PragerU

PragerU, also known as "Prager University", is an online media nonprofit. It describes itself as an "online video resource promoting knowledge and clarity on life's biggest and most interesting topics." It is not an accredited university, but a YouTube channel which regularly produces approximately five-minute-long videos discussing political, economic, cultural, and religious topics. These videos are categorized into playlists with themes such as "Religion/Philosophy", "Economics", "Political Science", "History", "Foreign Affairs", "Race Relations", and Environmental Science. Prager University's videos have a decidedly right-wing focus. The channel's top performing videos include titles such as "Why I Left the Left", "How's Socialism Doing in Venezuela?", "Make Men Masculine Again", "How Socialism Ruined My Country", and "Democratic Socialism is Still Socialism". As of July 2019, the channel had over 2.2 million subscribers, over 660 uploaded videos, and over 2.3 billion total views.

Video Content

American Pride

Explaining The Mission of PragerU, Prager says "Our kids aren't learning that American is a land of opportunity, a defender of freedom around the world, a source of pride. They're learning that America is a land of inequality and racism, an imperialist power, something to be ashamed of." He wants PragerU to provide students with a counter-narrative to this "politically correct orthodoxy".

Black Conservatism

Derryck Green of Project 21, an organization promoting "the views of African-Americans whose entrepreneurial spirit, dedication to family and commitment to individual responsibility have not traditionally been echoed by the nation’s civil rights establishment" explains conservative opposition to affirmative action in a video entitled Who Are the Racists?. He explains that "Conservatives believe blacks and other minorities are every bit as capable as whites of succeeding as engineers, surgeons, policemen, businessmen, lawyers, and college students. And therefore, lowering standards for blacks is unnecessary as well as insulting."

Antonia Okafor, campus-carry advocate, presents a video entitled "Black, Millennial, Female and… Conservative", where she says the Republican party "...views me as an empowered individual, able to shape my own destiny, not as a member of a victim group."

Candice Owens, who worked as the communication director for Turning Point USA, a group financed by Koch donor Foster Friess, presents a video entitled "Playing the Black Card". In early 2019, Owens left Turning Point USA for her own PragerU show. Owens also founded Blexit, which she describes as "...the black exit from the Democratic Party. It’s the black exit from permanent victimhood, the black exit from the false idea that we are somehow separate from the rest of America.”

Taleeb Starkes, author of "Black Lives Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry", lays out what he believes to be The Top 5 Issues Facing Black Americans, including a mentality of victimhood, lack of diversity of thought and diversity of political affiliation, high crime rates, high single motherhood rates and unquestioning allegiance to Progressive/liberal policies.

Diversity of Presenters

There are over 170 different "presenters" who voice PragerU videos.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, ex-Muslim and vocal critic of Islamic doctrine, presents two videos, entitled "Is Islam a Religion of Peace?" and "Why Don't Feminists Fight for Muslim Women?"

Another high-profile PragerU contributor is resident American Enterprise Institute scholar, author, and self-described "Factual Feminist" Christina Hoff Sommers, who presents videos focused on gender such as "The War on Boys" and "There Is No Gender Wage Gap".

Gloria Alvarez, a Guatemalan "political scientist, radio broadcaster, and project director at the National Civic Movement of Guatemala", encourages Hispanic immigrants to advocate for smaller government in a video entitled "Immigrants! Don't Vote for What You Fled".

Mother Jones comments on the advantage of having such a wide variety of presenters, saying "PragerU also finds strength in diversity, racial and otherwise. (Robert Reich)’s videos are typically smarter, the production values every bit as high, but if you can’t relate to a septuagenarian white guy, then they probably aren’t for you."

Environmental Issues and Climate Change Denial

Alex Epstein is a former adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute He has written two books: The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Fuels Improve the Planet. His former website advertised his communications consulting services, saying "As an executive or communications professional in the energy industry, your industry and your company face formidable attacks by so-called environmentalists that can put a halt to your projects and sabotage your bottom line." More info on Epstein can be found here.

In 2011, Epstein founded the Center for Industrial Progress, a for-profit think tank that "makes the moral case for fossil fuels" and help teach "millions of employees in the fossil fuel industry to understand the value of what they do and how to communicate it." He engages in keynotes speeches and workshops designed to improve companies' and organizations' "clarity, persuasion, and inspiration".

In one video called "Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy", Epstein makes the claim that fossil fuel is an energy source that can "solve our biggest environmental challenges, purify our water and air, make our cities and homes more sanitary, and keep up safe from potential catastrophic climate change". He shows a graph of the correlation between fossil fuel use and access to clean water, saying "Am I saying the more we have used fossil fuel, the cleaner our water has become? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying."

