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I'm not going to watch @PragerU 's proslavery video because I've read enough of the original texts but let's unpack this Yuletide burning of the cross.
1) Prager released a video years ago that admitted the American Civil War was fought to preserve slavery. https://twitter.com/cringepolitik/status/1341937771766718464
1) Prager released a video years ago that admitted the American Civil War was fought to preserve slavery. https://twitter.com/cringepolitik/status/1341937771766718464
2) That's good and not at all what you'd expect from an organ of the American Right, most of whom pretty openly wish the other side won that war and damned near all of them have animating passion of a whites-only polity for all time.
3) But doing good, if extraordinarily easy, history once put them in an obvious pinch when they wanted to defend Lee. In the absence of his treason in defense of slavery, Lee's just a rich proslavery nobody.
4) This leaves PragerU with the one other thing that gave Lee much national attention before the ACW: Putting down John Brown's failed attempt to incite a slave rebellion at Harper's Ferry.
5) A slave rebellion did not ensue and probably would not have anyway -Brown's plan was bad- but we should take a moment to appreciate what a slave rebellion is: Enslaved people using force to free themselves from literally torturous persecution and oppression.
6) If Americans believe their own hype, and we usually do, then a slave rebellion is the literally super-American. Any enslaved person in the United States had infinitely more grievances against their enslavers than a white colonist in British North America had.
7) One cannot have sympathy for the patriot cause, which Prager U surely fancies, and then NOT draw the obvious comparison. Even white enslavers were aware of it, when they nervously looked at Black Americans during Independence Day celebrations.
8) John Brown was a white man who wanted to join forces with black men to fight for their freedom against other white men. Sounds like George Washington except for the fact that black freedom is being fought for. Prager are fans of Washington, I'm sure.
9) So the rub is black freedom. At PragerU, they think Brown is a radical. No one who knows anything about Brown is going to disagree. But more importantly, he's a bad radical because he wants to kill whites to free blacks.
10) This ought not be a hard choice. Taking sides in 19th century disputes over something we all theoretically agree is bad is the lightest of lifts. A child could swing it. It would cost PragerU nothing side with Brown the complicated, flawed radical against slavery.
11) Or rather it would cost PragerU their admiration of Lee, the blindingly white proslavery militant who betrayed his country and waged a bloody war against it so he and others like him could keep on stealing the lives, labor, and loved ones of four million black Americans.
12) The only ways you can come down as they do are to never give it any thought and coast along on passively-imbibed but still horrific white supremacy or go full-bore for the position that black Americans are better enslaved than living free.
13) As an outfit that pretends to being a University, a place of learning and study meant to cultivate minds and further the expansion of human knowledge, PragerU can no more claim to half-ass this than they could claim to be an ice sculpture museum on the surface of the sun.
14) This isn't even a choice to favor a multiracial democracy where Americans of all creeds and colors live together in some semblance of harmony and equality, with hopes to become a better and more compassionate society, which itself is just not being a white supremacist.
15) Given the choice between a world where black Americans must daily face both the prospect and regular reality of torture, sexual violence, and having their own children literally stolen from them and anything that's not that, PragerU is with the Bobby Lees of the world.
16) You can, and millions of people have, argued for versions of white supremacy that are still profoundly damaging and utterly evil without also taking that extra step and openly siding with the enslavers. No half-assing here, though: PragerU is a proslavery outfit in 2020.
