PragerU's Influence - 2018-06-07

PragerU's Influence June 7, 2018, Brendan Joel Kelley, Southern Poverty Law Center

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The video in question, "Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?," is from PragerU — not an actual university, but a nonprofit disseminator of five-minute or so "educational" videos espousing conservative explanations on often-controversial topics. This particular video posits that the "Southern Strategy" employed by Richard Nixon in the late '60s — Republicans angling for votes from conservative whites in the South by appealing to racism — is a myth invented after the fact.

The summary of the video on PragerU's website is: "The south used to vote Democrat. Now it votes Republican. Why the switch? Was it, as some people say, because the GOP decided to appeal to racist whites?" Absolutely not, says the host of the video, Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, who attempts to convince viewers of this in the course of five minutes and 20 seconds.

In Kruse's Twitter takedown of the video, over the course of more than two dozen tweets, he destroys the PragerU video's proposition. "I was originally going to let it slide, then I saw that it had almost 10 million views — if I can help one person push back against this stuff, it's worth taking the time to go through it one more time and really hit specifically the argument laid on the mat," Kruse tells Hatewatch.

Wikipedia cite:

{{cite news | first = Brendan Joel | last = Kelley | title = PragerU's Influence | url = https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/06/07/prageru%E2%80%99s-influence | work = Southern Poverty Law Center | date = June 7, 2018 | accessdate = November 27, 2019 }}