The right has waged a war on “woke” Sesame Street for generations. When the party passed the 2025 Recissions Act, they were finally able to take a significant field advantage in this battle—one which Big Bird and Mr Snuffleupagus never wanted to be in. That bill stripped $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, greatly damaging NPR, PBS, and mostly their member stations. The CPB announced it will have to close in January 2026. What will take its place? Well, the right has a plan for that, or so Vox speculates: PragerU.
Founded in 2009 as a right-wing alternative to reality, the sprawling, well-funded network teaches kids to hate DEI, love paying taxes, and recognize that the Bible offers the only salvation on this planet. Could it replace Sesame Street, however? Well, it’s already in use in numerous classrooms—and the right wants it in all of them.
Show Notes
The White House has a preferred alternative to PBS. It may already be in countless classrooms.
What Percentage of White Southerners Owned Slaves
How Neoliberalism Swallowed Arts Policy
The Global Liberal Arts Challenge | Ethics & International Affairs
When the Arts Are Attacked, Democracy Is at Risk | Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council
Davis, Michael. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
Kamp, David. Sunny Days. New York: Simon & Schuster, n.d.
Ledbetter, James. Made Possible By...: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States. London; New York: Verso, 1997.
Stewart, David C.The PBS Companion: A History of Public Television. New York: TV Books, 1999.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 in El Salvador?
How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s?
Or what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab?
Or why the Japanese yakuza have all those crazy dragon tattoos?
I'm Sean Williams.
And I'm Danny Gould.
And we're the host of the Underworld Podcast.
We're journalists that have traveled all over reporting on dangerous people and places.
And every week, we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world.
We know this stuff because we've been there.
We've seen it and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it.
We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it.
The Underworld podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not.
Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality.
where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
We are also all individually on Blue Sky, so you can find our names there.
And you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon dot com slash conspirituality.
If you use Apple podcasts, you can just access our Monday bonus episodes via Apple subscription.
They make that very easy for you to do.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Conspirituality 271, the miseducation of Prager U. The right has waged a war on woke Sesame Street for generations.
When the party passed the 2025 Resisions Act, they were finally able to take a significant field advantage in this battle, one which Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus never wanted to be in.
That bill stripped $1.1 billion.
from the corporation for public broadcasting, greatly damaging NPR, PBS, and mostly their member stations.
The CPB announced it will have to close in January 2026.
What will take its place?
Well, the right has a plan for that too, or so Vox speculates.
Prager U. Founded in 2009 as a right-wing alternative to reality, the sprawling, well-funded network teaches kids to hate DEI, love paying taxes, and recognize that the Bible offers the only salvation on this planet.
Could it replace Sesame Street, however?
Well, it's already in use in numerous classrooms, and the right wants it in all of them.
What has happened to American schools and children's entertainment?
Woke agendas are infiltrating classrooms, culture, and social media.
Is there anywhere that's still safe for our children?
Yes, it's called PragerU Kids.
So Reeds, the PragerU landing page that hosts the videos for their kids section, also available for streaming directly to your TV.
This particular endeavor started in 2021, but it's part of the much larger and longer-lived Prager operation.
So let's start there before we zoom in.
Positioned as an alternative to woke educational indoctrination, PragerU has no campus, employs no professors, and offers no courses or diplomas.
It's an online propaganda platform built around a YouTube channel.
It also registers as a 501C3 nonprofit advocacy group.
Though the channel itself shows 3.3 million subscribers and around 2.3 billion views, in 2022, they claim to have had 7 billion lifetime views across various platforms.
As we'll get into later, 84 million of those views have come in just four years via their PragerU Kids YouTube channel.
Originally founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, who's been on the radio since 1982, and screenwriter Alan Estrin, seed money for PragerU came from the billionaire Wilkes brothers, who made their fortune as fracking pioneers.
Now, the Wilkes' father, as it turns out, is also the founder of an ultra-conservative Jews for Jesus-style church called the Assemblies of Yahweh, which keeps the Jewish Sabbath, but believes Christ to be the Savior and Son of God, while also rejecting Trinitarianism.
The Assemblies of Yahweh preaches that abortion and homosexuality are not only sins, but should be criminalized and punished by law.
By the way, the Wilkes brothers also funded Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire.
Other Prager U funders include Sheldon Addison, the National Christian Foundation, the DeVos Family Foundation, and Home Depot founder, Bernard Marcus.
Prager is very at home with this group, we should add.
He was born in Brooklyn, and he's an early case of a disaffected liberal who made a right turn in the Reagan era.
There seems to be a lot of them, especially, I would imagine, people who made money and liked Reagan's tax incentives.
Prager said that accepting homosexuality is a sign of the decline of Western civilization.
He wants conservative Jews and Christians to unite to push back against the existential danger of secularism.
And more recently, he called COVID-19 measures the greatest mistake in the history of humanity while comparing the struggle of unvaccinated individuals to the stigma that gay men face during the AIDS era.
So some really scrambled empathy there, right?
Exactly, exactly.
I hate gay people.
They are the mark of Satan, but they face a lot of stigma.
Yeah, and if we can steal their victimhood, we will.
Prager is also on record claiming that campus hate crimes against black students are hoaxes that are perpetuated by the black students who just want attention.
All of this and more appears in Prager U's content, including that children's channel that you referenced, Julian.
And as I'll cover in the second segment today, it goes far beyond all of what I just expressed.
Meanwhile, Prager has made the most of his estimated $12 to $20 million net worth by selling books on religion.
I'm sure they hold up very well on ethics and on politics.
And you flagged his show that started in 1982.
It is a long-running nationally syndicated show called the Dennis Prager Show.
He comes off to me a little bit.
