Propaganda in the Bunker
I saw Dennis Prager speak to a small college audience in 2016, a few months before his chosen candidate, Donald Trump, won the presidency.
In September 2016 as now, the PragerU founder was deeply concerned with the stupidest bullshit imaginable, moaning that Flag Day was no longer getting its proper due. But, when asked by a conflicted student whether voting for a loathsome figure like Donald Trump was the right thing to do, Prager gestured at a greater evil. “You don’t know how bad what the left has done to America is,” he said. “Otherwise, Donald Trump’s morally ambiguous past would be trivial to you.” Presumably, “what the left has done to America” had something to do with Flag Day.
As a reporter at a small daily paper in south-central Michigan, I often covered events at the nearby college, a right-wing institution whose president was considered for the Trump-era Secretary of Education gig that eventually went to Betsy DeVos. The college takes no federal funds, instead relying on donations from wealthy donors, like Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, who chairs the board.
I grew up in this town before returning as a journalist. I grew up seeing the college as just “the college.” I attended the college’s preschool, used the college’s library and, in high school, posed for goofy pictures on the lap of the college’s Margaret Thatcher statue. The presence of Thatcher didn’t seem ideological to me, at the time. I had no understanding of who Thatcher was, beyond the brief description on the plaque (if I had bothered to read it). The school is lousy with statues of important historical figures and Thatcher, who I was, at best, hazily familiar with, fit right in next Washington and Jefferson and Churchill.
During my time covering events at the college, I saw a who’s who of right-wing figures speak. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the commencement address a few months before I joined the newspaper and Vice President Mike Pence delivered the 2018 commencement address a few months before I left. I saw Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage somewhere in the middle. In the midst of these high profile shitheads, Prager seemed relatively unimportant — a well-known radio host with awful politics whose fame was relegated to certain conservative circles; a lesser known Rush Limbaugh in professorial glasses and a tweed jacket.
But, in the time since, Prager’s influence has only grown, thanks to the popularity of PragerU, a media company that uses its website, YouTube channel and significant social media presence to spread propagandist content mimicking the presentational style of educational videos. The message is that leftists are ruining the United States, that racism does not exist and that capitalism is the cure for society’s woes. As I began to write this, the most recent tweet on PragerU’s Twitter account was an article in which Prager argued that Twitter’s January purge of Nazi and alt-right accounts, including the Donald Trump’s, was comparable to the atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany. As I edit it a few months later, recent tweets argue that “An Identity Based on Race is Racist.” Par for the course.
This is PragerU’s house style: winsome presentation; batshit content. Umurangi Generation, a first-person indie game about being a photographer at the end of the world, perfectly reproduces and skewers this kind of content in its recent Macro DLC. In Macro, civilization is on its last legs. After years of war between monstrous kaiju and humanity’s mechs, much of the human race has moved underground. In the third level, “The Depths,” we find that The Rats, a militant resistance group, has taken up residence in a sewer, camping out in stolen UN tents. In Gamers Palace, the nightclub/arcade that serves as the expansion’s opening level, a vast, bright subterranean city is visible through the bit of glass floor that projects out at one end of the club. This is where the wealthy come to dance, and use VR, and stare blankly at tiny projections of e-girls on their tabletop. Take the stairs out of Gamers Palace, though, and you’ll find a small enclosed area. Your tired friends sit wearily on benches as sirens wail. The club beats drown out the noise, but out here, closer to the surface, you can’t forget that the world is ending.
But, if Umurangi Generation’s PragerU equivalent, Liberty Inc., is to be believed, the end of the world isn’t all that bad. In Gamers Palace, side by side with the escapist VR, videos of smug propagandists play, each arguing that the end of the world as we know it isn’t the end of the world as we know it.
“Do you own things? If so, your way of life isn’t actually that bad,” says a smarmy man, against a dark teal background. “Next time someone says something you don’t like, sit down with them and discuss IDEAS. This will achieve nothing but make it so we continue to live comfortable lives where we aren’t challenged on our old man opinions on ‘how the world really works.’”
As he concludes his brief message, the Liberty Inc. logo appears, flanked by three orange circles on the left, a dead ringer for the thinky polka dots that accompany the intro and outro of a PragerU video, and multiple trademark and copyright seals on the right.
On another screen within the club, a talking giraffe stars in an explainer titled, “The Problem with Kaiju Body Counts.” The giraffe, which embodies a Shapiro-y energy despite residing on the opposite end of the height spectrum, argues that the UN killing less kaiju doesn’t mean that humanity is losing the war and is actually a GOOD thing because it means that there are less kaiju to kill.
These videos are an odd contrast with the rest of the more obvious objects of escapism in the club. Who would want to watch PragerU videos when there are VR games to play and alcoholic beverages to drink and a cyborg dolphin spinning club beats from its tank? But, these videos are just escapism of a different kind. In Umurangi Generation, many of the people with money have fled Earth in favor of colonizing Mars, leaving the husk produced by elite inaction behind. The partygoers in this club evidently can’t. They’re wealthy enough to get off the streets where the sirens blare, but maybe not wealthy enough to escape the planet entirely. Instead, they turn to Liberty Inc., which has built a business model around telling them that things actually aren’t that bad. Sure the wealthy of the planet have fled. Sure, the UN is in the middle of a massive, destructive war against the kaiju. But, at least you’re on the right side of the bunker door.
The real-life PragerU fulfills the same function for white people. In a nation where capitalism has produced a class of people who can, metaphorically, leave for Mars while the rest of the world suffers, PragerU exists to convince the people at the top that they are morally righteous and the people at the bottom that they are there because of their own lack of work ethic. As of January, billionaires had collectively gained $3.9 trillion since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Meanwhile, in January, 10 million adults reported that they were behind in their rent payments, nearly one-fifth of all renters. More than half-a-million people have died from the virus in the United States alone, and almost 30 million have been ill. Over 73 million people lost work during the first nine months of the pandemic. (Thanks to Inequality.org for these statistics).
Our system is fundamentally broken. Meanwhile, some of PragerU’s most recent videos have titles like, “NFL QB Aaron Rogers: We can’t rely on government to help small businesses” and “Yale Students Want to Repeal the Constitution” and “Woke Dr. Seuss Book Titles with Will Witt.” Despite the United States, under the leadership of Prager’s chosen president until a few weeks ago, blundering its way to the worst coronavirus death toll in the world, despite a rising tide of white supremacist thought and action that climaxed with the attempt to overturn the loss of Prager’s chosen candidate by storming the capitol on January 6, despite widespread civil unrest in response to rampant police brutality, which Prager’s chosen president inflamed during his term, the problems PragerU continues to focus on are still on the same level as “Flag Day gets no respect.”
Lyndon Johnson said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” PragerU’s success is dependent on this kind of misdirection, convincing their audience that they are “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who should not work to improve material conditions for their own class, lest they make things less decadent for the class to which they believe they will someday belong. The same goes for Liberty, Inc. Convince the people in the underground dance club that they’re better off than the folks on the outside, and they won’t notice that they got left off the flight to Mars. At least they’re on the right side of the bunker door.
