PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American people.
Streit’s company is involved in a big-money operation targeting children with neoconservative, pro-war, pro-business, pro-Israel messaging, attempting to indoctrinate them at their youngest and most impressionable age.
MintPress explores this increasingly powerful group, with ambitions to completely overhaul the American educational system.
Leave Our Kids Alone
You have probably seen a PragerU video. An estimated one-in-three Americans have. The billionaire-funded media machine is a powerful force on the American right, providing highly-produced conservative content attempting to push U.S. politics and society rightwards.
Recently, however, PragerU has set its sights on children, and is seeking to hijack the American education system. Since 2023, it has signed deals with ten states – Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah – to become an official education provider, supplying books, videos, and other content to schools across the United States. Students in New Hampshire, meanwhile, can earn credits by completing online PragerU courses. And with PragerU Español, it has plans to expand into Latin America as well.
Florida was the trailblazer in this phenomenon. As part of his Stop WOKE Act – a bill that sought to eradicate liberal ideology from public life – Governor Ron DeSantis partnered with the organization, identifying it as one that “aligned with the state’s revised civics and government standards.” PragerU now provides ultra-conservative “American values” messaging for use in grades K-12.
Florida’s post Stop WOKE Act curriculum now requires middle school teachers to instruct students on the benefits of slavery for black Americans, including that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
It has also rewritten the 1920 Ocoee Massacre – a pogrom that saw a white mob kill dozens of black residents and permanently ethnically cleanse the Florida town of its black population – as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”
College students at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, meanwhile, can earn extra credit by taking a PragerU history course. This, despite the fact that, despite its branding, PragerU is not an accredited educational institution, let alone a university.
Oklahoma, however, has gone even further. Last year, the state’s superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, launched a controversial teacher evaluation test developed by PragerU to vet teachers for their ideology and filter out applicants considered insufficiently conservative. The plan even withheld teaching certificates from educators from what Walters described as “woke states.” Walters left his position to head the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative pressure group opposed to teachers unions.
Free Healthcare is Slavery, But Actual Slavery is A-OK
The PragerU content being shown to American schoolchildren contains a number of highly controversial viewpoints presented as common sense. Most “lessons” are presented in cartoon format, with one about the founding of America including an animated Christopher Columbus stating that slavery was “no big deal.” “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” he said; “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” Further justifying the enslavement and genocide of two continents, Columbus tells those watching that, “The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.”
Another video lesson grossly distorts the views of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, with an animated Douglas justifying slavery in America, stating that “the founding fathers made a compromise [supporting slavery] to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”
PragerU Kids videos also cover more contemporary issues. One video, titled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,” deals with the murder of George Floyd, whom the narrator describes as a “black man who resisted arrest.” The video claims that “violent protests” and “looting” were sparked by “false claims” of racist policing spread by unnamed “activists.” Mateo, a Los Angeles child, is aghast by protestors “threatening police,” or, as the video calls them, “protectors,” and decides to stand firmly in solidarity with the Blue Lives Matter movement.
Another educational resource approved for use in schools is a lecture called “Is Fascism Right or Left?” by controversial conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, in which he insists that, “Fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.” In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty for violating federal campaign financing laws.
Unsurprisingly for a conservative movement funded by fracking billionaires, PragerU also instructs children to reject the overwhelming consensus on climate change. However, it takes it to absurd levels, comparing the supposed oppression of climate skeptics to the living in Warsaw Ghetto, where upwards of 300,000 Jewish people were killed by the Nazis.
In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,” the titular character is fed propaganda at school about the disastrous impact of human-made climate change, only to have her eyes opened by her conservative parents. Ania is ostracized by the other children for merely expressing her concerns. Luckily, her grandfather Jakub gives her the strength to continue, by telling her about the Warsaw Uprising. “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” viewers are told.
On India, American children are told that the country benefitted greatly from British imperialism, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions,” and “gave” India its independence in 1947. “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” the video concludes, framing India’s problems as entirely down to their own backward culture, rather than centuries of direct rule and oppression.
