Climate Change Denial, Lies About Enslavement Fueled Florida’s Anti-African American Instruction
If there was any pretense of objectivity over the changing of curriculum involving African American history and other right wing issues, they were blown away when Florida hired an educational consultant who is notorious for anti-climate messages, videos that soft sell enslavement and denial of systemic racism while a key member of a Florida educational advisory group edits a blog that makes QAnon look tepid.
Florida has eliminated advanced placement African American history courses, and the public schools will revamp instruction giving enslavement a softer touch. Teachers also must refrain from subjects that infer systemic racism in the U.S. Studies about the Black Lives Matter movement, the case for reparations, and queer studies also have been eliminated.
The Arkansas Department of Education (DOE) also recently rejected AP African American Studies, saying the course may violate Arkansas law.
Last month, Florida became the first state to accept PragerU as an official education vendor. Despite what it sounds like, PragerU is not a university or even a college. PragerU is not an academic institution and does not hold classes, does not grant certifications or diplomas, and is not accredited by any recognized body.
PragerU is a for-profit company that makes and sells conservative videos to schools and it is funded by two of the most aggressive right wing religious, anti-climate change, oil and gas fracking billionaires in the country. The company was formed in 2009 by conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager and Allen Estrin, a screenwriter, producer, director and author. In 2020, PragerU had revenues of $28 million.
The Florida Department of Education said that PragerU “aligned with the state’s revised civics and government standards.” The decision allows public school teachers in Florida to incorporate PragerU videos into their classroom materials.
Those standards evidently allow for gross misinformation as PragerU has marketed children’s videos stocked with misinformation on a number of topics.
In one video, slavery is portrayed as normal for its time. The animated video includes a re-creation of Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became an abolitionist in the 1800s. The character of Douglass welcomes children to 1852, and says, “There was no real movement anywhere in the world to abolish slavery before the American founding. Slavery was part of life all over the world. It was America that began the conversation to end it.”
The video fails to note the fact that Denmark, Britain and France had already outlawed the trading of slaves.
Climate change is among the topics that have been falsely represented by PragerU videos. Other topics with inaccurate information include racism in the United States, immigration and the history of fascism.
PragerU’s biggest funders are fracking industry billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks. Not surprisingly, PragerU videos show a false side of climate control science. One video says energy poverty is a bigger issue than climate change, and ignores the science of greenhouse gas emissions.
In another video, a narrator explains a conversation between parents and a girl, who is concerned with climate change.
The child says that “fossil fuels will soon lead to a climate disaster.”
“The parents then challenge her with some thought-provoking questions. They encourage her to consider how the planet has been warming and cooling since prehistoric times, long before carbon emissions were a factor. Can she explain that?” says the narrator.
The proven science of greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change is not mentioned and parents respond to their daughter this way.
“They asked her if everyone in Poland stops using coal, will that lower Earth’s temperature especially when countries like China and India burn many times the amount of coal as Poland and are not cutting back?” the narrator says.
PragerU videos promote fossil fuels, criticize the use of renewables, and dispute the scientific consensus on climate change, while promoting a conspiracy theory that “big government control” is the real motivation behind energy policies to reduce gas emissions. Climate Feedback, Reuters and the Weather Channel have found that PragerU’s videos promote inaccurate and misleading claims about climate change.
On other subjects, a 2018 PragerU video, “The Suicide of Europe,” argued that Europe is “committing suicide” by allowing mass immigration, condemned “The mass movement of peoples into Europe…from the Middle East, North Africa and East Asia” and criticized European multiculturalism.
PragerU also has been accused of promoting anti-LGBT politics. Media Matters for America reported that PragerU raised more than $25,000 “off of a video featuring a client of extreme anti-LGBTQ group Alliance Defending Freedom.” In 2020, YouTube took down two PragerU, anti-trans videos featuring far right commentator Candace Owens for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech as Owens said that being transgender is a disease like schizophrenia.
PragerU video presenters have included right wing personalities like Owens, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Nigel Farage, Charles Krauthammer and Michelle Malkin. PragerU has promoted its videos to about 6,500 college and high school students as of 2020. In 2018, PragerU reached a billion views.
The organization depends on donations to produce its videos. And it gets plenty of donations. Much of PragerU’s early funding came from hydraulic fracturing billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks.
The next-largest donor is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The foundation also has given millions of dollars for three anti-Muslim groups, including the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum.
On the foundation’s board of directors is former trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, who joined trump on his phone call on Jan, 2, 2021, when Trump pressured Georgia election officials to find more than 11,000 votes to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.
