The right-wing advocacy group, PragerU, has reached a new low.
Videos from its educational entertainment program, PragerU Kids, show misleading and inaccurate information, including a video of abolitionist Frederick Douglass describing slavery as a “compromise between the Founding Fathers and the Southern colonies for the benefit of the U.S.,” NBC News reports. The video, Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass, shows two children going back in time to meet the civil rights icon.
Fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison is also criticized in the video. Critics deemed it propaganda with an alleged reference to the 2020 police brutality protests. Douglass can be heard saying, “William refuses all compromise, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.”
The PragerU programming has received major backlash as CEO Marissa Streit announced in July that the group is providing supplemental lessons to Florida as an education vendor. In defense of the content, Streit says some educational material can be viewed as offensive
and said critics have only read one version of history—a progressive one. “I challenge those same people to look through every word that Scholastic has printed or, or every word that BrainPOP has published, and tell me that you’re not going to find something that you are not offended by,” Streit said.“But you know, I completely stand by what’s in our videos. I actually think that our Frederick Douglass video is a great one.”
In a recent announcement from the Florida Board of Education, content from PragerU, which is unaccredited, was approved for classroom use, according to the Pensacola News Journal. “We have seen that our schools have been hijacked by the left,” the statement reads. “They have been politicized, they have been used by union bosses, they have been doing everything under the sun not for our children.”
Other offensive content on the PragerU Kids page includes a video entitled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,”
where viewers follow Mateo, an animated 13-year-old student and son of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles, as he navigates the issues between police and Black Lives Matter protestors. According to the website, the lesson is to “teach middle and high school kids how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and anti-police sentiment affected crime, families, and small businesses in American cities.”RELATED CONTENT: 10 Million Names Project Digs Into History Of Black Families