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Now that you know about the extreme-right ideology being taught in public schools using PragerU materials, you’re probably wondering what you can do to stop it.

Whether you’re in one of the four states that approved PragerU (Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma) or you’re trying to keep your state from becoming the next one on that list, the good news is, there are things you can do. Communities are pushing back on this kind of extremism in schools, and they’re winning!

For example, last year in the Pennridge School District in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a local group called the RIDGE Network successfully activated community members to defeat extremism. Laura Foster, co-founder of RIDGE Network explained how they did it on our Cost Of Extremism podcast episode about PragerU (season 2, episode 3).

Extremists held a majority of seats on the Pennridge School Board, and they secretly arranged to contract with Vermillion Education — a group similar to PragerU — for curriculum. Under the extremist majority, students were subjected to whitewashed history and other inaccurate lessons. But after the RIDGE Network and other community members organized and turned out voters in the 2023 elections, five open seats on the Pennridge School Board were won by common-sense candidates who oppose extremism, and the contract with Vermillion was canceled.

Here’s what Laura and other experts recommend you do to effectively fight extremism in schools:

• Regularly talk with teachers and school administrators. This is how you learn what is going on at school, and how you let them know you’ve got their back.
• Volunteer in your local school(s).
• Go to school board meetings.
• Have conversations with people in your community about your schools. Many of us are busy and just assume everything is okay unless we hear otherwise, so let people know what is going on.
• Get parents involved. Ask everyone you know who cares about your schools to join you in supporting them.
• Be the biggest cheerleader for schools in your community. Promote school activities and showcase the hard work educators are doing everyday to help children become well-educated, better citizens.

Download our Parent Playbook for even more ways to keep extremist BS out of your local schools.

With these actions and our Playbook in hand, you’ll be ready to defeat extremism — like that of PragerU — if it ever shows up in your local schools!

Last week, we shared some examples of PragerU videos that are being shown to children in public school classrooms in the U.S. They may have seemed too extreme to believe, so this week, we want you to see for yourself!

Watch this video where Jo from Red Wine and Blue pokes a little fun at some clips from PragerU videos, but seriously explains the threat they pose to our kids’ education.

Next week, we’ll talk about how to keep PragerU (and other extreme companies like them) from becoming part of the curriculum in your local schools.

Picture this: a classroom full of third graders settles down to watch a colorful, animated video together. A cartoon Frederick Douglass — the abolitionist, writer, and orator who escaped slavery — confidently explains that while he isn’t “okay with slavery, … the founding fathers made a compromise to achieve something great.” Down the hall in a sixth grade classroom, a man in another video explains that “one of the most beautiful things God has created is a woman’s smile.”

Sounds too unlikely to be true? Think again! These are real videos created by PragerU, and they have been approved for use in public schools in at least four states (Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma). And because they are free and publicly available, they are likely being used in countless other educational settings.

So what is PragerU? Well, it’s certainly not a university or accredited academic institution of any kind! PragerU is a conservative media company whose goal is to spread right-wing ideology to our kids through “edutainment” — videos and handouts created to appeal to children. Educators, news organizations, and historians have repeatedly found that their content includes inaccurate and false narratives on history and climate change, and politically biased rhetoric.

In their own words, PragerU was “created to inoculate children against the ‘woke’ and anti-American leftist narrative taught in most schools.” One of PragerU’s founders, Dennis Prager, has said he doesn’t understand what the problem is with his organization wanting to “indoctrinate” kids. The Southern Poverty Law Center says PragerU’s content is a dog whistle for the extreme right.

How do they get away with this in our public schools? For starters, they are extremely well funded. They get hundreds of millions of dollars from conservative donors, in addition to tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue from product sales. They are associated with big names in far-right politics like Elon Musk and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who we’ve talked about in previous Easy A blogs (“Read This”, “Watch This”, and “Do This”).

While it might be tempting to brush this off, trusting that most reasonable educators would never let this sort of propaganda enter their curriculum, the scary truth is that many students are being taught this content. That’s because they’ve been approved in school systems where extremists have been elected to serve on school boards and as superintendents, like in Florida and Oklahoma. In their 2023 bi-annual report, PragerU says that their materials have been viewed eight billion times.

It’s dangerous for our students to be exposed to the factually inaccurate content that PragerU is serving. It’s especially dangerous when it’s taught in classrooms that aren’t diverse and where there aren’t other viewpoints from students or teachers to challenge PragerU’s narrative. But that’s exactly what PragerU wants. They want to keep our students from learning about diverse backgrounds and viewpoints because they want to keep us from moving forward as an inclusive, multiracial, multicultural democracy.

