Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has already come under fire after the administration formally approved the use of far-right PragerU videos as educational material in K-12 schools, owing to these videos' distorted takes on American history, whitewashing of slavery and other issues.
But that's not the only way these videos misinform children — PragerU also spouts false claims about climate science, according to Scientific American.
"PragerU CEO Marissa Streit told Scientific American that the videos are meant to counterbalance information students are currently being taught about climate change."
"'Young kids are being taught climate hysteria,' Streit said. "They’re hearing that the world is coming to an end, and we think that there needs to be a healthy balance.'"
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These videos use a teenage character Ania, who is concerned about climate change, and has her fears allayed by narrators who tell her that the climate has always cooled and warmed "long before carbon emissions were a factor" — which is true but irrelevant to the current crisis, which is directly caused by emissions of carbon into the atmosphere.
Other videos attack wind and solar energy as harmful to the environment and unreliable. The material even compares climate activists to Nazis, having a survivor of Hitler's regime compare his own struggle to Ania being criticized by her teacher and classmates after she repeats PragerU's talking points.
All of this comes as Florida is battered by environmental disasters accelerated by human emissions, including a hurricane last year that drove over 100,000 people in Cape Coral out of their homes, and a scorching heat wave this year that has warmed the Gulf waters around the state to the temperature of a hot tub. Conditions are so severe, with so much risk of continued disasters in coming years, that home insurance companies are exiting Florida in droves, leaving residents with few options and skyrocketing rates.
PragerU, despite its branding, is not actually a university, but a media company that specializes in short, easy-to-digest videos designed to educate young people on issues from a right-wing perspective, often characterized as propaganda by its critics. Although Florida is the first state to adopt formal guidelines allowing PragerU clips as coursework in public schools, reporters found in 2021 that teachers all over the country have been working PragerU videos into their classrooms for years.
DeSantis, who is currently running for the GOP presidential nomination for 2024, has also come under fire after a task force he appointed, led by controversial right-wing scholars, drafted new statewide Black history guidelines that say Black people learned valuable skills in slavery and that Martin Luther King-style civil disobedience is "irresponsible citizenship."
