"PragerU as Genre: How Ideologies Typify Speech"

Download PDF

About the Author

Christopher Luis Shosted is a student at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. He will graduate in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a certification in writing arts. Since enrolling at Moravian College in 2018, Christopher has focused on understanding the drives behind rhetorics that harm marginalized groups. He plans to continue his education through a Master’s and Ph.D program where he wishes to put rhetorical theory in conversation with literary studies.

Contents

Introduction

Theories on Genre

PragerU’s Videos

Comparing PragerU to Academic Discourse

PragerU and Post-Truth

Conclusion

References

Introduction

PragerU is a website founded by conservative talk show host Dennis Prager. It features five-minute videos on a variety of topics such as immigration, criminal justice, and education. As demonstrated by its name, PragerU brands itself as a university but this branding is part of a larger trend of ideology-promoting discourse garbing itself in well-established genres. PragerU is a university in much the same way Fox News is news; while both use the style of the genre they are mimicking, the use of false information to reaffirm hegemonic ideologies belies the motivations that inspire these types of rhetoric.

As a system of genres, the social motivations and exigencies that propel PragerU’s rhetoric can be understood. That rhetoric may seem laughable due to how poorly it apes academic discourse, but its producers are keenly aware of the conventions they flout. Their videos less resemble the crackpot conspiracy videos of YouTube instead opting for slick visual graphics and simple, carefully chosen language. Their rhetoric is also demonstrably successful; their YouTube channel currently sits at 2.2 million subscribers and has garnered three-quarters of a billion cumulative views since 2009, yet the facts used to support the arguments in these videos are often cherry-picked, misrepresented, or wholly incorrect. It is not that PragerU succeeds despite its fallaciousness, but because of it. Their rhetoric preys upon the social anxieties endemic to modern life and lays them at the feet of a particular community: academics.

For the purposes of this article, three video from PragerU will be analyzed: Jordan Peterson’s “Dangerous People are Teaching Your Kids,” Heather Mac Donald’s “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?,” and George Will’s “The Speech Every 2015 Grad Needs to Hear.” These videos are just three in PragerU’s extensive catalogue but they demonstrate a pattern of rhetoric united in their goals. Each video discusses a different feature of college: professors, curricula, and tuition and degree marketability respectively, but each speaker addresses their topic with a layer of ridicule and disdain.

PragerU’s videos can be seen as a more palatable form of the discourse that has become common in online spaces, but there’s no denying that they attempt to garner credibility for some of the more problematic aspects of society. In short, they cloak rhetoric that promotes racism, misogyny, and social inequality under the banner of fact. There is a risk present in the wanton promotion of these videos even when the goal is to counter them. Engagement with these videos brings them into a conversation they otherwise may not have been a part of, but in the age of the internet inaction is a form of engagement as well.

The intent here is not to amplify this rhetoric; rather, the exigence is to warn. The rhetorical studies community is uniquely equipped to understand the larger implications behind problematic rhetorics such as those promoted by PragerU. Yet understanding requires engagement and unfortunately promotion of these regressive ideals. The issue is that PragerU and rhetors who will adopt PragerU’s strategies in the future will continue to see success independently of scholarly engagement with their rhetoric. That is unless that rhetoric can be understood in terms of a higher order.

What this analysis proposes is one of myriad potential lenses that might be used to understand this type of rhetoric. PragerU’s claims cannot be countered because they exist on an order beyond a true-false dichotomy. Instead, what is required is public education on the ways in which rhetors attempt to supersede truth. This analysis is one step toward that goal.

The three videos analyzed here are part of PragerU’s larger strategy to usurp the social role held by the mode of discourse it mimics: academia. By lowering the credibility of orthodox education PragerU bolsters its own authority to promote ideology that skews further and further right. PragerU operates within systems of genre, but the ways genres function and what epistemic roles they serve require definition.