Taxpayer-Funded 250th Anniversary Group Pushes AI Slop to Whitewash US History

When the America 250 Civics Education Coalition launched last fall, it brought the U.S. Department of Education into partnership with several right-wing organizations with the aim of “renewing patriotism, strengthening knowledge and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.” Primary sponsors of the coalition include the America First Policy Institute, Turning Point USA, and Hillsdale College, as well as additional supporting partners such as the Heritage Foundation, Moms for Liberty, PragerU, and Priests for Life.

In a press conference to announce the launch of the ongoing educational campaign, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon made clear that she believes there’s a need to boost civics education in U.S. schools. “Civic knowledge, engagement and Constitutional literacy among our youth — I’m going to say it’s in decline,” she said. “I can almost say it is absent and we have to really refocus on this.”

“Why don’t these young people love America, or why aren’t they proud to be Americans? It’s because they don’t know America,” she railed. “We haven’t taught them about America. They don’t know our history. They don’t know the trials and tribulations that led to this being the most wonderful country on the face of the earth.”

Now, as the U.S. gears up to mark the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a range of political and social justice organizations and educators are contesting what that history looks like.

The history of the right’s efforts is murky. The education initiative follows the 2016 establishment by Congress of the nonprofit America250, which was charged with planning celebrations for the semiquincentennial. The initiative has brought together corporate sponsors — including Amazon, Boeing, Palantir, and Oracle — with a host of congressional representatives, current and former members of government, and private citizens.

The corporate nature of the nonprofit can be found in its programming. For example, one of its main educational components is America’s Field Trip, a competition that was connected to America250 classroom instruction. The competition asked students in grades 3-12 to write essays about “what America means to them.” One hundred and twenty-five first-prize winners — and their chaperones — were recently awarded what was billed as “an unforgettable field trip and experience at some of the nation’s most iconic historical and cultural landmarks,” including Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park, as well as institutions such as the George W. Bush Presidential Center and Library and the Coca-Cola headquarters. Suggested lessons feature documents like the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the Constitution itself, and zero in on encouraging community engagement, from celebrating business and (certain) community leaders to removing litter from local parks and communities. The Bank of New York was the field trip’s financial sponsor, and the trip was promoted as “inspiring the next generation to continue the [nation’s] long history of innovation.”

But, not content with America250, Donald Trump launched (to much confusion) his own competing initiative last year: Freedom 250. While both organizations are receiving taxpayer funding, the Trump administration has directed funding toward his preferred organization, NOTUS has reported. Freedom 250 is perhaps most known for Rededicate 250, a prayer event on the National Mall, as well as a concert series that swiftly fell apart when numerous musicians dropped out almost as soon as the lineup was announced. But the initiative has also included its own “Story of America” history lessons, developed by the conservative Christian Hillsdale College. Among them is a video about the “faith of our founders” that offers a Christian nationalist perspective on the separation of church and state.

Hillsdale is a member of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, as is the right-wing digital media outlet PragerU, whose Road to Liberty videos are featured on the Freedom 250 website. That series, produced in conjunction with the White House, features AI-generated figures like George Washington offering Trump-friendly “history” lessons that blend quotes from primary sourcing with fiction. As NPR pointed out, for example, a video purporting to speak for John Adams features the quotation “facts do not care about your feelings” — a common refrain from right-wing provocateur and PragerU contributor Ben Shapiro.

A Return to the “Great Man Theory” of History

Joseph A. McCartin, professor of history at Georgetown University and co-director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, called the Freedom 250 resources a “coloring book version of U.S. history” and a “simplified and truncated version of developments that remove the complex questions that have shaped our history.” It focuses on “the great man theory of history,” he said, centering George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams as an exclusive band of founding heroes.

But McCartin notes that who — and what — is left out is as important as who and what is included.

As a history instructor, he said he’s observed that students are often stunned to learn that many Black people sided with the British during the revolutionary period, as Britain had promised them their freedom. “If you do not understand this, you can’t really understand America,” McCartin told Truthout. “The world’s oldest constitutional democracy includes many rich, but contradictory impulses. The statement that all men are created equal, with inalienable rights, is something the founders said was provided, but it was not actually true. It took until women’s suffrage and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 [which has since been eviscerated] for the U.S. to take steps toward becoming a multiracial democracy.”

Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project, agrees and told Truthout that contesting the mythology surrounding the U.S. founding requires challenging the idea that “while the founders were men of their time, they were also geniuses who set us on a path to freedom.”

The kinds of educational material being shared ahead of the semiquincentennial, she said, perpetuates this myth.

Moreover, some of the lessons go beyond the schoolhouse, with messaging that is geared to adults as well their kids. Among them are Freedom Trucks, an interactive “history exhibit” seen in mobile trailers that are on a nationwide tour. The trucks are part of Trump’s Freedom 250 programming, and include video content developed by PragerU and Hillsdale College.

