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118: PragerU & the Alt-Right Pipeline w/ Rob Dickinson & Tom Cowin
5 Plays2 years ago
On today’s podcast we’re talking about PragerU, the infamous and growing conservative nonprofit that’s probably best known for its YouTube channel with recent uploads like “Why I Sued My Daughter’s Woke School”, “What Kinds of Shows is PBS Making Now?”, and “Teachers are Training Marxist Revolutionaries.” Which on its face is quite a silly thing to talk about, but this channel receives billions of views each year and is a stronghold of conservative leaders and talking points.
To help us make sense of PragerU, as well as understand what its goals and objectives are, we’re joined by Rob Dickinson and Tom Cowin from the University of Sussex. Rob and Tom both have backgrounds in international relations and global policy, and together founded FRAMES project in 2020 to analyze contemporary far-right propaganda in the US, with a specific focus on PragerU. This project is virtually the first of its kind, with essentially no coverage of PragerU in academic circles.
This podcast dives into the methodology and role of PragerU in the education sphere, offering educators reasons why they should care, why they need to be informed, and what actions they can take to stop PragerU from propagandizing students/other educators.
GUESTS
Rob Dickinson, leads the African Cabinet and Political Elite Data project, working with the Scaling-up Packages of Interventions for Cardiovascular disease prevention in selected sites in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa (SPICES) project, and researches how the Trump Administration may fit into historical patterns of neoliberalism as a candidate for a PhD in International Relations at the University of Sussex.
Tom Cowin, delivers undergraduate teaching in International Relations, International Political Economy, and Globalisation and Global Governance at the University of Sussex. He previously held the position Doctoral Tutor Representative for IR, sits on the Management Committee for the weekly PGR-led Chapter Chats sessions and is a Postgraduate Researcher Representative for Sussex UCU.
Both Rob and Tom are co-founders of the FRAMES project to study far-right propaganda in the United States, with a specific focus on PragerU.
RESOURCES
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 117 of our podcast.
00:00:14
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
00:00:20
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Norman DeLisley Jr., John White, and Jennifer Mann.
00:00:28
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:30
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
What is PragerU and its Influence?
00:00:39
Speaker
On today's podcast, we're talking about PragerU, the infamous and growing conservative nonprofit that's probably best known for its YouTube channel with recent uploads that I just found like, why I sued my daughter's woke school, or what kinds of shows is PBS making now?
00:00:56
Speaker
And my personal favorite, teachers are training Marxist revolutionaries, which on its face, it's kind of a silly thing to talk about, but this channel receives billions of views every year, and it's a stronghold of conservative leaders and talking points.
Guest Introduction: FRAMES Project Founders
00:01:09
Speaker
To help us make sense of PragerU, as well as understand what its goals and objectives are, we're joined by Rob Dickinson and Tom Cowan from the University of Sussex.
00:01:18
Speaker
Rob and Tom both have backgrounds in international relations and global policy and together founded the FRAMES project in 2020 to analyze contemporary far-right propaganda in the United States, with a specific focus now on PragerU.
00:01:31
Speaker
This project is essentially the first of its kind because there virtually is no coverage of PragerU in academic circles.
00:01:38
Speaker
So thank you, Rob and Tom, for joining
Why Study PragerU?
00:01:41
Speaker
us today.
00:01:41
Speaker
Thank you for having us.
00:01:43
Speaker
Awesome.
00:01:43
Speaker
Awesome.
00:01:43
Speaker
So the first question I want to start with really is just like, why are you doing this?
00:01:48
Speaker
One, because it is kind of the first of its kind.
00:01:52
Speaker
So like, why start there?
00:01:53
Speaker
Why is it important?
00:01:54
Speaker
But also, it's especially interesting because you're not in the States and PragerU is a very like States-focused thing.
00:02:01
Speaker
So why?
00:02:02
Speaker
Why do you PragerU?
00:02:04
Speaker
I've never actually come across a PragerU advert on YouTube, which is, as a Brit, I don't think much beyond the norm.
00:02:11
Speaker
But Rob is, by himself, an American, and Rob gets bombarded with PragerU adverts on YouTube.
00:02:19
Speaker
The main reason that we're doing what we're doing is because...
00:02:24
Speaker
Priggy sits in that really, really interesting sort of grey area between the mainstream and the far right.
00:02:33
Speaker
And a lot of the attention, a lot of the scholarly attention, media attention is almost entirely devoted to the far right, the far right end of the spectrum.
00:02:47
Speaker
And then obviously you have a huge amount of media money on mainstream projects as well.
Research Challenges in Analyzing YouTube Content
00:02:55
Speaker
There's not that much on where they intersect, and PragerU is a big part of that intersection.
00:03:04
Speaker
And then you alluded to it a little bit in your intro, right?
00:03:06
Speaker
They've had billions of views.
00:03:08
Speaker
Their advertising budget is in the millions...
00:03:12
Speaker
And I can't really think of many other things that have had billions upon billions of views that academics haven't really got their teeth into yet.
00:03:20
Speaker
And yet here we are with Fraga Yu and no one in academia talking about it.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:25
Speaker
When we first started in 2020, the idea came about because I get, like Tom mentioned, just bombarded with YouTube ads for a variety of just far right garbage.
