Indoctrinating With Conservative Cartoons

WHEN I FTRST HEARD about somthing called "Prager University", my assumption was that this was another of those profit seeking online institutsions, such as The Iniversity of Pheonix, among others, which enroll students and graduate them with bachelor degrees within months, conferring fake degrees upon unsuspecting people who later on discover that they have spent a lot of money on an essentially worthless piece of paper which provides no help in furthering a careeror even getting a job. These paper mills are ultimately beseiged with laswuits, and eventually declare bankruptcy and are heard from no more. The truth about Prager U is much worse, much more unflattering. Prager University is not a university at all. It confers no degrees, provides no classroom instruction. It is merely an online propaganda pachine, a few folks ensconced in smoky, hidden rooms using computers and churning out videos prompting a false, far right wing version of history, political science, even science. It was founded by one of the many conservative radio talk show hosts who stain the A.M. airwaves with clones of the late Rush Limbaugh, the undisputed king of conservative alternative reality. Its stated purpsoe is to counter the liberal lies being taught throughout America's public schools by the elite liberal establishment which has allegedly, like some malignant virus, taken control of the entire education system, public and higher university. The imaginary liberal conspiracy which evidently consists of millions of public schools teachers, administrators, and college professors, all determined to brainwash American students into believing such liberal nonsense as slavery was evil, climate change is real, life on Earth evolved into its present form by natural selection, and socialism is sometimes useful. Once upon a time Prager "instruction" consisted of short videos in which real people enacted scenes pointing out that climate change happens whether humans have anyting to do with it or not, that evolution by natural selection is only speculation and actually also a liberal hoax, that socialism, presumably including Social Security, Medicare, and publicly funded streets, highways, police and fire departmens), is pure evil, and that slavery actually existed all over the world long before the United States did. The implictions are that climate change by human selection is a hoax, the United States is superior to all othr nations because it ended slavery after institutionalizing it for a mere 246 years, that free market capitaism is the embodiment of Christian virtue, and that creationism as explained in the Holy Bible is the literal,unassailable truth. Alarmingly, these false narratives, which are themselves indoctrination intended to replace reality, have been viewed more than a billion times by students being subjected to what is effectively mental torture, like religious indoctrination. More optimistically, the videos are now animated, to cut costs and to avoid the plethora of lawsuits which accompanied the real life early versions. Our best hope is that there is truly virtue in the free maket of ideals, and that the nefarious nonsense spewed by prager U will experience the same fate as dinosaurs, drive in movie theatres, and Rush Limbaugh.