We’ve been meaning to get to this one since we saw it mentioned on Twitter a couple weeks ago, shortly after Florida’s Department of Education approved the use of videos from PragerU (Slogan: “In no sense a university”) as supplementary materials for “civics and government” in Florida classrooms. PragerU is the rightwing disinformation factory run by Dennis Prager (Slogan: “Anne Frank was a IDIOT”), and earlier this week we looked at a particularly noxious video in which Christopher Columbus teaches kids that slavery was merely a product of its time, everyone did it, and hey, it was better than being killed.
We have good news for you, Wonkers: the lousy lying climate denial video we’ll consider today isn’t nearly as awful, although it too is full of lies. But they aren’t lies about enslaving human beings, so … progress?
New Lessons For Florida School Kids: Native Americans Were No Saints, Slavery Much Nicer Than Death
Today’s experiment is “Ania’s Energy Crisis,” eight minutes of video torture that the Interplanetary Mad Scientists Union deemed too cruel to inflict on any of the crews of the Satellite of Love on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
The video is set in present-day Poland, where a bright tween girl named Ania learns to resist the ideology of climate change, although you won’t actually learn anything about science in the video at all. Fear not: I’ve slapped fact-checking URLs on top of most of the climate denial claims mentioned in the video.
Please note that Anya look slightly starved, and her family members are all a little haggard and disheveled. We guess that shows Europe isn’t free like America.
We learn that coal blesses Poland with 70 percent of its power, adding that over a third of Poles use plentiful “cheap brown coal” to heat their homes. It briefly mentions “pollution” is a problem, but doesn’t explain.
Sadly, the government of Ania’s hometown, Krakow, banned coal! Her teacher, a frumpy elitist who loves telling others how to live, insists that Poland must eliminate all fossil fuels to “save the world,” although why people think so is never explained.
Her teacher pushes Ania to mindlessly spout climate doctrine, but like Christians in the closing pages of a Chick Tract, Ania’s parents rescue her via logical fallacies taken straight from climate denial blogs. Hasn’t climate always changed? If Poland stopped using coal, would that really halt climate change? Especially since India and China aren’t doing anything? These loaded questions make Ania question everything.
Then Russia invades Ukraine and cuts off gas supplies, and Poland’s foolish ban on coal makes everyone miserable, because wind and solar energy can’t power a whole country!
Ania does her own research and “learns” renewable energy is unreliable and more expensive than coal, because she only reads stuff the Heartland Institute wrote a decade ago. (The video is recent enough to discuss the invasion of Ukraine, but deliberately ignores the fact that wind and solar are cheaper than coal, and have been for years. )
Poor Ania shares her concerns at school, but even her best friend shuns her because belief in climate change is the “cool” thing for kids these days. You know you’re in a rightwing fantasy, because not even Ania’s teacher can’t explain how renewables can ever be abundant and affordable enough to replace coal.
Ania goes online to tell anyone who’ll listen that “energy poverty” is far worse than “climate change,” but as she shares her research, she gets nothing but rude replies like “Your ‘facts’ make me angry!” with lots of angry emojis. Nobody argues back with science.
And there’s the big cheat: the video doesn’t even attempt to explain away climate science, apart from the broad idea that “believers” in climate change say not burning fossil fuels will save the world. Not a word about the science, which is plenty easy to understand: Burning coal, oil, and gas releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping heat and warming the planet.
The video’s “arguments” are entirely emotional: without coal, nice people must suffer for the sake of what snooty experts claim is real, even if the “believers” have no good answers. And if you dare question climate change, people get angry at you. Climate change is pretty much a fad. It’s climate denial that doesn’t even bother denying anything.
Anyway, Ania’s family is “proud of her for telling the truth,” which isn’t specified either. They tell her tales of how before communism fell, Dad had to meet friends secretly, under threat from the government, to “share his ideas.” And Grandpa Yakob tells her about the “Warsaw Uprising,”
when the city’s Jews fought back against the Nazis. Yakob remembers helping smuggle food, blankets, and even ammunition to the Jewish resistance fighters through the sewer tunnels.
May we get pedantic? Here the video conflates — deliberately or lazily — two completely different events in WWII: the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Or maybe Grandpa just has a bad memory, because he’s recalling a story that couldn’t have happened.
The August 1944 Warsaw uprising was a brave but doomed attempt by tens of thousands of Polish resistance fighters to drive the Nazis from the city. They held out 63 days, but Joseph Stalin halted the Red Army’s advance long enough to let the Nazis wipe out the democracy-minded resisters who might otherwise have opposed Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. So pragmatic!
There weren’t any “Jewish resistance fighters” in Warsaw during the 1944 uprising, because they were all dead. In April and May of 1943, about 750 Jewish fighters made a brave but doomed stand against the Nazis’ plan to liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto and send the remaining Jews to concentration camps. They resisted hellish Nazi assaults for 27 days before they and thousands of Jewish civilians were killed or captured.
And while one faction of the Jewish underground obtained a small number of pistols and some explosives from the regular Polish underground in October 1942, there were definitely no Polish gentiles running supplies through the sewers during the actual fighting.
So hey, PragerU, thanks for the inspiring “history” of a thing that never happened.
But we digress. The big lesson is that “fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” so Ania keeps up her own brave online fight.
Yes, really. These Prager people are sick, stealing the valor of those who fought the Nazis and saying that demanding continued use of fossil fuels is every bit as brave. Also, opponents of fossil fuels are Nazis.
Ania’s blog starts taking off as others realize they too are oppressed by not having beautiful cheap carbon-rich coal. The Polish government drops restrictions on coal, and Ania helps folks score bargains on coal from the Czech Republic, which she helps deliver with her brother’s truck! The narrator’s voice trills with joy here, as everything is made better again by coal, all thanks to Ania, the brave little Johnny Carbonseed of Krakow.
Now, as with that idiotic slavery video, we don’t know whether any Florida schools are actually showing this crap to students. But the Florida Department of Education has determined that PragerU propaganda “aligns to Florida's revised civics and government standards." We do know for certain that PragerU videos are a standby for homeschoolers, and that during the pandemic, some teachers in public schools used them to fill time.
With other rightwing governors hot to copy Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke,” it seems inevitable that PragerU lies will be showing up in classrooms in other red states, too, unless people who give a damn about reality demand otherwise. Whole lotta school board seats up for election every year, everywhere, people.
UPDATE for Nerds: NPR reported on the PragerU nonsense yesterday, pointed out that "No Florida school district has yet announced plans to use PragerU Kids videos, but they can't stop teachers from showing them, either."
The story adds that public school advocates suggest parents tell principals to opt kids out of PragerU videos. Like so, from the Twitters:
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Just updated story with a link to an NPR story which notes that "No Florida school district has yet announced plans to use PragerU Kids videos, but they can't stop teachers from showing them, either."
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/11/1193534564/videos-by-prageru-a-conservative-media-company-can-be-played-in-florida-classroo
Same story mentions that public school advocates (the non-crazy kind) are suggesting that Florida parents contact their schools to opt them out of any PragerU materials a teacher might decide to use. May as well use that "parental rights" stuff for good instead of evil.
Grandpa Yakub sounds like he's a cheap knock-off of Uncle Albert.
https://youtu.be/yLS3op_BTr8