Essay:PragerU Debunking Videos Fail Every Time

Prager University, or PragerU, is an American non-profit company which produces short, educational online videos, in addition to interviewing people at events and college campuses, and hosting "Fireside Chats" starring the owner, founder, and namesake Dennis Prager. PragerU does great work, and is one of my three main sources of information (along with the Rebel Media and, of course, Conservapedia).

As many conservatives likely already know, there has been a concerted effort by YouTube to suppress and silence PragerU. The company is currently suing YouTube for placing several of their videos on the "Restricted Mode" list, placing them in the same category as pornography and blocking their videos from schools, libraries, churches, and certain places of residence. Most notably, one of their videos regarding the Ten Commandments was placed under Restricted Mode, purportedly for the use of the word "murder."

But let's put aside YouTube censorship for a second. Despite everything, there are quite a few people who don't like PragerU. Of course, these people have themselves created videos "debunking" PragerU. These videos, and I mean every single one of them, fail to coherently communicate any genuine, valid criticism.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}

From the anti-Semites who put the company's name within triple parentheses and refer to its fans as "Pragerites" to the leftists who insist that Prager University spreads blatantly false right-wing propaganda, all the videos are terrible and inaccurate. They usually concentrate on one specific video.

They play the video and react to each clip, laughing and mocking PragerU as the video goes on. They rely on one thing the narrator says, and attempt to deconstruct the whole video, and sometimes even the entire company, using that one out-of-context quotation. "X said that Imperial Germany was as evil as the Nazis, therefore the entire video is wrong!" "X said that the British Empire was a bastion of freedom and liberty, even though it imposed the Salt Tax! What would Gandhi think of this?" "X said that the Confederacy was an inherently racist institution, while ignoring the racism of the Northerners!" And so on and so forth.

This bombasticism makes for an inconsistent and extremely faulty argument, one which relies on the entire PragerU video itself being filled with careless inaccuracies (how ironic).

Identitarian James Allsup says that the alt-right is much bigger than PragerU realizes, and relies on the amount of mainstream media attention the racist, extremist movement has received. He says they are wrong to support legal immigration, while relying on doomsday white genocide conspiracy theories, literally mentioning the "browning of America."

The debunking video ends with the smugness of its creator being openly portrayed, as they believe they have convinced PragerU's or at least their own crowd of the PragerU video's falsehoods and inaccuracies. They do not realize that they have missed the mark entirely.

This describes all of the debunking videos. Every. Single. One.