I’ve always felt that one’s political views are one’s own and while I may disagree with someone, I try to respect another’s viewpoint. For that reason, while I may vehemently disagree with another writer, I am loath to openly criticize another pundit’s opinions. So far, that policy has been reciprocated by fellow writers.
But when someone publishes claims that are so outlandishly misleading, even downright false as has the Hayride writers, I have to call them out.
Last Thursday, Scott McKay, who, for whatever reason, chooses to use the name MacAoidh for his byline (I suppose he thinks he’s a member of a once-powerful Scottish clan), went a little rabid over criticism of the Louisiana Department of Education’s decision to offer those silly PragerU five-minute video clips for public school civics and American history classes.
McKay, or MacAoidh, insisted on calling it Prager U (separating the letter “U” from the rest of the outfit’s name) in some king of subliminal attempt to legitimize it as a full-blown university. It’s not. It’s not even a school. It’s a content carrier. In other words, a not-so-subtle propaganda generator much the same as Fox News or the late, not-so-great Rush Limburger. Watch any PragerU video clip and you’re going to be treated to some oatmeal-for-brains-generated mishmash of “everything’s rosy in America except Democrats” claptrap.
Watching these clips, I could almost hear David Duke proclaiming that he has lots of black friends, or Florida’s Rhonda Santis extolling the virtues of Key West’s gay community in an effort to sound .
I’ll let you decide if it’s a real civics or history lesson when PragerU’s own CEO Marissa Strett said that the U.S. education system is “a left-wing propaganda machine” and that PragerU is “medicine for the mind so that we can cure and help people think clearly.”
But wait. There’s more. In one video clip that National Public Radio cited as being offered by PragerU, an animated CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS says, “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.”
Really? PragerU’s clip must have overlooked a third alternative: freedom, as opposed to slavery or death.
Apparently, PragerU and by extension, McKay/MacAoidh, are just fine with one human being owning another human.
I’d have to say the PragerU teachings pretty much dovetail Florida’s new standards that require that students be taught that the experience of slavery was beneficial to African Americans because it helped them acquire skills.
But that must be okay with McKay/MacAoidh.
Here’s what McKay/MacAoidh said in praising the works of PragerU: “Prager U (sic) is a great educational asset. Prager U’s video content items are among the most digestible Cliff’s Notes versions of explainers for historical events, civics concepts and other things that would fall under the ambit of ‘social studies.’”
Then there’s Hayride writer CHUCK OWEN who felt the need to be the official apologist for Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley. Without commenting on Brumley’s qualifications, we do challenge the veracity of Owen’s claim that complaints over the PragerU controversy is “repressive tolerance,” a “tool of Cultural Marxists that seeks to silence anything that they don’t approve or understand.”
Owen wouldn’t know “cultural Marxism” if it hit him in the face. And as far as accusing anyone of seeking to silence anything they don’t approve or understand, has he taken a look at the Republicans’ “don’t say gay” nonsense or their efforts to squelch any teachings about the Civil War and slavery or women’s suffrage? Or maybe the right’s hysterical apoplexy over the content of public and school libraries? I think the proper term for that is grooming.
And finally, Hayride columnist Jeffrey Sadow, an associate professor of political science at LSU-Shreveport, offered up his own defense of PragerU with his rambling DIATRIBE.
As we did last week, we invite you to make your own decisions by clicking HERE to view some of the clips being offered by PragerU. Don’t watch just the featured video that pops up, though it’s sufficient inane to induce eye rolls. Go to the menu at the right of the page and check out a few of the others.
The late Sen. Daniel Parick Moynihan has often been cited for one of his more famous utterances: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.”
The folks at the Hayride would do well to remember that.
Louisiana Voice 
Excellent commentary Mr. Aswell.
Other than the quest for power, I can’t for the life of me understand why these MAGAts associate their name with and tarnish their own public image by espousing this claptrap.
Tom,
Thanks for sending out these comments, and for the link to PragerU. It’s helpful to be able to sample these materials when trying to evaluate them. PragerU is clearly a source of right-wing propaganda that is not suitable for general education purposes, even if some of their output may have some pedagogical value. It makes me wonder how BESE or the local school boards determine what books and other materials to use. Thinking of all the issues in Texas over such things, along with the religious and ideological convictions of most Louisiana Republicans, I have very little confidence in the judgments that are being applied. Again, thanks for bird-dogging such things.
Mike Wolf
In the real world MAGA fascism is without justification. Some MAGA fascists know this and willingly choose to sell out to an alternate reality in order to wallow in their prejudices, which they believe they are entitled to. The rest of MAGA world is just too stupid to know better. I suspect McKay and his ilk are in the sold-out category but it may be they’re just stupid.