In another video, Epstein claims the "97% of scientists" figure "says nothing about the meaning or magnitude" of Climate Change. He also argues the effects of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by fossil fuels must be weighed against the enormous benefits of these fuels.

Religious Issues

Many PragerU videos stress "Judeo-Christian" values. One playlist entitled "Religion/Philosophy" contains many videos about God and moral questions, including "If There is no God, Murder Isn't Wrong", "The Benefits of Belief", and "The Best Book to Read To Your Kids" (it's the Bible).

In response to the July 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case which legalized same-sex marriage in every U.S. state, Dennis Prager published a piece entitled "The Formal End to Judeo-Christian America", where he claimed, "Beginning with the Supreme Court’s ban on nondenominational school prayer in 1962, the same-sex marriage decision has essentially completed the state’s secularization of American society." In the same piece, Prager drew a contrast between the heart (secular values) and the mind (Judeo-Christian values) saying "It is the heart, not the mind, that has concluded that gender has no significance... It is the heart, not the mind, that has concluded that all a child needs is love, not a father and mother."

American Identity

In one video, Prager says that his ideal high school would "no longer honor race or ethnicity" and that he would tell students, "if you wish to affirm here an ethnic or racial identity, or a national identity other than American– you will have to attend another school" and "This school will have failed if any of you graduate without considering him or herself inordinately lucky– lucky to be alive, and lucky to be an American."

In another video, Niall Ferguson, husband of fellow PragerU contributor Ayaan Hirsi Ali, shares his experience becoming an American citizen, positively contrasting Trump's recorded welcoming message "You now share the obligation to teach our values to others, to help newcomers assimilate to our way of life" with Obama's message "Together, we are a nation united not by any one culture, or ethnicity, or ideology..."

Strong Pro-Israel Stance

Dennis Prager hopes to use PragerU to garner more support for Israel, stating, “Due to the influence of leftism in high schools and universities, vast numbers of young Jews are alienated from Israel and believe that Israel’s enemies are the moral party in the Arab-Israeli, Muslim-Israeli, and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts.”

PragerU CEO Marissa Streit, an American with Israeli heritage who served in a military intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces, echoed Prager's concerns, "As the left takes over the media and Hollywood, it becomes more anti-Israel and you see it even more at the university... Back in the day, the fringe made the effort to be anti-Israel and now it’s the trend to be anti-Israel...If you are pro-American, you are pro-Israel. The more people you bring to American values, the more people you bring to Israel."

PragerU presenter Alan Dershowitz has defended Israel military conduct on multiple occasions, including after the 2006 Lebanon War, which left 4,400 injured and close to 2,000 dead in Lebanon. According to UNICEF, "Most of these casualties are civilians; an estimated 30 per cent are children." For comparison 164 Israelis, largely IDF members, were killed and around 1500 injured. During this conflict, Dershowitz noted the high support of Hezbollah among Lebanese citizens, claiming "It is virtually impossible to distinguish the Hezbollah dead from the truly civilian dead" and shifted blame away from the IDF, saying "The deaths of these “civilians” are the responsibility of Hezbollah and the Lebanese government, which has done very little to protect its civilians."

PragerU contains many pro-Israel videos, including among others "Israel: the World's Most Moral Army", "Israel's Legal Founding", "Why Don't You Support Israel?", "BDS: the Attempt to Strangle Israel".

News and Controversy

Trump Social Media Summit

In July 2019 U.S. President Donald Trump hosted a "social media summit", which excluded tech giants Facebook, Google, and Twitter, but included right-wing media outlets and organizations including PragerU, Turning Point USA, and the Heritage Foundation.

Intra-Conservative Dispute Over Immigration

Writing for the Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh offered a scathing rebuttal to a PragerU video entitled "A Nation of Immigrants" presented by Michelle Malkin, author of In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror, claiming, "The video is poorly framed, rife with errors and half-truths, leaves out a lot of relevant information, and comes to an anti-legal immigration conclusion that is unsupported by the evidence presented in the rest of the video." Despite this disagreement, both Prager University and the Cato Institute have financial ties to the State Policy Network as well as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Closeness to White Nationalists

A Data & Society study raised an issue with PragerU's broad range of conservative collaborations, "Prager’s amplification strategy also regularly promotes the ideas of white nationalist thinkers, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, and Stefan Molyneux... creating a dense network of extremist thinkers allows for [viewers] who identify as mainline conservatives to gain easy access to white supremacist logic."

Distrust of Mainstream Media

This study also noted the prevalence of PragerU videos which aim to create distrust for mainstream media sources, "Because these videos also stress the connection between mainstream media and liberal logic, the overall take away is that liberal ideology is formed by disputable claims and emotional appeals instead of fact-based evidence."

