Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

PragerU? Don't make me laugh.

THIS video has the virtues of being balanced, factual, historically accurate and contextual. No cherry picking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9d6HcXbw6w&feature=emb_logo

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/inside-right-wing-youtube-turning-millennials-conservative-prageru-video-dennis-prager/

But in a transformation that surprised even some of his peers, genteel Prager has become a die-hard Trump cheerleader, loyally supporting the president and downplaying his boorish conduct. He even went so far as to root for Roy Moore, the disgraced Senate candidate from Alabama. Prager denies he’s changed. His support for these men is a rational, practical matter, he says. You vote for the guy who votes the way you would—character is secondary.

But his other line of reasoning on the subject is both irrational and apocalyptic: Prager is convinced that at this historical moment—not in 1976 when he voted for Jimmy Carter, nor in 2006 when he was a sanguine Bush supporter, but right now—our society is collapsing, and a liberal Supreme Court nominee could portend the final flood. Last summer, he tweeted that Western media outlets “pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.”

Prager explained to me that because “the universities have all but shut down, not to mention demonized, nonleft ideas,” and the media “are not far behind,” it is his duty to provide a conservative take “on things that matter—economics, good and evil, America, Israel, religion, God, etc.” His goal is to imbue young people with “the principles on which America was founded,” and to demonstrate “why Western society will not survive the death of Judeo-Christian values.”

These instincts—Prager the Genial Radio Host and Prager the Gloomy Prophet—merge in PragerU, whose videos are too gentle in tone for the Infowars crowd and too conservative for committed liberals. Rather, they are engineered to sway those in the mushy middle, especially young people trying to figure out what they stand for. Prager’s radio show has about 2 million weekly listeners (to Rush Limbaugh’s 14 million), but PragerU’s appeal goes well beyond the graying talk-radio audience. More than 60 percent of its viewers are younger than 35, according to YouTube analytics.

So many conservatives have made their peace with Trump by now that we’ve come to expect it. But moral rectitude was always central to Prager’s message. In 2011, he wrote that Trump’s repeated uses of the F-word “render him unfit to be a presidential candidate, let alone president.”

Early in the primaries, Prager attacked Trump regularly. Now he’s loath to utter a negative word. Asked what he considers the worst aspect of Trump’s presidency, he couldn’t really name one. “If he said what he wants to say in a classy way—in the NPR sort of way in which Obama spoke—and didn’t make me cringe on occasion, I’d be happier,” he told me. “But if he spoke like NPR, he would probably care what NPR said about him, and then he wouldn’t be effective.”

Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic who tracks conservative talk radio, is baffled by Prager’s shift. “Dennis Prager is smarter than Sean Hannity,” Friedersdorf says. “He is less insecure than Rush Limbaugh, and he is more civil than Mark Levin. In fact, his commitment to civility and reasoned discourse distinguishes him from other talk-radio hosts in tone and substance.”

But Prager’s Trump enthusiasm makes Friedersdorf wonder, “Does he really believe in those things, or is he ultimately just another partisan Republican or anti-leftist who will pull the lever next to ‘R’ and support the Republican president rhetorically for that reason?”


“I think he got caught up in this notion that all politics is this ultimate binary choice, this belief that the left was poised to destroy America,” says Sykes, Prager’s occasional guest host. “As someone who has dealt so seriously with ethical issues—and he is a serious ethicist, I think—that came as a real shock to me.”