70% of Americans lack basic civic literacy. We can't name branches of our government, much less understand how they affect our lives. Yet every two years, we're asked to vote anyway. Informed voting is undermined by civic illiteracy.
Dept. of Public Education is a new kind of entertainment lab. Civics lessons disguised as content people actually watch — built for the feed, accountable to the public, indifferent to the algorithm's mood. D.O.P.E. began in 2025 as a hunch and a Google doc: that the most urgent failure of American democracy is not partisan, but attentional. People don't tune out because they don't care. They tune out because nobody is making it worth their time.
We make things worth their time.
In 1966, television revolutionized preschool education with Sesame Street. In 2026, short-form video could do the same for civic literacy with a new approach.
We're a studio in the lineage of a public-service broadcaster, a scrappy newsroom, and a writers' room that cares about the joke landing. We hire creators who can already hold a camera and a crowd. We add editors, fact-checkers, civic experts, lawyers, and a long memory.
We can't hire the right person for a job we don't understand.
Twenty-five years building digital creative for Netflix, A24, Disney, Paramount, and Sony will teach you one thing above everything else: you have about three seconds, and then they're gone. Kirk founded D.O.P.E. on the conviction that civic illiteracy is a media failure, not a school failure — and that the same craft that sells a blockbuster can sell a citizen on giving a damn about their own government. Not by dumbing it down. By making it worth their time. His theory is the organization's theory: we don't need more civics. We need better content. Content that makes the job description legible — so the public can finally start making better hires.
After getting humiliated by a TikTok influencer, this Times Square liberty statuette is on a quest to figure her shit out. The only things stopping her are hangovers and that nagging indecent exposure misdemeanor.
A subversively political, live, pop-up game show about basic f#cking civics.
So new, we don't even know what it is yet.
You do you. Authentically you, the way your audience likes it. Just drop a little knowledge here and there.
If you've got a voice, an audience, and monetization goals. We want to talk. We commission, we collab, we co-produce. We don't take your channel. We don't tell you what to think. We're like a sponsor who isn't selling anything but facts.
PITCH THE DEPT.→Foundations, newsrooms, universities, civic-tech orgs, libraries, city halls — bring us a brief, a body of research, or a problem. We'll bring creators, formats, and a distribution plan that doesn't end at a press release nobody reads.
Send a brief→The irony of privately funding civic education is not lost on us. We're asking you to help build something our country never quite got around to building; a public-service media studio for the feed. Every dollar is reinvested into growing the Dept.
This is for you busy folks who want to help but are too busy making money, so the way you can look at yourself in the mirror is by giving.
CONTRIBUTE→Imagine being a producer on Backrooms, before it was Backrooms. That could be you, but even nerdier. $500 gets you a producer credit in the captions.
FUND A SHOW→