'Inside the Right- Wing YouTube Empire That's Quietly Turning Millennials Into Conservatives'
'Inside the Right-Wing YouTube Empire That’s Quietly Turning Millennials Into Conservatives.' The viral videos from Dennis Prager’s “university” have clocked more than 1 bill views. Mark Oppenheimer, Mother Jones, *Mar-Apr 2018. Ed., Excerpts:
In the weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Americans flocked to the internet with pressing questions. Some inquired about immigration to Canada. Others Googled “sanctuary city.” And millions were newly curious about the Electoral College, which for the second time in recent memory was going to contravene the will of the majority. What was it? Why was it? Could electors defy their voters’ wishes?
People turned to the New York Times and the Washington Post, Fox News, and even the Constitution for answers. But few sources were as widely consulted as “Do You Understand the Electoral College?” a five-minute video hosted by retired lawyer and television pundit Tara Ross. Her genial lecture, illustrated with colorful cartoons and pop-up text—”pure democracies do not work”—can be found at Prager University, an online video portal curated by the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager. The Electoral College video had about 850,000 views before the election, says Allen Estrin, Prager’s producer and consigliere. “Two weeks later, it had 50 million.” (*See video below).
The intellectual quality of Ross’ video is decidedly junior varsity. She doesn’t mention how the Electoral College was born of a compromise with slave states or note the degree to which it skews the will of the majority—for example, by effectively giving a Wyoming resident’s vote almost quadruple the power of a Californian’s. She also claims (bizarrely) that the Electoral College thwarts voter fraud. But never mind any of that. The video is short and memorable, with quick cuts, zippy graphics, and cool sound effects.
Since 2012, PragerU has posted nearly 300 similarly digestible videos. At PragerU, police are not biased against black men, and man-made climate change is debatable. You’ll find takes on animal rights (against), the $15 minimum wage (against), the gender wage gap (doesn’t exist), and why the South turned Republican (nothing to do with race). PragerU “students” don’t earn degrees, of course. Yet a dedicated viewer might walk away with the consistently conservative outlook of a charming, curmudgeonly 69-year-old radio personality who lacks the ratings of his blustery peers—the Sean Hannitys and Mark Levins and Alex Joneses—but boasts a more reassuring disposition. Despite his chosen profession and Brooklyn upbringing, Prager is no yeller. He welcomes guests with whom he disagrees and is respectful to all callers. Prager is convinced that at this historical moment our society is collapsing, and a liberal Supreme Court nominee could portend the final flood. Last summer, he tweeted that Western media outlets “pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.”
Prager explained to me that because “the universities have all but shut down, not to mention demonized, nonleft ideas,” and the media “are not far behind,” it is his duty to provide a conservative take “on things that matter—economics, good and evil, America, Israel, religion, God, etc.” His goal is to imbue young people with “the principles on which America was founded,” and to demonstrate “why Western society will not survive the death of Judeo-Christian values.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Prager
These instincts—Prager the Genial Radio Host and Prager the Gloomy Prophet—merge in PragerU, whose videos are too gentle in tone for the Infowars crowd and too conservative for committed liberals. Rather, they are engineered to sway those in the mushy middle, especially young people trying to figure out what they stand for. Prager’s radio show has about 2 million weekly listeners (to Rush Limbaugh’s 14 million), but PragerU’s appeal goes well beyond the graying talk-radio audience. More than 60 percent of its viewers are younger than 35, according to YouTube analytics. Strazzeri estimates that 100 million individuals—almost one-third of the US population—have watched at least part of a PragerU video via Facebook, where the organization has more than 2.8 million followers.
With his move past talk radio, Prager is making a play for the future, for the generations that aren’t listening to AM in the car, if they even drive. By meeting young people on their own turf—social media, smartphones—and addressing them amiably, Prager manages to deliver conservative thought in a package even Never Trumpers are willing to open.
Among the major contributors are Dan and Farris Wilks, fracking billionaires who want to bring Christianity into public schools. (PragerU’s Educators Program encourages K-12 teachers and college professors to use “our curriculum as a teaching supplement.”) The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, another funder of right-leaning educational initiatives, has given a substantial sum, too. The left also has deployed bite-size videos to sway millennials, albeit with less success. Inequality Media, founded in 2014 by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and filmmaker Jacob Kornbluth, has produced about 120 shorts, most featuring Reich. The most popular, “Trump and the Press,” has received more than 10 million views. But PragerU’s marketing savvy puts it miles ahead of any ideological competitors. Strazzeri’s team works diligently to sync Prager’s offerings to the news cycle via targeted Facebook and YouTube ad buys.
“All our videos are evergreens,” he explains. “Every day we are looking at what is trending, lining up the right videos, and pushing them.” "In the world of the internet, five minutes is the right dosage,” Estrin says. “You can get a lot in politics, history, a lot of things."...
More, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/inside-right-wing-youtube-turning-millennials-conservative-prageru-video-dennis-prager/
"Pure democracies do not work, they implode." Tara Ross, PragerU.
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