Prager U—a producer of right-wing “educational videos” founded by conservative radio host and edutainment entrepreneur Dennis Prager—has recently been in the news regarding its “America at 250” initiative, a collaboration with the Trump White House well described by The New Yorker as “Serving AI Slop for America’s Birthday.” The initiative is one of many administration efforts to conscript this year’s July 4 celebration in its culture war against the left, a war, announced by President Donald Trump back in March 2025 with his Executive Order 14253, cynically named “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

It seems particularly appropriate to reflect on the MAGA effort to promote historical misunderstanding today, the 150th anniversary of one of Frederick Douglass’ most important speeches, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” For Prager U first made headlines back in September 2021, with the posting of an animated video entitled “Leo & Layla’s History Adventure with Frederick Douglass.” While Prager is a stridently anti-“woke” enterprise, purveying a manifestly whitewashed historical narrative, this video was particularly notable, and outrageous, because it featured Douglass, the ardent Black abolitionist and radical Republican, as a self-righteous extoller of caution and celebrant of American Greatness. Like Trump’s “1776 Commission Report,” published that same year within weeks of the January 6 insurrection, Prager sought to co-opt Douglass (and also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.) rather than to ignore him, all the better to promote its right-wing conception of “patriotic history.” Prager did this in a particularly insidious way.

“Leo” and “Layla” are two white kids innocently watching TV when a newscaster reports on “angry” (obviously BLM) protesters demanding the abolition of the police. Leo, put off by a math teacher who strangely teaches about “systemic injustice,” then asks his older sister: “Why is everyone so angry? Are they burning a car? What does abolish even mean?” Seeking to understand, the siblings enter a time machine, where they are immediately greeted—“welcome to 1852!”—by a dapper Frederick Douglass eager to school the innocent children and restore their abiding reverence for all things American.

Douglass proceeds to explain “abolition” by informing the kids that he was himself once a slave, and when they ask him how he dealt with his unenviable situation, he replies: “It was very hard, and I was often sad. I taught myself to read and write... knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom... [and] today I am a free American, fighting for all to be free.” When the children express confusion about how the “founding fathers” could have reconciled slavery with the idea that “all men are created equal,” Douglass reassures them: “Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong... They wanted it to end, but... made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.” Noting that abolition would have alienated the Southern plantocracy, he explains that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.”

Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence.

When the naïve students fret about hypocrisy, Douglass explains further: “Sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem, and complicated problems take time to solve... big problems need to be approached very carefully.” He then delivers the coup de gras: “Have you kids heard of William Lloyd Garrison? He’s an abolitionist like me, and he and I used to be friends, but we aren’t any longer... William refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” He then explains that he is “trying to work for change inside the American system, and that “our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.” Douglass then warns the kids to avoid people like Garrison, radicals who “don’t just want slavery abolished, but the whole American system.”

The video obviously centers on a tendentious reading of Douglass’ famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” that completely ignores the way Douglass brilliantly shifted back and forth in that speech between identification with his white audience and harsh challenge to it:

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.

In his speech Douglass embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of 1776. But he did not say that the American system was “wonderful,” and indeed he committed himself to working with other abolitionists to radically change the system. And while he did break with Garrison, his former mentor, believing that the Constitution—if properly interpreted to support radical abolition, a big “if”—was a “glorious liberty document,” he also clearly believed that its promise had yet to be redeemed, and could only be redeemed through a broad-based and uncompromising abolitionist movement. Far from disparaging Garrison’s radicalism, Douglass actually literally extols it in his closing words: “In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubileeThe wide world o’erWhen from their galling chains set free,Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,And wear the yoke of tyrannyLike brutes no more.That year will come, and freedom’s reign,To man his plundered rights againRestore...

Douglass’ 1852 speech, a brilliant reclaiming of the “spirit of ’76,” was no kind of celebration. It was a subtle but nonetheless powerful disruption of celebration, and an invitation and incitement to radical action. And what Douglass says in it was perfectly consistent with the equally famous and more radical words that he would utter a few years later, in his 1857 speech “On West India Emancipation”:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

These are not the words of a man who believed that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.” They are the words of a man who believed, to the contrary, that slavery would not end until it was politically and militarily defeated.

Douglass, like his Radical Republican allies, Wendell Phillips, William Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, vigorously supported the Union in the Civil War precipitated by Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and the wave of secessions that followed it. But he did this not to vindicate the greatness of the Constitution or to preserve the existing........

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