The study noted the effects of PragerU videos on its viewership, "By the end of the study the positions of PragerU and those I interviewed became indistinguishable. Time and again, I was told that mainstream media are 'fake' because coverage is based on feelings instead of fact-based evidence."

Accusations of Censorship

In October 2017 PragerU filed a lawsuit against Google and Youtube. Dennis Prager claimed, “They are engaging in an arbitrary and capricious use of their ‘restricted mode’ and ‘demonetization’ to restrict non-left political thought. Their censorship is profoundly damaging because Google and YouTube own and control the largest forum for public participation in video-based speech in not only California, but the United States, and the world.”

In August 2018 Facebook censored PragerU posts, prompting a statement from the nonprofit: "Does anyone really think that Facebook censoring our videos was simply a 'mistake?' It was deliberate censorship of conservative ideas."

After Twitter blocked PragerU from running ads on its platform in June 2019, PragerU tweeted "If that's not censorship of conservative speech, what is?" The libertarian publication Reason Magazine published an online rebuttal to this claim, pointing out, "Except that's not actually censorship, as Twitter's advertising policies have nothing to do with free speech. The First Amendment protects PragerU from government action, not from the decisions of a private company."

Ties to the Bradley Foundation

Between 2010 and 2016 Prager University received $465,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

Bradley detailed the most recent grants in internal documents examined by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Below is a description of the grants prepared by CMD. The quoted text was written by Bradley staff.

2016: "$175,000 to support general operations. According to the grant proposal record, "At its heart, the purpose of Prager University Foundation is to articulate the meaning of conservatism. Its target audience consists of those who have reflexively dismissed or misunderstood conservatism as well as those "in the choir who have forgotten the melody." Central to the PUF strategy is its work with and to the benefit of a number of conservatiive organizations. As an example, Aayan [sic] Hirsi A1i's foundation reports a substantial increase in gifts directly attributable to her PUF video, and she has asked to film a second. From its inception, Prager University's online lecture series has represented a leveraging opportunity for Bradley, because it provides a platform for disseminating ideas supportive of our mission that reaches tens of millions of internet users."

2015: "$75,000 for general operations. The Bradley grant proposal notes that PragerU's videos are "taught by public intellectuals and/or Bradley Prize winners, fox example George Will, Robert George, Heather MacDonald, Thomas Sowell, Nicolas Eberstadt, Walter Williams, John Taylor, and Victor Davis Hanson... Other courses feature "visiting faculty" associated with Bradley and/or Encounter Books, for example AEI's Arthur Brooks and Jonah Goldberg; George Gilder; John Eastman; Daniel DiSalvo; and Greg Lukianoff." According to the grant proposal record, PragerU videos "have attracted almost 27 million viewers. Teachers are increasingly using the videos in their classrooms. This year, PUF has been increasing video production to one release per week, reaching three million views each month. Should funding be secured, it will create three new series of courses on radical environmentalism, "left vs. right" and the American heritage... from its inception, the Prager University's online lecture series has represented a leveraging opportunity for Bradley, because it provides a platform for disseminating ideas supportive of our mission that reaches millions of internet users."

2014: "$75,000 for general operations. The Bradley grant proposal notes that PragerU's videos are "taught by public intellectuals and/or Bradley Prize winners, fox example Thomas Sowell, Paul Johnson, Walter Williams, Amity Shlaes, John Taylor, and Victor Davis Hanson... Other courses feature "visiting faculty" associated with Bradley and/or Encounter Books, for example AEI's Arthur Brooks and Jonah Goldberg; George Gilder; Nicholas Eberstadt; and Greg Lukianoff." According to the grant proposal, "The proposed lecture series represents a leveraging opportunity to provide a platform for and promote the ideas of Bradley associates, potentially spreading them to millions of internet users through Prager University."

Bradley Files

In 2017, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), publishers of SourceWatch, launched a series of articles on the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, exposing the inner-workings of one of America's largest right-wing foundations. 56,000 previously undisclosed documents laid bare the Bradley Foundation's highly politicized agenda. CMD detailed Bradley's efforts to map and measure right wing infrastructure nationwide, including by dismantling and defunding unions to impact state elections; bankrolling discredited spin doctor Richard Berman and his many front groups; and more. Find the series here at ExposedbyCMD.org.

History

Prager University is named after Dennis Prager, an Orthodox Jewish American conservative political commentator and radio show host. He has a Monday-Friday show owned by the Salem Media Group, which is connected to other religious conservative talk show hosts such as Larry Elder and Sebastian Gorka.

