Many of their videos are wildly against academic consensus and also inflammatory. A classic is the claim that colonialism was actually great for colonized nations.
You can absolutely voice inflammatory and bogus intellectual material in a "calm manner". That doesn't change that it is both wrong and inflammatory.
All advancement of knowledge stops when the prevailing truth of the elite is unquestionable.
If debates like this don't happen, you end up with a populace that has no idea why certain things that were tried in the past went horribly wrong, even if they seemed innocuous.
Personally I'd far rather be exposed to outrageous claims and work it out for myself.
There are plenty of topics that have been discussed and settled. Colonialism is one such topic. PragerU isn't bringing new facts or ideas to the table. Instead they are repeating ideas that have been analyzed and dismissed by experts decades ago.
Beyond that, hardly anything can make a bad idea more attractive than telling people that it's been dismissed by their betters long ago and should no longer be discussed.
* Whether it is good to own black people as property due to belonging to an inferior race
* Whether women are incapable of rational thought and should be denied voting rights and the ability to hold a job
* Whether gay people are aberrant and should be forcibly sterilized
or less evil but still stupid
* Whether the earth is flat
* Whether the halting problem is undecidable
* Whether the ether exists
* Whether bloodletting is an effective medical treatment
* Whether the miasma theory of disease is correct
* Whether the time cube theory is correct
And you'd support active discussion among experts at professional conferences on these topics, taking time away from other topics?
Frankly that's insane. We've only got so much time in the day. Your approach enables literally anybody to perform a denial-of-service attack against any discipline.
The question is: Should someone be able to present a position on either side of such questions in public? My answer is yes. For questions that are clearly "decided", those positions are very likely to be completely ignored in general. But it would be very useful to have people periodically explain why they are incorrect.
There is no DOS here, unless someone is actively interfering with (say) a professional conference. Those people should be bounced regardless of the position they're advocating.
"of the academy"
In the beginning, you were explicitly talking about academia. PragerU is welcome to spray its drivel all over the web. But when academics all look at that and say "this is garbage" and didn't engage on PragerU's terms, you complained.
Colonialism is discussed. Constantly. There have been hundreds of academic books written on the subject in the past year or so. But these books don't set out to discuss the merits of colonialism, since that would be a waste of paper. The material is widely available if people care. PragerU doesn't.
In the context of that particular video, the degree to which the value judgements disagree with academic consensus is mostly reflective of the ideological leanings of current history departments in comparison to PragerU. And to address the main thesis of the video- Western democratic freedom is almost certainly more widespread nowadays than it would have been without the presence of the British Empire (also assuming that France or similar colonial competitors didn't swoop in to fill the power vacuum).
The way that the video seems tone-deaf is that it isn't sufficiently critical of Britain's moral failings. However, its central thesis is not incorrect.
My time to shine! I'm married to a history professor. All of the history faculty I know would call that video wrong. History is not the collection of facts but instead putting those facts into a narrative. If you make a narrative that is ill supported by evidence then you've done wrong history.
It is that the spread of the British Empire spread Western democratic norms.
This particular facet is well-supported by the facts. I agree that it fails to be sufficiently critical of the British. However, it falls well within the Overton Window and any claim that this particular video is incendiary, or that it is sufficiently wrong that it should be discouraged for people to watch it, is absurd.
To the degree that History departments want to tell a moral narrative, they need to be a lot more careful than a youtube channel, I agree. I remember my British History professor in college implied that any Republicans taking courses at a state-supported university are hypocrites, so I'm well-aware of the ideological leanings of the ivory tower. If it came down to it, I'd prefer a left-leaning history department to a right-leaning one, just for the fact that you can (typically) squeeze more nuanced narratives out of the (typically) increased moral relativism of the left. It's a pretty slight preference though, subject to the tradeoff that a bleeding-heart professor still has enough assertiveness to admit to moral failings across all sorts of different cultures.
Regarding objective facts of a video- they remain true on the ground. Regarding the moral narrative- I see no reason to hold the rest of the world's commentariat to the same standard of preference as a history department. I would also remark that PragerU has the merit of making it's moral leanings obvious enough that you don't have to guess at their direction of bias, in contrast to other presenters who may be willfully disguising their revisionism.
Perhaps it's easier to discern the truth when you give competitors on all sides of the moral landscape a fair fight.
Oh boy. I've got some friends who would be set off on a multi-hour rant if you said this in front of them.
PragerU's history is shit. Absolute garbage.