The outfit known as 'Prager U' was first featured on this blog in a post from January, 2020.
Wherein we learn from the Prager U jokesters and con artists:
"Youtube is a way to circumvent brick and mortar classrooms - and parents- and appeal to Generation Z".
Why? Because Prager sees young people as "too indoctrinated by left wing views." According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization to which I've belonged for 31 years:
"Prager U's five minute videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the Right."
Related to the SPLC piece, is the latest issue (October) of American's United Church & State wherein we learn (p.7):
"The Trump Administration, having withdrawn federal funding from the Public Broadcasting Service, has turned to Prager U to indoctrinate America's children and young adults in extremism....Prager U intersects a large white supremacist ecosphere with a shared central emphasis on building a white Christian identity group."
And who better to groom to expedite that goal than a smooth-talking, white Christian extremist huckster like Charlie Kirk.
Even before Kirk's Turning Point USA there was "Project Blitz" created to remake America as a Christian Right bastion. Never heard of it? Here's an early (June last year) account from The UK Guardian:
"The emboldened religious right has unleashed a wave of legislation across the United States since Donald Trump became president, as part of an organized bid to impose hardline Christian values across American society. A playbook known as Project Blitz, developed by a collection of Christian groups, has provided state politicians with a set of off-the-shelf pro-Christian “model bills”.
A recent (Sept. 18) ABC News release was the giveaway about the connections, e.g.
Education Dept. unveils nationwide civics push led by conservative coalition
Wherein we learned about the mutated Dept. of Education - now programmed to "launch a patriotic" (i.e. white Christian nationalist) civics program and:
"the initiative will be led by the America First Policy Institute, a group closely aligned with conservative causes and President Donald Trump. ...In addition to Turning Point USA and the America First Policy Institute, other notable conservative groups involved include Moms for America, PragerU and the Heritage Foundation."
To refresh memories, Turning Point USA was Charlie Kirk's organization which he used to spread white supremacist nonsense and Christian nationalism as well as other extremism, see e.g.
The Reality Of Charlie Kirk: Hate, Hypocrisy & Violence
Multiple instances show the sheer prejudice, effrontery and arrogance of Kirk, exemplified in these sound bites from his "debates":
"Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more".– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023
"If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?"– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
"If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."– The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023
The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
That was responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024
PragerU is Dennis Prager's own 'engine' for the spread of Christian Nationalism. And lo and behold the Heritage Foundation is behind Project 2025. In earlier posts I've even warned about the connections to the Trump agenda and how way too many voters were being snookered, e.g.:
Rural WI Voters Are Convinced Trump Is "Anointed By God" - Can They Be Rescued From Their Delusions?
To make Prager U and Kirk's Turning Point USA so persuasive and powerful a catalyst had to be injected, especially to induce mass Trump religious fixation and support.
Kirk's Turning Point has been particularly effective and in the words of one UK podcaster ("supertanskii") and Kirk researcher:
"It was essentially a radicalization scheme for the youth. Their big sell was that 'the Left is ruining your life' and they essentially framed rebellion as siding with the far right.
Why do this? Because the Right realized they couldn't get by relying on the votes of the old forever. So they targeted the young with this light-hearted meme warfare, using Tik Tok to spread memes.
This is how the young people know who Charlie Kirk is. And they framed the message as an outsider voice to appeal to young people who might otherwise be disillusioned by having hard right government. The problem with this is it pushes young people directly into the radicalization pipeline.
A 17-year old might watch a Charlie Kirk video and end up deep in the conspiracy pipeline."