In 2011, Prager condemned Trump's use of profanity in an article called "F-Word Laced Speech Disqualifies Donald Trump from Presidency", claiming "As a father, I even banned use of the word "sucks" in general conversation in my home. I am certain that the use of that word at sporting events such as when thousands of fans scream the word at an opposing player or at the entire opposing team has contributed to— and is a sign of— the coarsening of American life."

By election day 2016, Prager had reversed his position entirely, resulting in criticism of hypocrisy from libertarian The Atlantic columnist Conor Friedersdorf, who wondered "What principles, if any, does he regard as more important than the 'greater principle' of defeating Hillary Clinton?" and stated "So long as Prager supports Trump, he is a member of the Immoral Majority, the newly ascendant coalition on the American right... There are many just like him on the right who’ve compromised their beliefs for Trump. They are now apologists for moral relativism and indecency publicly personified."

In 2014, Prager expressed discontent with the "hubris" of judges who ruled gay marriage bans unconstitutional, claiming, "If American society has a "constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis," then there is no plausible argument for denying polygamous relationships, or brothers and sisters, or parents and adult children, the right to marry." In 2006, Prager wrote that allowing congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to U.S. Congress, to take his oath of office the Koran "undermines American civilization" and that "Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible."

In 2011, Prager and Alan Estrin, a TV screenwriter, teamed up to create Prager University, which Dennis Prager views as a "growing alternative to the moral and intellectual wasteland known as the Western university.”

Funding

Prager University's funders include:

• Dan and Farris Wilks, a pair of billionaires who became wealthy by founding and later selling a hydraulic fracking company. Farris Wilks and his wife Joanne created the Thirteen Foundation, a major donor to The Franklin Center, The Heritage Foundation, the State Policy Network, and other right-wing groups connected to the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch Network.
• The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has given a total of $465,000 from 2010-2016
• DonorsTrust gave $35,540 in 2017.

Core Financials

2017

• Total Revenue: $10,383,560
• Total Expenses: $8,355,612
• Net Assets: $7,990,826

2016

• Total Revenue: $5,336,708
• Total Expenses: $3,318,541
• Net Assets: $5,679,912

2015

• Total Revenue: $3,609,499
• Total Expenses: $2,166,761
• Net Assets: $3,553,594

Personnel

Staff

As of 2019:

Executive Leadership

• Dennis Prager, President
• Marissa Streit, CEO
• Craig Strazzeri, Chief Marketing Officer
• Allen Estrin, Executive Director
• Layne Thrasher, CFO

Notable Presenters

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, visiting American Enterprise Institute scholar, 2005 Time 100 "Leaders and Revolutionaries", 2015 Bradley Prize winner
• Glenn Beck, conservative radio show host and political commentator
• Tucker Carlson, Fox News contributor
• Alan Dershowitz, lawyer, political commentator, frequent defender of Israeli military action, and author of many books, including "The Case Against BDS: Why Singling Out Israel for Boycott Is Anti-Semitic and Anti-Peace"
• Dinesh D'Souza, right-wing filmmaker, conspiracy theorist
• Greg Gutfeld, Fox News host
• Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada
• Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA
• Charles Krauthammer (since deceased), Pulitzer Prize winner, 2004 Bradley Prize winner, conservative columnist, Fox News contributor
• Heather MacDonald, Manhattan Institute fellow, 2005 Bradley Prize winner
• Candace Owens, former communications director of Turning Point USA
• Jordan Peterson, psychology professor and vocal critic of social constructionism, college campus activism and the current teaching of sociology and other humanities
• Dave Rubin, host of the Rubin Report, a YouTube channel partially supported and produced by Learn Liberty, a former Institute for Humane Studies project
• Ben Shapiro, youngest nationally syndicated U.S. columnist, former Breitbart News Network columnist and founder and current editor in chief of the Daily Wire, a conservative online publication
• Christina Hoff Sommers, resident American Enterprise Institute scholar

Board of Directors

As of 2017:

• Steve Robinson, Chair
• Greg Cassileth, Secretary
• Dennis Beck, Treasurer
• William Herreid III
• Barak Lurie
• Richard Lederer
• Jon Francis
• Marty Watkins
• Bob Hutt
• Kim Bengard

Contact Information

Prager University Foundation
15021 Ventura Blvd. #552
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403

Telephone: (833) 772-4378
Website: https://www.prageru.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/prageru
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prageru/

Articles and Resources

IRS Form 990 Filings

2017

2016

2015

External Links

Joe Bernstein How PragerU Is Winning The Right-Wing Culture War Without Donald Trump, "Buzzfeed News", March 3, 2018.