00:03:36
Speaker
Right now it's the Daily Wire.
00:03:37
Speaker
I get tons of Daily Wire content as ads.
00:03:42
Speaker
And I approached Tom because we're working on similar areas for our PhDs in kind of the timeframe just before PragerU.
00:03:51
Speaker
Well, I guess as PragerU rose to prominence.
00:03:54
Speaker
We were going to start off with a paper about YouTube and advertising algorithms.
00:04:00
Speaker
But then quickly realized there's so little written about it that we have to build our own literary body to work off of.
00:04:08
Speaker
We had picked PragerU as a case study because it's so big and has so much funding.
00:04:12
Speaker
But then we realized no one had written anything about PragerU.
00:04:16
Speaker
So for more selfish reasons, as early academics, they're easy papers to write because if no one's written about it, proving your originality is really easy.
00:04:29
Speaker
Sure.
00:04:30
Speaker
Why do you think it is that no one is studying just YouTube in general, considering that it's a platform that's been around for, what, at least a decade as mainstream?
00:04:41
Speaker
So I think a couple of things.
00:04:43
Speaker
We like to work with text, like academics in general, and find text much easier to pass, particularly small chunks of text.
00:04:50
Speaker
Like Twitter, as I'm sure you know, is the darling network for academic research.
00:04:56
Speaker
I mean,
00:04:58
Speaker
being slightly hypocritical here, my thesis uses Twitter data.
00:05:01
Speaker
So I am guilty as charged as preferring Twitter.
00:05:06
Speaker
By comparison, YouTube, while they do have obviously a massive and often awful comment section, the bulk of the videos, the reason that we're all there, the reason that YouTube is one of, if not the most visited website on the planet, the reason that people spend about four or five times as long on YouTube every visit than they do Facebook, Twitter,
00:05:26
Speaker
is because of the videos and videos are just much harder to work with, particularly on the sort of scale that you need to be able to work with to understand how the right in the US and across the world are manipulating and engaging with algorithms to spread the message.
Media Scandals and Public Awareness
00:05:45
Speaker
It's so much harder to do on YouTube than it is just to feed a bunch of tweets into a network analysis program and have it churn out a pretty map, which again, guilty as charged.
00:05:54
Speaker
That's what I do for my thesis.
00:05:57
Speaker
But YouTube is so much harder to work with.
00:06:00
Speaker
And then there's also the...
00:06:02
Speaker
the delay in academia around peer review.
00:06:05
Speaker
As I'm sure we'll mention, we have a couple of papers in peer review at the moment and it takes a while.
00:06:13
Speaker
So there is always that time delay and YouTube moves so fast.
00:06:17
Speaker
I mean, social media as a whole does, but YouTube, I think in particular moves really, really, really fast and academia is always playing catch up and we're no exception.
00:06:26
Speaker
with YouTube, the audience is so much bigger, partially because content takes longer to digest and they have more space to be able to say what they want to say.
00:06:37
Speaker
And that makes it harder on academics too.
PragerU's Target Audience and Content Shift
00:06:39
Speaker
It just takes longer.
00:06:40
Speaker
There's a reason why I don't think we have ever
00:06:45
Speaker
used a full fireside chat with Dennis Prager video because it's an hour long and there's just no way we're going to sit through that.
00:06:53
Speaker
I think we've used clips, but there's just, yeah, the reality of it.
00:06:59
Speaker
It's also important to mention how important just media coverage of it is.
00:07:04
Speaker
There was a real spike in academic work around this about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
00:07:10
Speaker
Tom and I were both aware of that before starting this project.
00:07:12
Speaker
And I think both of us expected that academics had just kept paying attention to it afterwards.
00:07:19
Speaker
And that's not the case.
00:07:21
Speaker
It's important to recognize how unaware most people, including academics, are of how prevalent this radicalization is and how widely manipulated the average person is, including all of us.
00:07:36
Speaker
I mean, manipulation works very well.
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, the content that they offer is, it's both...
00:07:43
Speaker
intriguing as well as horrifying, at least to me, when I go across their offerings.
00:07:50
Speaker
I always remember PragerU as being the organization that had the really well-produced infographic videos where they would show you all this, what they saw as cool research, typically on conservative issues like dismantling public institutions or something of that nature.
00:08:08
Speaker
We spoke before about how this
00:08:14
Speaker
methodology is very much being shifted toward educating younger groups of children.
00:08:18
Speaker
I was just on their YouTube channel and like some of the most recent uploads are people that are likely in their thirties dressed as if they're 15, uh, with like nineties graphics around them, like they're trying to like be on Nickelodeon.
00:08:31
Speaker
And I,
00:08:32
Speaker
subjected myself to going to their website and looking at their programming options.
00:08:37
Speaker
There's this graphic on there that's like, you know, it's like PragerU for your family or something like that.
00:08:42
Speaker
And there's all these like little icons of different shows.
00:08:44
Speaker
Some of them are literal children shows like cartoons.
00:08:47
Speaker
Some of them are the shows with the 30-year-old people.
00:08:50
Speaker
And also, I thought it was just very funny that Dennis Prager's Fireshite chats on there, which obviously stood out to me.
