The Founding Fathers have returned from the dead to speak once again, thanks to AI-generated videos, and their views on current events seem to align with the views of their creators.
A video posted by President Donald Trump shows George Washington, dressed in 18th century clothing, walking with Trump in a completed White House ballroom. “Thank you, George, for some of your brilliant ideas on this great Military Complex/Ballroom!,” Trump says.
A video posted last year by conservative media star Glenn Beck featured a contemporary-looking George, clean shaven, buff and wearing a dark T-shirt, as he answers questions from Beck and bemoans America’s “moral failing.”
“George AI draws ONLY from Founding-era documents and provides the sources every time,” Beck claimed. But one Beck video features contemporary George disagreeing with the actual historical George on the issue of foreign entanglements.
Glenn Beck’s updated George Washington
Historical George warned in his Farewell Address of 1796: “Steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” But Beck’s George thinks America’s alliance with Israel is a good thing, as is the war the two nations launched against Iran.
Welcome to the world of AI-generated Founding Father videos, where new versions of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and other founders say whatever their creators want them to say, even if the real Founding Fathers never did so.
Some of the fathers don’t even seem to have the correct number of fingers on their hands, a common flaw in AI videos.
Exploiting the Founding Fathers is a bipartisan tradition, but these AI videos arrive as the Trump administration seeks to change the stories America tells about itself by going after institutions like the Smithsonian and historical displays at national parks.
A classic case of putting words in the founders’ mouths is PragerU’s AI-generated John Adams, who says, “Facts do not care about your feelings.” Adams never said it, but it’s a slogan popularized by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
Adams never said it, but it’s a slogan popularized by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
The White House partnered with PragerU, a conservative advocacy and media group, to create 87 AI videos for America’s 250th anniversary, “The White House Founders Museum: The Road to Liberty.”
The Founding Fathers praise press freedom in an AI video that aired at the July 24 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was rescheduled from April’s dinner, which ended with an assassination attempt on Trump.
“The true danger lies not in a press that is too free, but in one that forgets why it was made free at all,” the founders told the crowd. “Thanks for helping us reach 250 years of American democracy.”
A video from the Babylon Bee wins the award for funniest. A contemporary couple tries to ask Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, who have time-traveled to the present in historic garb, about the growing federal deficit.
“Look, a woman is talking to us about political matters,” marvels Franklin, before the founders fixate on the history of dinosaurs, which was unknown in their day.
Another Babylon Bee video uses humor to score political points. In “Liberal Goes Back In Time to Fix the Second Amendment,” a Democrat from 2025 named Brynnleigh confronts James Madison as he is writing the Second Amendment to the Constitution (“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”)
Brynnleigh gives Madison an update on America: We “have crippling depression and 400 new genders. Oh, and you can kill your own baby.”