Every kid has the right to learn about themselves and others in school, and receive an accurate and honest education. Over the next few weeks, we’ll learn more about PragerU and how you can keep their content from being used in your local schools.

Now that we know how dangerous the far-right extremist group Turning Point USA and its founder Charlie Kirk are, it’s time to do something about it. Turning Point USA specifically recruits high school and college-aged people, so we need to be talking to them!

In our Cost of Extremism podcast episode on Turning Point USA, we spoke with college students Francesca Martin and Jacob Marson of Keep Arizona Blue Student Coalition. They told us that no matter how well-funded Turning Point USA is (which makes them successful in reaching young voters), their values do not align with most young people.

Our values — protecting reproductive rights, supporting public education, reducing gun violence, protecting the environment, and valuing diversity and inclusion in our communities — are more appealing! We want to safeguard their rights and provide for their future. We’re leading with our hearts, not hate. We’re just trying to be, and raise, good people who care about our communities. That’s a far more appealing message than Turning Point’s bullying, angry, hateful, and violent rhetoric, so we have to make sure young people hear from us too.

Our Rally Your Squad program is specifically designed to help you identify people in your life who you can talk to about these important issues, and how to do it. Rally Your Squad has proven to be the most effective way to educate and turnout voters, and turning out young voters this election will be crucial to our success. So that’s your Easy A this week — join Rally and get started talking to young people in your life about the dangers of Turning Point USA today!

If you’re in Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, start here!

If you’re in any other state, start here!

We don’t know about you, but we’ve returned from our Fourth of July holiday more committed than ever to protecting our democracy against extremism. So let’s get back to learning about Turning Point USA!

We recently read how Turning Point USA’s founder, Charlie Kirk, is trying to normalize his brand of extremism and make it seem “cool” to young men. Now let’s watch award-winning journalist and author Kyle Spencer explain how Kirk does this, and how, like Donald Trump, he presents anger and rage as acceptable responses to democratic progress being made in our country.

You can see in the clip that Kirk tells his audience directly that “well-armed and disruptive men are the hope, not the problem.” It’s plain to see just how dangerous he and his extremist organization are, and they have the attention of more than 10 million of our young people online!

So what can we do about it? Watch for next week’s Easy A action and we’ll take on this problem together!

Have you seen extremists on the far-right trying to connect with certain groups of voters? We’ve talked before about how they target young women; now, let’s look at how they target young men.

One of the most insidious actors is Turning Point USA, an extreme-right organization run by Charlie Kirk that targets youth across the country. Kirk’s goal is to recruit young people into the far-right movement by making conservatism seem “cool.” They project a clean-cut, straight-laced image in an effort to appear less threatening than other far-right extremist groups, hoping that they can draw more people in and make their radical ideas seem normal.

Turning Point’s messaging is not really “conservative.” Instead, it centers around white male “grievances,” claiming to be victims of liberal values like equality and inclusion. They want to return society to what they consider to be “traditional” values, but what the Anti-Defamation League has identified as sexist gender roles and racist and antisemitic goals. Kirk knows this rhetoric appeals to young men who are feeling disrespected and isolated because it validates their feelings. Turning Point USA offers them a community and a sense of belonging. Once they lure in vulnerable followers by talking about these issues, they expose them to their more radical ideas. Their end goal is to promote a more authoritarian, anti-democratic government in the U.S.

In fact, one of the overarching themes that Turning Point USA promotes is that the U.S. is not a democracy. It gets worse, because their messaging is also filled with hyper-masculine and aggressive themes of defiance, revolution, violence, and guns. They prop up people including Donald Trump, who consistently incites violence, and Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered Black Lives Matter protesters, as heroes. This is especially dangerous because we know that Turning Point keeps a “professor watchlist” and a “school board watch” to name and monitor educators and administrators who they don’t agree with. Stoking rage with this kind of messaging while idolizing violence and keeping lists of perceived enemies is a recipe for disaster.

Kirk and Turning Point USA started off by speaking on college campuses, where they knew they could reach large audiences of people who are in a vulnerable time of transition and self-exploration. They’ve now expanded their reach through social media campaigns, TV and other forms of media, political campaigns, faith-based activities, and their own AmericaFest conference. They have more than 10 million followers online.

The good news is, there are many groups of young people who are countering Turning Point USA’s message, so we need to support them! Red Wine & Blue helps women engage in our local schools and communities and in the coming weeks, we’ll keep talking about what we can do to stop Turning Point USA from radicalizing young men.