For these reasons I was glad my former university, Loyola in New Orleans, rejected a Turning Point USA application to become a chartered student organization, see e.g. the story from the Loyola Maroon:
Loyola faces backlash after SGA denies TPUSA charter - The Maroon
Incredibly, the imps pushing for the TPUSA acceptance actually claimed an "alignment with Jesuit values of faith and justice" - which is pure balderdash. Those Jesuit values do not include racism, misogyny and extremist radicalization - all of which were embodied by TPUSA's founder Charlie Kirk. Which the UK podcaster (Tanskii) pointed out, and which readers can see here:
The Reality Of Charlie Kirk: Hate, Hypocrisy & Violence
So no, Loyola had no obligation to allow those rapscallions entry or acceptance by the student government. And Landry, the white supremacist Louisiana governor can whine all he wants.
Apart from the youth (like so many of Gen Z) being bamboozled, how did nominally moral Christians come to such a sorry pass? Jeff Sharlett pulls no punches in his 2020 Vanity Fair piece:
Showing the warp and woof of what Trump has done to debase Christianity, turning it into a- quasi religious personality cult. As Sharlett writes in the article:
"Many Trump followers deploy a familiar Christian-right formula for justifying abuses of power, declaring Trump a modern King David, a sinner nonetheless anointed, while others compare him to Queen Esther, destined to save Israel—or at least the evangelical imagination of it—from Iran. Still others draw parallels to Cyrus, the Old Testament Persian king who became a tool for God’s will. ...Lance Wallnau, a founding member of Trump’s evangelical coalition, dubs him “God’s chaos candidate”: “the self-made man who can ‘get it done,’ enters the arena, and through the pressure of circumstance becomes the God-shaped man God enables to do what he could never do in his own strength.”
And even more unhinged:
"In Trump’s case, divine backing is more about smiting than healing. When Rep. Elijah Cummings died last October shortly after sparring with Trump about Baltimore, Peterson declared on his radio show, “He dead”—like Trump enemies John McCain and Charles Krauthammer, Peterson noted. “That’s what happens when you mess with the Great White Hope. Don’t mess with God’s children.”
This is not exaggeration, and we've since seen then how ordinary evangelicals have been snookered and Trump has become deified. This is especially after surviving the July 2024 assassination attempt, which these folks have interpreted as a divine intervention when it was actually an accident of position. Had Trump not turned his head by just 20 millimeters at the precise instant of the shot we'd not be having this conversation.
Meanwhile millions are asleep 'at the switch' as our own legislators - deep in the Trump Messiah Myth- seek to rush our nation into a theocracy. Model bills - according to Americans United - have already been created by a group called the CPCF ( Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation ) with the stated aim to "protect religious freedom, promote America's Judeo-Christian heritage and promote prayer." When the actual purpose is to firmly stamp out all speech that inveighs against their Christian White Nationalist, Trump-worship messaging and Project 2025 linked agenda. Basically, as noted by AU, the CPCF is using the banner of "religious freedom" to impose fundamentalist Christianity on American public, political and cultural life."
by Maya Boddie | April 8, 2024 - 6:32am | permalink
Donald Trump's "Messiah complex" perhaps, may have reached its peak last month when the former president announced he was selling $59.99 'God Bless the USA' Bibles.
Laura Brodie noted in a TIME Magazine article the MAGA hopeful's recent antics include telling his supporters "that he’s suffering for their sake, sharing a faux courtroom sketch of Christ at his side, and circulating actor Jon Voight’s bizarre claim that he is being 'destroyed as Jesus.'"
Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson, in a Sunday, April 7 op-ed for Milwaukee Independent, submits, "Trump is not the first president to compare himself to Jesus Christ."
And:
by Will Bunch | July 19, 2024 - 6:36am | permalink
— from the Philadelphia Inquirer
I came to the American Heartland to cover a political convention, but all I found was a tent revival, Brother Trump’s Traveling Salvation Show.
The Republican National Convention took just minutes after Monday’s opening gavel to officially nominate its Dear Leader for the third and probably not the last time. The roll call, once the highlight of past conventions, is now an empty ritual. A party platform that was probably written on a Mar-a-Lago cocktail napkin was rammed though with no dissent. RNC schedulers quickly liberated all four nights for the only real purpose they had here in Wisconsin.
The deification of Donald J. Trump.
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