Even after retirement, he spoke against the Iraq War and tore into Barack Obama for his drone kill list. As a staunch anti-war hardliner, Gravel railed against imperialist policies and used a committee hearing to read the leaked Pentagon Papers - a massive indictment of American corruption in Southeast Asia - into the Congressional record. In his 12 years in the Senate, Mike Gravel had fought to end the draft for the Vietnam War, locked horns with Nixon over ballistic nuclear missiles and wrestled Ted Kennedy for leadership roles. Motherboard reached out to The Gravel Institute to ask about its goals and methodology but did not hear back.What does it take to launch a leftist institution? For Henry Williams and David Oks, it started with one uncertain phone call across the country, to an 89-year-old former senator whom the teenagers both admired. "Like okay, the institutes are now the official people who talk about PragerU. "Part of me feels strangely nostalgic about it," he said. Despite not knowing how effectively combat PragerU's disinformation, at the very least someone is giving it a try. He said that the fact that someone with institutional power was taking on PragerU was a good thing, and wished them success.
But Big Joel's content runs into the same issue as Ellis and HBomberguy's-his content has to rely on complex facts rather than comforting feelings.īig Joel said that he was excited about some aspects of The Gravel Institute, especially the presenters they've announced, like Slavoj Zizek and Cornel West. It's long, thoughtful and nuanced, making it pretty much the opposite of PragerU in aesthetics even if it's competing with some of the content on PragerU in terms of views. I guess I’m saying, I hope they have someone who liked Fox News on staff."īig Joel's work is eclectic, running the gamut from animated films to left wing politics, though his first video about PragerU is the most popular video on his channel. And what will work is beyond my imagination. Debunking their ideas won't necessarily work. "I think the most important thing to remember and take seriously here is that reaching people who would otherwise like PragerU isn’t an obvious process. "The truth is, when I make a video, I don’t have some personal fiction of destroying PragerU such that people don’t like them anymore," he said. YouTuber Big Joel has made videos critiquing PragerU, as well as anti-abortion propaganda and Christian films, but said that he doesn't imagine himself as deprogramming right wingers when he does so. Getting bogged down in facts loses people quickly, especially when the facts are emotionally unsatisfying or complex. PragerU can upload videos on a daily basis that aren't quite true, but videos that debunk them are going to be longer, slower, and less snappy. Ellis pointed out that right wing content tends to rely on emotional truths rather than factual truths, and the necessity of fact checking hamstrings the left wing equivalent. "What is the Gravel Institute going to be a gateway to? Me? There's nowhere to go that isn't already pretty mainstream, and there isn't a vast underbelly of leftist content that Gravel can redirect toward."Įven though Ellis and HBomberguy are extremely popular-Ellis has more than a million subscribers, and Hbomberguy, the moniker of YouTuber Harry Brewis, has more than two million views on all his most popular work-there is nothing that they can do to match the scale of PragerU. "To me the most insidious thing about PragerU is how it functions as a gateway drug to much more extreme politics, like QAnon," she said. While Ellis hasn't taken on PragerU directly on her YouTube channel, her media analysis comes from an explicitly leftist point of view, like her three part documentary on how the making of The Hobbit films changed New Zealand labor laws for the worse (as well as making some pretty bad movies). Why would The Gravel Institute be any different?īest-selling author and YouTuber Lindsay Ellis told Motherboard that part of the issue of combating the spread of PragerU is that the right has an ecosystem of more extreme content that already populates YouTube that PragerU serves in part as a gateway to.
But there's already a cottage industry of YouTubers who have taken on and tried to debunk PragerU, and they've barely made a dent. Part of this has to do with The Gravel Institute's relative newness, and it's possible as time goes on they will be able to reach people on a similar scale to PragerU. A video that Prager U posted two days ago, titled "Never Apologise To The Mob," reached 278,000 views in the same amount of time. The Gravel Institute's video got 78,000 views in two days, which isn't that bad in the scheme of things. The similarities to PragerU in style are obvious, but in terms of reach, the Gravel Institute is outmatched.
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