We're going to hear some clips, but he's sort of like a more even keel intellectual sounding Rush Limbaugh because he dates from that era, doesn't he?
Are you saying that Rush Limbaugh is an intellectual?
Yeah, I am.
Yeah, he is a bit more measured and he does have some of that sort of pretense toward a theologian and a sort of philosopher where Limbaugh is just kind of doing bombastics, right?
He seems also affect-wise to hide the aggression a little bit better.
Yeah, no, I think that's a good observation.
So PragerU initially produced After about three years of that and 60 million views, they started gradually varying their content, all of which they describe as promoting Judeo-Christian values.
It's been criticized, though, by historians and political scientists for misleading and false statements about climate science, COVID, vaccines, racism, slavery, immigration, and fashion, so all the good ones.
Climate scientists and journalists have pointed out their frequent misleading claims on that topic, and gay and trans advocacy groups have flagged their discriminatory stances.
Mother Jones reported in 2018 that each video costs between $25,000 and $30,000 to produce and that all the scripts were personally edited and approved by Prager himself.
Now, Matthew, if you look at their YouTube, you might be glad to know that their most viewed video, at 27 million, helps viewers understand the difference between liberals and leftists.
So perhaps that's one saving grace, a public service of sorts.
Well, I watched it, and Dennis himself is a presenter.
I don't think he actually does a bad job of outlining like reformism versus revolutionary positions, although he strawmans the latter as like terminally hateful or self-hating or anti-American.
So John Brown wants to have a word.
But his main point is that liberals should view leftists as their political enemies, not conservatives.
So basically he's cheering us on, guys, whenever the three of us fight.
Yeah, he loves that.
But I would say as a progressive, I strongly disavow his binary construction there.
Now, second in the list of video views is one that tells immigrants not to support.
what they've fled, which presumably is communism.
And then the third is a video that criticizes progressive income tax, because, you know, every college student is obsessed with that topic.
Despite not really being a university of any kind as we've established, PragerU developed a school partnership program in 2015 that provides secondary school and college teachers with lesson plans that accompany their videos.
And then in 2023, they became an official education vendor to the Florida education system, which means their content is featured within lesson plans as part of revision civics and government standards.
Since then, New Hampshire, Montana, Oklahoma, Arizona, South Carolina, Idaho, and Louisiana have followed suit.
The Prager U website also has a kids section with categories that serve videos to kids from kindergarten through sixth grade on a cheery blend of patriotism, free enterprise, Bible stories, history, and civics.
And then at the White House this past June, Linda McMahon's Education Department announced a partnership with Prager U on something called the Founders Museum.
And this is a virtual exhibit celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which features AI-generated videos of the people from the Revolutionary War coming to life to give us a little chat.
And one of these AI videos features John Adams uttering modern-day Ben Shapiro's infamous catchphrase, facts don't care about your feelings.
So I see a transition here with Prager U from the old media of talk radio into a YouTube channel, and they were early adopters, so kudos on that foresight, funded by religious extremists.
that positions itself as both educational and engaging to young people and serves them viral political propaganda which distorts facts and science to fit their agenda and then finds their way into the educational system.
They also now run six podcasts.
PragerU has also been very algorithmically savvy in a way that researcher Francesca Tripodi, who we've interviewed before on the show, says allows people who identify as mainland conservatives to dabble in alt-right and white supremacist ideas within the ecosystem created by the suggested content recommendations.
I'm really...
I don't know if that's the right word because they've done it in open sight.
But for generations now, the right has attacked public schooling in order often to funnel taxpayer money into private schooling, which, you know, Mother Jones has reported on that extensively.
But they shit on public schooling all the time while at the same time trying to feed all of their educational content into public school curricula.
That's been the sleight of hand.
And as we're seeing now going over it, you know, we're going to soon go over some of the actual content.
They've been extremely successful at this game.
When you say sleight of hand, though, Derek, are you saying that, like, isn't it a double-pronged, you know, sort of effort that, you know, we're going to try to privatize on one side, but then if there's anything left of the public school system, they're going to be like watching Prager U all day long.
They make it seem like a sleight of hand, but what they're actually doing is what you just identified.
That's better put that way.
Yeah, I got you.
Okay, so Derek, as the non-parent on staff, you've bravely volunteered to survey PragerU's educational kids content.
And we'll get into that in the next segment.
Well, we're also glad that he volunteered because I think both of us would be like— Well, it's going to get there in the next segment.
Okay.
If you're obsessed with true crime, cults, or conspiracy theories, I've got the perfect show for you.
Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a new weekly podcast from Crimehouse and Pave Studios that dives into the darkest corners of human behavior.
Every Wednesday, we uncover the true stories behind the world's most shocking crimes, deadly ideologies, and secret plots.
From mass suicides and political assassinations to secret government experiments and UFO cults, you'll hear about infamous cases like Jonestown and JFK, as well as hidden horrors like the Octopus Murders and Starvation Heights.
But remember, these aren't just stories.
These are real people, real events, and very real consequences.
So if you love mystery, madness, and diving deep into the world's most unbelievable true stories, you won't want to miss this.
Follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes now, wherever you get your podcasts.
And for ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Feeling overwhelmed or stressed?
Take a deep breath and join me on the I Can Relax podcast.
Whether you're new to mindfulness or looking to deepen your practice, each episode is designed to help you slow down, calm your mind, and be fully present, even if you've never tried mindfulness before.
With simple guided exercises, soothing nature visualizations, and relaxing stories, I Can't Relax makes mindfulness easy and accessible for anyone who wants to reduce stress and find peace.
Subscribe to I Can't Relax wherever you get your podcasts and start your journey to a calmer mind today.
Hey, do you have trouble sleeping?
