Leo and Layla are cartoon adventurers on the PragerU.com website. Cartoon Layla is a white teenage girl in middle school. Her younger brother, Cartoon Leo, is a white pre-teen boy. In July, the Florida Department of Education approved the use of “PragerU Kids” videos in elementary school classrooms to teach social studies and American history.
“PragerU,” despite the “U” in its name, is not a university. A note on its website acknowledges that it is “not an accredited university” and it does not offer degrees. It claims to “provide educational, entertaining, pro-American videos for every age.” It might better be called DeSantis.com. Its goal is to challenge the “Woke agendas infiltrating classrooms, culture, and social media” and “teach classic American values.”
The Southern Poverty Law Centers calls PragerU, established up by rightwing radio talk show host Dennis Prager, “another node on the internet connecting conservative media consumers to the dark corners of the extreme right.” Some of its videos are hosted by extreme right-wingers including Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor who co-founded The Daily Wire, Kanye West influencer and Trump apologist Candice Owens, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, and Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute. Charles Blow of the New York Times describes Prager as “poison on the racial question, and anything springing from his efforts should, by definition, be considered tainted, particularly when it comes to race.”
“Leo & Layla's History Adventures with Frederick Douglass” is a seven-minute trip back to 1852 where they interview Mr. Douglass, a former slave and African American abolitionist, in what “PragerU” describes as “an honest and accurate look at slavery and a lesson on how to create change.” The video starts with Leo and Layla sitting on a bed watching a mock television news broadcast about “violence and destruction” caused by “angry activists” who want to “abolish the police” and tear down the U.S. system. Leo says they are talking about social justice in his math class and Layla responds that math class is supposed to be about math. Leo asks Layla what abolish means, which leads to a factually flawed history lesson about the 19th century movement to end slavery in the United States. Layla mistypes abolitionist into her magic cell phone which transports the two adventurers into the past where they meet Frederick Douglass. They ask Douglass if he can help them learn about activism and abolishing things. The ensuing conversation between Douglass and the adventurers presents a very distorted history of slavery and the United States.
1. Cartoon Douglass tells Leo and Layla that “slavery has existed everywhere in the world for thousands of years.” But Cartoon Douglass is mistaken. Slavery did not exist in most of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire. Chattel slavery was a modern invention after the Columbian exchange as European countries used Africans to exploit the resources of the Americas. There were bondage systems in other parts of the world, but only in the Americas, including in the United States, were enslaved people considered property and denied humanity. The chattel slavery system was also the only slave system based on race where children inherited the enslaved status of their mother.
2. Cartoon Douglass tells Leo and Layla that the existence of slavery is “especially disappointing here because American was founded on the idea of freedom.” Cartoon Douglass was apparently unfamiliar with Frederick Douglass’ 1852 July 4th speech in Rochester, New York where he described Independence Day celebrations as “a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.” To the enslaved African, “your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity” are “mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
3.Leo tells Cartoon Douglass that he heard that some of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Cartoon Douglass responds that “our Founding Fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong” and wanted it to end but had to compromise to create a unified country. When Layla asks Cartoon Douglass if he was “okay with that,” Cartoon Douglass says he’s not okay with slavery, “but the Founding Fathers made a compromise to achieve something great, the making of the United States” and “created a system they thought would end slavery gradually.” Sorry Cartoon Douglass, but there is no evidence to support this claim.
4. Leo says that slavery still exists 75 years after the founding of the nation and wonders if the system created by the Founders didn’t work. Cartoon Douglass assures him that the system did work because slavery had already been abolished in the North. Cartoon Douglass can be forgiven for not knowing the nation would be plunged into a bloody Civil War over slavery in nine years, but the people who created the cartoon definitely should have known.
5. When the kids want to know why it was taking so long to end slavery. Cartoon Douglass becomes an apologist for the continuance of slavery arguing that “sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem and complicated problems take time to solve.”
6. Cartoon Douglass explains there was no “real movement anywhere in the world to abolish slavery before the American founding. Slavery was part of life all over the world. It was America that began the conversation to end it.” Actually, it was British Quakers who began the conversation to end it, a British court that ruled in 1772 that slavery could not legally exist in England, and Britain that first outlawed the slave trade and ended slavery in its colonies. It was enslaved Africans in Haiti who overthrew slavery in the French colony and established an independent African nation in the Americas, seventy years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. Sorry Cartoon Douglass, but you were wrong again.
7. Cartoon Douglass is very critical of William Lloyd Garrison because “William refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” Leo tells Cartoon Douglass that we’ve got that type in our time too. Layla concludes that Cartoon Douglass is “trying to work for change inside the American system” and Cartoon Douglass responds “precisely” because “our system is wonderful. And the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” Cartoon Douglass dismisses Garrison and radical, and Leo calls Garrison “silly.” Layla says, “your way if definitely better, it’s the right way to get change.” Leo adds that in our time, “All Americans are equally protected under the law and have equal voting rights regardless of race.” I wish Cartoon Douglass had pointed out that it took a Civil War to end slavery and that Jim Crow segregation racial continued deep into the 20th century, but he didn’t.
8. Layla asks Cartoon Douglass if he thinks “we should be activists, just not radical ones.” Cartoon Douglass agrees it is important to work with activists who want to improve things, but only if they are willing to work within the system and “understand that change usually requires patience and compromise . . . If they are radicals like Garrison, you and your brother would be best served by staying away.” Again we need to forgive Cartoon Douglass for not being aware that during the winter of 1858-1859, the real Frederick Douglass housed the fugitive John Brown at his Rochester, New York home where they collaborated on a plan to launch a slave rebellion in the United States. If that idea isn’t radical, I don’t know what is.
In other episodes, Leo and Layla get to meet George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Christopher Columbus, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Moses, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Ronald Reagan and lots of historical, Biblical, and religious characters. They provide plenty of opportunities to indoctrinate children with rightwing propaganda, the anti-Woke wokeness.