The Right-Wing Nonprofit Serving A.I. Slop for America’s Birthday
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In his new book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” the right-wing radio host and edutainment impresario Dennis Prager spends a couple of pages discussing the killing, in 1989, of a sixteen-year-old American girl by her parents, one of whom was Muslim and born in the West Bank. “I’m not picking on them because they’re Muslim or because they’re Palestinian,” Prager writes. “It just happens that this story was about them.” In the next paragraph, Prager seems to change his mind about why he’s picking on them: “In many parts of the Arab world, parents essentially own their children, especially daughters.”
Ostensibly, Prager is recounting this awful crime because it illustrates a central question taken up by his book, which is “Why do people hurt other people?” The answer, by and large, turns out to be secularism. “The death of God has led to massive deaths of men, women, and children,” Prager writes, citing the “secular doctrines” of Nazism and communism. Secular creep, he goes on, “also appears to be leading to the death of Western civilization.” One might wonder why Prager would choose a thirty-seven-year-old murder, which he implies is linked to monotheistic religious extremism, to build his case against secularism. But the God he has in mind is specifically that of “the Judeo-Christian outlook.” The sole “source of objective morality,” Prager suggests, is the Bible. Prager does not mention that the murdered girl’s mother, who held her down while her father stabbed her to death, was Catholic and from Brazil, a country whose most famous landmark is a hundred-and-twenty-four-foot statue called “Christ the Redeemer.”
“If There Is No God” is not the worst thing Prager has ever written. (That honor may go to a two-part op-ed from 2008, titled “When a Woman Isn’t in the Mood,” in which he explains why wives should have sex with their husbands even when they don’t feel like it.) That said, if Prager’s new book were a term paper, his teacher would have a lot to say. She might flag, for instance, that lack of symmetry between his argument and his choice of grisly anecdote. She might object to the tautological reasoning, or to the flagrant cultural animus and Islamophobia. Using terminology from the education world, she might say, politely, that Prager has many “areas of growth” as a student, or that his progress toward grade level is “emerging.”
Yet Prager, a co-founder of the conservative education-media nonprofit PragerU, is one of the most influential voices in education in the United States today. PragerU is not an accredited university, but curriculum materials from its PragerU Kids division, on American history, civics, and financial literacy, are approved for optional classroom use in eleven mostly right-leaning states. (One of those states, Oklahoma, also worked with PragerU to develop a short-lived multiple-choice test intended to screen teachers for signs of “woke indoctrination.”) Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”
PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler.
Prager, who is seventy-seven, is an observant Jew who sees evangelical Christians as natural allies in his pursuit of “transforming America into a faith-based nation,” as he once wrote. (He has also lamented what he termed Jewish “bigotry” toward evangelical Christians, whose “support, and often even love, of the Jewish people and Israel is the most unrequited love I have ever seen on a large scale.”) In 2009, decades into a successful career in conservative talk radio, he co-founded PragerU, in order to provide what he called a “free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.” PragerU has received major funding from hard-right benefactors, including Betsy DeVos’s family foundation and the billionaire fracking brothers Dan and Farris Wilks. According to its most recent tax filing—which describes PragerU’s purpose as “marketing and producing educational content for all ages, 4-104, with a focus on a pro-American, Judeo-Christian message”—it received more than sixty-six million dollars in donations in 2024. (In November of that year, Prager sustained a severe spinal-cord injury in a fall that left him paralyzed below the shoulders; he has since resumed making video content for the PragerU website, and composed part of “If There Is No God” by dictation.)
Prager’s nonprofit is just one of dozens of conservative organizations, many of them Christian, that are named as “partners” in the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which is overseen by Linda McMahon, the Education Secretary. The coalition has the secular task of developing programming for America’s birthday, such as PragerU’s Founders Museum and the Freedom Trucks, the latter of which received a fourteen-million-dollar grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. (In March, President Trump signed executive orders to dismantle both the I.M.L.S. and the D.O.E.; they remain alive, albeit in shrunken, ideologized versions of their former selves.) Other America 250 partners include both of the major pro-Trump think tanks (the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation), a Christian liberal-arts school (Hillsdale College), the Supreme Court’s favorite conservative-Christian legal-advocacy group (the Alliance Defending Freedom), the Christian-right-aligned church of Charlie Kirk (Turning Point USA), and something called Priests for Life.
According to a D.O.E. press release, the America 250 coalition is “dedicated to renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” Of course, one of America’s founding principles, taught in every civics class, is the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which might seem to frown on the knitting together of so many religious organizations and public funds intended to advance civic education.
