Burgum’s Mass Censorship Campaign Spreads As His Shady “Freedom 250” Scheme Pushing Revisionist History Hits The Road
Taxpayer-Backed Propaganda Trucks Are Pushing Sanitized, Christian Nationalist Version of History
HELENA, MT – New reporting and data expose the unprecedented extent of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s mass censorship campaign and his shady “Freedom 250” initiative – a wasteful, duplicative effort that has already funneled at least $10 million in tax dollars to the administration’s political allies while pushing revisionist, censored history.
A major part of the so-called “Freedom 250” celebrations are “Freedom Trucks” traveling all over the country. The content inside the trucks, which reinterprets American history from a Christian nationalist perspective, had largely been unknown until new reporting covered a recent stop. Burgum still seems to be flying below the radar screen even as he heads up this administration’s mass censorship campaign to disregard science, whitewash our history, and peddle-influence.
“The buck stops with Doug Burgum, who authorized this scheme and is orchestrating this administration’s mass censorship campaign. Now, Burgum’s taxpayer-wasting Propaganda Trucks are rolling into communities, spreading whitewashed, revisionist history one stop at a time,” said Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill. “Trump and Burgum have hijacked what was once a bipartisan effort to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary and turned it into just another partisan grift. Censoring history and removing science from our cherished parks and public lands is, fundamentally, unAmerican.”
Complete with videos of Trump, AI slop of the Founding Fathers, and a sanitized, Christian nationalist version of America’s history, these trucks attempt to make Donald Trump the center of attention, while funneling money from corporate and special interests into National Park Foundation accounts. The National Park Foundation, established in 1967, is the official nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. The foundation’s mission is to generate private support and build strategic partnerships to protect and enhance America’s national parks for present and future generations.
Background:
Ten years ago, Congress created the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, named America250, to commemorate our 250th anniversary. Not content to share the spotlight, Trump’s White House created its own effort, Freedom 250, sponsored by groups like Exxon Mobil, as well as far-right nationalist organizations PragerU and Hillsdale College. Trump and Burgum’s thinly-veiled influence peddling operation has already received millions in taxpayer dollars, and is soliciting millions more from anonymous donors. Career employees at the Interior Department and elsewhere are likely being made to promote and endorse Freedom 250, which would be a violation of both the Hatch Act and the First Amendment, among other things.
Read more below:
USA Today: Trump’s Freedom 250 hits the road with museum focused on faith, civics
Slipping inside the semitrailer, visitors find a wall-to-wall display of the watershed moments leading up to the American Revolution and its biggest battles.
Tucked in a less visible spot, another exhibit tells visitors the “foundational principles of America are rooted in Western and Judeo-Christian values.”
This 53-foot mobile museum is one of six “Freedom Trucks” traversing the country as ambassadors of President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 program.
At a stop in Nashville during the National Religious Broadcasters annual gathering in February, Marissa Streit, chief executive of the conservative media organization PragerU, was showing visitors through the two-room museum her company helped design.
Streit said references to America’s Judeo-Christian roots were an intentional and deliberate part of the truck design, intended to help counterbalance an approach to the nation’s history that she said has misled the American public.
“How do we give that experience to people today who want to truly know what’s going on and not learn about what America looked like based on an interpretation of some woke agenda,” she said. “We’ve been talking about how intentionally taking the Bible out of the classroom has effectively ruined America’s education system.”
Streit sees her work as counteracting a partisan presentation of U.S. history. But critics of PragerU and their allies argue the opposite is true and say these new trucks will spread misleading accounts of American history that bolsters a Christian nationalist agenda.
The new mobile museums hit the road months after Trump accused the government-run Smithsonian Institution of being too “woke” and launched a review of its museums aimed at rooting out “divisive ideology” and promoting “American exceptionalism.”
But watchdog groups and historians have criticized Trump’s Freedom 250 as a taxpayer-funded propaganda campaign.
“The Trump administration is very specifically choosing people to be the face of the Freedom 250,” said Warren Throckmorton, an expert on Christian nationalism and the movement's narratives about U.S. history. “The face of these initiatives are evangelical Christians.”
Freedom 250, a subsidiary of the National Park Foundation, was created in December by the White House to fund Trump's vision for the country’s milestone birthday. Since then, it has drawn accusations of pushing a right-wing, Christian view of America.
The mobile museums are the latest flashpoint. PragerU, a conservative nonprofit that creates educational, pro-American videos, partnered with Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in Michigan, to develop the exhibits for Freedom 250. The six museums are traveling to public schools, state fairs and community events across eight states throughout the year
Neither PragerU nor Hillsdale received funding from the federal government for this work, Streit said, though the government has spent money on the project.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, gave Freedom 250 a $10 million grant for the project in December, according to federal spending data.
A spokesperson for Freedom 250 said Hillsdale and PragerU were chosen for their “extensive experience and expertise creating educational content for students focused on the American Founding,” and their offer to create the material for free-of-charge for the government.
Hillsdale also produces a civics curriculum for its charter school network, and has been a pioneer in the movement to reinterpret American history from a Christian perspective.
USA TODAY asked John Fea, a historian of American religion at Messiah University, to review photos from some of the exhibits.
He said most of the information was factually accurate, but the information provided about Thomas Jefferson's view of slavery, “is an interpretive choice meant to advance a particular vision of the American founding.”
That exhibit, titled “The Promise of Liberty,” referenced how Jefferson “called the slave trade ‘a cruel war against human nature itself.’” But it does not note that Jefferson personally enslaved 607 men, women, and children, many of whom he chose not to free when he died.
“The issue here is not so much the content of the displays, but the choices about who to include and why,” Fea said.
To speak with Save Our Parks spokesperson Jayson O’Neill, email jayson@focalpointstrategygroup.com.
###