Then maybe you should check out the Sleepy Podcast.
It's a show where I read old books in the public domain to help you get to sleep.
It was the best of times.
It was the worst of times.
It was the age of classic stories like A Tale of Two Cities, Pride and Prejudice, Winnie the Pooh.
Stories that are great for adults and kids alike.
For years now, Sleepy has helped millions of people catch some much-needed Z's, start their next day off fresh, and discover old books that they didn't know they loved.
So, whether you have a tough time snoozing or you just like a good bedtime story, fluff up the cool side of your pillow and tune into Sleepy.
Unless you're driving, then please don't listen to Sleepy.
Find Sleepy on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes each week.
Sweet dreams.
Sweet dreams.
Okay, kids content, sure, Julian, but there's a shit ton more content.
So we're going to kind of speed run through four different clips, or five actually.
I put in a bonus one just for Matthew here.
Prager U has 15 main ongoing shows, and these include Real Talk with Marissa Straight, which I covered on Monday's bonus and whose host Melissa recently sat down with Victor Orban to discuss how great Hungary really is.
She is also PragerU's CEO, so she's very visible throughout the channel.
There's Ami on the Loose where Ami Horowitz goes into the absolute chaos and anarchy in my adopted city of Portland, Oregon.
More recently, he wondered if anti-ice protesters are really that peaceful.
There's also history channel level shows like American Presidents, which are just basically puff pieces that skim over a whole lot of history.
They offer 32 additional playlists throughout their channels.
Some of the topics include why capitalism beats socialism every time, why socialism never works, and my favorite, which is health care is not a right.
There's also family favorites like, are you there, God?
The Ten Commandments and understanding the Torah.
Don't worry, they do round out the three main Abrahamic religions with their playlist, the dangers of radical Islam.
Yeah, that's great.
Rounding out their main offerings, they have five Prager U kids shows like animated.
Bible stories for kids, Cash Course, Financial Literacy for Teens and Young Adults, and they have four podcasts, including Fireside Chat with Dennis Prager.
One thing I want to point out that's important given that I reviewed dozens of videos preparing for this.
PragerU has an agenda, but they're very smart in how they approach it.
They are fundamentalist Christian.
They are pro-Israel, anti-Islam at every turn.
They are conservative and trumpian.
They are deregulatory and pro-regonomics, but they hire a diverse range of hosts and they use animated videos of very diverse characters.
You know, all the shit that the right has said that sitcom TV shouldn't be doing, they very much do.
They might be anti-DEI, but they're making sure to include equal numbers of women, black people, and Latinos.
Anybody in a hijab, Derek, that you saw?
They are only there if they're willing to be pro-Israel.
So they look for Muslims who have turned against Islam and are now fans of Israel.
That is the only people I've seen.
So no, they're not actually we wearing hijabs.
Yeah, I mean, just glancing over the web pages, I would say black folks are overrepresented in all of their branding.
There's a lot of tokenism going on.
And ironically, it seems like they've deliberately adopted these corporate, multicultural style optics as well as a PBS Kids style, and I'm familiar with this because my child is still quite young, of graphics to try to sort of normalize and have that sort of fun, bright colors and, you know, really cool graphics, which normalizes their overtly conservative and at times straight up racist content.
They really do just rip off the aesthetics of what exists right now and then replace it with their messaging.
So that is the macrocosm.
Let's listen to a few clips.
I want to play them with this thought in mind.
There's a possibility that Prager U is going to be integrated into the Trump administration as a form of state media.
Right.
That's what, that's what Vox speculates.
That's kind of the mindset that we're approaching this.
And I mean, really, it's already serving that function.
But this could be material passed off as educational on a national government endorsed level very soon.
What's the, what's the threshold there that they actually receive federal funding?
Like because.
like because it's pretty clearly being fronted by a whole bunch of government actors and it's making its way into a kind of, you know, functional national curriculum.
But what's like, what would, what would actually define it as state media?
Well, exactly, being funded specifically would, but also being written into state curricula, which we know it's being played in schools.
I don't know if any state has specifically said, like Texas, this is the curricula.
And we know from the textbook industry, right, that Texas sets the stage for the rest of the country.
So if they were to come out and be like, okay, every public classroom needs to play these videos, I would argue that that would be state media as well.
Right.
Yeah, essentially it's the journey into being institutionalized, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
I also want to point out that we could do a year's worth of episodes on their programming.
So deciding which clips to choose was difficult in terms of not choosing other options, but quite easy because they give us so much to work with.
As I flag, PragerU has gone hard at ICE protesters over the last few months, but I find this clip we're about to play rather funny, not in a ha-ha way really though.
They publish weekly news updates where they gloss over four or five studio stories in one video.
Here they play a clip from Melissa Strait's interview with Tyler O'Neill, who they only flag as a journalist, but who's actually a senior editor at the right-wing The Daily Signal, which was founded and run for a decade by the Heritage Foundation.
but which supposedly became independent in 2024.
O'Neill's books include Making Hate Pay, The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he regularly writes about gender ideology, critical race theory, and climate alarmism.
Here they're talking about the LA ICE riots being organized by CHERLA, which is the Coalition for Humane Immigration.ant rights of Los Angeles can't have anything humane around immigrants.
So let's see how well their journalism holds up.
Churla is the nonprofit organization that organized the anti ICE riots in Los Angeles.
Is it true that Churla received government funding both from the federal and from the state?
So we are paying for an anti ICE riot.
It's not 100 percent proven that they orchestrated the protests.
They've been on the ground organizing protests against ICE for a while.
And now that these protests are getting violent, they're saying we didn't organize this protest.
Meanwhile, I've been talking with sources in the government who are saying like, well, they won't come out and say to me specifically that they have concrete proof that this group organized it.
