'This is hell': Critics pounce on White House's 'preferred alternative' to PBS in schools

The White House has backed a right-wing educational partner to replace PBS after congressional Republicans effectively killed off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The publicly funded entity will shut down after Congress clawed back $500 million of federal funding in President Donald Trump's massive tax-and-spending law, but the White House announced a new partnership with the nonprofit PragerU, which specializes in right-leaning educational videos for adults and children, reported Vox.

"Since its founding in 2009, PragerU has become a juggernaut in the conservative educational media space, with their videos reaching millions of followers across social media," the website reported. "The organization has helped launch the media careers of right-wing figures like Candace Owens. Their popular videos elevate narratives that have been sharply criticized as climate denialist, Islamophobic, and 'misleading' about slavery."

Conservative talk show host Dennis Prager founded the organization to counter an educational system he deems too liberal, and the project's videos minimize the role of slavery or controversies about historical figures like Christopher Columbus, but critics say that content has no place in schools.

"The White House has a preferred alternative to PBS: PragerU, a nonprofit organization that specializes in creating right-leaning educational short videos for adults and children," posted journalist Jennifer Ouelette. It may already be in countless classrooms.

"Right leaning doesn't go nearly far enough, but also, this is hell," said history scholar Thomas Lecaque.

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here," agreed cartoonist Tom Tomorrow.

"Reporting on the way conservatives planned to promote Prager U while they were defunding PBS would have been useful context for readers and the general public," posted Bluesky user Jack Tripper.

"Parents should be storming their kids' schools and school board meetings," added Bluesky user Beth Jackson. "I have seen the prager ads on YouTube and it's glossy, well packaged white supremacy."

"When MAGA says it wants to replace woke history with the truth, what they mean is burying the uncomfortable facts," said cultural studies professor Timothy Messer-Kruse, linking to a critical essay on PragerU by historian Seth Cotlar.

"PragerU is hardly the first outfit to pump ideologically-slanted pseudo-history into the public sphere and they won’t be the last," Cutler wrote in his piece. "But it is incumbent upon those of us who actually do care about getting the history right that we call out mendacious bulls--- when we see it."