Trump Axes Independent News – And Puts Israeli Intelligence on Air

Right, so it takes a special kind of patriot to wave the flag while quietly handing the microphone to a foreign intelligence asset, albeit a former one — and an even rarer one to do it in the very week you’ve gagged your own public broadcasters. But that’s the Trump White House for you: defunding PBS and NPR with one hand, ushering in PragerU with the other, all under the banner of “patriotic education.” The result is a neat magic trick for the MAGA age: make the country’s independent news vanish, pull a ready-made ideological mouthpiece from your hat, and tell the audience it’s what George Washington would have wanted. Never mind that the new headliner cut her teeth in Israel’s Unit 8200, the cyber-spy corps famed for vacuuming up data and shaping information to fit that state’s needs. Never mind that the “optional” videos her outfit pumps into US classrooms are already recasting America’s founding, rewriting its sins, and smuggling in a foreign ally’s talking points, that ally of course being Israel yet again.
Right, so in the weeks after Donald Trump signed into law the measure that zeroed out federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the two best-known public media brands in the United States—PBS and NPR—were already preparing contingency plans. For more than half a century, those networks have provided Americans with a rare alternative to commercial news, protected by charters that guaranteed editorial independence from government interference. Now, $535 million in annual funding had been erased in one move, stripping away the infrastructure for investigative journalism, cultural programming, and foreign reporting that frequently ventured into uncomfortable territory for those in power. Into that vacuum, the White House quietly ushered in something entirely different: a multimedia “Founders Museum” exhibit in partnership with PragerU, the self-described conservative educational nonprofit whose CEO, Marissa Streit, is a veteran of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s decidedly shady intelligence branch.
The installation, unveiled back in June and described in both PragerU’s own announcement and reporting by outlets such as Vox and 404 Media, is a polished mix of physical displays and QR-code-linked videos in which AI-generated likenesses of Revolutionary-era figures deliver patriotic monologues. One shows “John Adams” quoting the modern conservative catchphrase “facts don’t care about your feelings,” popularised by Ben Shapiro. The White House’s website includes a downloadable “host your own museum” kit for schools and communities. A small-print disclaimer notes that the partnership “does not constitute or imply US Government or US Department of Education endorsement of PragerU,” but the exhibit is co-branded with the Department of Education logo and was launched with Education Secretary Linda McMahon standing alongside Streit. In the context of PBS and NPR’s defunding, what we have here is a state-sanctioned civic education platform, presented in the heart of the executive mansion, now bears the stamp of a private ideological outlet.
PragerU is not, and has never been, a university. Founded in 2009 by radio host Dennis Prager and producer Allen Estrin, it began as a YouTube channel offering “five-minute university” videos designed to counter what its founders saw as liberal bias in higher education. Over the years, it has received millions from conservative megadonors, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Wilks brothers, and Koch-aligned funds. Its content has consistently promoted climate change scepticism, free-market orthodoxy, and hard-line social conservatism. In recent years, PragerU has moved beyond adult online audiences to target children directly, developing “PragerU Kids” animated series, storybooks, and lesson plans aimed at K–12 classrooms.
As of this month, according to PragerU’s own state announcements and reporting in the likes of TIME and Vanity Fair, nine Republican-led states—Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Louisiana, South Carolina, Idaho, Arizona, and New Hampshire—have approved PragerU Kids as an “optional” resource for public school teachers. Florida was the first, with Governor Ron DeSantis hailing the videos as “factual and patriotic.” In practice, “optional” often means that politically sympathetic administrators and teachers adopt the material wholesale. The content, critics note, blurs the line between civics and propaganda: slavery is described as a “necessary evil” in the founding era, systemic racism is dismissed as a myth, and Israel is depicted as a democratic bulwark of Western civilisation under siege from irrational enemies. Once embedded in classrooms, these narratives become part of the default civic knowledge of the next generation.
It is here that Marissa Streit’s biography takes on heightened significance therefore. Born in Los Angeles but raised in Israel, Streit served in Unit 8200 before returning to the United States for a degree at UCLA and a master’s in education and nonprofit management. Unit 8200 is Israel’s equivalent of the NSA in the US, or GCHQ here is the UK, responsible for signals intelligence, cyber operations, and information warfare. Alumni of this elite unit often go on to lead major tech firms, cybersecurity companies, and strategic communications ventures, they go on to embed themselves all over the place. Streit took over as CEO of PragerU in 2016 and has overseen its transformation into a multi-platform media company with an explicit strategy to penetrate the K–12 market, that’s kindergarten through to age 17-18, the formative years. Her tenure has coincided with a marked increase in PragerU’s pro-Israel output, including videos minimising the humanitarian toll in Gaza and framing Palestinian political actors exclusively through the lens of terrorism.