But they know the people on the ground who are doing these things.
And they're like, well, this claim doesn't pass muster.
wink we know what's really going on so he's framing the ice protests which we know were predominantly mostly non-violent and just putting forward these vibes-based accusations.
While he repeatedly says we don't have proof of this, I also want to note that Charlotte does receive most of its funding from government grants.
That does not specifically mean that government is funding protests.
That is not how grants work.
The nonprofit system is meant where you apply for them, you get the grants, and then the government is supposed to play a hands-off role.
There are stipulations like if churches were to endorse political candidates, although the Trump administration is trying to do away with that.
But for the most part, every organization that gets a grant from the government pretty much has the gravity to do whatever they want, provided it's within the boundaries of what their stated, what their contract says.
And in this case, they are fighting for immigrant rights, which is well within the bounds of what they say they're doing.
Yeah, I've got their mission statement here.
They say Churla's mission is to achieve a just society fully inclusive of immigrants.
Churla was founded in 86 to advance the human and civil rights of immigrants and refugees.
Churla became a place for organizations and people who support human rights to work together for policies that advance justice and full inclusion for all immigrants.
Churla's first director was Father Luis Olivares, the pastor at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, is a leading voice of the sanctuary movement.
Olivares used his church to protect refugees fleeing human rights abuses in Central America in the 1980s.
Yeah, it's an interesting moral question too, because you get the grants from one government and then the government becomes an anti-government and they start attacking actually the system under which you were funded, right?
You applied to be able to protect immigrants from state violence.
And here's state violence.
And so, you know, sure, they're probably going to lose their grants and that's what obviously the straight interview is trying to do but yeah why wouldn't they organize protections against illegal renditions like what choice do they have also you know somebody's going to have to prove or maybe they won't because proof isn't really a thing anymore that they actually incited violence in response to state repression i mean i don't know maybe they directly encouraged some of those aunties to come out in their shower shoes and
like yell really loud in their pajamas when they were getting off of their fucking night shift yeah and and showing up because they had the de-ICER app on their phone and they figured out hey if we go in and yell, maybe something will happen.
Maybe we can de-arrest some people.
Yeah, I mean, it's a total inversion of where the outrage should be because these are people who are being brutalized and are just trying to fight back out of just the raw instinct of like, you're taking my family member or my community member away in front of my face.
In front of my face in a mask brutally with no warrant and not telling us who the hell you are.
Oh, and then this is your taxpayer money going towards illegal rioting or something.
Yeah.
Well, let's listen to one of their kids shows called Cash Course.
This one is titled Redistribution.
Does it work?
Here's the description of the video, which you might have guessed at from the title.
Life isn't equal, and neither are incomes.
But is government redistribution the solution?
In this episode of Cash Course, teens dive into the economics of fairness with playful illustrations that show what happens when the government tries to spread wealth around.
Learn how such policies affect incentives, the free market, and why redistribution often comes at a steep cost.
All right, let's hear it.
I clipped the three reasons why the host isn't into taxing wealthier citizens to help social services like food stamp programs and health care.
Unfortunately, government redistribution comes at a high cost and it rarely changes the distribution of income in any lasting way.
Unlike the fast-moving market where buyers and sellers deal directly with each other, transfer payments require going through a third party, usually the government.
And the government tends to be slower, more wasteful, and less efficient.
Yeah, I'll get right on that.
The real downside, however, is that redistribution disincentivizes work.
If people know they'll receive money regardless of how hard they work, or even if they don't work at all, they won't be motivated to improve or be more productive.
And with no extra rewards for hard work, fewer people will put in the time and effort to be surgeons, singers, or mathematicians in the first place.
History also shows that raising taxes for redistribution programs risks wealthy individuals taking their productive capital elsewhere.
If enough of them leave, an economy could suffer, losing important resources for everyone and leaving even less wealth to distribute.
Finally, many people think it's plain unfair of governments to take money from one group and give it to another.
Just as income inequality can lead to social unrest, heavy redistribution policies can trigger envy, division, and even, well, social unrest.
We didn't see the video here, but Derek, I'm assuming that the snores were coming from lazy layabouts who were getting government handouts and they weren't working.
They're just snoring.
They're on the couch.
There are many characters in this.
They have a woman and a man.
You heard the civil servant saying, yeah, I'll get right on that.
And then they have animations coming throughout.
It's, again, it's a very produced kids-type program.
And it's a mess.
What a mess.
That music, like the whole, the attempt to, like, shove through this propaganda in oversimplified language while using that music, which is like, I don't know what, supposed to be lighthearted or to represent the kind of farce of government or something like that.
Well, it's, I don't know what the genre is, but it's kind of like the lounge jazz of many animated segments in Sesame Street.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, like it's that Rhodes piano, it's the, or the organ or whatever.
And B3.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
And, yeah, it's, it's jazzy and it's moving along and it's telling you this is, if you're a kid, this is trustworthy information because, you know, it's not, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's.
hip.
And we're kind of enjoying sharing this with you in a very fast-paced fashion.
And that's the thing is that with Sesame Street, things can be delivered in very short segments because it's like, what's the difference between near and far?
Like basically you'll hear that soundtrack, that music behind the, I don't know who the nutty Muppet is who's going, you know, near, and then far.
But the concepts are boiled down as if they are that simple, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And that's why I say it's a mess, because in that kind of context, there's an educational thing going on where your brain is like learning about these sorts of factual distinctions and ideas that are age appropriate.
To try to use that to shoehorn this kind of ridiculous propaganda in an indoctrinating way, it's just...
Well, it makes propaganda age appropriate is what it does, right?
That's the attempt.