00:08:57
Speaker
I, of course, had to watch one.
00:09:00
Speaker
And it's to describe to people what this is like.
00:09:02
Speaker
It's very like FDR style.
00:09:05
Speaker
Dennis Prager seated in front of his fireplace at his, I'm assuming his mansion or a set.
00:09:12
Speaker
And the episode opens with him and like his dogs, like his bulldog.
00:09:18
Speaker
And he's like, oh, look at the cute little doggy who's joining us today.
00:09:22
Speaker
Anyways, let's talk about how the woke left is going to destroy your child.
00:09:25
Speaker
It's like, where did that come from?
00:09:27
Speaker
But also, this is aimed at kids?
00:09:29
Speaker
That's very weird.
00:09:30
Speaker
So, like, what's going on there?
00:09:34
Speaker
Why are they doing all this?
00:09:36
Speaker
I think you can really see an evolution over time with PragerU.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think particularly the fireside chats, I think really stand out as kind of leftover.
00:09:46
Speaker
I think maybe Dennis himself really likes those, so he doesn't want to give them up.
00:09:49
Speaker
But they couldn't possibly make them more like the opening scene to the Simpsons Halloween episodes if they tried.
00:09:57
Speaker
You can really see a shift over time of early PragerU videos where Dennis's story hour and the Candace Owens show and some kind of on the street sketches.
00:10:09
Speaker
And then they expanded into a lot of like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, feminism response stuff.
00:10:16
Speaker
And I think that's where they got their biggest.
00:10:19
Speaker
There was kind of a time period where they were very clearly targeting young adults and
00:10:23
Speaker
Uh, and that's probably where they got the most attention and responses from YouTube because it's young adults who are active on there.
00:10:30
Speaker
Now you can really see them expanding kind of both ways.
00:10:34
Speaker
Uh, you can see stuff very actively targeted towards like moms, like the mom audience, um, and parents, uh, including like explicit calls to like, take your kids out of public school, uh,
00:10:49
Speaker
begin homeschooling.
Impact on Public Education and Student Diversity
00:10:50
Speaker
Um, and then you can see on the other end, uh, it's, I think started with bringing, uh, will wit and Amala on as like influencers for the Gen Z crowd.
00:11:01
Speaker
But then, yeah, like you said, there's a lot of content that really seems like they're ripping off Nickelodeon.
00:11:06
Speaker
They've got like, uh, like, like slimed videos, um,
00:11:12
Speaker
where it's like a quiz show and you get goop thrown on you.
00:11:15
Speaker
And then they've got just direct cartoons.
00:11:18
Speaker
I think they've done quite an effective job now of getting a bit less attention because they're not targeting young adults anymore because now they're targeting parents and children.
00:11:29
Speaker
So I think that it's almost inherently obvious what the concern is here for educators, given that it seems as if the end goal of this is to unmake and dismantle public education, as well as, frankly, make it –
00:11:45
Speaker
dangerous for many youth to be in the classroom if they are part of the LGBT community.
00:11:51
Speaker
Honestly, even at this point, if they're not white with some of the conversations that are occurring here.
00:11:57
Speaker
But is there a direct connection in any way?
00:12:02
Speaker
The folks that are running PragerU, that are working with PragerU, that are funding PragerU, what is their goal for education?
00:12:09
Speaker
What is the grand project beyond just making YouTube money?
00:12:14
Speaker
I mean, I think that's a really difficult question because we've got to then try and read in motives, which, particularly as someone from the UK, it's a little bit harder for me to do.
00:12:27
Speaker
But broadly speaking, there's obviously the... It's been part of the Republican Party's platform, the right wing in the US's platform for...
00:12:41
Speaker
years, decades to starve the beast, to reduce any sort of public expenditure to nil or as close to nil as possible.
00:12:51
Speaker
And education, I think, is one of the few social programs in the States that it's still like universally ubiquitous.
00:13:01
Speaker
So it is a place where, yeah, a lot of federal money, a lot of tax dollars can be saved.
00:13:09
Speaker
But beyond that, I think
00:13:12
Speaker
and this is definitely just speculating and I'm probably reading a little bit too much into it with my historian's hat on.
PragerU's Motives and Educational Influence
00:13:20
Speaker
Historically, the people bankrolling PragerU or the types of people bankrolling PragerU, like big business, they have been terrified of students and young people in education settings.
00:13:38
Speaker
This goes back, obviously, way back to the Red Scare.
00:13:41
Speaker
Richard Hofstetter in, I think, 1964 wrote about the paranoid style of the American right.
00:13:48
Speaker
And the focus even then was obsessively on what are kids learning, admittedly this time in universities rather than in specifically schools.
00:13:58
Speaker
The Powell memo, which was...
00:14:01
Speaker
was a memo to the Chamber of Commerce written by, I think he was a Supreme Court justice at the time, Powell Jr., who titled it An Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.
00:14:17
Speaker
And part of this was a response to the civil rights movement, to the uprisings in the student protests, the wave of activism in the 1960s.
00:14:27
Speaker
And one of the three planks that
00:14:31
Speaker
Powell identified as needing to be sort of brought round to the right-wing business way of thinking was education and universities in particular.
