Founding Failures: Welcome to America 250

The White House just dropped a series of newly drafted biographies – American Legends, they call them. “Legends” actually gets more right as a framing term than it gets wrong. Seven characters cast as the "Founding Fathers" on WhiteHouse.gov: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and Jay. Each rendered as a paragon of virtue, vision, and sacrifice. This is how America 250 begins.

I urge you to read them. Closely and critically. And not just for the words on the webpage, but for all the words that are absent

Because this isn't commemoration. It's not an act of collective memory, to earnestly attempt to bring together a fractured American society. It's a declaration of war. A formal and aggressive reassertion of the state-driven, nationalist mythology, embraced by the political right (and accepted by too many on the left), that the United States sprang from the minds of a small group of extraordinary white men, whose genius and character birthed a country worthy of worship. That story—as we have discussed —is designed to mislead. That is the function of myth in the authoritarian playbook.

What you're seeing isn't history. It's heritage. The kind weaponized to serve a very specific purpose: to comfort as it distorts.

So these biographies aren't, in any way, meant to inform; they're supposed to direct -- your identity, your loyalty, your behavior. But much of it is already familiar as features of the Patriot Myth. Washington is transcendent, Adams the moral conscience, Jefferson the enlightened visionary. Madison is the quiet intellectual, Hamilton the financial prophet, Franklin eternal ingenuity, Jay the embodiment of lawful order. These are castings for roles, not instructive descriptions. And the characters have been assigned to their narrative as starring roles to provide ideological anchors. All effective narratives have structures, and characters perform functions in them. Here are their protagonists.

Now, as you're reading, notice what's missing, what's conspicuously absent. Can you find even the word "slavery." It’s there. Once. Near the very end. But not even a hint about the human beings Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Jay bought, sold, and exploited for their wealth and comfort — more than a thousand people, claimed by those five alone. No mention with how Hamilton's life and finances were entangled with oppression of others, nor Franklin's decades of profiting from it before his late, convenient turn from white supremacist to abolitionist. Of course not. This is historical distortion with surgical precision. To purify America's founding, to make it fit the image this regime wants to present, they have to sever the nation's origins from the brutal reality of chattel slavery. Now that's impossible to do and maintain any historical legitimacy. But that's a clear signal of what they are reallt after: a fairy-tale foundation scrubbed clean to make the Revolution white, the Constitution sacred, and these men uncomplicated idols.

The segregation of history is the point. Subordinate roles need to know their place in the narrative as supporting actors. America 250, launched with these sanitized tales, funded by the hundreds of millions of dollars that once went to the NEH, NEA, and IMLS, is the bid of this regime, and its collaborators in the heritage industry, to impose a unified, comforting national story to force compliance, to exploit our fractures by dismissing the relevance of alternative experiences and perspectives. It's an effort to discipline memory, to muffle dissent with nostalgia, and to launder white grievance as patriotism. And it starts by pretending the patriots' "liberty" wasn't built on Black bondage.

This is where our work, our resistance, digs in. To expose their fantasy not just as distortion, but as a mechanism of power. Because that’s what it is. And that’s what it’s doing now—right before our eyes.

Forget parsing whether Jefferson "struggled" with slavery (he didn't). Forget debating the resonance of Washington's farewell address. That's engaging the myth on its own terms, validating the very sentimentality that does the damage. The urgent task now is recognizing these texts for what they are: tools deployed to discipline the historical imagination. They aim to train citizens, especially the young, to accept the past as settled, righteous, and immune to scrutiny.

So our work isn't about "balancing" the story. Balance implies negotiation with power, an accommodation. Our goal is resistance. And resistance, as we practice it, means refusal: refusing to comply with authority grounded in convenient fictions, refusing the terms set by power when those terms demand silence about the truth.

These biographies are fiction. And not the harmless kind. They’re operational. Quietly posted. Quietly spreading. Soon, they'll be the bedrock for America 250 programming in schools, museums, media, and historic sites—many federally funded, adopting these texts as gospel, avoiding any truth that risks controversy, or threatens their revenue streams.

This is authoritarian commemoration in the digital age. No statues needed (although they're coming), no grand declarations (although they're coming, too). Just unchallenged, polite narratives cascaded from the top down—designed to stand.

Unless we refuse to let them.

This marks another phase of our work. We will dismantle these “legends,” not because the men themselves are the primary focus, but because the propaganda they're being used to construct is dangerous. A fantasy built, most fundamentally, on the erasure of slavery and the resistance against it. Honest history demands we refuse the terms set by power, especially when those terms require forgetting the foundations of that power.

Read what they've posted. Watch what gets adopted. Attend to what is left out. And remember, for your resistance history lesson of the day: historical control always begins with a story that sounds too familiar, too comfortable, to notice, so that it makes it easier for you to accept their power easily, on their terms.