And the thing is, is that, I mean, I don't think we have to say that they're just evidence-free here.
I mean, the basic evidence that we have from a lot of UBI pilot projects around the world actually shows the opposite of disincentivization, which is part of their main point.
They're talking about speed and like market fluidity beforehand, but they really concentrate on, you know, people won't want to work.
And that's not what shows up when pilot projects in UBI are used in Finland, in Kenya, in India, Iran, Netherlands, Germany.
Also, I didn't know until I looked a little bit farther that Alaska redistributes oil revenue, and that has not disincentivized anybody from pursuing their dreams in Alaska.
What does disincentivize people is actually actual poverty.
That disincentivizes people from, you know, participating in society, you know, exercising democratic rights and, you know, trying to make a life for themselves.
It's pretty demoralizing.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like also they're going to lump a whole lot of things into redistribution, like just having the kind of strong social safety net that every other liberal democracy on the planet has, but America refuses to adopt.
You know, just one thing here.
I went and looked at the YouTube PragerU Kids channel, and the most viewed video is clearly like created for kids with this very hip sort of guy who walks into the shot, and he has this whole monologue where he says, have you ever felt that something was unfair?
It doesn't feel good, does it?
like someone said you did something and you really didn't do it and you get punished for it and he goes into this whole thing where he's kind of drawing the kids in like they know what it feels like to be unfair and then he goes well here's the thing nobody cares Nobody cares.
You should get over it.
You should stop expecting the world to be fair.
It was like really chilling to me how they did this kind of gradual self-sufficiency and don't rely on anybody else and don't expect the world to be fair.
And, you know, just like basically develop a thick skin kid.
But to do that in an inviting and sort of that that's that that's a cool way to be.
Yeah, I will.
I will teach you how to be sort of borderline sociopathically unempathetic.
And that's going to be fun.
And actually, here's the Hammond organ in the background, too.
I want to point out what you said, Matthew, if you ever want to really gauge the state of electoral politics in Alaska, go watch interviews with people when they suggest taking away that oil revenue tax break that they that they get every year.
And you'll you'll quickly find that no politician can talk.
touch that you know i didn't realize that was there do you know how long that's been running for i mean it's i think decades yeah right so it'ss deeply embedded in society.
That's like, yes.
Yeah.
If you're in Alaska, that's your entitlement.
And it's very interesting that they frame the idea of just having...
Right, yeah.
When all people like Bernie Sanders have been saying or Elizabeth Warren have been saying is just tax them at a rate that's applicable to the rest of, you know, on par with the rest of society.
That's it.
No, no, you're stealing from them.
Julian, to your point a moment ago about that sort of self-reflection, the next video, I think, is really going to nail it.
called Multiculturalism, a Bad Idea.
And I've clipped a few moments from it and strung them together.
You'll get the idea.
You're going to know the voice very quickly.
Bad ideas never seem to die.
Multiculturalism is one of them.
And what, after all, is the problem with a society made up of different people all coming together to pull in the same direction?
The answer is nothing.
But that's not what multiculturalism means.
It's not at all about pulling in the same direction.
Multiculturalism is about people coming to the West and forming their own communities with their own rules and and practices In the eyes of multiculturalists, e pluribus unum, out of many one, the great goal of America, and until now the great achievement of America, is just another form of colonialism.
It imposes American and Western values on the non western immigrants who come here.
Immigrants therefore need to cling to the cultures of the countries from which they came and stay separate.
The only way multi ethnic societies can work is if we all play by the same rules and live by the same basic moral values.
People like me who come from other places must be encouraged to assimilate.
Immigrants must learn the language, adapt to local customs, and become full citizens with both rights and responsibilities.
The onus should be on the immigrant, not the host country.
At my doctor's office in East London, I regularly encounter paperwork that's been translated into a dozen languages.
It's not what assimilation looks like.
Wow.
Oh, don't give people help as they are actually making the transition.
When did he arrive in East London?
He's Russian, right, Kisson?
Yes.
All right, so did he grow up in London?
As a child, as a child.
He talks about it later in the video about how when he was a child, he was of speaking age.
I don't know, maybe eight, 10, something around that age.
And he arrives there and he wanted to speak with his Russian friends in Russian.
And his parents yelled at him and said, you have to learn this language.
We are now British.
You have to accept that.
So he's using his anecdote to apply to all immigrants at that point.
It's incredible that he has lived in London for so long and he evidently hates it, right?
Somehow.
Well, he hates that London is no longer recognizably British.
that's that ship sailed a long time ago konstantin i mean it's like The 1960s.
Very, very strange view.
And he just sounds like a Borg here.
Like multiculturalism is irrelevant.
Accommodating immigrant needs is irrelevant.
His brand is hatred disguised as intellectualism.
I mean, that's what he's built it up as.
And he is a smart dude, but like when it gets to ethnic issues and trans issues, I should say, because his Oxford Union speech, he just, for no reason, took digs at trans people.
So that is his brand.
He realized that that contrarian podcast space is where he makes his bread and butter now.
Yeah, and he says a lot of things where you're sort of like, but wait, how would that work?
Are you going to force people to assimilate and adopt the local customs and speak the language?
Is there going to be some penalty if they're not becoming English enough for you?
Well, I think unless you're saying I'm going to devote X amount of resources to welcoming, you know, educationally and administratively the immigrant population.
What you're really saying is the fact that you haven't changed enough is hateful to me, right?
Yeah, and we all have to be operating from the same moral values.
Like, I'm not really sure.
Yeah, right.
As if we don't have laws, as if we don't actually have laws.
Exactly.
Exactly.
People are, they're subject to the laws of the country they're in.
So what are you talking about?
Yeah.
Right.
My great grandmother came from Hungary, never spoke a word of English in her entire life.
