PragerU

Based on Wikipedia: PragerU

In the summer of 2025, visitors to the White House encountered something strange: artificial intelligence-generated videos of Revolutionary War figures, presented as educational content for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The exhibit was produced by PragerU, an organization that, despite its academic-sounding name, is not a university at all. It grants no degrees. It holds no classes. It has no accreditation from any recognized educational body.

Yet PragerU's materials are now approved for use in public schools across eight American states.

How did a conservative media operation become embedded in the American education system? The answer involves billions of video views, millions of dollars in advertising, and a deliberate strategy to reshape how young people understand history, economics, and society.

The Origin Story

Dennis Prager is a conservative radio talk show host who has spent decades on the airwaves. In 2009, he and Allen Estrin, a radio producer and screenwriter, founded what would become PragerU. Their stated mission was to counter what Prager viewed as left-wing influence in higher education.

Originally, they considered building an actual brick-and-mortar university. They abandoned that idea because it would cost too much money. Instead, they pivoted to digital video content—a decision that would prove extraordinarily effective at reaching young audiences.

The organization is headquartered in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and employed around fifty people as of early 2020. Marissa Streit, who had previously served in Israeli army intelligence and later ran a Los Angeles county school, became chief executive officer in 2011.

By 2018, PragerU's videos had accumulated one billion views. By 2022, that number had grown to over seven billion.

The Funding Behind the Videos

Each PragerU video costs between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand dollars to produce. Where does this money come from?

The largest early funders were Dan and Farris Wilks, billionaire brothers who made their fortune in hydraulic fracturing—commonly known as fracking—the controversial process of extracting oil and natural gas by injecting high-pressure fluid into underground rock formations. Two members of the Wilks family serve on PragerU's board of directors.

Other major donors include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a conservative philanthropy; Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate who was one of the Republican Party's largest individual donors; and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation. Betsy DeVos later served as Secretary of Education under President Donald Trump.

The National Christian Foundation, one of the largest charitable organizations in America, also provides significant support.

By 2018, PragerU reported a ten million dollar annual budget. Notably, more than forty percent of that budget went to marketing. In 2019, the organization ranked among the ten biggest political spenders on Facebook. It consistently outspends major political campaigns and national advocacy groups on that platform.

In 2021, PragerU reported approximately fifty-seven million dollars in revenue, the vast majority from donations, with about thirty-three million in expenses.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, PragerU received over seven hundred thousand dollars in relief loans through the Paycheck Protection Program. This debt was later forgiven entirely by the federal government.

What PragerU Actually Produces

The signature product is the "Five-Minute Video"—short, polished segments that summarize complex political, economic, and cultural topics from a conservative perspective. As of February 2023, PragerU's YouTube channel contained over twenty-two hundred videos.

Dennis Prager himself personally approves every item and edits every script before publication, according to reporting by Mother Jones.

The presenters span a range of conservative thought. Ben Shapiro, the rapid-fire political commentator. Candace Owens, the controversial activist. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host. Nigel Farage, the British politician who championed Brexit. George Will and Charles Krauthammer, traditional conservative columnists. Michelle Malkin, whose views on immigration have placed her at the far end of the Republican spectrum.

The topics covered reflect conservative priorities: arguments against a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, opposition to gun control, support for capitalism, defense of the Electoral College. PragerU's website states that its content "advances Judeo-Christian values."

Interestingly, during Trump's first presidency, PragerU videos largely avoided mentioning him directly—a strategic choice that may have helped the content seem less partisan to casual viewers.

The Controversy Over Accuracy

Historians, political scientists, and fact-checkers have repeatedly identified problems with PragerU's content.

Climate Feedback, Reuters, and the Weather Channel have all found that PragerU videos contain inaccurate and misleading claims about climate change. The organization promotes fossil fuels while criticizing renewable energy and disputing the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet.

According to InfluenceMap, a non-profit think tank that tracks corporate influence on climate policy, PragerU's Facebook advertisements have included material that casts doubt on climate science, frames environmental concerns as ideological hysteria, and promotes conspiracy theories about government control being the real motivation behind emissions reduction policies.

