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…
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.