The Right's Project to Rewrite History Along MAGA Lines: A Video Roundup
Our early-August collection of clips on Trumpworld's attempts to honor Confederate figures, whitewash history, and provide state funding for an AI service that went on an antisemitic spree
Dear Readers:
One of the MAGA right’s most fervent initiatives is its wide-ranging campaign to impose its ideology as the standard view of the world. This project often involves rewriting the past to win the future. Across multiple fronts, Trump and his allies are attempting to construct a MAGA-friendly public narrative of America: one in which Confederate generals retain positions of honor among our public monuments and institutions, America’s historical wrongs are at best politely forgotten and at worst verboten, and an AI chatbot is reengineered so that its services reflects their worldview and even “corrects” the historical record.
This effort is aimed at nothing less than the entrenchment of MAGA ideology as the default in society; it represents a pernicious attempt to establish Trumpism’s reactionary views as the mainstream and liberal commitments and values as aberrant and deviant.
Our video roundup for early August shines a light on some of the right’s most brazen efforts to construct a public narrative that reflects MAGA ideology.
Watch and then follow/subscribe to our YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram pages to get our latest clips as soon as they’re released.
Landry Ayres
Senior Producer
Elon Musk’s AI Chatbot, Recently Reengineered to Be More ‘Anti-Woke,’ Is Now Funded by American Tax Dollars
August 1, 2025
Elon Musk has made no secret of his desire to make Grok—his AI chatbot—more “anti-woke,” ensuring that what it produces reflects his and Trump’s worldview. Now, with Grok poised to become part of the U.S. government via a lucrative Department of Defense contract, that ideological tilt could be baked into tools used by an authoritarian state. Grok’s infamous descent into conspiracism and racist rhetoric was a preview of how easily its underlying code can be reengineered to deliver a politically convenient version of events, bake bigotry into our digital infrastructure, and rewrite reality at scale.
In this video, we reveal how Grok’s new government role could accelerate the politicization of history—and why putting the power to edit the truth in partisan hands is a threat to democracy.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Trump Whitewashes Tragedy While Venerating Traitors
June 23, 2025
The Trump administration has quietly instructed the National Park Service to remove “disparaging” content from exhibits and online materials—including events like the massacre of Native Americans, the brutality of slavery, and other inconvenient truths. It’s part of a larger campaign to ensure that when Americans visit a national monument, they get the glossy brochure version of the past rather than the real story.
In this video, we explore how these edits enforce a state-sponsored historical amnesia, causing us to repeat the mistakes of the past rather than learn from the faults of those who came before us.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Trump’s Legal Loophole Renames Bases to Celebrate Confederacy
June 18, 2025
After years of bipartisan efforts to remove Confederate names from U.S. military bases, Trump has found a way to throw red meat to his base and reinstate them—using a dubious legal loophole that could undermine Congress’s 2021 mandate to strip such honors from traitors.
In this video, we dig into how this move distorts the military’s own historical narrative and why it’s a deliberate provocation to keep the Lost Cause myth alive.
Watch it below or on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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Fully agree that ideologues programming AI to propagate their worldview is deeply troubling and inappropriate, and not something the Trump administration should be pursuing. However, I would be remiss not to mention that for many years I covered Data Science Day at Columbia University and it was very common for leading data scientists to encourage and celebrate embedding principles of intersectionality and "wokeness" into artificial intelligence so as to automate the pursuit of "equity" and "social justice." At least up until this year, AI has had a deliberate and distinctly leftish lean, as demonstrated by the search results portraying founding fathers or Nazi generals as being black or Asian. Reasonable people can disagree how far it is appropriate to go to correct for that longstanding distortion before one starts sinning in the other direction. https://ivyexile.substack.com/p/social-justice-by-algorithm
There are completely utilitarian and practical uses for AI. The "problem" seems to be its use by content creators and influencers that drive the antisocial media. Step away from the antisocial media and AI almost returns to a benign tool for rapidly collecting and assembling information.
It is so interesting to hear about the horror of the way AI is used in China but there is no alarm about the way corporations are using it for marketing purposes. Following consumers and generating specific advertising content is the foundation of all propaganda.