Another video lambasts Canada’s free healthcare system and highlights the supposed dangers of socialized medicine, while extolling the for-profit privatized American system, despite it being by far the most expensive, comparatively, and having the worst outcomes of any developed country, according to international studies.
PragerU also sets its targets on Cuba, China, Venezuela, and North Korea as well, publishing videos demonizing those countries as authoritarian nightmare regimes in need of U.S. intervention.
Netanyahu’s Favorite Channel
No nation, however, concerns PragerU as much as Israel. The organization has dedicated a huge amount of time and resources to defending and promoting the country. Their “Israel at War” series of lectures denounces the “lie” that Israel is occupying its neighbors, and includes a link to sign a petition “to condemn Hamas and stand with Israel.”
A lesson plan designed for young children shows teachers how they can make a model Iron Dome out of juice boxes and straws, in order to educate American children on how Israel is defending itself from Palestinian terror, interspersed with messaging like Israel and the U.S. are best friends that “share values that are tied to God.”
Another video, explaining the current crisis in the region to older children, claims that, “Like the United States, Israel is a nation of immigrants, which prides itself on its freedoms for all citizens, no matter their religion, ethnicity, or race,” and, “Uniquely, Israel is the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations.”
This will come as some surprise to Israel’s Arab minority, who face systematic and institutionalized discrimination, including restrictions on land ownership, jobs, and education, and to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who describe Israel as an Apartheid state carrying out a genocide against Muslims and Christians.
PragerU, however, frames Israel as the victim. Israelis, they tell their audience, grow up under “ongoing attacks from terrorist organizations, whose primary goal is to destroy Israel.” “On many occasions,” it continues, “Israel sought peace with surrounding countries, and the local Palestinians,” but to no avail.
The network even comes with an endorsement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who shared their video, “Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army,” with his followers. “We stand with Israel,” PragerU replied.
PragerU: Run by an Israeli Spy
This unconditional support is unsurprising, given who actually runs the company. PragerU CEO Marissa Streit is, after all, an Israeli spy. On her eighteenth birthday, Streit joined Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Force’s spying agency. In interviews, she has admitted that she was an officer in the controversial unit, and stated that she uses the tactics and techniques honed by Israeli spying agency on the American people. “Coming back here to the United States with the gifts that Israel had given me during my military training, I felt compelled to employ them here in my nation of the United States,” she explained.
Exactly what her role as a Unit 8200 officer remains a mystery. Streit has said of her time there that, “We were tasked with looking at problems that the intelligence community might be missing.” Given that her service coincides with the Second Palestinian Intifada, however, one can speculate that suppressing domestic resistance to occupation was among her tasks.
One does not join Unit 8200 by chance. The group is Israel’s most elite spying agency, accepting only the top 1% of applicants. Rich parents spent fortunes on extra STEM classes for their children in the hopes that they will be chosen to serve in the unit, knowing that serving there is a fast track into the upper echelons of Israeli society.
Unit 8200 is responsible for cyberwarfare and psychological operations worldwide. The group has created a massive surveillance dragnet targeting Palestinians, and uses the data to generate massive A.I.-derived kill lists. It is widely identified as the group behind the 2024 Lebanese Pager Attack, which injured thousands of civilians.
Unit 8200 agents are also responsible for producing much of the world’s most invasive spyware that is sold to authoritarian regimes across the planet. This includes the notorious Pegasus software, which was used to surveil tens of thousands of politicians, journalists, human rights defenders, and union leaders. The Saudi government, for example, used Pegasus to track Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembering him with a bone saw inside their embassy in Türkiye. “So much of what I learned in Israeli military intelligence has impacted the way I think today. It is such a gift, what they have given me,” Streit said.
From there, she moved back to the U.S. to work for pro-Israel pressure group, the Israeli-American Council. She sees Israel and the United States as fundamentally linked together, and both under threat from progressive values.
“We are losing America to radicals who hate the West and everything we stand for… We must teach our children to be grateful to live in America,” she said, adding:
“Students should learn to cherish our Judeo-Christian heritage, which is the foundation of our great society… If we provide our children with a proper education, grounded in truth, justice, goodness and liberty, then I can assure you that they will grow to love both America and Israel.”
