Your Tax Dollars Are Funding AI Founding Fathers Who Quote Ben Shapiro

PragerU teamed up with the White House. Oof!

Six years ago, I spent a week watching PragerU videos for a Media Matters story, and let me tell you, my brain has never fully recovered. Back then, I was warning that this wasn't just some fringe YouTube channel but “arguably one of the most influential right-wing propaganda networks put into motion since Fox News.”

This week, NPR reported that PragerU has partnered with the Trump White House to create something called “The Founders Museum.” Look at PragerU, all grown up! From YouTube propaganda to official White House partnerships. *wipes tear from my eye*

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The museum features AI-generated founding fathers who, and I cannot stress this enough, literally quote modern conservative talking points. According to NPR, an AI John Adams actually says “Facts don't care about your feelings,” which is Ben Shapiro's catchphrase. Not John Adams's. Ben Shapiro's.

They took the second president of the United States and made him into a Ben Shapiro ventriloquist dummy. It’s amazing what technology can do these days.

The whole thing is housed in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, right next to the White House, and PragerU plans to take it on tour with “mobile museum trucks” to schools across the country. The White House is actively pushing governors to install this exhibit in state capitols and embassies.

Historians told NPR they're concerned about how the exhibit narrows history and blurs the line between reality and fiction. Brendan Gillis from the American Historical Association pointed out that “there's many, many more people who shaped the American Revolution” than just the handful featured. The exhibit also apparently sanitizes its subjects. Revolutionary writer Mercy Otis Warren, who was actually fiercely critical of the founders? In PragerU's version, she spouts what Brown University historian Karin Wulf called “pablum pieces about patriotism and liberty.”

This is what the slop economy looks like when it gets government backing. We're entering a world where the line between actual history and AI-generated fiction isn't just blurred, it's completely erased. When an AI John Adams quotes Ben Shapiro and it's presented as educational content in a government-sanctioned exhibit, what exactly is “history” anymore?

The real danger isn't just that kids might think John Adams had opinions about facts and feelings. It's that we're creating an information ecosystem where you can manufacture any version of history you want and call it education. PragerU has always been about flattening complex historical events into simple conservative morality tales. Now they're doing it with AI puppets wearing the faces of founding fathers.

The Government Is Now Deciding What History Museums Can Display

This is happening while Trump attacks the Smithsonian for its exhibits on slavery, immigration, and LGBTQ history. Real museums with real artifacts and real scholarship are being undermined while AI puppet shows get the White House seal of approval and mobile museum trucks to spread them across America.

We used to worry about people not knowing history. Now we have to worry about people “knowing” history that was generated by machines programmed by people with a deliberate agenda to mislead. The slop economy doesn't care about accuracy or context or the years historians spend understanding the complexity of the past. It cares about engagement, about content production at scale, about flooding the zone with whatever serves the agenda.

Welcome to the future, where your tax dollars fund AI founding fathers spouting catchphrases from guys who weren't even born yet. Facts might not care about your feelings, but apparently nobody cares about facts anymore either.