Sadow’s opinions are just that-opinions. Not truth. You can whitewash the truth but seriously….how can anyone honestly think being taken as a slave is better than death? Ridiculousness. As is PragerU. Indeed being free is the best alternative. Yes, the US is great, made great by stolen people on stolen lands. Not knowing your history (or ignoring or, whitewashing it) is dangerous as is the content of PragerU. As for Dr Brumley, same man who openly praised Moms for Liberty. Remember that group? Founded by a woman who opposed being gay, yet remember, she and her husband participate in a threesome (er… so two of the three were same sex) and then he was accused of raping said 3rd party. Just the kind of folks we don’t want anywhere near children, yet our state superintendent openly endorsed that group. Teaching children to think and weigh FACTS is healthy, PragerU is not, it’s grooming…..As for Sadow. Poor darlin.’ MM
Thanks Tom. The key word is “learning”. You know what happens when you stop or quit learning??? You become a F****ing Republican, they know everything!! We, all of us, must keep learning and loving. Vote Vets. ron thompson
really disturbing that people would produce and promote that garbage for child education. An example of what happens when white Christian nationalists come to power.
Referring to Sadow’s dribble about making America the greatest country that ever was. It always puzzles me how on one hand these MAGA can espouse how America IS the greatest and on the other hand how can they are going to make it great again. Did none of them pass 4th grade Language arts?
Readers who haven’t watched a PragerU video should do so. I watched the first one, a polished piece titled The Inconvenient Truth about the Democratic Party by Carol Swain, a professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt University. She is real with an impressive online curriculum vitae. In the video she reviews the comparative records of Democrats and Republicans on civil rights and racial equality since their inceptions. She details the multiple failures of the Democratic Party, their ardent support of slavery, the Dred Scott decision (7 ‘Democratic’ justices vs 2 ‘Republican’ justices, a subliminal plant about SCOTUS), their role in the cause of the Civil War, their abuses during Reconstruction, the Klan, Jim Crow, poll taxes, separate but unequal schools, resistance to Brown vs Board of Education, resistance to civil rights legislation, resistance to integration, voting rights abuses and others.
I couldn’t bear to watch it again for fact checking (I am averse to nausea), but best I can tell, everything she said was true or mostly true; at least there were no pants-on-fire statements, except for her claim that 100% of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act (see below). Moreover, every point followed a logical thread. An unskeptical 8th grader, especially one who lives in a MAGA state where such ideas are prevalent, would be thoroughly indoctrinated.
What she failed to note was the inconvenient truth that those Democrats who supported racist policies through the 1960s were mostly from Dixie, a hotbed of racism and white supremacy. Southern Democrats carried great power in the Party and in the Congress of those days because they tended to be re-elected time and again in a system that rewarded seniority. Until the 1970s, victory in the Democratic primaries in the Solid South was tantamount to election and voter turnout was poor in general elections. Republicans rarely ran for office for that reason. Charlton Lyons, a Shreveport Republican ran on a segregationist platform for Congress in 1961 and for governor in 1964, but, in spite of his views on race, lost both times. David Treen was the first Republican congressman (1971) and governor (1979) elected from Louisiana since Reconstruction. Ironically, Treen, known for his integrity, was defeated for re-election in 1983 by Edwin Edwards, a Democrat known for his corruption. Both Lyons and Treen were former Democrats who switched parties in the sixties, and Lyons was also a member of the States Rights party for a time.
I do not mean to suggest that Treen was a racist, that all racists came from the South, nor that all Democrats who switched to the Republican party are racists. I do mean to provide balance to the one-sided account promoted by Carol Swain. To be fair, many Southern converts to the Republican party were in fact overt race-baiters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms being two of the most notorious, unless you think David Duke was more notorious. There were many others. Helms and Thurmond held positions of high honor, influence and responsibility during their many terms in the Senate. Barry Goldwater, Arizona senator and Mr. Republican of the 1950s and 1960s, voted against the civil rights act of 1964, because he said it was unconstitutional. To bring it back home, the same Louisiana Republican Party who failed to censure David Duke for his neo-Nazi activities in 1990, censured Mitt Romney in 2020 for his anti-Trump activities. (Washington Examiner, February 20, 2020, not exactly a stronghold of liberalism. To be fair, the piece was highly critical of Louisiana Republicans.) I don’t think the Republican Party advocates white supremacy, but I am also unaware of any white supremacist who would identify as a Democrat. Finally, Republican state legislators deny that their gerrymandering tactics are based on race, but the result of those gerrymanders is a dilution of the value of black votes.
