger percentage of digital media than anyone realizes are now censoring, flat out censoring any material that mentions the name of the man believed to be the whistleblower. They’re not letting you know who this guy is.
Floyd Brown is co-author of “Big Tech Tyrants.” And he joins us tonight. So Floyd, it seems to me that we’ve moved to a stage a year out from a Presidential election, where the tech monopolies, which really control all of digital journalism in this country, are deciding what facts we’re allowed to know. Why should we not be terrified?
AUTHOR FLOYD BROWN: We should be terrified, and I am terrified. The truth is, is that over half of all news consumed by Americans is consumed on these social media platforms.
And when they can censor the way they’re censoring right now –both Facebook and Google around the name of this whistleblower — it’s chilling. It’s absolutely chilling.
They have such dominant power. In fact, you know, I know that Fox News isn’t saying the name of the whistleblower, but the name of the whistleblower was accidentally said by somebody on your network, and then that was posted on YouTube, which was immediately censored by Google.
So what you have — I’m the publisher of the Western Journal — we have decided to publish the name of the whistleblower, and we’ve done four stories on the whistleblower, and we have 43 million followers on Facebook. I don’t think ten of them have seen those particular stories.
CARLSON: So I mean, look, there’s a legitimate debate here. Let me just say that no one in Fox has told me what to do or not on that issue despite a lot of reporting to the contrary, I haven’t named the guy because I haven’t confirmed it. I can’t find anybody who will confirm it. But as soon as we do, we will I mean, that’s, you know — that’s journalism, and you may disagree.
But the point is this guy, whether he is the whistleblower or not, is at the center of a really important news story, and the average person ought to be able to make up his or her mind on that, but we’re not allowed to, because the tech monopolists won’t allow us. So why is Congress standing back and not saving us from this? Seriously.
BROWN: Yes, well, it’s amazing to me that a lot of the publications that you know, publish things like the Pentagon Papers, and have, you know, published almost all of what WikiLeaks released, and time and time again, they have been more than willing to publicize things that are the deepest secrets of the U.S. government.
But here this one particular secret, they’re so good at keeping the name of this whistleblower out of the media and you know, there’s been major changes in tech since Donald Trump was elected. And those major changes are all around keeping Donald Trump’s — really his ideas and his message — from reaching people.
CARLSON: Yes, I noticed that.
BROWN: I mean, when you look at Twitter, Twitter suppresses Donald Trump’s own tweets. And, you know, Facebook has limited the amount of people —
CARLSON: So this is much greater interference. I mean, this is an interference on a scale that Putin for all of his determination to hack our democracy never even approached or could have imagined. Purportedly American companies are putting a thumb on the scale of democracy and nobody is saying anything about it, why?
BROWN: They should be and Congress should be investigating them.
These companies have all grown incredibly large. You know, in my book, “Big Tech Tyrants,” I talk about the amount of data that has been collected on individuals. Americans don’t have any idea of the volume of information from medical records to you know, what they Google, to what they’re looking at, every single page of the internet that they visit is recorded somewhere.
And, yet people should be rebelling against that. And frankly, it’s a very dangerous situation.
CARLSON: Well, it is.
BROWN: When you see this kind of censorship, this is worse than what you would imagine from Putin and the Soviets.
Or the Russians.
CARLSON: These people are not your friends.
BROWN: No.
CARLSON: Meanwhile, I think Republicans control the Senate. I think it’s not just Josh Hawley, he is not the only U.S. Senator, where are the rest of them? It would be interesting to know.
BROWN: Well, as you know, as I. . .
CARLSON: I am sorry, but my lecturing is as put us over the edge, this this topic is worth being mad about. Thank you for your book. Thank you for coming on tonight. I appreciate it. I wish we had more time.
The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a [...]]]>
The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a fair representation of the news despite its decided liberal orientation and open-borders philosophy.
As an influential provider of conservative-leaning ideas, Dennis Prager has come under a lot of criticism from the left, particularly Silicon Valley.
On July 16, Prager appeared before a Senate hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines to defend his work — see my report including video and transcript, Dennis Prager Responds to Google Censorship against PragerU.