All of her children, some of whom were born in America, did.
And they were able to, because New Brunswick at the time had the largest Hungarian population in the world outside of Hungary, there was a, and there still is, there's a strong Hungarian community there where people speak that very hard language.
And she was able to survive, but had four children who then started to assimilate, which is how the process goes.
and so when someone like his and flattens it and just basically says okay if you're not going to learn get the fuck out it's it's it's it's it's humiliating to the people who, as you flag Matthew, are trying to figure it out in a new land for whatever reasons they came here for.
It's dehumanizing to the people like your grandparent who didn't have to because, well, I mean, it might have had some advantages if they had been able to do that more fluidly, but they were also surrounded by a community that was flourishing.
right?
What was the need?
They were able, they were functional, they were able to pay taxes, they were able to, you know, communicate with their society, you know, what's the deal?
Yeah.
And then this is the process of immigration as I've observed it, is that it just seems like with each generation, you have more of a, of a code switching that happens, right?
The second generation immigrant kids are going to be able to speak their language and observe their customs and interact with their, with their parents and their grandparents who may be come over as well.
and sort of tell teach them about the local culture.
And then when they go to school, they sound like they're from the region and they understand the slang and they're involved in that way of being.
It's the it's a sort of normal process.
Let's do one more.
I posted this on our Instagram feed last week, but it's just too good not to share here in case you're not following us on social media for some reason.
It's also from one of Prager U's kids shows and it features an animated Christopher Columbus.
Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world, even among the people I just left.
Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?
Before you judge, you must ask yourself, what did the culture and society of the time treat as no big deal?
Oh my God, it's just so incredible.
The music, the appeal to ancient authority, the normalization of slavery is no big deal.
I know it's a kids show, but the same week that I posted that clip, and we'll get to our bonus clip now.
Now, Jillian Michaels, who Jillian, you and I are going to cover next week extensively for the biggest loser documentary series, she went on CNN for a roundtable to discuss the Smithsonian Museum and the changes that are happening or the supposed racism that is there.
She's referencing Trump in this clip.
Let's listen to her argument.
It's not from Prague or you to be clear, but I feel like she might be trying out to be a host on the network.
Have you looked at some of the things you've been talking about slavery?
Yeah, slavery was a bad thing that we should talk about.
Okay.
Like he forgets slavery.
He's not whitewashing slavery.
So he's not.
He's not.
No.
Okay.
He's not.
And you can't tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.
But let's talk about the fact that when you know what type of slavery is, let's talk about the fact that slavery in America was a system of slavery.
Do you know that only less than two percent of white Americans own slaves?
But it was a system of white racism.
Do you know that slavery is thousands of years old?
White people were slaves.
In America, most races today.
And they're racist.
And they're racist.
Well, it's contradictory.
I'm very surprised.
It was an extraordinary exercise in historical racism.
I'm really struggling with racism.
Do you realize, Jillian, I'm surprised that you're trying to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery and who was the ruler?
I'm not.
What I'm trying to tell you is in the context of American history, in the context of American history, what are you saying is incorrect by saying that you can't have white people oppressing black people?
Every single thing is like, oh, no, no, no, this is all because white people bad.
And that's just not the truth.
It's amazing because she's referencing some historically true things about the ubiquity of slavery and the sort of cross cultural reality of slavery across history, but she's using it as a way to try to minimize the reality of the transatlantic slave trade and what happened in the United States to black people right which is just appalling well i think it's a position that she needs to take and those in her camp need to take to shut down any contemporary conversation about
structural or collective responsibility, especially reparations, which is looming in many discourses.
And I think they need to say it because, well, I think they need to say it was both universally accepted or no big deal.
That's the Columbus cartoon, but also limited in practice to a small number of psychopaths who are long dead and whose actions don't impact anyone anymore.
They need to forget that the original economic power of the country was built on that slave labor.
labor.
If they don't keep that in mind, if that's not sort of like, if they can erase that, then they're in the clear with regard to contemporary responsibilities.
And they need to battle DEI at every turn because of that, because they either don't realize or they're not willing to admit there's a difference between being someone who is white and not feeling guilty, but trying to make the best out of society today, which is probably a lot of white people, and understanding the structural, the infrastructure, literal infrastructure that's been created because of that slave labor.
and still perpetuates itself to today, which is why no one in Maha talks about the social determinants of health, because you have to face that.
So rather than actually.
attack it and start to understand those longstanding problems, much easier to make it seem like, oh, you're just saying white people are bad when that's never really been the argument.
Yeah.
And then this whole bullshit about just 2% of the white population owned slaves.
You can go, in fact, like this, once you correct the data by removing the 18 states that did not have slavery, and then once you subtract the actual slaves from the total population that you're basing that percentage on, you end up with a higher percentage.
It's probably more like something six or seven or eight percent of whites in those states who own slaves themselves.
And then when you look at the 1860 census, you find that it's actually over 30 percent of families in the Confederacy, right?
Because yeah, so, so, right.
So while, you know, women and children would not technically own slaves, they would inherit them as property or they would inherit the fruits of their labor or, yeah, the family's benefit.
Yeah, the family is living with slaves serving them in a multitude of different ways that enrich them over time so you get a much more relevant picture.
It's also this deceptive use of statistics anyway because no matter the number of whites who technically owned slaves, the important number is that there were around 4 million enslaved blacks in the United States in 1860 and we'll have stuff in the show notes about that.
Have you ever wondered why we call French fries French fries?
Or why something is the greatest thing since sliced bread?
There are answers to those questions.
Everything Everywhere Daily is a podcast for curious people who want to learn more about the world around them.
Every day you'll lear learn something new about things you never knew you didn't know.
