PragerU's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad History

I was interviewed for today’s episode of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast about the series of bizarre, AI-generated videos of the founders PragerU has created for the White House as part of the nation’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

These PragerU videos first came onto my radar around July 4 when I saw the AI-slop video screenshotted below posted on Facebook by the Oregon Republican Party. “Who the hell is Thomas Heyward, Jr?” I asked myself. I was trained as a historian of early America, so if *I* was unfamiliar with this signer of the Declaration of Independence then surely most Americans would have no frame of reference for caring about an AI video about him, other than that it was supposed to make them feel good about America and the Republican Party. I DID know enough about the meaning of “freedom” and “justice” in Heyward’s Revolutionary-era South Carolina, however, to take 5 seconds to google him and well…

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A quick scan of Wikipedia turned up the 100% unsurprising information that Mr. tyranny-hating and freedom-loving Heyward was not only a signer of the Declaration, but also a wealthy enslaving rapist who in the 1970s had a segregation academy named in his honor by the White Citizens Council of South Carolina.

Hm…maybe there was a good reason this Heyward fellow fell out of the pantheon of “generally admirable people from the founding era who our children should remember fondly?” I suppose we can credit the Oregon GOP for at least showing enough restraint to NOT brag about Heyward being the grandfather of one of South Carolina’s first Black Republican office holders?

The immensely complicated story of Thomas E. Miller, Heyward’s politically-prominent Black grandson, perfectly illustrates James Baldwin’s aphorism that “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” As historian Nathan Huggins put it in 1989, the stories of slavery and freedom, of Black and white America, are not separate stories, but are rather “joined at the hip.” But these sorts of morally and politically ambiguous stories about the multi-racial American past are of no interest to the propagandists and ideologues at PragerU, for whom history is not a source of curiosity and provocation, but rather functions as a malleable source of content for conveying their filiopietistic and monochromatic vision of the American past. They have every right to say whatever they want about US history, but citizens have a right to protest when the White House promotes their work and when schools use their shoddy content to “educate” (some might say, “indoctrinate”) the rising generation.

While the PragerU AI videos in the “Road to Liberty” series are generally quite boring and banal, I do think they’re worth talking about as a form of white identity politics that uses history to provide fan service for the MAGA base.

Take this video about John Adams, for example. Here we meet a brusque truth telling founder, an obnoxious guy who rubs many people the wrong way but yet persists despite the whining of his critics because “facts do not care about your feelings.” John Adams as a mashup of Ben Shapiro and Donald Trump…sure, why the hell not. At least we get to meet John Adams, the devoted “wife guy” to Abigail that Donald Trump has never been to any of his three wives or who knows how many other paramours.

Leave aside the fact that John Adams’s immensely learned collected writings take up over 10 volumes and that he wrote a 3 volume tome laying out the philosophical foundations of the US Constitution of which Donald Trump has zero comprehension, or that one of Adams’s marquee public moments came in 1770 when he defended the “enemies of the people” who fired on the crowd at the Boston Massacre because he was that committed to the principle that everyone was equal before the law. The most important thing kids need to know about Adams is that he had the same disposition as Donald Trump. This dopey video would be hilarious if it wasn’t being widely promoted by the White House and likely to be shared with school children around the country.

In the Vox podcast I mentioned the video below about another fairly obscure signer of the Declaration who gets pride of place in PragerU’s founder hall of fame, William Whipple.

Viewers are led to believe that William Whipple’s story shows how the egalitarian ideals of the American Revolution inspired many people like him to oppose slavery. While there’s some truth to that generalization, it grossly oversimplifies the relationship between slavery and the revolution in general, and William Whipple’s relationship with the unnamed Prince Whipple, the man William enslaved, in particular.

This essay by historian Timothy Messer-Kruse does an excellent job of demonstrating how the brave activism of enslaved people like Prince Whipple, not the kindness of enslavers like William Whipple, was responsible for Prince eventually gaining his freedom after the revolution. By telling the story as if Prince Whipple’s freedom was a generous gift that William freely gave to him, PragerU offers white viewers a story in which white people were the primary actors in the story of abolition. It goes unmentioned, of course, that New Hampshire’s William Whipple built a good chunk of his wealth by selling a shipload of enslaved people in Barbados and South Carolina. It goes unmentioned that Prince Whipple had to petition for his freedom to the state legislature in 1779 after fighting alongside his enslaver and that William Whipple did not sign the official manumission forms until 1784, one year before he died. It goes unmentioned that Prince Whipple’s life as an impoverished free Black man in New Hampshire was marked by all of the hardships one would expect someone in his position to face in a white supremacist society. All PragerU needs us to know is how kind, un-racist, and principled that signer of the Declaration, William Whipple, was.

The lies that PragerU tells with those “Road to Liberty” videos (and the accompanying text on the PragerU website) are mostly lies of omission and oversimplification. But in the extended PragerU cinematic universe, there is a plethora of content that can only be classified as “grossly inaccurate.” I’ll end with a particularly egregious example.

