Bonus Sample: Kanye, Candace & The Christian Billionaires
Antisemitism is in the news again, as Candace Owens defends Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, while her boss, Ben Shapiro shakes his head in dismay. In this Bonus special report, Julian looks into the Assembly of Yahweh family, which funds conservative new media giants, The Daily Wire and PragerU.How do we make sense of the racial and religious tensions created by the strange bedfellow alliances of right-wing propaganda?
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But of course, we know how the news operates, and they took me out of context to try to cancel Candace Owens for being anti-Semitic during the time that I was actually working for Prager University.
Prager University, obviously, the namesake being Dennis Prager.
Dennis Prager is Jewish, openly Jewish.
We've talked about his faith.
He writes extensively about his faith, and yet they went for this moment, left and right combined.
Because, I don't know, I guess I don't have a right to discuss Whether or not Adolf Hitler was a nationalist, which I still believe to be untrue.
Just in case you're blissfully unfamiliar with PragerU, they're self-described as an educational media platform dedicated to serving pro-American values.
They also claim to be supported by viewer donations and point out that these donations are tax-deductible because PragerU is a 501c3 non-profit.
Their bread and butter is YouTube videos, and their account on YouTube has 1.22 million subscribers, but wait for it, they have over 1 trillion, 500 billion total views.
I looked into their revenue and found that in 2020, according to ProPublica, PragerU brought in $36 million.
Co-founder, the eponymous Dennis Prager, is, as Owen says, an Orthodox Jew and a conservative radio talk show host.
The original founding concept was that PragerU would stand as an alternative source of information for college students who were being indoctrinated by liberal bias.
But unlike their religious beliefs, the term university, which is what the U stands for, is entirely metaphorical.
The secret of their massive success has been the strategy of publishing uniformly branded five-minute videos that use a combination of talking heads on recognizable flat backgrounds using muted colors as well as simple graphic illustrator animations that utilize the same color scheme.
Their most popular videos weave a narrative for disillusioned people converting to conservative politics with titles like Why I Left the Left and Liberalism vs. Leftism, as well as explainers on the problems with progressive taxation and immigration policies and how men are no longer allowed to be masculine.
Within their top 20 most viewed videos, they also seek to appeal to Latin immigrants who have fled socialist regimes and make the case for African-American conservatism, as well as pointing out that hypocrite Democrats were the real party of slavery and the KKK.
The channel also features arguments against raising the minimum wage, or instituting stronger gun control, or reforming the electoral college.
On their app and website, PragerU also has a Kids tab that takes you to a streaming service-style array of rah-rah kids programming explaining the history behind patriotic holidays, the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance, and even 9-11.
There's also a game show with multiple episodes which test retention of political information from digital magazines, also designed for kids, that feature profiles of American presidents, tales in a series called Around the World about how bad life is in other countries where America is coming to the rescue, or that profile what they call Women of Valor, like Ayn Rand, Carnalisa Rice, and most recently, Amy Coney Barrett.
So in the game show, kids compete to see how well they've learned the lessons from these
different stories.
The website lists their main presenters, amongst others, as Tucker Carlson, Stephen Crowder,
Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Michael Knowles, Candace Owens, and a new
addition, the 21-year-old Amala Ekponobi.
She's black, edgy, tattooed, has braided hair extensions, and carries the same I-used-to-be-a-woke-leftist-until-I-got-red-pilled banner that made Candace Owens famous.
But what is really noteworthy to me about this right-wing new media behemoth is that they don't have a single video about Donald Trump.
They seem to be playing a much longer game, and I think it's working.
Digital conservative media is positioning itself as the new free-thinking renegade counterculture perspective against what has been widely caricatured as the left-wing media dominance of political correctness, intolerant cancel culture, and valuing feelings far too much over facts.
They've branded themselves as the rational little guys fighting back against the mainstream media and corporate establishment.
Except, they're not little guys.
Not at all.
Independent analysis done for the LA Times showed that PragerU spends more on Facebook ads than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups do.
And they got the bulk of their startup cash from Texas fracking billionaires, the Wilkes Brothers, who also have two family members on the board of PragerU.
BuzzFeed reported in 2019 that each of those 5-minute educational propaganda videos cost
between $25,000 and $30,000 to make.
Oh, and like most of the people we cover, fiercely anti-socialist PragerU raked in over
$700,000 in now fully forgiven COVID relief loans in 2020.
Thank you.
But Candace Owens is no longer officially employed by PragerU.
Since 2021, she's been the host of a political talk show on The Daily Wire, which was co-founded in 2015 by Ben Shapiro, who, like Prager, interestingly, is an Orthodox Jew.
The overlap in the hosts between these two platforms is noteworthy, as Michael Knowles, Candace Owens, and Ben Shapiro all appear on both platforms.
And so does Dennis Prager himself.
In fact, Daily Wire recently launched a paid streaming service, and it hosts, amongst many other things, the entire PragerU video archive.
Their newest high-profile addition, though, is this guy.
I recently joined forces with the Daily Wire in a new venture they call Daily Wire Plus.
The plan is to build a multimedia empire offering services on the philosophical, educational, journalistic, and entertainment front, including movies, TV shows, and media for children.
And an empire that will not fall prey to the woke authoritarianism that has become increasingly mandatory in so many places, including, let's say, the once great Disney.