Subjects include history, science, geography, mathematics, and culture.
If you're a curious person and want to learn more about the world you live in, just subscribe to Everything Everywhere Daily wherever you cast your pod.
Overwhelmed by investing?
If you're anything like us, the hardest part is getting started.
That's why we created the Investing for Beginners podcast.
Our goal is to help simplify money so it can work for you.
We invite guests to demystify investing.
At least try to be setting aside like the minimum 10% into the 401k.
I'll teach you the basics of of the market.
Yeah, I think compound interest should be at the start of any discussion about investing.
We've had investment professionals who teach in a simple way.
A valuation driven bear market.
You know, we haven't really seen yet.
And I think everyone's thinking about it, but we haven't really seen yet.
Our QA episodes feature questions from listeners just like you.
So what do you think about the situation with ATBI, which is Activision?
I'm Dave Ahern.
And I'm Andrew Sather.
And we hope you join us on the Investing for Beginners podcast.
On the Investing for Beginners podcast.
So in the background of this entire episode, I think we can hear the ruffling of the feathers of Big Bird.
And so I want to do some reflections on what Prager U Kids is replacing.
And I want to start back on Thanksgiving Day, 1983.
Sesame Street aired Farewell Mr. Hooper to help the 10 million kids who watch the show reflect on the death of the old general store shopkeeper played by a guy named Will Lee.
Lee had died the previous December of a heart attack at the age of 74 and had filmed a backlog of episodes.
So the show didn't have to reckon with his absence on set right away, they had time to debate and consult with child psychologists about the best approach because the one thing they knew that they wanted to be was honest.
They weren't going to ignore the death.
They weren't going to try to recast Mr. Hooper, who was irreplaceable.
And so they had to do what the best adults always do, which is they had to engage with honesty and vulnerability.
The lead writer, Norman Stiles, recalls that the team was advised that the things children between three and five need to know about death is that it's permanent, that every emotion it brings up is okay, and that all the ancient questions about what happens to a person after death could be answered honestly, as in they live on inside those who love them.
And so listener, I want you to put a pin in those lessons because I'm going to argue that they are intolerable to the fearful, controlling, fascist mind.
And I think they're also lessons that we can relearn now as so many things die around us.
So the team decided to lead Big Bird through this moment because he's the proxy child of the show.
And the guy who played Big Bird, Carol Spinney, had created that idea early on after the first few episodes didn't feel quite right.
He played Big Bird as kind of like a gawky, awkward, goofy character.
And then he went to the director and he said, I think we should play this bird like he's five years old and like he's learning along with the viewers.
And that began the sort of technique of Big Bird constantly breaking the fourth wall and sort of inviting the viewer into whatever scene was being played out.
And so early in this Thanksgiving Day episode, Big Bird is doing a funny five-year-old walk.
He's walking backwards.
He's got his head down between his orange legs.
he's peering up between his legs at gordon who asks him why are you walking like that and big bird's answer is just because which is a pretty typical five-year-old answer.
Then later, the whole cast is seated at a long table in the street, kind of like Thanksgiving.
And Big Bird enters cheerfully with some cartoony portraits he's made of everyone as presents because he kind of wants to join the adults.
And they get to Mr. Hooper and he shows his picture and everyone praises it.
And Big Bird says, well, I can't wait to give it to him.
And then silence falls.
And then one by one, Louise, Maria, Susan, David, and Bob all tell Big Bird that the old man has died.
And then they hold the emotions over the next five, six minutes.
It's a long scene that Big Bird goes through and then it ends with this.
He's never coming back?
Never?
No.
I don't understand.
You know, everything was just fine.
Why does it have to be this way?
Give me one good reason.
Big Bird, it has to be this way.
Because.
Just because?
Just because.
You know, I'm going to miss you, Mr. Looper.
That's Hooper, big bird.
Hooper.
Maybe the psychologist also said that if you can pull an answer from the child's own vocabulary or reasoning out at that moment, that's really good too, because that's what Gordon does.
I don't think there's a more perfect moment in children's media, maybe television ever.
And every piece of insight and care that made that happen.
So the development time, the appeal to psychological expertise, the tenderness, the fact that six out of seven cast members on that stage comforting the awkward child are black and brown, and then the patience with the subject matter and the child viewer, all of it is anathema to right-wing politics based in anxiety and resentment and which simmers towards fascism.
Yeah, it also manages to gently sidestep any religious metaphysics that would sort of occlude the feelings of what's really going on.
Yeah, and that's why I thought I would find blowback to this.
And I combed the world to find it from the right, specifically on that point, like, oh, they've given us an atheist answer.
And the blowback isn't there.
Yeah.
Because maybe that's how good it was.
Maybe it was one of those rare events that transcended politics.
I would argue, though, that the children's television workshop couldn't have gotten to that moment without all of the radical and creative thinking that made it inevitable that Trump would ultimately cut that $1.1 billion in federal funds.
So, I think it's hard to overestimate the quality of the programming in general put out by PBS dating back to the late 60s.
So, I mean, Mr. Rogers' neighborhood electric comp Company, Masterpiece Theater, epic documentaries from Ken Burns, investigations from Frontline's Science Exploration with Nova, Bill Moyers, Kenneth Clark's Civilization, McNeil Lair NewsHour, and then the political programming ran the gamut from Buckley's Firing Line, take it or leave it, to Black Journal and Seoul.
Now, full disclosure.
As a leftist, I'm part of a long line of folks who find or found PBS's liberal commitment to balance a little bit too vulnerable to the both sides in view from nowhere, which often intensifies as it fights to retain public funds.
And it will do so usually by capitulating to the GOP or by increasing dependence on corporate sponsorships.
And that's what happened actually in many cases.