In 2020, PragerU reported about $28 million in revenues, most of it from donations, and reported around $28 million in expenditures, with 39 percent going into marketing. In 2019, it ranked among the 10 biggest political spenders on Facebook.
The Wilks brothers have made billions from fracking for oil and gas. In 2012, they sold their fracking company, Frac Tech, for $3.5 billion and each took home $1.4 billion. In 2013, the brothers began their climate disinformation campaign when they donated more than $6.5 million to start PragerU.
Two years later, Farris Wilks donated $4.77 million to start the Daily Wire, a right-wing news website and media company co-founded by Ben Shapiro. Shapiro now has 8.5 million followers of his personal Facebook page, while the Daily Wire has more than 27 million followers and last year reported annual revenues of $100 million.
The non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate last year named the Daily Wire as one of the country’s top 10 disseminators of climate skepticism.
By 2021, the Daily Wire had nearly 21 million visits a month on Facebook, more than the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, and CNN combined, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a special “working group” to create the state’s new, right wing standards. The featured speaker at a recent meeting of the working group, William Barclay Allen, has led Florida’s efforts to homogenize instruction on African American history.
A former Reagan appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Allen has spoken out against affirmative action, questioned the role of historically Black colleges and universities and wrote a 1989 speech, “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?”
That same year, Allen was caught up in a kidnapping case involving a high school student on tribal lands in Arizona. The incident became the subject of a U.S. Senate investigation.
In 1986, Allen ran for the U.S. Senate in California. His campaign chairman was attorney John Eastman, who was recently named as a co-conspirator in a federal indictment over trump’s aborted plans to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In a recent training session, Allen told teachers to teach “the whole picture.” For example, he referred to the nine students who famously desegregated Central High School in Little Rock,Ark., in 1957. They were first blocked from entering the school by members of the Arkansas National Guard. Allen said it is important for teachers to note that some of the National Guard soldiers were “protecting and escorting those children into school.”
Allen neglected to mention that the history of the so-called “Little Rock Nine” included months of harassment and threats the students endured as they feared the National Guard forces.
Another right wing conservative on the working group is Frances Presley Rice. She is the chair of the National Black Republican Association and although she has no academic credentials in Black history and has no PhD. she bills herself as “Dr. Frances Rice.”
The National Black Republican Association publishes a regular blog, under the heading, “The Republican Party is the party of civil rights and the four F’s: faith, family, freedom and fairness. The Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and socialism.”
The most recent blog was written by Judd Garrett, a former NFL player, coach and executive and contributor to the far right website, Real Clear Politics.
Titled, facetiously, “It’s Good to be a Democrat,” the blog refers to the recent shooting by FBI agents of Craig Robertson, a 74-year-old Utah man and Trump supporter, who had threatened to kill President Biden.
“We have a two-tiered justice system based on political beliefs,” Garret wrote. “When Donald Trump was President, it was a common occurrence for people on the left to make threats of bodily harm and even death against him, and nothing was ever done about it.”
He also referred to the Jan. 6, 2021, fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a DC police officer as the woman was attempting to break into a secure area of the Capitol during the riot by trump supporters. Garrett wrote that “DC police officer, Michael Byrd, was given a medal for shooting a Trump supporter, 130-pound unarmed woman, Ashli Babbitt” while Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with murder “because he shot and killed a BLM/antifa rioter who was pointing a gun in his face as he lied on the ground during the riot in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020.”
Rittenhouse shot three men, two fatally, during the civil unrest in Kenosha. Rittenhouse was acquitted at his trial in November 2021, after testifying that he had acted in self-defense.
Garrett also brought up the special investigation into trump’s links with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Special Counsel Robert Meuller concluded that trump likely committed crimes, but that the Justice Department advised against indicting a sitting president.
Garrett claimed that Meuller “found nothing.”
Rice also wrote that the Yocum African American History Association corrects “misconceptions” of African American history. Her explanations of supposed “misconceptions” downplays the severity of enslavement of African Americans and racism in the U.S.
One “misconception,” Rice noted, is that “Slavery is America’s original sin.”
Instead, she said that “Slavery is a universal institution, older than written records and flourished throughout the world long before the New World was discovered.”
Another is that “Only Black people were slaves in America.”
Rice said that “England sent White slaves: criminals, vagabonds, and children to the colonies to work.”
Another misconception is that “There were only White slave owners in America.”
But Rice said that the 1830, U.S. Census reported 3,775 free Blacks owned 12,740 slaves” and the 1860 U.S. Census reported 261,988 Southern Blacks “were free and not slaves.”
And then there is the “misconception” that America is a racist country. To which, Rice explained, simply, “Barack Obama was elected twice as President.”