How PragerU Is Winning The Right-Wing Culture War Without Donald Trump

A right-wing online "university" is on track for a billion views in 2018, its professors are some of the best-known conservatives in media, and its founder wants to put it in real schools. So how come you've never heard of it?

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.”

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.”

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.

But what are these PragerU students converting to, exactly? Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist at the Data & Society Research Institute, has spent the past nine months studying the media consumption of middle- and upper-middle-class conservatives, many of whom watch and share PragerU content.

PragerU videos, Tripodi said, are so powerful because “They start with a very basic truth, and then toe this line really well between valid critiques of liberal ideology and propaganda.”

“Why I Left the Left” starts with a commonsense premise that many Americans would agree with: People should be able to tolerate speech they don’t like. But over the course of the video, Rubin moves from this fairly neutral starting point to describing “Racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia” as “meaningless buzzwords.” That’s a long way from where he started, a position that is well outside of the US mainstream, and a rhetorical jump a 15-year-old might not catch.

Many PragerU videos follow this pattern.