Why Is PragerU on a ‘Hate Map’? Because It Loves America’s Founding Too Much
Last week, the Trump White House hosted PragerU CEO Marissa Streit to launch a patriotic exhibit called “The Founders Museum,” a joint effort involving the White House, PragerU, and the Department of Education.
That seems a rather odd thing for an “antigovernment extremist group” to do, yet that’s exactly the label the Southern Poverty Law Center applies to PragerU. According to the SPLC, this nonprofit best known for its five-minute educational videos secretly works to “protect white supremacy” and belongs on a “hate map” with chapters of America’s most notorious hate group, the Ku Klux Klan.
The SPLC’s ire against PragerU comes as no surprise. After all, the SPLC has a long track record of putting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on its “hate map,” and PragerU’s videos spread far and wide, encouraging Americans to defend family values, free markets, systems based on merit rather than identity—in short, the virtues of America.
This patriotism explains why PragerU is celebrating America’s 250th anniversary at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, so why does the SPLC hate it so much?
SPLC’s Beef With PragerU
As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy. Now, it uses a “hate map” to suggest that mainstream conservative nonprofits are somehow akin to the KKK. This map inspired a terrorist attack in 2012.
Back in 2018, the SPLC insinuated that PragerU has connections to the alt-right movement, even while admitting that PragerU published a video condemning the alt-right. Dennis Prager—who has been recovering in the hospital as the SPLC attacks him—eviscerated this disgusting attack at the time.
When the SPLC added PragerU to the “hate map” in May, it also published its “Year in Hate and Extremism” report, which mentions PragerU in two sections—the “anti-student inclusion movement” and the opposition to the Left’s diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
“In 2024, [DEI] initiatives became ground zero for hard-right mobilizations to whitewash American society and protect white supremacy,” wrote SPLC research analysts Maya Henson Carey and R.G. Cravens.
Carey and Cravens frame DEI as “essential in ensuring pluralism … and promoting democracy.” Such programs “promote teaching accurate histories of American inequalities as structural.” This sentence smuggles in the notion of critical race theory, which teaches that American society is fundamentally unjust and oppressive against certain races, classes, LGBTQ+ identities, and more.
Critical race theory inspired The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which attempted to redefine America’s Founding—placing the real beginning of America with the arrival of the first slaves, rather than the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
PragerU naturally disagrees with this. Yes, America has struggled to live up to the ideals of the declaration, but critical race theory effectively denies the real progress of abolishing slavery and defending civil rights. It also encourages Americans to judge each other by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
“The antigovernment group PragerU calls DEI ‘an affront to America’s core values’ that must be ‘cast … into the dustbin of history alongside all the other racist and discredited ideas of the past,’” the SPLC noted. Right-thinking Americans agree with PragerU on this score.
Fighting the Left’s Takeover of Education
The SPLC also attacked PragerU as part of an “anti-student inclusion movement,” including Moms for Liberty (which has been on the “hate map” since 2023).
The SPLC uses this framing to suggest that the parental rights movement is the aggressor in the cultural battles over education, while conveniently ignoring the Left’s ideological seizure of the classroom. In fact, the SPLC runs its own program—long called “Teaching Tolerance” but now rebranded as “Learning for Justice”—pushing critical race theory, transgender identity, and other leftist social causes in schools. The retreat away from tolerance is instructive.
When the parental rights movement calls for putting an end to classes teaching that blacks are inherently oppressed and whites inherently oppressors, for removing pornographic books from school libraries, and for parental opt-outs to LGBTQ+ lessons, the SPLC says that amounts to “promoting far-right ideological narratives.”
The SPLC claimed that PragerU is a “significant actor in this disinformation ecosystem,” and that it “specializes in promoting far-right propaganda through professionally produced media.”
“Critics have accused PragerU materials of promoting nationalism, anti-DEI narratives and the whitewashing of historical events as patriotic education,” the SPLC noted. “These narratives play into broader moral panic campaigns that portray public schools as battlegrounds for the nation’s cultural future.”
So, SPLC’s attack on PragerU boils down to two things: PragerU fights the SPLC’s woke agenda in schools and PragerU loves America too much.
By claiming that PragerU’s great sin is being insufficiently negative about America’s history and telling kids about the virtues of our Founding, the SPLC effectively admits there’s really nothing to justify PragerU’s presence on the “hate map.”
Americans should be grateful that PragerU, not the SPLC, is advising the White House’s celebration of America’s 250th anniversary.
