Image Source: WhiteHouse.gov

This week, the White House released the first of a series of American History videos to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the U.S.A. sweepingly titled “The Story of America.” These videos were produced by the “White House Salute to America 250 Task Force” and Hillsdale College. These are filled with glaring omissions, distortions, and outright factual errors, but these are what one has come to expect from the official version of “patriotic education.” While the specifics matter, what is in many ways more interesting is how the introduction to this series, by Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn, exposes the dark inner logic of MAGA thinking about the past and the nation’s essence.

The introductory video begins with a montage of sweeping panoramas, presidents, battles, moon launches, baseball, interned Japanese children waving little flags, and Dr. King’s March on Washington. Arnn is seated in a cavernous and stately but empty room, flanked by two American flags, and speaks in a hushed and reverent voice of how President Trump wants to do things “again” and this is like remembering or even history! “This places him somewhere near the politics of Abraham Lincoln,” Arnn observes, in a statement both absurd........

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