00:14:40
Speaker
And in the memo, Powell explicitly calls for screening textbooks, managing the content of curricula.
00:14:47
Speaker
And it's out of the Powell memo and the movement that Powell sparks amongst the people that are funding PragerU that you see the likes of the Heritage Foundation and the sort of the creation of a
00:15:01
Speaker
a group of right-wing, a network of right-wing think tanks that even today still steer conversation.
00:15:07
Speaker
So for me, with that historian's cap on, I see PragerU as sort of the, not quite the logical next step, but not far off.
00:15:15
Speaker
This is very much in keeping with the tradition of trying to
00:15:21
Speaker
almost de-democratize education because when education is democratized you start to see protests like you saw in the 60s and that is probably the only thing that scares capital and big businesses people taking matters into their own hands and educating themselves and getting on the streets and demanding change
00:15:43
Speaker
Yeah, whenever they do studies about education and conservatism or leftism, the more educated people are, the less likely they are to be conservative and conservatives are aware of that.
00:15:57
Speaker
It's the same reason why when PragerU presents itself as an educational institution, they're being misleading.
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's an interesting point.
00:16:04
Speaker
I think it connects well to why at a more, I guess, micro level in the classroom, educators should be aware of the work that's going on here.
00:16:15
Speaker
Because it's not just that PragerU is supplying, I guess, propaganda or educational resources from the right in a very specific way towards young people and towards moms and really going towards family-oriented content.
00:16:31
Speaker
But as you said earlier, they also market the hell out of their resources towards all those groups.
00:16:37
Speaker
And if you are a young white man in especially the United States and you don't have YouTube premium, you are probably getting PragerU ads every other time you log in.
00:16:51
Speaker
And it's part of that ecosystem too of like, I think like Tim Pool, Jimmy Dore, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson,
00:16:59
Speaker
They're all in that space of not only, and I say this in square quotes, educating people on issues, but also giving them talking points and propagandizing them toward a certain mode of thinking that doesn't involve any kind of critical thought.
00:17:18
Speaker
It's just repeating what you're told and then rejecting typically with rage towards those that you don't agree with.
00:17:25
Speaker
So from a classroom teacher level,
00:17:29
Speaker
When you're looking at your research and considering what the takeaways are, why would just a typical teacher care?
00:17:37
Speaker
Why does any of this matter?
00:17:39
Speaker
I think the most obvious answer is that
00:17:43
Speaker
the teacher in the classroom next door might be playing PragerU videos for the kids.
00:17:46
Speaker
That's
Comparisons with Leftist Media and Countering Strategies
00:17:47
Speaker
happened in many instances.
00:17:50
Speaker
And to be aware that I think it's perfectly understandable that teachers might look for educational videos online.
00:17:56
Speaker
I remember for me, when I was in high school, my teachers would play a lot of Khan Academy and TED Talks.
00:18:03
Speaker
And those are the exact institutions that PragerU attempts to mimic.
00:18:06
Speaker
And they mimic it very successfully.
00:18:09
Speaker
The videos look and sound like those other videos.
00:18:13
Speaker
So, yeah, make sure as teachers you're vetting the content you're showing because it might not be as educational as it presents itself to be.
00:18:22
Speaker
I mean, the other thing is it's super difficult to be a teacher.
00:18:28
Speaker
I teach a little bit at university, so I'm delivering seminars to undergrads and we're overworked, underpaid.
00:18:39
Speaker
It can be...
00:18:41
Speaker
quite liberating, I think, to stumble upon some resources that someone else has produced and to be able to demonstrate them.
00:18:49
Speaker
But as Rob said, yeah, you absolutely need to be really, really conscious, really, really careful about the sorts of materials that you show in the classroom.
00:19:01
Speaker
It is a little bit scary how well they ate
00:19:05
Speaker
Khan Academy and TED Talks, I, like Rob, saw hundreds of TED Talks.
00:19:10
Speaker
I mean, he doesn't love a TED Talk.
00:19:11
Speaker
And when you get a PragerU video with the same sort of polish with the infographics you mentioned, the sort of the pastel color scheme, the authoritative voice of this supposed expert who finishes every video with, I'm so-and-so from Prager University.
00:19:33
Speaker
If you're not aware of Gregor U, then maybe they do so well to sort of appropriate all the cultural capital they can from sources with real authority and pass it off as their authority.
00:19:46
Speaker
And just in general, you need to know who your competition is.
00:19:51
Speaker
I think that that's a real shift with PragerU and kind of the contemporary push against public education.
00:19:57
Speaker
I mean, there's obviously still huge school board level opposition and trying to change the textbooks and change the content in schools.
00:20:06
Speaker
But there really seems to be a bigger push and you can really see it in PragerU as well to remove children from public school altogether, either to homeschool them or enroll them in charter schools or private religious schools.
00:20:19
Speaker
PragerU goes beyond trying to supplement public education.
00:20:24
Speaker
Teachers need to be aware of
00:20:26
Speaker
That's the goal here, that this is the competition.
00:20:30
Speaker
The work, too, seems to very much coincide with I started off my teaching career teaching social studies.
