The site is screaming with its own statistics. Individual videos frequently garner more than a million views at least 10 PragerU videos gained more than 5 million views in 2017, and at least six gained more than 10 million. According to PragerU’s annual report, in 2017 the organization’s videos received 625 million views between Facebook and YouTube, up from 250 million the year before, and 75 million the year before that. These ideas - each one expressed in a five-minute video with titles like “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings,” “Black, Millennial, Female and… Conservative,” “Why I Left the Left” and “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?” - have found an enormous, and growing, audience. They are, according to PragerU’s founder and namesake, the conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager, “the best thinkers presenting their best ideas.” Their goal: to “undo damage” inflicted by an education system that teaches US students that their country is “a land of inequality and racism” and a place of which to be “ashamed.” But more importantly, PragerU’s faculty includes an all-star lineup of internet and media personalities who have made their bones in the Trump era antagonizing the campus left: Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, James Damore, Steven Crowder, Dinesh D’Souza, Christina Sommers, Adam Carolla, Charlie Kirk, and many more. Many of the people presenting these topics are establishment, PBS NewsHour–conservative types like Stephens, Charles Krauthammer, and Steve Forbes. Scrolling through its 300-odd videos yields a survey of almost every divisive national issue in the United States today: racism, sexism, income inequality, gun ownership, Islam, immigration, Israel, police brutality, and, of course, speech on college campuses. While it is not an accredited institution of higher learning, Prager University is most definitely an education.
It took two months for Prager University, one of the biggest, most influential and yet least understood forces in online media, to mold a conservative. It took about two months, Knaster, now 19 and a student at the University of Colorado at Denver, told BuzzFeed News, “to clear out my beliefs and reform them.” Now Knaster was hooked on these five-minute explainers - no, of course Israel was nothing like apartheid South Africa, an argument that bugged him - and he moved on to videos covering other topics: gun control, which, it turned out was a way for the government to encroach on its citizens’ rights feminism, which had started out fine but had at some point been overrun by radicals climate change, which was more complicated than liberals liked to admit and socialism, which was not, as Knaster had always thought, an “OK thing.” When it ended, the then–15-year-old queued up more PragerU videos about Israel, all of them five minutes, all presented with conscision and sobriety by experts, all in the same muted color palette. Unhappy that the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, Knaster found himself nodding along to the video, which was slick and succinct. Then, when he was a sophomore in high school, Knaster stumbled upon a video on Facebook titled “Iran and the Bomb.” Made by a nonprofit media company called Prager University, the five-minute clip featured then–Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens arguing that it would be catastrophically dangerous for the Islamic republic to develop nuclear weapons.
Among them: Guns should be harder to obtain, women make less money than men for the same work, and humans have made the planet hotter. Growing up in a pro-Obama household in liberal metro Denver, Matt Knaster held a few truths to be self-evident.
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