I’m starting to hear all about a major celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary next year, and it’s clear that the Trump administration is planning to use it for more propaganda. One ominous sign is that the White House is working with…<hack, spit> PragerU, which is not a university, to provide “educational” material for a major exhibit. PragerU is also not the Smithsonian Institution. But they’re the ones in charge of telling the nation’s history.
The Department of Education has tapped conservative media platform PragerU to tell the nation’s origin story in an “America 250” exhibit that opened in the White House complex this month.
The PragerU Founders Museum on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building features 82 historical paintings of people and events from the American Revolution to inspire patriotic fervor for the yearlong celebration of the July 4, 1776, signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Each painting includes a QR code linking to a short PragerU video or essay on the White House website. Online content includes artificial intelligence-generated talking figures coming to life from the paintings, such as the 56 men who signed the Declaration on July 4, 1776, and a written recap of the decisive Battle of Yorktown in 1781.
“President Trump is championing the spirit of patriotism in our country,” said Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman. “The Founders Museum is an innovative way for schools and community centers to encourage Americans to reflect on the pivotal moments and people that shaped our nation into one that values courage, hard work, and freedom.”
For a different perspective…
Social justice advocates, however, said the inclusion of PragerU reflects a Trump administration agenda to whitewash history. They say the exhibit fails to acknowledge the experiences of marginalized racial minorities, women and gay people during the revolution.
“This [exhibit] promotes a limited view of all that America is, was, and will be,” said Robert Kesten, executive director of Stonewall National Museum, Archives, & Library, an LGBTQ historical preservation group. “It shortchanges us and ignores all the progress we have made historically and academically.”
Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, said PragerU videos aim to make White people “not feel guilty about history.”
“PragerU’s videos are ignorant and disrespectful,” Mr. Dibinga said. “The goal of this partnership is to accelerate the erasure of non-White male history and use PragerU’s 3.37 million followers to spread their propaganda.”
And also to promote a Christian Nationalist view. Here’s a video that discusses Trump’s, and PragerU’s, atrocious slopaganda.
I’d bet this: https://www.charlestonmuseum.org/research/collection/captain-william-hall/C6817C6A-A013-4A49-8CC3-475248257440 portrait won’t be one they’ll use.
And this is the “company” responsible for creating some awful kid videos telling kids that’s it’s OK for slavery to happen, the Indigenous Americans deserved to be driven from their native land, etc.
Interestingly enough, one of the best descriptions of the causes of the Civil War was put up by Prager U. They had a historian who taught at West Point telling about the fact that no matter what someone says it was slavery and the desire to keep slaves that was the cause of the Civil War.
I was shocked it was from Prager U. I haven’t seen it recently, and I suspect it might have been scrubbed.
The Department of Education is currently being run by Linda McMahon, wrestling billionaire. Only the best people./s
If the history you’re reading only makes you happy, you aren’t reading history.
@4
White House to host UFC fight, Trump announces
What’s to celebrate? Ask a Black, Brown, or Red person. Ask a woman working two jobs to feed her kids. Ask a LGBTQ person. Ask anyone who can’t afford the rent, much less buy a house. I won’t even fly the American flag from my porch the way some of my neighbors do. It’s become the MAGA flag as far as I’m concerned. Every time I see one, the disturbing image of Trump masturbating against it pops into my head.
@6
Thanks. I was already nauseous from the concussion.
Then I read the link to the end
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-september17.htm
Going off on a tangent…something is horribly wrong in academia.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/v/15pVuydb7E/
[Birger, I never ever click on facebook links. I am not alone in that.
So what is allegedly going off and how and where about academia will have to remain a mystery to me.
Also, tangents meet the locus]
They can celebrate all they like, but the USA will not have a 250th anniversary. It is deceased in its 249th year.
PBS Newshour had a good if depressing segment linked here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/#comment-2270908
on the new censoring of history by the Trump regime.
I see more flags today (on non-7/4 days) than I remember in ’76. Whatever happens next year will be . . . interesting.
I can just hear the threats coming from Dennis the Menace: ‘You’ve got to promote our wonderful rightwing christian programming, or we’re gonnna prager you!’
His ‘educational’ programming is just part of the war on education by the rtwing xtian terrorists. It is helping push this country down the death spiral.