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PragerU Exposed

About This Project

About PragerU Exposed

PragerU Exposed is a project of Rough Beasts, an independent research effort that looks at how epistemological manipulation — the machinery of convincing someone to trust a source instead of checking a claim — moves through religion, media, and politics. This site applies that framework to one specific case.

Who built this

David Ambrose, a documentary filmmaker and independent scholar, researched and built this site. Rough Beasts, his ongoing research and writing project, traces what he calls the Augustinian Trap — a recurring three-step pattern of gating truth, capturing the arbiter of that truth, and nullifying dissent — from the early Church through the contemporary religious right. Case File 08 applies that framework directly to PragerU's own content, using an independent analysis tool built specifically for this kind of work.

The tools behind this site

  • Rough Beasts — the parent research project. Long-form essays and video on Augustinian epistemology, Christian nationalism, and disinformation, past and present.
  • Snare Check — the independent tool, built for Rough Beasts, that analyzes text and video for the three-step manipulation pattern documented in Case File 08.
A note on independence. This site isn't funded by, or produced on behalf of, any political party, campaign, or PragerU competitor. It's independent research, published under the researcher's own name, with every factual claim linked to its source on the Sources & Citations page.
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