*An animated lesson by PragerU portraying Black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass has received criticism online.
The conservative content producer is an official vendor for public schools by the Florida Department of Education, and new animated videos began circulating online that aim to teach students about a separate aspect of society.
Florida classrooms will use the organization’s “edutainment” materials as supplemental curricula since they align with the state’s revised civics and government standards. Critics have called the “indoctrination” videos nothing more than “white supremacist propaganda.”
PragerU Kids’ 2023 video titled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,” follows an animated 13-year-old student named Mateo, the son of Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles. In the clip, Mateo is worried “about his family’s safety, Mateo learns from a local law enforcement officer what he can do to help and make a difference in his community.”
The teen character addresses issues surrounding U.S. police and Black Lives Matter protestors and compares demonstrators in Los Angeles to Mexican cartel members. According to PragerU, the video aims to teach “middle and high school kids how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and anti-police sentiment affected crime, families, and small businesses in American cities.”
Of all the PragerU propaganda you’ve seen, this might be the worst.
Frederick Douglass takes a dig at BLM while praising the founding fathers as abolitionists and calling the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.”
Florida is letting schools play this stuff. pic.twitter.com/WbS3CDBeNE
— David Heath (@davidhth) August 7, 2023
In PragerU Kids’ 2021 video “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass,” siblings “Leo and Layla travel back to 1852 to meet Frederick Douglass for an honest and accurate look at slavery and learn how to create change,” per the non-profit organization’s description.
The video shows Douglass describing the Constitution as a “glorious” document, and he defends slavery in order to form the United States.
In the video, Douglass says, “I’m certainly not OK with slavery, but the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great, the making of the United States. It was America that began the conversation to end it.”
“Our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong, and they knew that it would do terrible harm to the nation,” the animated Douglass says.
“Their priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country. The Southern colonies were dependent on slave labor, and they wouldn’t have joined the union if they had banned it.”
Douglass also says in the video: “Our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.”
Florida’s latest curriculum—featuring cartoon Christopher Columbus explaining, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed!” and telling time-traveling kids that slavery was “no big deal.”
This is the kind of propaganda DeSantis and his friends at PragerU are teaching… pic.twitter.com/wPY8USFzhQ
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) August 7, 2023
Social media users criticized the video for misrepresenting the abolitionist’s political stance, thoughts on slavery, and history.
“Of all the PragerU propaganda you’ve seen, this might be the worst,” David Heath, an investigative journalist and author, wrote on Monday on Twitter. “Frederick Douglass takes a dig at BLM while praising the founding fathers as abolitionists and calling the Constitution a ‘glorious liberty document.'”
A PragerU spokesperson replied: “Note to David Heath, the description of The Constitution as a ‘glorious liberty document’ is a direct quote from Frederick Douglass in his “Fourth of July Speech” in 1852.”
The rep also noted that BLM “is a proven, corrupt group of Marxist radicals. Most Americans know this by now.”
In PragerU Kids’ 2023 video “India: Priya Overcomes Adversity,” the animated character Priya unpacks her journey to overcoming discrimination in India. Per PragerU’s description, “Through the life of Priya and her family, middle and high school students will learn how the British Empire lifted India out of a long tradition of caste discrimination.”
PragerU CEO Marissa Streit said teachers can incorporate PragerU’s educational content into their curriculum without fear of firing.
“We have seen that our schools have been hijacked by the left. They have been politicized, they have been used by union bosses, they have been doing everything under the sun not for our children,” Streit said when announcing the vendor status. “And so we have launched PragerU Kids and we started providing great ‘edutainment,’ educational entertainment for children across America.
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