As Maui Burns…

From The Guardian:

Videos that compare climate activists to Nazis, portray solar and wind energy as environmentally ruinous and claim that current global heating is part of natural long-term cycles will be made available to young schoolchildren in Florida, after the state approved their use in its public school curriculum.

Slickly-made animations by the Prager University Foundation, a conservative group that produces materials on science, history, gender and other topics widely criticized as distorting the truth, will be allowed to be shown to children in kindergarten to fifth grade after being adopted by Florida’s department of education.

Teachers who use the materials “will not be reprimanded, cannot be pushed back on about it, we are approved on the curriculum”, said Jill Simonian, director of outreach at PragerU Kids, the youth arm of the organization. “More states are following. Florida – I’m applauding. This is step in the right direction.”

But experts who have studied the videos and other PragerU output have warned that many of Florida’s 3 million public schoolchildren risk being exposed to a form of rightwing indoctrination that conforms to the worldview of the organization’s funders but bares little resemblance to reality.

“These videos target very young and impressionable kids with messages of support for fossil fuels and doubts over renewable energy resources – they are trying to grow the next generation of supporters for fossil fuels,” said Adrienne McCarthy, a researcher at Kansas State University who has studied the activities of PragerU.

“It’s propaganda 101. Equating people concerned about the climate change with Nazis can have long-term impacts on young, impressionable people. The beliefs PragerU are pushing forward overlap with far-right extremist beliefs. The fear is that they will bring this sort of extremist beliefs into mainstream society.”

Despite its name, Prager is not an academic institution and does not confer degrees. It is a rightwing advocacy group founded in 2009 that produces various materials, including magazines and videos, that have been criticized by experts for inaccurate portrayals of slavery and racism in the US. According to McCarthy, each of the animated PragerU videos costs $25,000 to produce.

The group, which has received substantial funding from Dan and Farris Wilks, two brothers who are petroleum industry businessmen, has also been accused of spreading denial of climate science.

Florida, whose governor Ron DeSantis has called climate change “leftwing stuff”, is the first state to adopt PragerU videos, although in several other states textbooks pushed by the fossil fuel industry have included references that either downplay or deny human-caused global heating.