“Real patriotic education,” McMahon said, at the opening of the Founders Museum last year, “means that, just as our founders loved and honored America, so we should honor them, while deeply learning and earnestly debating, still, their ideas.” One way to take McMahon up on this challenge is to deeply learn what James Madison wrote, in 1785, after a bill arose in Virginia’s General Assembly to establish a taxpayer provision for “Teachers of the Christian Religion.” In a petition to his colleagues in the Assembly, Madison asked, “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” He abhorred the proposal as “a melancholy mark” of “sudden degeneracy.” “Instead of holding forth an Asylum to the persecuted,” he wrote, “it is itself a signal of persecution.” A governing body that would permit such an incursion on the free exercise of religion was one that “may sweep away all our fundamental rights,” Madison warned. The bill died.
Although PragerU has won fans at the highest levels of federal and state government, its educational content and short-form videos are reviled across many chambers of the internet, where the Prager name—attached to videos with titles such as “DEI Must Die,” “Preferred Pronouns or Prison,” “Multiculturalism: A Bad Idea,” and “Is Fascism Right or Left?”—has become synonymous with MAGA-brand disinformation. (PragerU claims that its videos receive tens of millions of views per quarter, but these metrics have not been independently verified.) A PragerU Kids video called “How to Think Objectively,” which was reportedly shown in Houston public schools, provides the thinnest façade for a lesson in climate-change denial. Democratic socialism and, especially, immigration are scourges of the Prager-verse, which has attempted to undermine the constitutional provision of birthright citizenship and cranked out endless pro-ICE videos since the Department of Homeland Security began its violent occupations of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities.
The most noxious PragerU videos often involve slavery. In the PragerU Kids series “Leo & Layla’s History Adventures,” animated versions of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington are deputized to play down the historical significance of slavery; Christopher Columbus goes a step further, using slavery to introduce children to the concept of moral relativism. (“How can you come here to the fifteenth century and judge me by your standards in the twenty-first century?” Columbus asks.) A now deleted video—as bland as a corporate-compliance webinar, and scored to a generic hip-hop beat—gives Robert E. Lee a thumbs-up for crushing the attempted rebellion of enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry. The video also uncritically shares Lee’s view that slavery was harder on whites than on Black people, since “Blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa.”
In terms of historical facts and narrative, the A.I. videos that PragerU produced for the Founders Museum offer nothing so repugnant. In fact, they offer close to nothing at all. Like a poorly trained large language model, John Adams filibusters on his bona fides, calling himself a “voice for independence” who believed in “telling the truth” and who “stood on principle.” The content is oddly content-free, and then it repeats. Thomas Jefferson, who never blinks, says, “We must guard liberty with learning.” Adams, who seems to be reading off a teleprompter, tells us, “Guard liberty well, for, once lost, it is lost forever.” Ben Franklin agrees: “Respect this founding, friend. It is your inheritance, hard-won and fragile. Guard it well.”
A commonality across all the PragerU videos, and distinctly those in the PragerU Kids catalogue, is their total aesthetic bankruptcy, their absence of beauty or joy or wit. It’s impossible to imagine anyone enjoying any of this or electing to watch it, not because it’s factually wrong or propagandistic but because it’s ugly and boring. The intentionality of the misinformation—or the absence of information—coupled with the laziness of the execution ties a perfect knot of contempt. The various characters in “How to Think Objectively” grimace and vocalize as if the woke mob had dosed them with tainted ketamine. The “Leo & Layla” render-farm animation of Martin Luther King, Jr., sways back and forth affectlessly, like a puppet on a stick, voiced by an actor doing a bad Jay-Z impression. Perhaps Dr. King is dissociating, and the viewer should follow his lead.
In the Founders Museum, PragerU’s Chuck E. Cheese-ification of Presidents is hideous enough, but the animation deteriorates further as you click through to lesser-known revolutionaries, their mouths taking on the shape and muscular coördination of a Wombo A.I. The merchant Francis Lewis blankly recounts the death of his wife after her imprisonment by the British, and concludes, “Freedom demands much of us, but what it gives in return is everything.” Another Founder, Roger Sherman, intones, “I did my part. Now you must do yours.” It’s entirely unclear what the viewer is being asked to do, which may be the point. Dennis Prager once admitted that he didn’t mind accusations that PragerU indoctrinates its young viewers, saying, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.” But perhaps indoctrination and stupefaction go hand in hand. Maybe reaching patriotic Judeo-Christian nirvana should feel like the unbearable lightness of an emptied mind. ♦