“The Freedom Trucks that are traveling all over the country use AI-generated videos to present Thomas Jefferson saying that westward expansion was necessary to create an empire of liberty,” Eisen explained. Take this statement from a PragerU video — in the Road to Liberty series — that purports to be from the perspective of Thomas Jefferson, in which the AI-generated portrayal of Jefferson says freedom does not depend on force but on the cultivation of an enlightened mind. “This statement is coming from someone who enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime and relied on force to control them,” Eisen said. “The messaging that the video delivers is a fairy tale that rests on a conception of liberty and freedom that excludes Indigenous people and Black people. It’s an affront to history.”

Eisen also criticized the cherry-picked quotations in Road to Liberty materials. For example, she said PragerU’s lesson on Black poet Phillis Wheatley’s 1774 letter to Native American pastor Samson Occom highlights Wheatley’s recognition of a universal love of freedom but leaves out the letter’s condemnation of white colonists who supported their own freedom from England while simultaneously supporting slavery for Black people. Wheatley’s blistering condemnation of their hypocrisy, Eisen says, changes the meaning of the lesson.

Teaching Toward Freedom

A fuller explanation of Wheatley’s impassioned writing is included in a 51-page curriculum that Eisen, Bill Bigelow, and other Zinn Education Project historians and scholars have created. They present the entirety of the letter in their materials on the American Revolution, inviting teachers and students to look beyond the “founding fathers,” Constitution, and Declaration of Independence. Accounts from enslaved people, poor white farmers, Native people, and women — Quaker poet Hannah Griffitts, activist Belinda Sutton, and members of the Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee nations, among them — give students a more detailed and accurate look at the 18th century.

These accounts are essential to a full understanding of the past, Adam Sanchez, managing editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, told Truthout. Ignoring or sanitizing Indigenous, female, or enslaved voices stops teachers from presenting the truth about the foundational role of racism, sexism, and homophobia in U.S. history. “Over the past half-century, we have seen people of color and LGBTQIA+ people make leaps forward,” Sanchez said, calling the kinds of materials included in the America250 commemorations “part of the backlash to these organizing efforts.”

“We know that the American Revolution had roots in anti-colonial revolt against the British, but we also know that enslavers were rebelling against restrictions on slavery that the British wanted to impose. History is not just one story, and understanding the debates that took place engages students,” he said.

The right’s focus on spectacular events like the Boston Tea Party, Sanchez continued, ignores large swaths of the population, “some of whom aligned with the American Revolution and some of whom did not.” Sanchez sees the unwillingness to teach multiple perspectives or go beyond an oversimplified idea of loyalists and patriots as particularly damaging. “Ironically,” he added, “the right is pushing a political agenda while those of us in the progressive education community are working to give students a broader sense of the American Revolution and are asking them to consider what freedom meant, and continues to mean, to different people.”

Historian Barbara Winslow, professor emerita of education and women’s studies at Brooklyn College, said critical questions should be central to all lessons about the U.S. founding. “Students need to know why the Constitution was written, when it was written, and who wrote it,” she told Truthout. “They also need to ask how many of the framers of the Constitution were enslavers or financial supporters of enslavement. They need to ask why women weren’t listed as writers of these documents. They then need to delve into why these factors are important.”

Winslow added that a proper curriculum would also probe the reason the Bill of Rights was added, which is largely missing from the various official America250 curricula. “Students should know that some states said they would not ratify the Constitution unless individual rights were guaranteed and protected,” she explains. “Some colonists feared federal authority, and it is important for students to understand that the idea of federal authority was widely debated. Yes, Jefferson and others wrote a monumentally important document that was cited by Ho Chi Minh, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr., and while it includes a universal promise of liberty, students need to question what the framers meant when they wrote the phrase all men are created equal. Was it really all men, or was it just men of property?”

Winslow, Eisen, McCartin, and Sanchez know that students benefit from unvarnished, multitiered, and nuanced accounts of history that encourage students to ask questions, read primary source materials, and learn about efforts to promote social change. The Zinn Education Project, The Kalmanovitz Initiative, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, and other pro-labor groups have launched the #Peoples250 project. They are inviting people to submit short videos using the hashtag to social media in order to complicate and challenge official accounts of history and inform viewers of all ages about past and current organizing and resistance movements. To date, videos have been posted on the legacy of muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, a successful campaign to unionize a popular Washington, D.C., restaurant, and organizing to remove a statue of white supremacist George Rogers Clark from the University of Virginia campus.

“Teachers want honest materials that tells a truthful story,” Eisen says. “They want materials that includes people who have been critical of the unequal state of things throughout our country’s history. They want materials about the long struggle for freedom.”