Oklahoma on Tuesday became the second state, after Florida, to approve the use of materials from the right-wing propaganda outfit PragerU in the state’s public schools.
The organization, which isn’t an actual university despite what its name suggests, came under fire in August after one of its videos went viral for all the wrong reasons. The video used a cartoon version of abolitionist Frederick Douglass to downplay the devastation caused by slavery — and the United States’ role in perpetuating it.
The civil rights watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center has in-depth reporting on PragerU’s influence, finding that it has promoted videos with hosts who denounce immigration, dispute the existence of systemic racism, and deny ties between violent right-wing extremists and the conservative movement. The SPLC also found that some of PragerU’s presenters have connections with white nationalists.
PragerU co-founder Dennis Prager is a former conservative radio host who has openly admitted that his organization tries to indoctrinate children with conservative ideology.
But Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, said he’s “excited” about partnering with PragerU. “These additional resources will help ensure quality instruction in American history and values, and will enrich educational opportunities for our students,” he tweeted Tuesday.
I'm excited to announce this initiative with PragerU Kids today. These additional resources will help ensure quality instruction in American history and values, and will enrich educational opportunities for our students pic.twitter.com/aSrI3CqOpz
— Ryan Walters (@RyanWalters_) September 5, 2023
Walters has developed a reputation for right-wing positions. In a viral video earlier this year, he was seen arguing with an event attendee after Walters suggested that the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the worst incidents of racist violence in U.S. history — wasn’t about race. (He later tried to walk back those remarks.)
More recently, he’s been accused of stoking bomb threats against an Oklahoma librarian whom he and a popular right-wing conspiracy theorist accused of pushing “woke ideology” in schools.
The librarian’s so-called misconduct, according to Walters, was a caption she posted on one of her TikTok videos: “My radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind — hbu??”
Florida and Oklahoma are just the first two states to welcome PragerU’s propaganda into classrooms, and the organization is making moves on a third. In Texas, Democratic members of the state’s Board of Education have teamed up with experts and activists to denounce PragerU after the organization announced last month that it was partnering with the Lone Star State. (The Texas Board of Education refuted the claim, saying instead that PragerU had just taken steps to become an approved vendor in Texas.)
As I’ve said previously on MSNBC, we need to view these right-wing efforts to whitewash social inequality as part of a campaign to re-create that disparity in the present and the future.
“If you’re able to whitewash the atrocities committed in the past and downplay the severity of them, it makes it easier to commit those atrocities in the present,” @_Jahan tells @yasminv about Florida's attacks on African American history. https://t.co/ojohNs4ixy pic.twitter.com/nKtejVGquV
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 19, 2023
Conservative officials nationwide are rolling back civil rights for marginalized groups — gutting affirmative action for racial minorities and overturning abortion rights, for example. All the while, right-wingers seek to systematically sanitize the oppression these minority communities faced in winning these civil rights.
And PragerU is becoming an appendage for the conservative movement to do this — a tentacle they can use to reach into classrooms and grip America’s schoolchildren with right-wing propaganda.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.