Israeli “hasbara” is the government’s term for its global public diplomacy campaigns. In practice, it is a coordinated information strategy aimed at framing Israel’s actions positively abroad and neutralising criticism. Budgets for hasbara, documented by Israeli outlets such as Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, run into the tens of millions of dollars annually. The Ministry of Strategic Affairs has explicitly targeted foreign media, civil society, and educational institutions as arenas for influence. One common tactic is to partner with or fund ostensibly independent local organisations that can deliver pro-Israel narratives without the baggage of overt government branding. In the UK, for example, StandWithUs UK runs school assemblies, teacher toolkits, and youth leadership trips to Israel; its own reporting boasts of reaching “thousands” of pupils annually. At the end of last year, as the Times of Israel reported, it opened an “October 7 Education Center” in London, framing its work as antisemitism prevention while presenting the October 7 Hamas attacks largely outside the context of Israel’s blockade and occupation. In Germany, pro-Israel NGOs have been given state backing to provide “antisemitism prevention” training to teachers, with course content that conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In Canada, the Jewish National Fund’s long-running school programs have been criticised for whitewashing the destruction of Palestinian villages, though it must be said, and as I covered in a recent video, JNF Canada have now lost its charitable status after a review of its activities.
The parallels with the PragerU case are not subtle therefore, though this is an issue that mainstream media have largely ignored. In each, a trusted domestic platform—be it a school system, teacher training program, or cultural venue—is used to deliver ideologically framed content. The brand is domestic-facing, but leadership or funding ties link it to Israeli state networks. Content is introduced as “optional” or “supplementary,” avoiding the appearance of imposition while steadily normalising its use nonetheless. Once established, it shapes how a generation understands history, conflict, and civic identity. In the United States, the White House’s imprimatur on PragerU’s Founders Museum content elevates this from a state-level skirmish in the curriculum wars to a federal endorsement of an outlet already enmeshed in this pattern.
Supporters of the PragerU partnership argue that it simply offers an alternative perspective to what they characterise as left-leaning public broadcasting and progressive educational materials. They point to the disclaimer on the White House site as evidence of arm’s-length separation. But in the world of political communication, platform is power. PBS and NPR, for all their imperfections, operated under legal and cultural norms that insulated them from direct partisan control. They employed professional journalists, maintained codes of ethics, and were subject to independent boards. By contrast, PragerU is a private media company with no obligation to present opposing views, no independent editorial oversight, and an explicit ideological mission. Hosting its content in the White House and distributing it through Department of Education channels does more to legitimise it than any amount of corporate advertising ever could.
The timing compounds the effect. Removing PBS and NPR while elevating PragerU is not a random sequence of events; it is a replacement strategy. The audiences that once encountered balanced foreign coverage, in-depth policy analysis, and investigative reporting will now, if they turn to federally blessed sources, find AI-generated patriotism and culture-war talking points. The fact that the person steering this new platform’s growth is an alumna of a foreign intelligence unit whose government invests heavily in influence operations abroad should at minimum raise questions of transparency and appropriateness. In the name of protecting American values, the White House has outsourced civic education to an outfit run by a foreign intelligence alum. In other contexts—Chinese Confucius Institutes, Russian-funded media outlets—the US has acted to limit foreign-linked educational influence. Here, it is inviting it into the symbolic heart of American democracy now.
None of this requires conspiracy theorising to understand. It is enough to look at the structural incentives. For Trump, cutting PBS and NPR delivers a blow to media institutions he has long derided as hostile, he is horribly thin-skinned, he can’t handle criticism of any sort; all while satisfying a Republican base primed to see public broadcasting as elitist and left-leaning. Elevating PragerU rewards a loyal ideological ally, provides ready-made content that flatters his political brand, because kissing his orange backside always works, he is that vain and shallow and helps cultivate a rising generation steeped in a worldview friendly to his foreign and domestic policy positions. For PragerU, the White House partnership is a marketing coup that opens doors in more states and cements its reputation among conservative donors. For Israel and its advocacy networks, it’s mana from heaven, having a Unit 8200 veteran’s organisation embedded in US civic education and blessed by the federal government is an asset in their long-term battle for American public opinion on Middle East policy, all at a time when public opinion has shifted decisively against them.
The real casualty is the public’s ability to access information shaped by professional independence rather than political alignment. When the administration itself becomes a distributor of ideologically filtered “education,” the line between civic learning and state propaganda dissolves. And when that ideological filter is not purely domestic but overlaps with the influence strategies of a foreign government, the implications go beyond the familiar culture-war terrain. They reach into questions of sovereignty, democratic resilience, and the ethical limits of foreign engagement in a nation’s civic life. How far does this sell out go?
In the corridors of the White House, the Founders Museum now stands as a case study in narrative capture. To the casual visitor, it may look like a harmless celebration of American origins. But the context in which it appears—the dismantling of public broadcasting, the penetration of partisan media into classrooms, the leadership’s foreign intelligence pedigree, and the global precedent for this style of influence operation—tells a very different story. It is the story of how a democracy’s own institutions can be repurposed to carry someone else’s message, wrapped in the flag and sold as history. The question is no longer if this model will spread — but how much of America’s civic space will be left when it does.
Where Trump is handing education and media opportunities to a right wing outfit run by former Israeli intelligence, here in the UK, you can’t protest that sort of thing without it seems running the risk of being labelled a terrorist. The proscription of Palestine Action, now comparable to the likes of Al-Qaeda after throwing some paint on some planes is now subject to a judicial review and the Minister who decided to pull this stunt, doubling down as she has on it since, may not survive the fallout as an intelligence leak has implied that she’s lied through her teeth to justify this action. Get all the details of this exploding farce in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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