Carol Swain’s video is the most frightening presentation I have seen in a long time, because there is a lot of truth when her statements are evaluated devoid of their context. The graphics are cleverly designed to appeal to impressionable minds. It is hard to forget the cartoons of the DEMOCRAT, John Wilkes Booth shooting Lincoln in the head, or Lincoln’s successor, the DEMOCRAT, Andrew Johnson shredding Lincoln’s policies of racial reconciliation. The falsity lies mainly in the subtle way she connects the dots and the dots she omits. She uses true statements to create a false narrative. The unmistakable impression after viewing this piece is that today’s Republican party is the party of Lincoln, whereas the truth is that Ronald Reagan, and probably Lincoln, would get primaried by today’s Republicans. This video and presumably all of PragerU’s material would be convincing to children and others with uncritical minds and no knowledge of history. It is indoctrination at its finest.
Everyone who cares about education needs to see what these guys are promoting. Carol Swain has relinquished any claim to the community of scholars; she has become an advocate and a shameless promoter. As for PragerU, (a 501(c)(3) corporation by the way, exempt from federal income tax), they saw a need and created materials to address that need. This may be the saddest part of all, that there was ever a need in the first place. That and the fact that your tax dollars are paying for it.
Two more brief observations: 1. How is such material appropriate for a civics class at any level through high school? 2. How can fair-minded individuals require classroom discussions of both sides of the holocaust and slavery but this kind of one-sided presentation is OK?
There’s one major flaw in your argument: yes, the Democrats opposed the emancipation proclamation, the opposed the civil rights movement all the other issues you mentioned. BUT, what you failed to articulate was that all those Democrats are now members of the Republican Party. The simple fact is the two parties have switched identities totally. The Republicans were once supportive of these issues and vehemently opposed to anything associated with communist Russia. But look at today’s party planks. The Republicans are literally in bed with Putin; they’re promoting white nationalism more ardently than the Dems ever did; they’re stripping the rights from women – rights that the Dems fought for and won.
Who do you think is responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964? That would be LBJ, a Democrat. Who do you think is responsible for the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining to raise up the middle class, the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, rural electrification, overtime payment for workers, the construction of thousands of schools, courthouses, stadiums, parks, and other public buildings during recovery from the Great Depression? The answer to each of these is Democrats. Republicans opposed each and every one of those issues.
Look at the old Democrats of Dixie: Strom Thurman, John Connally, and countless old-school politicians who stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the wind was blowing and turned Republican.
Your argument is as empty as that of Carol Swain, who offered such disingenous feel-good pablum as to be laughable.
I respectfully refer you to the observations of reader Remi DeLouche below this comment.
They forgot to say that republican party left the earth decades and decades ago before anyone now alive was born and they vowed to NEVER TO RETURN AND THE CURRENT DEMOCRAT PARTY took over the efforts that the republicans fostered in the in the 1800s, IN THE 1900s and have continued all the way to the current year….
Good grief, holy cow, and my soul, Tom. Are we having a bad day? I am scratching my head at how an experienced journalist could completely miss the whole point of my essay. My first thought was that only the first paragraph went through but I see that is not the case. I wanted to explicitly critique the Swain video, not catalog all the hypocrisies of the Republican Party, which would fill and has filled many books and editorials. Besides the essay was already too long; I was shocked when the finished piece appeared on my screen.
As for your major critique, that I failed to note those Southern Dixiecrats who all became Republicans, I covered that. Although I did leave out John Connally, I said there were many others. My bad. I confess I omitted the fact that LBJ was responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 64 and the Voting Rights Act of 65, not to mention the important contributions of JFK and RFK and all the others. I gave your readers credit for knowing that and it was a little beside the point for my purposes. I also sometimes forget that most of the population was not born yet when all that happened.
To clarify, my expressed purpose was to call attention to the way ingenious, disingenuous propagandists can use true statements and clever graphics to indoctrinate uncritical, unknowing people, especially our children. I provided examples. I could have added more. Your comments add to, but in no way refute anything I said.
The tone of your response suggests you may have approved more if I had expressed more vitriol and umbrage. There is enough of that already and it is just not my style. I thoroughly pilloried Carol Swain and her video; to call my arguments empty is unnecessary and a low blow to someone who is on your side.
I like Remi’s comment. My preferred pronoun is “he”.
I remain your humble and loyal reader,
Hank
My sincere apologies for not reading your comment more closely. You called me an experience journalist and I suppose 50+ years in the business does qualify me for that. At least you didn’t make the mistake of calling me intelligent or perceptive. I obviously misinterpreted your comments as being favorable to PragerU and did a sloppy job of reading your entire post. That’s 100% on me.
Thanks for your gracious response. I think I am partially to blame for trying to balance an issue that can’t be balanced, for the benefit of people on the other side who wouldn’t listen anyway. We should have a beer some day!
I’ll drink to that offer.