If you click here you will see a 3 minute PragerU video from 2020 in which Candace Owens and Pastor Jack Hibbs answer the question “Did the Founders Support Slavery?” The answer, you’ll be surprised to learn, is “hell no, the Founders HATED slavery and also, slavery was in many ways not even that bad!”

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of the screamingly obvious lies told in that 3-minute video.

1. There is no evidence Thomas Jefferson taught his slaves to read, nor would he have been bravely breaking the law even if he did.
2. George Washington did NOT leave half of his estate to an enslaved man named William Lee. GW granted Lee a $30/year annuity. Colonial Williamsburg estimates that GW’s estate at his death was valued at $780,000, meaning that the approximately $300 William Lee received from GW’s will before he died in 1810 was more like 0.0004% of Washington’s wealth, not 50%. In an age when Donald Trump is cutting prescription prices by 1500%, I suppose that math now checks out just fine.
3. Candace Owens at the 1:37 mark. “[Thomas Jefferson] met [Sally Hemings] in France, I can’t remember her name, he met this Black woman in France and said ‘I’m in love with you, come back to America and live with me.’ And she said ‘Why would I go back when I’m free in France.’ And he said “I promise if you come back our children will be free after 20 years and he did that, he made good on his promise.” Not only does Owens not know Hemings’ name, she also seems to be unaware that Hemings was enslaved by Jefferson and was also his widow’s half-sister. It’s unfortunate that Candace, who professes an interest in the truth about Jefferson and Hemings, didn’t take the time to even glance at the prize winning 2008 book on the subject by Annette Gordon-Reed.
4. Jack Hibbs opens the video by claiming that the Christian antislavery of William Wilberforce was a huge influence on the founders…which would have been quite an achievement since Wilberforce gave his first major speech on the subject of abolition in May of 1789, a few months AFTER the US Constitution had become operational. During the American Revolution in the 1770s, however, seventeen enslaved people at Mt. Vernon and nineteen enslaved people at Monticello escaped to freedom. This was long before Wilberforce ever wrote anything on the topic, and obviously long before GW freed the people he owned in his 1799 will. It’s almost as if…and hear me out now…enslaved people didn’t need Jefferson and Washington to let them know that freedom was precious and worth fighting for.
5. Candace Owens at the 1:00 mark: “These are men who inherited a virgin nation that was entrenched in slavery.” I’m not even going to bother to comment on that everlasting gobstopper of foolishness.
6. At the 2:00 mark: “It is a fact and no one disputes it” that the enslaved people at Monticello “lived better than white people who were laborers at the exact same time.” “The standard of living for slaves at Monticello was higher than it was for the laborers that were living up North.” Not only would just about everyone who’s actually studied US history dispute that, but it’s a master class in white identity politics whataboutism.
7. At the 2:35 mark Owens says “To call Thomas Jefferson a racist is almost crazy.” If you read Jefferson’s 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia, it is clear that Jefferson reviled slavery and thought it had a deleterious effect on the morality of enslavers. He did not think slavery was a positive good, but he didn’t think it was soooo bad that he was obligated to sacrifice his own well-being to free his slaves. It’s also notable that Jefferson’s text broached the very un-Enlightenment idea (by the standards of his day) that there were inherent, biological differences between Black and white people, and that white people were superior in the qualities that mattered most. Jefferson also believed that white and Black people formed “different nations” and could never co-exist in one nation together. In today’s parlance, Jefferson could be called “a white nationalist.” So contra Owens, it is not at all “crazy” to call Thomas Jefferson a racist by either standards of our day, or the standards of his own time.

Ok, I’ll stop there because pointing out 7 egregious whoppers in a 3 minute video is probably sufficient to get the point across that PragerU is absolutely not an institution anyone should ever trust to teach young people about US History. Those lies told in that high-production-value video (which is still publicly available on their website) could have been fact checked in 5 minutes by an undergraduate intern who was paid $15/hour…but of course PragerU didn’t think to do that because telling the truth about history is not something they appear to be all that concerned about.

It’s not as if I or anyone else is the possessor of the single, “true” version of US history from which PragerU is deviating. History will always be an argument. But good history never knowingly lies like so much of PragerU’s content does. Good history always starts from the evidentiary base that exists in the archive, and builds upon what past researchers have discovered. History isn’t just whatever the hell we want it to be to serve our present ideological needs, just as unemployment numbers are not whatever the hell we want them to be to serve our present political needs. History can be a source of wisdom, insight, and self-knowledge, but only if its carried out with a basic level of respect for the truth and a willingness to have the people from the past surprise, disappoint, enrage, and inspire us in ways that don’t simply confirm our priors.

Bad history has always been with us. PragerU is hardly the first outfit to pump ideologically-slanted pseudo-history into the public sphere and they won’t be the last. But it is incumbent upon those of us who actually do care about getting the history right that we call out mendacious bullshit when we see it. Hopefully my saying this won’t hurt PragerU’s feelings too badly.

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