The US government’s anniversary PragerU project tells us nothing about American history and everything about today’s America
The US government takes its latest turn towards authoritarianism with a two-pronged attack on state-sponsored arts and education: as the future of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stands in the balance following the effective shutdown of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, its primary source of funding, a ‘conservative alternative’ is stepping in educate the masses. For over half a century, PBS has been known to set a gold standard for children’s educational television with shows like Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and a suite of programming developed by artists, early-childhood-development specialists and education professionals. In its place, the second Trump administration will offer short-form video developed by a nonaccredited, nonprofessional organisation called PragerU, whose sole qualification is its ability to provide ‘pro-American videos for every age’.
To celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the USA, PragerU partnered with (what’s left of) the Department of Education to turn parts of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located behind the White House, into The Founders Museum: portraits of six signatories of the Declaration of Independence, details of 20 key events from the American Revolution and profiles of six ‘Ladies of the Revolution’. The historic figures are made all the more dazzling by a QR code that redirects the viewer to AI-animated videos of the portraits that recite basic facts about themselves with nationalistic fervour.
To this project, PragerU contributes an emphasis on remembering ‘our nation’s history’: ‘we’re not going to let anybody have a nation with amnesia’. It wants you to know that President John Adams basically said the same thing rightwing troll Ben Shapiro said in 2016: “They called me obnoxious and disliked. I called it telling the truth. Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes and inclinations, they cannot alter the state of facts. In other words, friend, facts do not care about our feelings.”
But as Ben Davis wrote in Artnet, ‘it’s not hard to find places where the “feelings” that PragerU wants to convey absolutely do obscure historical facts’. As is the case with all of PragerU’s edutainment, the scale and evils of slavery are obscured through abuses of the passive voice and transparent efforts to make excuses under the guise of representing what the historical figures could be thought to have said at the time. “Real patriotic education”, declared Secretary of Education Linda McMahon at the museum’s opening, “means that just as our founders loved and honored America, so we should honor them.”
The primary impetus here is to stir up patriotic, nationalistic sentiments. As in feelings. This veneer of enlightened reason reflects similar strategies employed by everyone from longevity grifters to AI accelerationists and even climate-change denialism (The science is inconclusive!) or gender essentialism (It’s basic biology!). They all insist their ideas are sustained by logic, while ‘bleeding-heart liberals’, ‘tree-huggers’ and the mentally disturbed are getting duped by their emotions. But this performance of clear-headed rationalism hides a swirl of baby-soft emotions – like fear, guilt, shame, anxiety and insecurity – that cannot withstand even the most basic of historical facts. They will foam at the mouth and raise their voices to tell you that facts do not care about your feelings, because they were the first victims and have since endeavoured to develop a suite of pseudo-facts that cater to theirs. Like last century’s fascists, today’s fascists are motivated by their ‘contempt for all that is reflective, critical and pluralistic’, as Susan Sontag defined it in her ever-prescient 1975 essay ‘Fascinating Fascism’. At The Founders Museum the likenesses of a dozen historical figures have all been animated to deliver identical testimonies. And as Sontag says of Leni Riefenstahl, the creators of these portraits ‘care about myth, not history’. (McMahon is credited with the museum’s pivot to video, failing to realise just how unstable digital video’s shelf life really is – there goes the totalitarian regime’s interest in immortalisation.)
Online, the word ‘aesthetic’ is most commonly used, as the artist James Bridle once observed, to denote, quite simply, ‘what it looks like’. Common refrains decrying AI as the aesthetic of fascism regularly conflate the way regular people use the tools to generate an abusive abundance of slop – the image-level smoothness – with the violence of its production, the despotism of an image-generating system based on preselected datasets and biased models, the White House’s eagerness to retweet images of Ghibli-style deportation cartoons and the AI industry’s self-annihilatory TESCREALism. We’d point to the Founders Museum portraits’ uncanny faces, their smoothed movements and their forced uniformity and say that is what fascism looks like, AI-generated idealism. (Sontag, again: ‘Fascist art scorns realism in the name of “idealism”.’) As if hegemony, bias, and propaganda were never before codified into visual art. As if Vigée Le Brun’s portraits of Marie Antoinette had different goals.
Fascist aesthetics, Sontag writes, ‘is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in’. Experts guess that PragerU fed portraits of its chosen figures through products like HeyGen, for the video, and ElevenLabs, for the voices. Because both products integrate with ChatGPT and most generative AI products have or recurrently utilise the same handful of datasets containing unconsensually aggregated data mined from our online activity, it can be said that AI-generated art fulfils fascist desires because, according to one of Sontag observations, ‘the masses are made to take form, be design’. Figures like Sam Altman or Elon Musk seduce fascist leaders with visualisations of whole populations modelled as dataveillance aggregates that can be applied towards ‘the rendering of movement in grandiose and rigid patterns’, a trait Sontag identifies in fascist art. As such, the shakiness that has come to define the AI-generated video reads as an infinite series of faces flitting in and out view – a likeness made up of sums. In the writer Phillis Wheatley’s animated portrait, for example, hundreds of faces layer over each other at undetectably high speeds, their mouths moving in unison, forcing a smile as they explain how she “was enslaved and educated in the house of prominent Boston commercialist John Wheatley”. Because Wheatley’s animation cycles through so many faces, she can be anyone, but is everyone. With AI, all of our faces have been made to take form and have been designed and animated to recite the lines as written. Even the president’s, in his so obviously AI-generated address to the public in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Confined, held tight, held in.
Michelle Santiago Cortés is a writer and critic based in New York
