The administration’s sketchily funded Freedom 250 undertaking, which can oversee the celebration of America’s semiquincentennial, is a pageant of right-wing extremism.
A Freedom 250 insignia, alongside different tchotchkes signifying Trump clan dominance, on the US delegation headquarters throughout final month’s World Financial Discussion board at Davos, Switzerland
(Theresa Münch/image alliance by way of Getty Photos)
Over the previous 12 months, Donald Trump has been fixated with remaking a lot of the nation’s key establishments in his personal picture. He has renamed the Kennedy Heart after himself, put his own likeness on the Nationwide Parks move, and threatened federal funding for Penn Station and Dulles Airport in an effort to acquire naming rights for them so that they, too, can grow to be extensions of the Trump model. That is all to say nothing of his concerted efforts to hijack universities, media corporations, and diverse companies to serve the MAGA agenda.
But even this rolling offensive doesn’t appear to fulfill the president’s insatiable ego. Trump is now embarking on a campaign to MAGAfy the American previous, by way of a hostile takeover of the federal authorities’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For a decade, the federal entity in control of organizing the anniversary has been the US Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan group commissioned by Congress. In 2019, the federal government launched America250.org because the official nonprofit companion of the Fee, to assist plan occasions, competitions, and different packages for the semiquincentennial. However the Trump White Home has sidelined America250 within the run-up to the anniversary celebration; as an alternative, it’s arrange a brand new group known as Freedom 250, to plaster MAGA-sanctioned messaging all through the festivities.
Freedom 250 is a completely owned subsidiary of the Nationwide Park Basis (NPF), itself a nonprofit that Congress set as much as promote the actions of the Nationwide Parks Service. However on Trump’s watch, the NPF is popping into one more establishment peddling MAGA speaking factors for mass consumption.
Usually, the NPF backs enhancements on park lands, corresponding to habitat restoration and path renovation. However Trump has remade the NPF right into a de facto PR operation for the White Home’s political initiatives.
Present Concern
This makeover has principally been the handiwork of Inside Secretary Doug Burgum, who serves as ex-officio director of the NPF board. Burgum swiftly set about stacking the board with Trump loyalists, together with prime Trump fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 marketing campaign co-manager. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, NPF isn’t required beneath federal tax legislation to reveal its donors and is even empowered to grant donors anonymity. Donations to the inspiration are additionally tax-deductible—an added bonus for anybody in search of entry to Trump’s fundraising ecosystem.
If that seems like a recipe for grift dressed up as a charitable donation, that’s as a result of it’s. The New York Occasions recently unearthed documents exhibiting that Freedom 250 is a clearing home for donor perks. A cool $1 million reward affords picture alternatives with the president; $2.5 million can land you a talking slot on the marquee July 4 celebration in Washington. And due to the NPF’s opaque standing as a 501(c)3, the general public could by no means know who its well-heeled benefactors are.
There’s additionally a wave of federal funding sluicing into the NPF’s coffers. The Trump administration has redirected a $10 million grant initially earmarked for America250.org to the NPF. One other $5 million grant was shuffled out of the Nationwide Park Service and to the Nationwide Park Basis to fund “A250 occasions.”
However these occasions are extra than simply vessels for influxes of money—they’re selling a right-wing bid to whitewash the history of the country, and promote the dogmatic worldview of Christian nationalism.
The administration will start selling Freedom 250 initiatives with a caravan of “Freedom Trucks” traversing the nation. The vans are cell museums featuring AI-generated pictures and movies depicting vital American historic figures. They’re additionally outfitted with MAGA-sanctioned broadsides in regards to the American previous produced in partnership with PragerU and Hillsdale School.
The Michigan-based Hillsdale is a major redoubt of Christian nationalist scholarship that’s been selling a “1776 Curriculum” for public colleges that misrepresents the fundamental character of the American founding and the nation’s subsequent historical past. The for-profit PragerU is a right-wing propaganda outlet that likewise traffics in fundamental fabrications about the nation’s history whereas crusading against anti-racism, which it dubs “as anti-Americanism.” Whereas the Freedom Vans’ full displays haven’t been publicly launched, Hillsdale and Prager’s in depth observe data depart little doubt in regards to the broader historic narrative on provide.