00:20:37
Speaker
And that wasn't that long ago.
00:20:39
Speaker
Kids were on YouTube getting talking points from various right wing sources and understanding the ecosystem helps you.
00:20:49
Speaker
de-radicalize.
00:20:51
Speaker
Obviously, the goal of the institution is not to turn kids into radical leftists, but certainly the goal isn't to allow them to continually foster these ideas of hate that are given through ultra-right-leaning organizations.
00:21:07
Speaker
This isn't one of those issues that can necessarily be fire with fire, at least not in the same manner that it's being done.
00:21:17
Speaker
Which leads me to a kind of a side question, but how does this relate, if at all?
00:21:23
Speaker
And I'm not sure if this really relates to your research, but it's organizations like the Gravel Institute, where it's meant to be like the leftist version of the same thing.
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah, so we obviously come across the Gravel Institute really early on.
00:21:41
Speaker
The thing, I think that, well, there are two things, in my opinion, Rob jumped in, that separates the preggy years of the world from the likes of the Gravel Institute.
00:21:53
Speaker
Capital, like preggy years just has so, so much more money.
00:21:57
Speaker
There is...
00:21:58
Speaker
Again, I think, was it about $50 billion worth of revenue?
00:22:02
Speaker
They spend most of that on million, sorry.
00:22:07
Speaker
They spend, yeah, of course not billion.
00:22:09
Speaker
They spend most of that on advertising.
00:22:14
Speaker
The attempts to then...
00:22:17
Speaker
get in that space are just incessant.
00:22:20
Speaker
The sheer volume of content that Preker U and the rest of the intellectual dark web, if you want, don't particularly enjoy the term, but they just have the left well and truly beaten for volume.
00:22:36
Speaker
It's...
00:22:38
Speaker
you can go through the Gravels Institute's Twitter page and be done in maybe an hour or two.
00:22:45
Speaker
PragerU, you'll just keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling because they just put out so, so much more content than any competing leftist, left-leaning organization, much more than centrist organizations as well.
00:23:00
Speaker
And if you've got 6 billion viewers, even if you only convince...
00:23:07
Speaker
percentage point, that's still a huge number of people.
00:23:12
Speaker
So a lot of it is throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks, but they have the money to be able to just churn out content to reach as many people as they can.
00:23:23
Speaker
I don't really think they're particularly bothered about their success rate just because of the sheer numbers that we're working with.
00:23:29
Speaker
That makes me then consider, as we're talking about this, shifting towards how do we combat against it?
00:23:36
Speaker
I'm sure the folks that are listening into this podcast are not going to go on to PragerU and all of a sudden change their mind about any of these issues.
00:23:45
Speaker
But they are going to be concerned with, well, how do I even combat an organization that has that much funds
00:23:52
Speaker
And for that matter, kind of aggressive supporters.
Challenges of Opposing Far-Right Content
00:23:57
Speaker
We actually unknowingly to a certain extent, we sponsored a YouTuber for our conference that was a few weeks ago.
00:24:04
Speaker
And the YouTuber put our ad into a video that was like against PragerU, which is fine.
00:24:10
Speaker
I don't care about that.
00:24:11
Speaker
But as a result, the PragerU ecosystem kind of came after the Human Restoration Project.
00:24:18
Speaker
We got all of these comments.
00:24:21
Speaker
We got like the Twitter comments.
00:24:24
Speaker
influencers, if you will, like quote tweeting HRP stuff.
00:24:28
Speaker
And it's shocking the level of engagement that far right organizations have in mobilizing almost like online armies.
00:24:39
Speaker
Within literally 10 minutes of a quote tweet, you'll get 30 replies, if not more, that are just not only visceral, but to the point of being dangerous.
00:24:49
Speaker
You have folks that try to dox you, folks that try to like oust you to your institution,
00:24:53
Speaker
and kind of perform almost like libel and slander against the work that you're doing in order to ruin you in some way.
00:25:00
Speaker
So before we dive into specific actions folks can take, how do you go about working in a space where you know that everything that you say and do is not only going to be monitored and surveilled by these organizations, but also mobilized against?
00:25:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:19
Speaker
So I think there's a term that Tom and I have been throwing around a lot recently called intransigence.
00:25:24
Speaker
Uh, and what, what that term refers to is, is how people are kind of taught to ignore arguments against their beliefs.
00:25:36
Speaker
Uh, if you've ever tried to talk to like your far right uncle about something over Thanksgiving dinner and been met with just a stone wall, uh, that's intransigence.
00:25:47
Speaker
And I think it's important to understand that what is being taught at PragerU is intransigence.
00:25:53
Speaker
And when you see far-right content that masquerades itself as educational content, that's what they're teaching, is how to tell their viewers how to combat attempts by the left, by everyone else, to de-radicalize them.
00:26:12
Speaker
So a lot of it, I think, is trying to make sure that what...
00:26:17
Speaker
What you're saying doesn't match what the far right says you'll be saying.
00:26:23
Speaker
because there are very specific talking points that they'll essentially teach viewers how to respond to.
00:26:30
Speaker
And so if you make those points, you're not going to get anywhere.
00:26:34
Speaker
You might not get anywhere anyway.
