The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
History is dangerous. Not because it tells us where we’ve been, but because it has the audacity to remind us who we really are. That’s why Glenn Beck and PragerU are teaming up to produce their own AP History class—because nothing terrifies the right more than kids learning the difference between reality and a bedtime story.
To them, history isn’t about evidence, context, or truth. It’s about nostalgia. It’s about painting George Washington as a flawless saint, slavery as a regrettable hiccup, and Jesus as America’s first Founding Father. They don’t want students learning history—they want them catechized into the Church of the Idealized Past.
PragerU has always been a propaganda factory, peddling five-minute sermons on why inequality is good, why racism ended in 1964, and why your boss underpaying you is actually freedom. Now they’ve leveled up to indoctrinating teenagers under the guise of “AP History.” Their curriculum isn’t about complexity or nuance—it’s about flattening America into a marble statue that can never be questioned.
Glenn Beck, of course, is ecstatic. He’s been running a nostalgia racket for decades, pining for the mythic America where everything was great—if you were white, male, straight, and wealthy. This partnership is his dream: rewriting history so it’s more Norman Rockwell painting, less Wounded Knee massacre.
If Beck and Prager need a devil to cast out, they always pick Howard Zinn. A People’s History of the United States is their favorite punching bag, not because Zinn was inaccurate, but because he refused to bow before their golden calf version of America. Zinn had the audacity to tell history from the bottom up—from the enslaved, the workers, the women, the exploited.
That’s unforgivable to the right. Because if kids read Zinn, they might start asking why “land of the free” was built on stolen land, slave labor, and corporate exploitation. They might learn that patriotism without honesty is just propaganda. And they might realize that “American exceptionalism” looks a lot less exceptional when you tell the whole story.
Here’s the choice: history or mythology. History is messy, complicated, and often uncomfortable. Mythology is clean, simple, and always flattering to power. Zinn taught history. PragerU sells mythology.
One path teaches kids to think critically, empathize with the oppressed, and wrestle with complexity. The other path teaches kids to memorize patriotic hymns while ignoring the blood in the soil. Beck and Prager would rather indoctrinate than educate—because their movement doesn’t survive critical thought.
PragerU’s AP History is just the prosperity gospel with powdered wigs. Comforting lies, dressed up as truth. It’s not education—it’s indoctrination, selling students a past that never was to control the present that is.
Zinn’s work was prophetic: inconvenient, disruptive, unwilling to flatter the empire. Which is why the empire still hates him.
So the question isn’t whether kids will learn history. It’s whether they’ll learn the truth—or just another sermon from America’s false prophets of nostalgia.
