For Williams, PragerU is the latest version of the right-wing ideological project that began in the 1960s and 1970s with organizations like the Ayn Rand Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hudson Institute. Instead, it focuses on evergreen cultural and political issues. It also generally stays above the fray of the daily battles and rarely mentions specific politicians. PragerU does exactly that for conservatives. Williams says that one of the weaknesses of the Democratic Party has been its unwillingness to build political organizations, like PragerU, that are solely devoted to shaping the left’s ideological base. The conservative outlet has more than half a million Twitter followers and nearly three million YouTube subscribers the Gravel Institute has nearly 330,000 Twitter followers and roughly 240,000 YouTube subscribers. He hopes that by attracting stars like David Cross, and by posting well-produced content, the institute will be able to eventually match PragerU’s online reach. Williams says the Gravel Institute has a different model. According to its 2019 tax returns, the nonprofit spent over $6 million on Facebook and YouTube ads alone. One trademark of PragerU is its expenditures on advertising. Gravel is important because I think there’s a better chance of it reaching those voters on YouTube than through another shiny magazine.” “Democrats these last two election cycles have bled working-class support. “They won me over right away with their pitch months before they launched the thing,” Matt Karp says. In the institute’s most-viewed video, Arrested Development star David Cross challenges whether America is really the freest and wealthiest country on Earth. So far, the institute’s videos have included personalities on the left like Briahna Joy Gray, the former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and scholars like Fordham Law School associate professor Zephyr Teachout, and Princeton University associate history professor Matt Karp. But Williams is confident that its grassroots model will be more effective in the long run. The Gravel Institute knows it’s punching up. The institute is designed to germinate progressive ideas without being moored to electoral politics. It’s the pointy end of a giant media and influence machine.” “And it’s an asymmetric fight because PragerU is not this stand-alone institution.
GRAVEL INSTITUTE HOW TO
The institute officially launched last September, with a video called “ How to Defeat PragerU.” “It’s an asymmetric fight,” Williams says. While the Gravel Institute brands itself as a progressive answer to PragerU, the organizations are not in the same weight class instead, think David and Goliath. They still call every few weeks to keep him updated, but he’s not involved with the nonprofit’s day-to-day operations. The institute’s core values are driven by Gravel’s politics and the platform they all drafted together for his presidential campaign. “Mike is sort of the patron saint and namesake,” says Williams. Gravel has given the men his blessing to run the nonprofit on their own. They hope to connect existing organizations on the left, online personalities, and celebrities to ensure a strong, enduring digital ecosystem for the American left. Currently, the group counters PragerU’s nonstop stream of online content. Now, Oks, 19, and Magowan and Williams, both 20, are playing catch-up with the institute, a nonprofit advocacy organization designed to germinate progressive ideas without being moored to electoral politics. The four of them finally thought of a way to bolster progressives and keep the spirit of their online campaign movement alive: They would create the Gravel Institute. He shared thoughts on the future of the progressive movement and discussed the most powerful forces on the right, including the conservative heavyweight PragerU. The three stayed with Gravel on the California coast for about a week, listening to his stories about Richard Nixon and the Pentagon Papers-in 1971, he risked entering thousands of pages of secret history of the Vietnam War into the Congressional Record. Now they were going to visit with him to reflect on the campaign.
For eight months, the three students had run Gravel’s long-shot progressive campaign from Oks’s childhood bedroom in Westchester County, New York. Mike Gravel called off his 2020 presidential bid, Henry Williams, David Oks, and Henry Magowan made a trip out to Monterey, California, to see their candidate. Mike Gravel, Henry Magowan, and David Oks.Ī few months after former Alaskan Sen. The co-founders of the Gravel Institute, with the progressive advocacy nonprofit’s ‘patron saint and namesake.’ From left: Henry Williams, former Sen.
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