00:26:36
Speaker
It's extremely difficult.
00:26:38
Speaker
But I think that's one of the first steps is being aware of what they expect you to say, because if that's what you say, they'll already know how to respond to it.
00:26:50
Speaker
People are dug in.
00:26:52
Speaker
Um, for Tom and I, I think a lot of what working in this space looks like is, uh, a few weeks ago we deleted our social media accounts.
00:27:02
Speaker
Um, there, there's, there's discussions we'll have to have with the journals we publish in about potential lawsuits because you can be sued for libel and slander, regardless of whether or not you say anything untrue.
00:27:16
Speaker
Um, um,
00:27:17
Speaker
So I think just being aware of the realities that the people that you're going up against and the institutions you're going up against have a lot more money and resources than you do.
00:27:28
Speaker
That's just the reality of the situation.
00:27:32
Speaker
But I think tapping into the wider community and network of people and activists and scholars that are working against the far right is a really effective way.
Community and Academic Role in Combating Radicalization
00:27:45
Speaker
That YouTuber you mentioned, Zoe B., that's how we actually got in touch with you all.
00:27:50
Speaker
And that video that she made was talking about Tom and my research.
00:27:55
Speaker
We're in the process of planning a book about PragerU at the moment, and Zoe B is one of our chapter contributors at this point.
00:28:07
Speaker
So I think the more you can get involved with community efforts, the more you can understand the arguments the far right is making and the arguments that they expect you to make, the better chance you'll have of making an impact.
00:28:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:22
Speaker
I mean, solidarity is the main thing.
00:28:26
Speaker
I think finding a network of like-minded people, as Rob said, there's comfort in community and people can support you and each other.
00:28:36
Speaker
And hopefully at some point we'll be able to return the favor if we ever find ourselves in the process.
00:28:43
Speaker
It's... Yeah.
00:28:44
Speaker
I mean, the other thing is I suppose get involved with
00:28:50
Speaker
kind of solidarity as well like um if you're a member of a profession get involved with your union um in order to to access their resources and the the solidarity there um it's just about finding mutual aid and support wherever you can and and don't don't expect that it won't happen at some point because it probably will um
00:29:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's something we'll work through, I think, more as we get more and more papers published.
00:29:21
Speaker
But it comes with the territory.
00:29:23
Speaker
As you say, we're dealing with people who can be mobilized very, very quickly.
00:29:28
Speaker
I mean, this isn't us reading into what Prager you say.
00:29:33
Speaker
They come out and say that this is how we want to get people with the wider...
00:29:37
Speaker
shorter, snappier, punchier five minute videos.
00:29:40
Speaker
And they actually describe it as a content funnel to funnel people in to get them fully locked into the ecosystem.
00:29:47
Speaker
I think at that point, when you're locked into the ecosystem, it does become very, very difficult.
00:29:52
Speaker
Imagine the sort of people who get active and get defensive and will quote tweet and attempt to dox and that sort of thing.
00:29:59
Speaker
But there's always hope, I think, around the margins, whether that's us building solidarities ourselves or just being able to pull people away before they drop off the precipice.
00:30:11
Speaker
It also goes back to your last question about the Graval Institute.
00:30:15
Speaker
I think trying to fight fire with fire in this instance won't work particularly well.
00:30:22
Speaker
I applaud all the efforts to do so, and I'm as strong a supporter of the Graval Institute as you'll find.
00:30:28
Speaker
But...
00:30:30
Speaker
in, in a war of attrition, the side with more resources is going to win and they have much more resources than we do.
00:30:36
Speaker
Uh, there are spectacular content creators out there like Zoe B, like a variety of left-wing YouTubers who full-time respond to PragerU videos and other radicalizing videos.
00:30:50
Speaker
Um, and they do a great job of trying, of de-radicalizing people and, um,
00:30:57
Speaker
helping people stay informed about contemporary issues without falling into far and manipulation for Tom and I. And I think for other people who were interested in trying to do something against far radicalization, it often looks like, what can you do in, in your life and with your skillset?
00:31:16
Speaker
So for Tom and I, we're not YouTubers.
00:31:19
Speaker
We have an audience of essentially zero.
00:31:23
Speaker
So yeah,
00:31:25
Speaker
what we can do is write academic papers, uh, and try and influence policy at some level.
00:31:32
Speaker
Uh, and when we've talked to impact groups, uh, and other academics that often seems like where the potential for us to make some kind of change comes in.
00:31:41
Speaker
Uh, and I'm sure we'll get into, uh, responses, uh, more.
00:31:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:48
Speaker
And that's really what I wanted to,
00:31:50
Speaker
to really finalize with, which is how do we respond to this in our own way?
00:31:55
Speaker
I, I said before that as a classroom teacher, the ways are,
00:32:00
Speaker
uncomfortable but obvious.
00:32:03
Speaker
If you are able to de-radicalize students by having transparent conversations with them about beliefs and allowing them to express their beliefs and talk about things like current events and politics in the classroom in a way that's not meant to radicalize them the other way, just mostly to get facts out there and talk about things.