The criticism extends beyond climate. Paul Gottfried, a paleoconservative scholar who specializes in the history of fascism, took issue with a PragerU video hosted by Dinesh D'Souza that claimed fascism was a left-wing ideology. D'Souza argued that Giovanni Gentile, the Italian philosopher who influenced Mussolini's fascism, was a leftist. Gottfried noted that this contradicts the research of almost all scholars who have studied Gentile's work—they view him as an intellectual of the revolutionary right.

Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute—a libertarian think tank, not a liberal one—criticized a 2018 video by Michelle Malkin that argued for stricter immigration restrictions. Nowrasteh wrote that the video was "full of errors and half-truths" and omitted relevant information.

GLAAD, the media monitoring organization focused on LGBTQ representation, has documented what it calls PragerU's "horrific anti-LGBTQ record." In 2020, YouTube removed two videos featuring Candace Owens for violating hate speech policies; the videos had compared gender dysphoria to schizophrenia and disease.

The Censorship Narrative

PragerU has built a significant part of its brand around claims of being censored by technology companies.

In October 2016, PragerU claimed that YouTube had placed twenty-one of its videos in "restricted mode"—a setting designed to filter content that may not be age-appropriate. YouTube responded that it applies the same standards to everyone and considers factors like the intent and focus of each video.

The following year, PragerU sued Google, YouTube's parent company, claiming that thirty-seven of its videos had been unfairly demonetized or restricted. PragerU argued that YouTube was essentially a public forum and therefore subject to First Amendment protections of free speech.

The case was dismissed. Federal Judge Lucy Koh ruled that because Google is a private company, PragerU had failed to show any infringement of free speech rights. The First Amendment restricts government censorship, not decisions by private businesses about what content to host or promote. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this ruling in 2020.

Reason, a libertarian magazine, criticized PragerU's censorship claims as fundamentally misleading. The publication noted that PragerU's content had not actually been removed from social media platforms and that the organization's arguments reflected a misunderstanding of what the First Amendment actually protects.

In 2018, YouTube did add fact-checking labels to some PragerU videos about climate change—part of the platform's broader efforts to counter misinformation on that topic.

Entering the Classroom

Starting around 2015, PragerU developed programs to bring its content into schools.

The Educator Program provides teachers with lesson plans and study guides to accompany PragerU videos. By 2015, it had three thousand sign-ups. The Academic Partnership program allows secondary school teachers and college professors to register their classes, enabling them to monitor student engagement with PragerU content.

PragerU also created "PragerFORCE," an organization encouraging students to promote the organization's videos. By 2020, approximately sixty-five hundred college and high school students had signed up.

Then came the state approvals.

In 2023, Florida became the first state to accept PragerU as an official education vendor. The Florida Department of Education stated that PragerU's materials "aligned with the state's revised civics and government standards." This approval meant that public school teachers in Florida could incorporate PragerU videos into their classroom instruction.

Critics warned that this decision would expose students to what they characterized as extreme material from an organization with a documented track record of spreading misinformation.

New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Montana, and Arizona followed Florida's lead. Louisiana became the sixth state to grant official sanction to PragerU materials in May 2024. By mid-2025, eight states had approved PragerU content for classroom use.

In July 2025, Oklahoma announced a partnership with PragerU to develop what officials described as an ideology test—a screening mechanism that would withhold teaching certificates from educators graduating from what the state deemed "woke" schools.

Understanding PragerU's Influence

Sociologist Francesca Tripodi of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has studied PragerU's marketing strategies for Data & Society, a non-profit research organization. Her research reveals sophisticated techniques.

PragerU relies heavily on search engine optimization—the practice of structuring content so it appears prominently in Google and YouTube search results. The organization also benefits from "suggested content" algorithms that recommend its videos to viewers watching related material.