Streit has made her own views on Israel’s attack on Palestine clear. She has justified attacks on civilians in Gaza, claiming that they are “harboring terrorists and hostages in their homes,” suggested that Hamas plans to “kill all Jews including nursery children,” and asserted that slogans such as “Free Palestine” are “synonymous with ‘destroy the West.’”
Make America Dumb Again
Streit has been at PragerU since its inception in 2009. Her views on politics and Israel/Palestine, however, could almost be described as moderate, compared with company founder, Dennis Prager.
The right-wing talk show host has visited Israel dozens of times, including leading a “Stand with Israel” tour across the country, including into occupied East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. He labeled Palestinians as “among the world’s most morally unimpressive national groups” and claimed that “lying is a Palestinian art form.” Prager, who has campaigned for whites to be allowed to use the N-word, fell in his bathroom in 2024, and was left quadriplegic and paralyzed from the neck down, and since has taken a back seat in the organization.
The empire he built was bankrolled to the tune of millions by fracking billionaires, Dan and Farris Wilks, although the pair later pulled their money after Prager was insufficiently homophobic for their liking. By this time, however, the company was funded by Israeli-American megadonor Miriam Adelson, and had grown from strength to strength. By 2024, its revenue climbed to a reported $70 million, and it could afford to hire A-list conservatives such as Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nigel Farage, and Douglas Murray to present their videos.
The original plan was for PragerU to pursue university accreditation (hence the name). However, this was quickly dropped. And yet, despite holding no educational accreditation whatsoever, they kept the misleading moniker.
This sort of callous relationship with the truth has been a constant feature of the organization. It is regularly criticized for producing content with little to no intellectual merit. Multiple sources have cataloged what they call the “blatant lies” present in the outlet’s videos.
Officially, PragerU is a non-political organization. “We’re a 501(c)(3)” non-profit, company co-founder Allen Estrin said. “We don’t have any political involvement with anybody. That would be against our charter.”
Few, however, would take this at face value, especially as Streit herself posted a video of her dancing with President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence, with the caption “Make Education Great Again! Thank you President Trump.”
PragerU has strongly supported Trump’s wholesale attacks on the education system and teachers unions, who they see as the primary obstacle to their plan to “disrupt the education market.” Trump has also attempted to cut funding for PBS children’s programming – music to PragerU’s ears, as the organization attempts to shape young minds from infancy stepping in to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s gutting of the U.S. education system.
Racist Sesame Street
PragerU sits at the apex between neoconservative foreign policy, reactionary social policy at home, and relentless pro-Israel advocacy. But the primacy of all three of these positions are increasingly under threat in the United States, and are becoming progressively more unpopular.
Large majorities of Americans support a system of socialized medicine that PragerU so actively campaigns against, as well as making colleges free to attend, and building social housing nationwide. Sixty-two percent of young Americans hold a favorable view of socialism.
Polls show the country overwhelmingly disapproves of Trump’s aggression against Iran. And after nearly three years of genocide, the tide is turning on Israel. An April Pew Research Center study found that even four in ten Republicans hold an unfavorable view of the country. That figure rises to 57% of Republicans under the age of fifty. Top right-wing media figures, such as Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, are all vehemently anti-Israel. Meanwhile, pro-Israel conservative thought leaders, such as PragerU’s Ben Shapiro, have seen their audience crater by up to 90%.
For pro-war, pro-Israel, pro-billionaire PragerU then, the situation is grave. Despite years of extremely well-funded P.R., they have been unable to stem the tide of public opinion. Their new strategy of targeting children appears to be an attempt to inculcate Americans with these values when they are at their most impressionable; to stop the rot before it gets started.
PragerU is enthusiastically backing Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. education system, and is poised to step in to fill the void. In this sense, they are hoping to do to American education what Israel has done to Palestine. And with a former Israeli spook at the helm, they are in a perfect position to do so, blasting young minds with a blitz of reactionary propaganda, making them passionate advocates of a system that fundamentally does not work for them.
