Eric Kelly/The Gravel Institute
The co-founders of the Gravel Institute, with the progressive advocacy nonprofit’s ‘patron saint and namesake.’ From left: Henry Williams, former Sen. Mike Gravel, Henry Magowan, and David Oks.
A few months after former Alaskan Sen. 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. For eight months, the three students had run Gravel’s long-shot progressive campaign from Oks’s childhood bedroom in Westchester County, New York. Now they were going to visit with him to reflect on the campaign.
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. 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 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.
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. Currently, the group counters PragerU’s nonstop stream of online content. But they have far bigger plans. They hope to connect existing organizations on the left, online personalities, and celebrities to ensure a strong, enduring digital ecosystem for the American left.
Gravel has given the men his blessing to run the nonprofit on their own. “Mike is sort of the patron saint and namesake,” says Williams. The institute’s core values are driven by Gravel’s politics and the platform they all drafted together for his presidential campaign. They still call every few weeks to keep him updated, but he’s not involved with the nonprofit’s day-to-day operations.
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. The institute officially launched last September, with a video called “How to Defeat PragerU.” “It’s an asymmetric fight,” Williams says. “And it’s an asymmetric fight because PragerU is not this stand-alone institution. It’s the pointy end of a giant media and influence machine.”
The institute is designed to germinate progressive ideas without being moored to electoral politics.
The Gravel Institute knows it’s punching up. But Williams is confident that its grassroots model will be more effective in the long run. 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. In the institute’s most-viewed video, Arrested Development star David Cross challenges whether America is really the freest and wealthiest country on Earth.
“They won me over right away with their pitch months before they launched the thing,” Matt Karp says. “Democrats these last two election cycles have bled working-class support. Gravel is important because I think there’s a better chance of it reaching those voters on YouTube than through another shiny magazine.”
One trademark of PragerU is its expenditures on advertising. According to its 2019 tax returns, the nonprofit spent over $6 million on Facebook and YouTube ads alone. Williams says the Gravel Institute has a different model. 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. 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.
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. PragerU does exactly that for conservatives. It also generally stays above the fray of the daily battles and rarely mentions specific politicians. Instead, it focuses on evergreen cultural and political issues. 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.
Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was a turning point for Democratic campaign strategists like Williams, who believes that the Democrats have floundered again and again by not keeping Democratic voters engaged after elections. According to the Pew Research Institute, during that historic election, Americans were online more than ever before and Obama’s team tapped into that enthusiasm. By Election Day, Obama for America had amassed 13 million emails and solicited half a billion dollars online, out-strategizing a Republicans Party fueled by Karl Rove’s legendary voter lists, which had helped keep George W. Bush in the White House four years earlier.
Then the campaigning stopped, and the 13 million internet users were left without a collective focus or a communal rallying cry. Instead of ensuring continuity, Obama’s re-election campaign organization—and the transformative energy it harnessed—fizzled out.
Williams wants the nonprofit to unify often disparate progressive forces into a cohesive left movement, much like PragerU has successfully done on the right.
Williams and Oks first became involved in national-level politics when they decided to run then-88-year-old former Sen. Mike Gravel’s presidential campaign in early 2019. Oks was still in high school, and Williams was in his first year at Columbia University when he became the campaign’s chief of staff. “Mike is a really pragmatic guy” he told the Prospect in the summer of 2019. Magowan, another Columbia student, joined later as the campaign’s treasurer. He’s now the institute’s CFO. Against all odds, they were soon running Gravel’s campaign and attracting national press attention. The campaign lasted a brief but fiery six months.
Today, Williams doesn’t see their age as a weakness. Instead, he says it’s a strength. According to Matt Compton, the senior vice president of mobilization and strategy for Blue State, a digital media firm, and the former digital director for the DNC, young people are increasingly the ones running these online political campaigns. “The folks who were raised with access to the internet are the ones who are best equipped to understand what resonates with their own communities,” says Compton.
The Gravel Institute is already working with organizations like the People’s Policy Project and the Economic Policy Institute. It’s also collaborating with big YouTube personalities like Big Joel and music critic Anthony Fantano. The institute has even partnered with Progressive International to document political movements in Latin America, including on a recent trip to Ecuador for the general elections. Williams wants the nonprofit to unify these often disparate forces into a cohesive left movement, much like PragerU has successfully done on the right.
Last year, PragerU had a $28 million operating budget, and has a goal of $35 million for 2021. Despite PragerU’s politics, it’s still benefiting from its status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Under that section of the tax code, nonprofits cannot engage in political campaigns directly or indirectly. Most of PragerU’s videos don’t engage in political campaigns. But one video from last July describes a Trump rally like a “rock concert” and lauds Trump for being “so funny.” In a trademark “Fireside Chat” video, Dennis Prager, PragerU’s founder, smokes a cigar while praising Trump. “He has done incredibly good things as president,” he says.
The Gravel Institute got off the ground through a one-time $25,000 donation from David Karp, the founder of Tumblr (no relation to Matt Karp) and runs almost entirely on Patreon donations. The institute registered as a 501(c)(4) organization, which means it can participate in political activities. The main financial difference is that, although the Gravel Institute is exempt from federal income taxes, its donations are not tax-deductible. Part of the draw for wealthy donors to PragerU is that they can deduct their donations on their tax returns. Some critics of the Gravel Institute have said that the progressive online ecosystem isn’t primed for this sort of organization, and that without massive donations, it doesn’t stand a chance against PragerU.
But Williams isn’t convinced. “Let’s wind the clock to 2010 when PragerU started,” he says. “There was no online Ben Shapiro. PragerU was able to transform the conservative ecosystem by serving as a hub and giving it a lot of oxygen, funding, and ideas. Our hope is to do something very similar to that online ecosystem on the left.”
