Politically, South Carolina is a very conservative state. However, only recently has South Carolina’s Republican party grappled with the fact that leftist teachers and administrators hold sway in the state’s public schools. Change is coming, though, because some social studies content from PragerU is now available on the South Carolina Department of Education (“SCDOE”) website.

Predictably, Democrats are up in arms (the same Democrats who are fine with pornographic material in K-12 schools). To fan the flames, the state’s largest-circulation paper, the hard-left Post and Courier, has informed its readers that PragerU’s inclusion in the SCDOE’s website is highly problematic.

The essay makes two primary points. The first is that the SCDOE superintendent, Ellen Weaver, made the videos available unilaterally. However, while the essay’s author, Anna B. Mitchell, who has a fanatic regard for the current education establishment, speaks about Weaver having broken with precedent, neither she nor the people she quotes provide any evidence that Weaver lacked the authority to do so.

Image made using Grok AI.

Instead, while Mitchell acknowledges that there’s a formal process for actual textbooks (which schools must purchase with taxpayer funds), she admits that “teachers typically use free online content with care — often sharing YouTube videos with department heads and school leaders before showing them to students.” In other words, hidden behind Mitchell’s delicate caveats, the reality is that teachers do whatever they want regarding videos on the internet.

To bolster an empty argument, Mitchell turns to “Paul Thomas, an education expert, former K-12 English teacher and professor at Furman University.” Thomas informs readers that not only did Weaver do something unprecedented, but that the move is obviously a “pure [sic] political move” because PragerU is “not a school or accredited educational organization.”

While it’s true that PragerU is not an “accredited educational organization,” the reality is that every single PragerU video contains content from an expert in the field, whether a journalist, academic, or someone who has “lived experience” (a term that should resonate with leftists). Thomas’s complaint is the same as saying that students may never see a documentary unless the studio producing it is an “accredited educational organization.” In other words, he’s spouting nonsense.

Significantly, while touting Thomas as an education expert, Mitchell forgets to tell readers that Thomas is so far to the left that his website his website domain name is “radical scholarship.” A stroll through its pages reveals that he is as radical as that name suggests, with topics such as “fascism,” in which he explains how Republicans and conservatives are creating “an environment of fear around teaching and learning,” or Trumplandia,” in which he writes in hysterical terms about “the insurrection at the Capitol by rightwing domestic terrorists supporting Trump...”

For Thomas, PragerU is like sunlight to a vampire. Yet while Mitchell is at pains in the first sentence of her essay to inform readers that PragerU is a “rightwing content creator,” she neglects to inform readers that one of her experts is a hard leftist.

The article’s second point is that the videos are “mis-educating” rather than educating students. Thus, Mitchell announces at the top of her article that “educators” say that many videos “are biased or contain errors.”

However, in the seas of words jostling for space in her essay, Mitchell digs up only one person willing to explain what’s wrong with PragerU videos: “Kathy Hogan, a former Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher who retired from Lexington/Richland Five schools in 2012...”

[Hogan] noted bias and factual errors in multiple videos that made it onto the state’s vetted list of PragerU content, including “Understanding Nixon,” which described Nixon’s role in Watergate as “covering up for overzealous subordinates.” In another PragerU video, the instructor wore a shirt with guns printed on it, noted Chester County English and public speaking teacher Pete Stone noted.

[snip]

“Prager videos will require a teacher not only to look at them, but you're really studying them to make sure they’re accurate,” she said. “Because I can tell you, a lot of them are not accurate history, or they put such a Republican conservative spin on it, it’s almost unrecognizable,” she said.

You don’t need Hogan’s breathless hysteria about a shirt or her anger at “Republican conservative spin” to understand her biases. If you watch the PragerU video about Nixon to which Hogan refers, it’s clear that the language about “covering up for overzealous subordinates” was a passing comment in a larger video about Nixon’s accomplishments (which were many).

More significantly, Hogan misrepresents the narrator's words by leaving out important language and context. Thus, by quoting only the first few words of the relevant language, she gives the impression that PragerU ignored the subordinates’ criminal acts and downplayed Nixon’s behavior. This is a sin of omission on Hogan’s part. The truth is that, as is the case for all PragerU videos, the facts are accurate.

Moreover, for those who are interested in learning more about Watergate, another PragerU video manages in five minutes to give a completely accurate summary of those events, even if it attributes better motives to Nixon than a leftist would:

Ultimately, Mitchell’s long, chaotically organized essay boils down to this: The Superintendent of South Carolina’s schools did something entirely legitimate to make a free resource available to South Carolina’s teachers. The content (although Mitchell does not acknowledge it) comes from experts in their fields, is well-produced, and stays within strict factual boundaries.

What Mitchell and her experts cannot tolerate is that PragerU’s videos draw different, conservative conclusions than leftists would from accurately presented facts. For leftists, there is no truth to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s statement that “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Or, as I like to say, conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.