To critics who call his videos biased, he remarked during his testimony:
DENNIS PRAGER: PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime-ministers, four Pulitzer-Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO, or the former prime-ministers of Norway, Canada, and Spain, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
PragerU presents a variety of historical subjects, from the current failure of Europe to confront hostile Islam to the importance of the Protestant Reformation in creating modern freedoms. Most are essays presented by experts, from well known persons to professors you never heard of. All are interesting, and their Monday morning appearance is a good start for the week.
How a Los Angeles-based conservative became one of the internet’s biggest sensations, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2019
WASHINGTON — Earlier this summer, as Donald Trump assembled online activists at the White House to thank them for their role in getting him to the Oval Office and – Trump predicted – keeping him there, one guest didn’t rush to claim credit.
Los Angeles-based Prager University, a registered charity, is legally prohibited from politicking. It isn’t truly a university and doesn’t have a campus. But the digital empire created by Dennis Prager, a 71-year-old conservative radio host and erstwhile Never Trumper, is having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.
The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times, according to the group’s own count. Independent analysis done for The Times by Tubular Labs, a video measurement company, largely backs up that claim. PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups. It ranks among the top 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.
Its videos are becoming a staple on college campuses, where Prager is dead set on overturning liberal orthodoxy. PragerU boasts that thousands of college and high school teachers screen its videos in their classrooms.
All that has caused considerable consternation on the left.
“It is a sophisticated campaign to indoctrinate young people,” said Tara McGowan, chief executive of Acronym, a nonprofit that advises progressives on digital campaigning. “The amount of money they are putting behind it is alarming and significant. They seem to have created a savvy way to push an ideology onto an audience and get a tax break in the process.” (Continues)
The article goes into great detail about funding, including the identities of major contributors. If you are interested in Prager’s philosophy of education, the Times article provides almost nothing. For that, the best introduction is probably his Senate testimony:
]]>One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.
PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may [...]]]>
One person testifying was Dennis Prager, whose website PragerU has suffered many instances of censorship by Google with no explanation.
PragerU takes on liberal shibboleths, such as the “Nation of Immigrants” myth, which may anger the far left. (Actually, we are a nation of citizens.)
The educational five-minute videos are aimed at a young audience to fill in the historical gaps left by the liberal education establishment, but the restrictions placed on some items are nonsensical: Mr. Prager learned from the first witness, a spokesman from Google, that the video about the Ten Commandments was put under restriction because it mentioned murder — negatively, of course, but those algorithms are strict!
Seriously, you would think that a major web publisher like PragerU would get responsible human attention.
]]>DENNIS PRAGER: I will take just a moment because my opening comment is under five minutes just to respond on the issue of the Ten Commandments video that was a placed on the restricted list by Google; the representative from Google mentioned that a reason that it would be on the restricted list was that it contains mentions of murder, so I was thinking, I have a solution that will I think appeal to Google. I will re-release it as that the Nine Commandments. That should solve the problem of including murder in my discussion of the Ten Commandments.
And as regards the swastika, yes, there is a swastika; it is again in the commandment of do not murder wherein I show that murder — there are people who believe murder is all right even today, and I use the swastika and the hammer and sickle as two examples. I would think we would want young people to associate the swastika with evil; that was why I had a swastika.
It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate, but I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube’s (and for that matter Twitter and Facebook’s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.
In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.
Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University, PragerU as it often referred to.
I was born in Brooklyn NY. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the US Navy at the start of World War II. My father’s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on antisemitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.
He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism, and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one’s country leaves a terrible hole in one’s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.
And it breaks my heart for America, because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it. I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network, an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America’s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age of 35, PragerU has achieved some success.
My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism, and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or “haters” only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.
PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime-ministers, four Pulitzer-Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO, or the former prime-ministers of Norway, Canada, and Spain, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
Yet, Google, which owns YouTube has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. “Restricted” means that families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.
Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments, as we have seen. Yes, the Ten Commandments.
We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given. But, of course, we know why. Because they come from a conservative perspective.
Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America’s crowning glory – free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, “first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing, and then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.”
Thank you.