Videos From Right-Wing Site That Preaches ‘The Left Ruins Everything’ Assigned In Ohio School

[ZiprHead]

PragerU videos were recently assigned in an Ohio classroom. Turns out, the right-wing site is looking to further its influence in K-12 settings.

An Ohio public school has been giving students extra credit for watching videos from PragerU, a right-wing website that produces clips of talking heads such as Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro discussing conservative viewpoints, HuffPost has learned.

The PragerU videos — with titles such as “Build the Wall,” “Why the Right Was Right” and “The Left Ruins Everything” — were assigned to a 10th-grade history class at Maumee High School, along with a series of questions about the videos’ “most important messages.”

The assignment came at the same time that the website has tried to gain further influence in K-12 classrooms. Earlier this month, the organization launched a program directly aimed at parents and educators, complete with study guides with sections such as “Conservatives Are the Real Environmentalists” and “The Ferguson Lie,” based on a HuffPost review of the materials.

Andrea Cutway, the mother of 16-year-old student Avery Lewis, brought the assignment to the attention of Maumee City Schools administrators and immediately pulled her daughter out of the class. Maumee is about 10 miles southwest of Toledo.

 

[repoman]

They should read Howard Zinn instead.

 

[marc]

Prager U translated:

[YOUTUBE]https://youtu.be/u1ovUbSZcXQ[/YOUTUBE]

 

[Politesse]

Fine as long as they balance it out with videos from Philosophy Tube, Shaun, and Hbomberguy.

 

[J842P]

Fine as long as they balance it out with videos from Philosophy Tube, Shaun, and Hbomberguy.

I agree, these sorts of things are appropriate for a 10th grade class.

 

[Patooka]

Fine as long as they balance it out with videos from Philosophy Tube, Shaun, and Hbomberguy.

I agree, these sorts of things are appropriate for a 10th grade class.

And yet no outrage about PragerU. Huh.

 

[Mumbles]

Fine as long as they balance it out with videos from Philosophy Tube, Shaun, and Hbomberguy.

I'm not too sure I'd like most of their videos in US classrooms either - although Arrows and particularly Shaun, have done very good job when it comes to debunking particular events and ideas. Good for Youtube, but not always great as cirricula.

PragerU, though, is oil baron funded buffoonery that's worthless for anything other than as a "don't". Between the shadowy "leftists" they claim are behind all things wrong, and laughably bad charts that are really just random nonsense, they're pretty easy 101-level examples of how to spot a bad scam artist.

 

[scombrid]

“Conservatives Are the Real Environmentalists”

Their propaganda is effective for sure. I just came in from a workout on the Indian River Lagoon. It is pea soup green and >90% of the beneficial submerged aquatic vegetation is gone. This algae bloom is so widespread and so intense that I expect there to be a massive fish kill when the bloom collapses and the dissolved oxygen crashes. Most of our major lakes have become hypereutrophic due to anthropogenic nutrient inputs with all the attendant water quality problems. Folks outside Florida may recall the cyanobacteria and red tide disaster of 2018. Our water is a fucking mess.

Florida has had GOP control of the entire government for decades now. Amazingly all the Trumpers blame liberals and libtard state scientists for the water quality problems. There is a "South Florida Clean Water Movement" and "Captains For Clean Water" that hold that all of the water quality problems are caused directly by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Water Management Districts. 99% of their membership are Trumpers. None of them notice or acknowledge that all state agencies and commissions have been controlled by GOP Governors and Legislatures for a very long time. The agencies either do directly what they are told to do or only as much as they are allowed to do without having their heads chopped off by the government elected by all the pissed off fishermen.

 

[scombrid]

These people have come a long way since the Heartland Institute created Rush Limbaugh on AM radio back in the 1980s. Hunters and Fishermen were the last conservatives that tended to support environmental regulations and conservation. This was a problem for American Petroleum Institute, Farm Bureau, and National Association of Home Builders. Hunters and fishermen wanted wetlands protected and the Chesapeake Bay cleaned up. Farm Bureau and National Association of Home Builders especially want to dump their negative externalities all over the commons that are our nations waters. Poultry and Swine factories need a cheap place to get rid of their shit. Home builders and farmers don't want pesky rules on dredge/fill and stormwater rules. Heartland Institute et al. needed to drive a wedge between sportsman and the state and federal environmental agencies. They've done it with astroturf and the internet and now look at where Waters of the United States, The Chesapeake Bay Agreement, etc... stand.

 

[bigfield]

“Conservatives Are the Real Environmentalists”

Their propaganda is effective for sure. I just came in from a workout on the Indian River Lagoon. It is pea soup green and >90% of the beneficial submerged aquatic vegetation is gone. This algae bloom is so widespread and so intense that I expect there to be a massive fish kill when the bloom collapses and the dissolved oxygen crashes. Most of our major lakes have become hypereutrophic due to anthropogenic nutrient inputs with all the attendant water quality problems. Folks outside Florida may recall the cyanobacteria and red tide disaster of 2018. Our water is a fucking mess.

Florida has had GOP control of the entire government for decades now. Amazingly all the Trumpers blame liberals and libtard state scientists for the water quality problems. There is a "South Florida Clean Water Movement" and "Captains For Clean Water" that hold that all of the water quality problems are caused directly by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Water Management Districts. 99% of their membership are Trumpers. None of them notice or acknowledge that all state agencies and commissions have been controlled by GOP Governors and Legislatures for a very long time. The agencies either do directly what they are told to do or only as much as they are allowed to do without having their heads chopped off by the government elected by all the pissed off fishermen.

I've seen this same political tactic used here. In fact, our current federal government is fond of using it. Essentially, these conservatives frame government agencies as an adversary, something that they do not control and are not responsible for. This is a political tactics intended to justify spending cuts, which both starve regulatory bodies and appear to deliver on the promise of "more efficient" government. It also provides a kind of pre-emptive cover; if a regulatory body does something badly, or just their job and people don't like it, the politicians can appear to "step in" and fix a problem while dodging the fact that they are responsible in the first place.

In Commonwealth countries there is a convention known as ministerial responsibility. Most recently, this was demonstrated by the resignation of a state health minister who took responsibility for a Coronavirus outbreak due to mismanaged quarantine. However in recent years, the overall trend is that ministers are increasingly following the American example, pretending that any failures are government are to be blamed on rogue bureaucrats and contractors.

The strategy works well; voters are not willing to hold governments accountable for many bureaucratic bungles, although I suspect this is largely because the government is given considerable cover by sympathetic media, much like Fox News gives cover to the GOP.

It's all part of a decades-long campaign of calculated negligence.

 

[Politesse]

Good for Youtube, but not always great as cirricula.

American high schools aren't so much educational institutions as temporary holding pens.