Tripodi found that PragerU was popular among the participants in her study; all of them had either liked or shared PragerU videos on Facebook. More concerningly, she documented algorithmic connections on YouTube between PragerU, Fox News, and personalities associated with the alt-right—a loosely defined movement that includes white nationalists and other extreme voices.

In Tripodi's analysis, PragerU serves as a gateway. Viewers who identify as mainstream conservatives gain what she called "easy access to white supremacist logic" through content that "makes connections to" alt-right talking points without explicitly endorsing them.

A 2018 BuzzFeed News article attributed PragerU's success to two factors: high production values compared to similar outlets, and the use of presenters who already had established audiences. The article also noted that PragerU had received relatively little scrutiny from media analysts, partly because it avoided covering topical news events.

Vanity Fair described PragerU as "one of the most effective conversion tools for young conservatives," noting that it "packages right-wing social concepts into slick videos."

Academic Analysis

Scholarly criticism of PragerU has intensified in recent years.

McCarthy and Brewer, in a case study of the organization, concluded that "PragerU has fundamental overlapping ideologies to the extreme right." They detailed persuasion techniques that "reflect information laundering"—a term describing how fringe ideas are repackaged in professional-looking formats that obscure their origins and make them seem more mainstream.

Pam Nilan, in her 2021 book "Young People and the Far Right," wrote that PragerU "pretends to sidestep" white supremacy while consistently delivering "the message that white culture is better than other cultures."

Tripodi found that many PragerU videos advance what has been called the "great replacement" conspiracy theory in softer form—the idea that whiteness and conservatism are under attack. The videos frequently seek to delegitimize mainstream media by accusing journalists of being driven by emotion or opinion rather than facts.

Mother Jones reported that PragerU videos assert there is no gender pay gap and that African Americans do not face discrimination in policing—claims that contradict extensive research in labor economics and criminal justice studies.

Responses and Counter-Movements

PragerU's rise has prompted responses.

In 2019, former United States Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska launched The Gravel Institute, a progressive think tank that explicitly aims to counteract PragerU. The organization produces its own short videos presenting left-leaning perspectives on similar topics.

The Human Rights Campaign, America's largest LGBTQ advocacy organization, has been particularly vocal in its criticism. When PragerU released "Detrans: The Dangers of Gender-Affirming Care" in November 2023—a twenty-one minute film following two people who underwent and then reversed gender transition—the Human Rights Campaign president called it "hate-filled propaganda." PragerU had launched the film with a one million dollar marketing campaign, including a "timeline takeover" on Twitter.

GLAAD's Drew Anderson documented what he characterized as PragerU's pattern of interviewing "controversial public figures who are often hailed by the white supremacist movement."

The Pandemic Record

During the COVID-19 pandemic, PragerU's coverage was found to contain false and misleading information about the nature of the disease and about potentially life-saving treatments and preventive measures. This misinformation spread during a period when accurate public health information was literally a matter of life and death.

What PragerU Represents

PragerU sits at an interesting intersection of several trends in American life: the decline of trust in traditional institutions, the rise of alternative media ecosystems, the power of algorithmic content recommendation, and the increasing politicization of education itself.

The organization has demonstrated that with enough money, professional production values, and sophisticated digital marketing, it is possible to build an enormous audience for ideological content—and eventually to have that content formally integrated into public education.

Whether you view this as a success story of grassroots conservative media or a cautionary tale about misinformation entering the classroom depends largely on your own politics. What is harder to dispute is the scale of PragerU's reach and its trajectory from YouTube curiosity to approved educational vendor in nearly a fifth of American states.

The debate over PragerU is ultimately a debate about what gets taught in schools, who decides, and what counts as education versus indoctrination. That debate is unlikely to be resolved any time soon. In the meantime, the videos keep playing, the view counts keep climbing, and a new generation of Americans is learning about history, economics, and society through five-minute segments that cost thirty thousand dollars each to produce—funded by fossil fuel fortunes and filtered through the editorial judgment of a radio talk show host who believes the left has undermined higher education.

The university that is not a university has become, for millions of young people, a primary source of political education.