johnknefel Profile picture
Jul 27, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read Read on X
NEW: Florida just approved PragerU Kids’ right-wing propaganda videos for use in public school classrooms. There's copaganda, celebrations of colonialism, and more. Follow along for some lessons DeSantis et al are foisting on students.
Me at @mmfa mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/…
One video tells the viewer that embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw Uprising
Another has a fictional Booker T. Washington telling two children: “Future generations are never responsible for sins of the past”
One responds that she "won’t feel guilty about historical stuff"
The kids later travel to meet Christopher Columbus, who tells them: “The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful”
You'll never guess PragerU Kids' take on Canada's government-funded healthcare system
The overriding theme of PragerU Kids is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated by alternately burying and sanitizing the past As this episode shows, the overriding theme of Leo and Layla’s adventures — and PragerU Kids in general — is that schools have made white children feel uncomfortable by teaching them about racism, colonialism, and other forms of oppression, and that that anxiety must be alleviated through a rigorous disavowal that the past plays any role in ordering the present. If historical wrongs committed by white people in the United States or Europeans must be acknowledged, we must teach that those injustices were undertaken with good intentions. Even more importantly, the past must remain firmly in t...
The goal is to render history and its inheritances invisible, inert, and incapable of inspiring young people to seek a more equal and more just world.

There’s lots more in the piece. And PragerU is trying to expand to more states as we speak. /END
Thanks to @lawton_sophie & @jacktwheatley for the help watching and documenting all those (and many more) videos

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More from @johnknefel

Dec 13, 2023
This "news analysis" from the NYT is one of the most openly propagandist things they've published in years. Truly shameful. Under Rules of War, ‘Proportionality’ in Gaza Is Not About Evening the Score The concept, important for determining the legality of an act of war, is about weighing civilian harm against military objectives, not about achieving a balanced number of casualties.
First, it cites old Gaza death toll figures, already out of date as of about a week ago. As a result, the NYT undercounts the number of Palestinians that Israel has killed by at least 3,000. (Second screenshot via CBS)
Still, the numbers on either side of the conflict stagger.  Israel says about 1,200 people were killed and another 240 taken hostage in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks. As of today, the war has killed over 15,000 Palestinians, and perhaps thousands more, many of them women and children, in Hamas-controlled Gaza, according to health officials there. (The Gaza health ministry does not count Hamas fighters separately from civilians when providing death tolls.)
Israel insists it is only targeting terrorists and terror infrastructure, but pressure to halt the ceaseless bombing was mounting fast as Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry said the war had killed more than 18,000 people.
That same paragraph implicitly criticizes the Gaza Health Ministry for not making distinctions between militants and civilians, while the NYT itself fails to make that distinction re: Israeli casualties.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 10, 2023
I saw this from Kamau and wondered which other outlets did something similar. Here's a partial list
The NYT story he was referring to nytimes.com/2023/10/09/wor…
Israel ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip on Monday as it retaliated for the largest and deadliest incursion into its territory in decades, while Hamas threatened to respond to the Israeli bombing campaign by executing civilians its fighters took hostage in Israel.  Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of Israel said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza, the crowded and impoverished coastal territory that is already under a 16-year blockade by Israel and Egypt. Israeli warplanes struck hundreds of sites in Gaza, which is controlled by the militant ...
That story also led the NYT's liveblog, at least for a while. nytimes.com/live/2023/10/0…
Image
Read 10 tweets
Sep 8, 2023
The crew at @mmfa watched 258 PragerU Kids videos. The content is even worse than you think. The dominant themes are denying climate change, celebrating capitalist exploitation (& demonizing socialism), and distorting the histories of Black & indigenous people in the US. Thread:
The piece was written & researched by @lawton_sophie, Jacina Hollins-Borges, @jacktwheatley, & me. mediamatters.org/dennis-prager/…
@lawton_sophie @jacktwheatley Here’s Lincoln preparing his 2nd inaugural, saying he’s “very disappointed in the Confederacy” but that “yelling and scolding the South for the harm they caused” is “not going to get me or the nation anywhere.” Layla adds that it would “probably end up pushing them further away.”
Read 9 tweets
May 25, 2023
NEW: Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military.
Conservatives targeted the DoD official in charge for months, ultimately sidelining his working group.

Me at @mmfa mediamatters.org/fox-news/anato…
The boilerplate backlash began with a report from Revolver, founded by Darren Beattie, and was picked up by middling Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Both compared Bishop Garrison, who ran the effort, to Ibram X Kendi.

Hegseth also called Garrison the Pentagon's "MAGA purge man" On February 16, 2021, Garri...The following day, Fox News...Hegseth then referred to Ga...
From there it was off to the races. Hegseth interviewed Beattie. Junksite Just The News aggregated Hegseth. Bannon had Beattie on his War Room podcast. Hegseth kept beating the drum at Fox, including appearing on Jesse Watters' show. Tucker picked it up shortly after. Underscoring the siloed, se...Watters introduced Garrison...Carlson referenced Revolver...
Read 5 tweets
Dec 8, 2022
NEW: Ron DeSantis has largely avoided interviews with mainstream outlets, but granted one to Will Witt of The Florida Standard. Witt is a conservative influencer, and his site is reportedly the "brainchild" of pro-DeSantis donors. Me, at @mmfa mediamatters.org/diversity-disc…
Witt is a former PragerU pundit, and one of his recurring bits was dressing in stereotypical clothing of ethnic groups and nationalities to provoke college students. He has also embraced the great replacement theory, and RT'ed a post with the racist "it's ok to be white" meme Witt comes from the right-w...Beyond those purposefully o...More recently, he retweeted...
He called Ketanji Brown Jackson "historically unqualified" for the Supreme Court, and, commenting on greeting cards celebrating Black heritage, asked Hallmark if they'd make the same cards for white people The obvious corollary to Wi...Will you make these cards f...
Read 5 tweets
Nov 28, 2022
The Maricopa Board of Supervisors is currently hearing public comments about the Arizona 2022 election in a meeting dominated by conspiracy theorists. Here's a sampling of what they're dealing with.
Right-wing podcaster and election denier Joe Oltmann, who is from Colorado, showed up today. He pushed conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, covid origins, and "gender fluidity."
Also at the Maricopa County meeting, an election denier addressed the board of supervisors as "traitors," and accused the board of interfering in an election. She says that is a capital offense, punishable by death. (part 1)
Read 8 tweets

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