00:32:20
Speaker
I remember students would bring up crime statistics, for example, very racist crime statistics, and then we had to go through, well, no, this is what the report actually
Avoiding Amplification of Far-Right Messages
00:32:28
Speaker
says.
00:32:28
Speaker
And
00:32:29
Speaker
They can say whatever they want, but it's just getting the truth out there and having a really holistic look at not only the content of your classroom, but all of these outside forces that are also influencing your classroom day after day.
00:32:43
Speaker
I taught social studies during 2016, and that was the worst year of teaching in my entire life, teaching government, because that just completely transformed the conversations in the classroom.
00:32:54
Speaker
And it was brutal, but kids would walk away from that room not being as extreme as they were before because of those interventions and having those conversations.
00:33:03
Speaker
Now, I'm curious to hear in general what responses you think there should be, but I'm also curious about, do you think that folks should react online?
00:33:12
Speaker
Like, should folks be responding to these folks in online ecosystems like social media or YouTube comments or et cetera, or is that just fodder?
00:33:20
Speaker
Is that just stirring the horde?
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah, there's so much to say here.
00:33:26
Speaker
I'm hoping you can keep Tom and I on track about it.
00:33:28
Speaker
But yeah, I think the first thing to say, the reason that the far right has always been so strongly against public education and the reason that public education is so often cited by the right as somehow indoctrinating leftism into children, the reason for all of that is that high quality education is one of the most effective tools against radicalization.
00:33:51
Speaker
If you already have some level of education or ability to be critical about the sources that you're gaining information from, you become much less vulnerable to manipulation.
00:34:01
Speaker
And that's why they're so against it.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's quite a lot about less combating specific claims, as Rob's already explained why that's a singularly bad idea, because they'll just counterpunch.
00:34:17
Speaker
It's more about...
00:34:20
Speaker
fostering hard skills like the ability to to read a text and discern like who wrote it why did they write it what were they experiencing while they wrote it again historians hat on here interrogating sources um and that's obviously a lot harder to do when you're in a youtube comment section um it's a lot harder to do when you've got 280 characters on twitter um so
00:34:48
Speaker
Broadly speaking, I think this is the sort of education that you do most effectively face-to-face in person at the front of the classroom.
00:34:56
Speaker
Obviously, small class sizes help, so you can actually sit down and talk to people for longer.
00:35:05
Speaker
But then, on the flip side, I suppose in a similar vein...
00:35:13
Speaker
One thing that the right has been able to do is essentially weaponize the striazan effect where someone will react to you and then you'll get 10,000 people saying, look at these idiots on the right.
00:35:28
Speaker
They're making a stupid point that doesn't match up with
00:35:31
Speaker
with the empirical fact and then you just shared that with 10,000 people's networks and maybe there's one or two people in there who will click on the original post and actually think actually this is right so for that reason I would probably caution against engaging directly don't give people the oxygen of publicity sunlight isn't always the best disinfectant when you've got
00:36:01
Speaker
so so many people that are viewing the the content in the first place do i think it's possible to to convince someone through youtube comments to change their their worldview probably not no i certainly wouldn't recommend trying um
00:36:19
Speaker
Is there a chance that it could work?
00:36:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:36:21
Speaker
But I think it's important to remember, we only have so much capacity to do this work.
00:36:27
Speaker
Put it towards more optimal ends.
00:36:31
Speaker
Use your energy elsewhere.
00:36:32
Speaker
Whenever I see a million people,
00:36:37
Speaker
comments and retweets and like right-wing angry comments.
00:36:41
Speaker
Um, I'm a little bolstered by it because it's, it's activist energy going to waste for the most part.
00:36:48
Speaker
Uh, I'm there.
00:36:49
Speaker
There's no doubt in my mind, Tom and I will be on the receiving end of a lot of that at some point in the future.
Local Activism and Public Pedagogy
00:36:54
Speaker
Um, but instead of putting your efforts towards trying to de-radicalize someone via social media who you don't know, uh,
00:37:05
Speaker
your efforts towards making yourself more resilient against manipulation.
00:37:10
Speaker
I mean, it is everywhere.
00:37:12
Speaker
And the reason it's so effective is because our brains are really susceptible to it.
00:37:17
Speaker
Manipulation works because we're all susceptible.
00:37:21
Speaker
So be wary and try and get a better understanding of where your sources are coming from and where you get your information from.
00:37:30
Speaker
But like we mentioned earlier, I think the most effective thing anyone can do to combat the far right is local collectivization, organizing people.
00:37:40
Speaker
Start with your neighborhood, start with your community, start with your union if you have one or form a new one.
00:37:47
Speaker
But I really think that's where the potential for gain for our efforts is.
00:37:56
Speaker
you can burn yourself out responding to comments in an afternoon, and that doesn't do much good for anyone.
00:38:02
Speaker
Or you could spend those two hours attending the PTA meeting.
00:38:05
Speaker
The one thing that the right has, again, done historically very well is they turn out for every damn election, no matter how small it is.
00:38:16
Speaker
They go to the school boards, they go to council meetings, and they get involved at a really, really local level.
00:38:23
Speaker
this is like they quite like weirdly, this is all stuff that like left leaning thinkers from years gone by suggested that left activists do is that we read Saul Alinsky's rule for radicals.
