PragerU videos teach Florida students that slavery wasn’t so bad | Fred Grimm

What Prager University really needs is a mascot.

What Prager University doesn’t need are the credentials required of other vendors distributing educational materials to public schools.

The Florida Department of Education approved PragerU, as it styles itself, as a content provider because the not-actually-a-university’s hard-right ideological bent makes up for its lack of academic qualifications.

No further discussion necessary. Filling school kid noggins with alt-right propaganda has become this state’s top educational priority.

Still, this is Florida, where citizens regard Gators, Sharks, Hurricanes, Seminoles, Owls, Bulls, Knights, Panthers, even Rattlesnakes with a kind of worshipful reverence ancient Greeks reserved for the gods. Even a pseudo-university like PragerU needs a nickname and a corresponding mascot to be taken seriously.

(The importance Florida’s political hierarchy attaches to collegiate totems was evident after the DeSantis administration’s hostile takeover of New College in January. The incoming regime quickly expunged “Null Set,” a math term for numbers amounting to an infinite nothingness, adopted as the school nickname by its iconoclastic students back in 1997. Instead, New College has become home to the “Mighty Banyans.”)

PragerU, a kind of rightwing think tank founded in 2009 by Los Angeles-based radio commentator Dennis Prager, mostly cranks out short instructional videos — lectures for adults and cartoons for the kids — that repurpose right-wing agitprop into misleading history lessons.

Academics may be appalled, but PragerU’s bigoted worldview offers some swell mascot possibilities. Admittedly, it might be tough, choosing between the Prager University “Raging Homophobes” or the “Mighty Xenophobes.”

An institution determined to rehabilitate Christopher Columbus’ tattered reputation could dub itself the “Historic Revisionists.” A Prager animation depicts Columbus telling a couple of time-traveling 21st Century children to stop dissing him for enslaving the New World’s native inhabitants, given that at the time, slavery was “no big deal.”

Besides, said cartoon Christopher with unassailable logic, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed.”

Not to be outdone by Columbus, an animated version of Frederick Douglass, the 19th century abolitionist, author and orator, a onetime slave himself, tells kids (no doubt surprising his biographers): “I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the Founding Fathers made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”

PragerU’s expurgated version of slavery and slavers, however offensive to actual historians, leads to other mascot possibilities. Fans could cheer on the “Contented Slaves” at sporting events. The “Smiling Slavedrivers” or the “Benevolent Overseers” might roam the gym with authentic-looking bullwhips and jangling manacles, while humming “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah (Song of the South).”

Prager videos similarly characterize colonialism as a boon to the backward countries seized, along with their natural resources, by European powers. After all: “The British Empire lifted India out of a long tradition of caste discrimination” — reason enough to excuse the military suppression of unwilling natives. (The Irish can describe how they happily endured under three centuries of British rule.) Fans could be cheering on the Prager University Subjugators.

Prager videos depict Black Lives Matter as a subversive anti-American cabal. Racial profiling by police is characterized as a myth. Prager videos warn that universal health care could lead to medical deprivations and premature deaths. A little cartoon hero’s brave refusal to acknowledge global warming is equated to Warsaw’s World War II Jewish resisters who rose up against the Nazis.

Another Prager production denies the existence of a gender gap among American workers. Prager characterizes Islam as violent and anti-American. (Possible nickname: the “Crusading Islamophobes.”)

The videos embrace so many untruths that PragerU fans should be cheering on the “Unhinged Fabulists.”

The Florida Department of Education’s embrace of Prager’s controversial classroom offerings, especially the sanitized reassessment of slavery, coincides with the adoption of controversial new middle school history standards that, among other offensive takes, inform students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

See, kids — you white kids anyway — slavery wasn’t so bad. Enslavement was like getting a scholarship to a trade school. With no charge for room and board.

The Prager imbroglio did clarify what Gov. Ron DeSantis meant when he promised Floridians: “We want education, not indoctrination.”

Dennis Prager told a Moms for Liberty gathering on July 6 that, indeed, his outfit “brings doctrines to children. But what is the bad of our indoctrination.”

Apparently, DeSantis meant to say: “some indoctrination.”

All hail, the PragerU “Lying Indoctrinators.” Bring your own pompoms.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter @grimm_fred.