The first thing that followed these criticisms of the 1619 Project’s flaws was censorship—the imposition of laws all over the country that sought to excise any arguments that might lead to nonconservative conclusions. But now the saga has come full circle, with Oklahoma and Florida approving material from the right-wing content mill PragerU for use in schools, as Republicans who complained about propaganda and brainwashing seek to fill public schools with propaganda and brainwashing.
As the liberal watchdog Media Matters documents, PragerU’s animated videos are comically ahistorical. One features Booker T. Washington rationalizing American slavery and telling kids that they “have nothing to be sorry about” because “future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.” Another features Frederick Douglass—who in real life said the proper response to the Fugitive Slave Act was to “make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers”—condemning “radicalism” and falsely stating that the U.S. “started the conversation” about abolishing slavery.
Another clip features Lincoln stating—in the midst of waging war against the Confederacy—that “yelling and scolding the South for the harm they caused” is “not going to get me or the nation anywhere.” I suppose this might be accurate if the cartoon Lincoln then said, “Only shattering the Confederacy and its slaver army by force of arms will do that,” but that’s clearly not the implication of the clip.
Another video features Ulysses S. Grant praising Robert E. Lee as a “good man” and saying, “We were just caught on the opposite side of things.” As Ron Chernow writes in his biography of Grant, the future president was disgusted by former West Point graduates—like Lee—who had turned their arms against their country, and memorably described the southern cause as “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Perhaps my favorite example, however, is the one that insists that the “Founding Fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong … But their first priority was getting all 13 colonies to unite as one country.” The intention is to redeem the Founders; the effect is to establish that slavery was so integral to the colonies that no union was conceivable without preserving it. Even this friendly framing validates the critiques it is meant to disprove—not that any teacher or student would be allowed to make that point in the current censorship regime.
These representations do far more violence to historical fact than anything in the 1619 Project, and it is clarifying that this is the material that some of those who reacted so hysterically to the 1619 Project now wish to employ to educate children. Their objection was not to propaganda, brainwashing, or indoctrination: They wanted those things, but they simply wanted right-wing propaganda, brainwashing, and indoctrination. The objective behind this campaign was not to depoliticize classroom history, but to make it as ideologically right-wing as possible, regardless of underlying historical facts. It’s not even the first time this has happened.