00:38:37
Speaker
We go to, we go to the meeting and if there's 10 of you there, then you're going to sway policy at a really micro level, which then feeds up and up and up.
00:38:48
Speaker
And the right has done that so, so well.
00:38:50
Speaker
And I think there's,
00:38:53
Speaker
quite a sizable capacity in the American left, in the global left, to start to regain those spaces because there's not that many people who do get involved at a local level.
00:39:06
Speaker
And at the minute, it tends to be those on the right.
00:39:09
Speaker
It doesn't have to be.
00:39:11
Speaker
As a closing thought, I'm curious about your
00:39:14
Speaker
Reaction really to this, which is we had Henry Giroux, Dr. Henry Giroux at our conference, and he proposed in his keynote that educators need to turn themselves toward more public pedagogy and get involved more in digital spaces, meeting students where they're at, young people where they're at, adults where they're at.
00:39:37
Speaker
in framing the discourse and in sharing ideas.
00:39:40
Speaker
Now, you all obviously have reached out to a YouTuber to promote your work, and it's going to, that alone, it has an exponential number of views probably versus what your eventual paper will have read.
00:39:53
Speaker
Um,
00:39:54
Speaker
because that's just how academia works.
00:39:56
Speaker
What are your thoughts about how you can utilize these new mediums and public pedagogy to talk about these ideas?
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think the key is in the framing the discourse part of the statement.
00:40:11
Speaker
That is so difficult to do, and that is what
00:40:14
Speaker
the right-wing media ecosystem does so effectively is it sets the terms of debate.
00:40:21
Speaker
And the trick, I suppose, is to be able to
00:40:27
Speaker
get the right to come to you and fight and debate on your terms rather than people on the left thinking, let's talk about critical race theory.
00:40:37
Speaker
We've got to defend critical race theory.
00:40:39
Speaker
They've picked the battleground because, I mean, they just come out and tweet it.
00:40:42
Speaker
They say there was a specific goal for promoting critical race theory specifically to undermine the faith in the public education system.
00:40:50
Speaker
Again, it's not analysis.
00:40:52
Speaker
They just come out and say it.
00:40:54
Speaker
And as long as...
00:40:56
Speaker
the right has that ability to set the terms to frame discourse, I think it will always be a lot harder for us on the left to do something about it.
00:41:06
Speaker
And how you then sort of intervene and how you set the terms comes down to, I think, as Rob was alluding to, understanding the sort of the fundamentals of the platforms that we're engaging with.
00:41:19
Speaker
The YouTube algorithm will work in one way for everyone.
00:41:23
Speaker
Craig E. Yu, Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire have learned how to use that for their ends, then it's clearly something that we can learn as well.
00:41:33
Speaker
And if we can do that then and sort of get there half a second quicker, get there one above the right on the YouTube recommended videos list, then we've got a much greater chance of preventing people from becoming radicalized in the first instance.
00:41:51
Speaker
It's important to remember that when you're thinking about these systems, even social media and the way that new media operates, these are systems that have been set up and structured by the right.
00:42:06
Speaker
There's a reason that all social media companies today are for-profit corporations.
00:42:14
Speaker
So to a certain extent, they have a structural advantage and they're going to continue to have that advantage as long as the policy stays the way it is.
00:42:24
Speaker
So...
00:42:25
Speaker
part of the unfortunate difficult answer to questions about what we can do is policy change.
00:42:31
Speaker
Obviously more funding for education, but even things around better content policing by social media, reshaping some of the structural issues in social media and new media.
00:42:46
Speaker
As much as that happens,
00:42:51
Speaker
The more it happens, the better we'll be in a position to combat fire radicalization.
00:42:57
Speaker
For sure.
Conclusion: Continuing Research and Activism
00:42:58
Speaker
Thank you so much, guys.
00:43:00
Speaker
I think this is a conversation that's needed now more than ever because this growth of radicalization online and use of social media by ultra-right-wing institutions is not going to go away.
00:43:13
Speaker
It's only going to become more and more prevalent at the current rate.
00:43:16
Speaker
So I think that this work is needed now more than ever.
00:43:21
Speaker
Is there...
00:43:23
Speaker
outside of watching the Zoe B video, uh, that's covering your work.
00:43:26
Speaker
Is there any other place that you would turn folks towards to learn more?
00:43:29
Speaker
Uh, yeah, we've got a blog post coming out with you all, uh, and in a couple of weeks, um, our academic papers, if, if you feel like reading them, uh, will eventually become available.
00:43:41
Speaker
Uh, at some point it, it, it takes incredibly long to get through the publishing process.
00:43:46
Speaker
And if you happen to be listening to this three or four years down the line, we'll have a book available about Prager U2.
00:43:51
Speaker
Uh,
00:43:53
Speaker
Awesome.
00:43:53
Speaker
Thank you so much, Rob and Tom.
00:43:54
Speaker
It's been fantastic.
00:43:56
Speaker
Look forward to talking to you more soon.
00:43:58
Speaker
Thanks.
00:43:58
Speaker
Thank you for having us.
00:44:03
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Projects podcast.
00:44:06
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:44:10
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.
00:44:18
Speaker
Thank you.