The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles has discovered that PragerU is making inroads with teenagers and she’s not happy. She's written a long article, a combination of honest facts and oozing snideness, that reveals her disdain for and fear of conservative values.

Dennis Prager matters because he is persuasive. In the early 2000s, as I was going through the process of disengaging from a Democrat party I realized bore no relationship to my values, he helped me create a framework for my new worldview. I’ve also loved his PragerU videos. While open about their biases, they are temperate in tone and carefully objective in their facts. The videos, which rely on experts in whatever field is at issue, also present complex ideas in ways that are simple without being dumbed down.

Here are some good things about Bowles’ "Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time." She factually describes Dennis Prager’s growing empire, from the videos (over a billion viewed), to the outreach on college campuses, to a new channel for Hispanics. She states correctly that today’s teens, having been weaned on Leftist ideology, are becoming “conservative curious” (my phrase, not hers). She accurately notes that Prager’s goal is to spread Judeo-Christian values for societal betterment.

After visiting Prager’s headquarters, at which roughly 50 people (average age 30-ish) work, Bowles honestly quotes Craig Strazzeri, the Chief Marketing Officer, when he explains the myriad empty offices: “A lot of people stayed home because they were scared of being identified as working for Prager.” Bowles, though, seems not to realize that this is a sad commentary on today’s progressives.

But not all is good. One can imagine that, if PragerU were progressive, Bowles would have written in glowing terms, with riffs about Prager’s warmth, charisma, and erudition; enthusiastic descriptions about how he’s changing minds; and sympathy for the fact that Google-owned YouTube is systematically censoring PragerU videos to prevent young people from seeing them. But that’s not what Bowles does. Instead, it’s sneering, all the way down.

The sneering begins with Will Witt, 23, who gives college students the opportunity to reveal on videos what passes for “knowledge” in Progressive academia. Bowles begins straightforwardly enough by telling how Witt, although raised in “a relatively liberal home,” was leaning conservative when he reached the University of Colorado in Boulder. Once there, Witt discovered that conservative students were subject to systematic intellectual discrimination. Frustrated, he discovered PragerU, which he found more informative than his classes.

Then Bowles’ gets snide: “He did not graduate from college.” Had Witt been a David Hogg, it’s a certainty that she might have written, “Realizing that college could not give him the knowledge he craved, Witt left to begin learning about life,” or something similar. Instead, Bowles panders to the Jennifer Rubins demographic.

Bowles next seeks out the inevitable “expert” opinions about underhanded way in which PragerU is inveigling good Progressive youth into the conservative cult:

The way PragerU presents that “alternative voice” is in the measured tone of an online university, carefully avoiding the news cycle and President Trump. That is part of its power. “They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution. “PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black. Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.

Bowles also denigrates Prager himself for being a conservative who supports Trump. She accurately summarizes Prager’s contention that Trump’s personal acts are between himself and God, but his public acts are what matter to the country and, as to the country, Trump is a good and moral leader. Bowles sees this as hypocrisy, cluing readers when she writes that Prager “carefully threaded the needle for listeners as he made the argument….” Proving that she cannot understand the distinction Prager has always made between public and private, Bowles adds

This is a new line of argument for Mr. Prager, who spent much of his career focusing on those micro values. He is a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, which he considers an effort to “destroy the foundation of our Judeo-Christian civilization.” An episode in his “Same Sex Issues” collection is titled, “Love Is Not Enough.”

In fact, it’s not a departure at all. There are societal values, which benefit of society as a whole, and there are individual values, which are between a person, his conscience, and his God. Conservatives understand this; Bowles does not.

And it goes, on and on (it’s a long article), with Bowles swerving between telling the truth and implying nefarious conduct. In a tour de force of subtly biased writing (despite factual honesty) by the end Bowles' own disdain for Prager bleeds through so clearly.