The Florida Department of Education (under Gov. Ron Desantis’ direction) recently approved videos from the conservative unaccredited Prager University Foundation (PragerU) as part of its newest public school curriculum.

The self-proclaimed “world’s leading conservative nonprofit” offers free curriculum to students in public and private schools and has come under fire for whitewashing Black history, denying the existence of climate change, promoting colonization, inserting opinion into its curriculum, and more.

Here’s a taste of what some videos show:

• One video called “How to embrace your femininity” tells girls to try smiling more (because it’s one of the most beautiful things God created), to embrace taking on the role of a wife and mother and to not show anger.
• Another video shows Frederick Douglass taking a dig at the Black Lives Matter movement while justifying the existence of slavery and calling the founding fathers abolitionists.
• A narrator in one video claims, “Slavery was not invented by white people,” while in another, she says, “There is no such thing as gender-affirming care. You cannot affirm something that does not exist.”
• In the “Playing the Black Card” video (which has 11 million views), conservative activist Candace Owens says, “With the Black card, you can sell books full of indecipherable prose because with a card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense?”

You get the gist.

Who’s behind PragerU? The biggest figure of the far-right group is co-founder and conservative radio host Dennis Prager, who’s repeatedly chastised Democrats for making it “impossible to say the n-word” and has used a slur for Jewish people on his radio show.

In an op-ed for Newsweek, he claimed that sending your kid to college “[endangers] their mind and their character,” and that they will leave college “more intolerant and more foolish” than they did when they arrived.

Other PragerU leadership, such as CEO Marissa Streit, unsurprisingly believes the American education system is failing kids by teaching them “leftism,” rather than tools “to think critically.” One PragerU presenter, Karly Borysenko, went so far as to say that “everyone who died in the Holocaust chose to die before they were ever born.”

The org’s funding also comes from sources that echo the messages presented in its curriculum. Texan billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks, who made their fortune from oil and gas fracking, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation — a group that opposes climate regulations and advocate for low immigration — both help fund PragerU.

As of 2018, the group spent more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups and was among the top 10 biggest political spenders on the site.

What’s especially dangerous about this group in the classroom, educators say, is the way its videos insert opinions, which to young viewers presented in an educational context, can seem like fact. While individual school districts get to decide whether they’ll encourage the use of these videos, the decision to use the materials ultimately lies in the hands of the teacher since PragerU is now state-endorsed.

There are around 3 million kids (more than the entire population of Kansas) in Florida schools.

“I don’t think that all of our educators are going to have some sort of, you know, sinister agenda, I think that we’ll have well-meaning people who are just looking for resources to use in their classroom… They cut out a lot of curriculum that we typically would be able to choose from, and so they’ve created what a lot of us refer to as a resource desert. So, if you’re in a resource desert, you’re gonna reach for the most accessible resource, which could be PragerU in this situation,” said Jessica Wright, the vice president of the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

Florida is the first state to approve videos from PragerU, but many are worried it will set off the same decision for many states. That being said, Florida isn’t the only state to shy away from teaching the truth; Texas science curriculum now requires that schools teach positive lessons about fossil fuels.