Neither is there a lot doubt in regards to the temporary of one other Freedom 250-affiliated program, the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. At first look, this system’s mission appears pretty mundane; its stated aims are to “renew patriotism,” “strengthen civic information,” and “advance a shared understanding of America’s founding ideas.”
However on nearer examination, the coalition’s mannequin of civics schooling hews as soon as extra to a imaginative and prescient of the nation because the creation of true-believing Protestant evangelicals, untroubled by critical social upheavals or racial battle besides when these are launched by faithless liberals. The coalition’s preliminary press launch options a testimonial from a Turning Level USA official pledging that the group is “extra resolved than ever to advance God-centered, virtuous schooling for college students flourishing throughout our nation.” American public colleges aren’t designed for such cultural missionizing, since they’re charged with educating college students of any (or no) religion background. This mandate additionally contravenes the basic protections of the First Modification, which bars the institution of a state faith.
Such precise ideas of American civics additionally play no position within the handiwork of one other Freedom 250 and Civic Schooling Coalition companion, Moms for Liberty, a far-right group that helped spearhead the ethical panic in opposition to important race idea and continues agitating in opposition to any measure to incorporate LGBTQ college students and points in American colleges—as much as and together with by way of useful e-book bans.
One other group affiliated with Freedom 250 is America Prays, which can also be featured on a subpage on the White Home’s personal authorities website. The America Prays web site incorporates a portrait of President Trump—an unlikely avatar of Christian values—in addition to the group’s solemn pledge to “return [the country] to its non secular foundations” and “rededicate ourselves to 1 nation beneath God.”
America Prays lists a company known as WallBuilders as a companion—a Texas-based group based by Christian nationalist David Barton, selling the core deceptive narrative of the motion: that the nation’s founders had been evangelicals who envisioned the nation as a uniquely Christian nation. Barton has additionally reportedly captained the Trump administration’s ideological campaign to weed out secular and putatively liberal content material from museums and exhibitions administered by the Smithsonian Establishment.
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America Prays has additionally joined forces with Flashpoint, a podcast selling the militant gospel of the New Apostolic Reformation—the evangelical motion on the vanguard of the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol. One may regard the promoters of a failed coup in search of to overturn the outcomes of a free and honest election as doubtful apostles in the reason for civic schooling or the preservation of primary American freedoms. However within the agitprop reveries of the second Trump White Home, right-wing vigilanteism is a function, not a bug. One Flashpoint host, Gene Bailey, has repeatedly had Trump seem as a visitor. He has additionally avowed, “We do have an agenda, and that’s I’m a Christo-fascist, Christian nationalist.” Because the watchdog group Media Issues has chronicled, Bailey has additionally featured company prophesying “pure disasters in response to Trump’s legal indictments, urged that Trump is ‘anointed’ and that God will kill his opponents, and fram[ed] political developments within the context of a ‘demonic spin cycle.’”
Additionally on board as a Freedom 250 sponsor is the evangelical movie manufacturing firm Angel Studios. Angel was the distributor of the controversial QAnon-adjacent 2023 movie The Sound of Freedom. The film offered a fictionalized account of the profession of anti-sex-trafficking activist Time Ballard, and starred Jim Caviezel, who called QAnon “a superb factor,” whereas echoing QAnon language and conspiracies. Ballard was later faraway from his group, Operation Underground Railroad, following allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment in opposition to feminine workers.
These extremist figures and organizations may appear to be an ungainly match with the company backers of Freedom 250—a quickly increasing roster of main corporations who, just like the non-public particular person donors behind the undertaking, are eager to leverage any and all out there platforms to curry favor with the Trump White Home. As Judd Legum’s Substack publication Popular Information reports, companies like ExxonMobil, Deloitte, and Mastercard are already lavishing tens of millions in donations on the undertaking, with many extra certain to observe swimsuit. The roll name of big-ticket company sponsors for Freedom 250 echoes the sooner musterings of big-money donors for Trump’s second inauguration and his $400 million White Home ballroom undertaking. These, too, are federal initiatives that wed MAGA ideology to Trumpian self-importance, with out Freedom 250’s breathtaking mission of revamping all of American historical past. However with this summer season’s baldly ideological celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the forces behind the Trumpist putsch are aligning behind George Orwell’s well-known dictum from 1984: “Who controls the previous controls the longer term: who controls the current controls the previous.”
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