This show brought to you by Chevron, Merck, ExxonMobil, IBM, Boeing, and DuPont.
So all that said, however, I would give anything to have it all back because it was a huge social good overall, especially for rural and inner city citizens.
It's hard for me to see the political moment that gave PBS its altruistic thrust as more than a temporary concession, however, from capital during a period of post-war prosperity where there were these ideals of social cohesion and education and inclusive cultural literacy,
all seen as salutary signs of positive governmental potential, and also, frankly, a form of soft power against the Soviets, who we were told had no culture at all.
And maybe it's inevitable that we see this come to a close, that it can't really last for long before neoliberalism puts downward pressure on public spending and the idea that public arts funding is out of touch or, you know, there are advoccates for smaller government pushing for privatization and corporate sponsorships.
And then we have the culture war front where Rush Limbaugh and everybody else is out there every day in the 80s and 90s yelling about our taxes funding the gays and pushing the idea that government can't be trusted to do anything, least of all influence your kids.
So now the hammer has fully come down.
Julian, at the opening, you talked about how, you know, they've been trying to do this for decades.
Well, you know, anybody could have seen this coming.
Going back to 1972, Nixon issued what was called the Archie Bunker veto against a PBS funding bill.
He argued that published...
There were complaints about high salaries at PBS.
There were accusations of a kind of failed social engineering.
There were also, I think, relevant questions of relevance and popularity, given that PBS never captured more than 2% of the overall TV market, except for Sesame Street.
Now, there's this brief reprieve under Carter, whose I think sweaters rhymed with the cardigans in Mr. Rogers' wardrobe.
But then Reagan and Bush carried the torch to burn it down, railing against shows like PBS's Vietnam, a television history, which they denounced as communist propaganda.
And then an organization called Accuracy in Media, which I think we could call a spiritual ancestor to PragerU, was formed in 1969 specifically to counter that propaganda.
And they produced a rebuttal film to the series, and it aired on PBS for balance.
Then comes Newt Gingrich, Family Research Council, and remember Bob Dole?
In 1992, he accused PBS supporters of hiding behind Big Bird, Mr. Rogers, and Masterpiece Theater to shovel out funding for gay and lesbian shows, all these doom and gloom reports about what's wrong with America and all the other liberal cheerleading we see on public television, unquote.
With Clinton and a little bit more so with Obama, there's an attempt to protect and bolster the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS a little bit more against the onslaught through these very modest increases in funding, but the headwinds are very strong because Conservatives, I think, have always known that public broadcasting means public education.
It means inclusivity.
It has to.
It means a potentially radical increase in democracy and equality.
So they had good reason to fear Pete Seager being a repeated guest on Sesame Street.
They weren't wrong that there was a progressive agenda on this show.
They were open.
The producers were open about, yeah, we're setting it in inner city New York.
And we are specifically trying to reach black kids.
They had reason to be a little bit worried about Jesse Jackson with a six-inch fro and this huge MLK Jr. gold medallion swinging from his neck, leading 50 kids in a call-in response.
I don't know if you guys have heard this this, but listen to this.
I am somebody.
I may be poor, but I am somebody.
I may be young, but I am somebody.
I may be on welfare, but I am somebody.
I may be small, but I am somebody.
I may make a mistake, but I am somebody.
My face is different.
My hair is different.
But I am somebody.
I am black.
I am brown.
White.
I speak a different language.
But I must be respected.
Protected.
Never rejected.
I am God's child.
I am somebody.
Give yourself a big hand.
Matthew, you're doing such a good job of like running down all of the conservative opposition and attempts to get rid of this kind of stuff.
And yet it survived decade after decade.
And yet as someone who is not from North America, that is the kind of mutilation, Yeah.
Farewell Mr. Hooper aired in 1983, and that's the same year.
that Donald Trump opened Trump Tower.
And then in 1994, they made fun of him explicitly.
Here's Joe Pesci playing Ronald Grump.
Mr. Grump, we want to talk to you about your plans for Sesame Street.
My plans?
See for yourself.
Out of the ruins of Sesame Street rises the gleaming Tower of Grump.
Where's 123 Sesame Street?
I'm glad you asked that.
It is now a luxurious boutique called If You Have to Ask, You Cannot Afford it.
Mr. Grump, we don't think you really understand what you're destroying.
No.
Mr. Grump, Sesame Street is more valuable than any boutique.
Yeah.
Not according to my figures.
Um, Mr. Grump, um, Elmo knows even a big Grump like you will melt into a muddy puddle when Elmo tells you about our little street.
And Elmo wants to keep his fur just where it is.
There you go.
On Elmo.
Yeah.
Right next to Whoopi.
Oh.
I like that too, Elmo.
Yeah.
I am deeply and profoundly Yes.
disgusted.
Ah.
Is one thing I despise it's cheap sentiment.
Hugs, kitty television, cute furry animals.
What about cute furry monsters?
Are you people still here?
Get packing!
Get packing!
Wow!
Amazing.
Dark prophecy.
So for those of us not yet running from ice in the streets, I think a lot of us are in the position of maybe feeling like Big Bird wondering what happened to Mr. Hooper of the Old Country, who represented, you know, solid eldership in an integrated, sharing neighborhood, where even Oscar the Grouch was loved and taken care of.
of but I want to end by saying I don't think that neighborhood is dead because you know we've got the Mumdani campaign which in many ways I think is also I mean Breaker U is doing it but Mumdani is also grabbing some of the Sesame Street aesthetics and you know they're killing it with millennials and Gen Z I think if they got the rights for sunny days to run on his ads,
he'd also light up a bunch of boomers and Gen Xers as well because I think they would be reminded that, you know, just like 40 years ago.
