The lineup for this year’s Arkansas Folklike Festival in Argenta is really something. There’s music, with headliners including Arkansans Lucinda Williams, Dylan Earl and Nick Shoulders. There’s internationally renowned bladesmith Jerry Fisk. There’s even an Arkansas foodways panel on cheese dip! Yessir, there’s a little something for everyone.
Now, thanks to the folks who brought you Alligator Alcatraz and “antifa vandalized my reflecting pool,” the Folklife Festival will also include an … AI-powered George Washington? What the hell?!
According to the Freedom250.org website, one of six “Freedom Trucks” will be at the festival this weekend, offering attendees a chance to view American history that has been just absolutely whitewashed by the same people who took down references to slavery at national historical sites because it hurt their melanin-deficient feelings.
What is a Freedom Truck? Glad you asked! They are “mobile museums” that present a sanitized and AI-heavy version of American history. As the Guardian put it, while there are occasional mentions of Black Americans in the trucks, the displays are primarily geared “toward the white men who led the charge to nationhood, with minor roles granted to their women dutifully holding the fort back home, and on God as the source of the country’s greatness.”
These Newsmax-on-wheels displays, predictably, pay heavy homage to President Trump, according to the Guardian:
A nearby board quotes Trump’s State of the Union address last year: “My fellow Americans, get ready for an incredible future, because the golden age of America has only just begun.”
The implication is unmistakable. The man who launched his first bid for the presidency by descending a golden escalator, who has sloshed gold paint all over the White House, not to mention the Aurelian hue he has coloured his own skin, would like us to believe that he, and he alone, is the channel through which America’s so-called “Judeo-Christian” lineage now flows, and that he, and he alone, should be credited for all its future greatness.
Slavery, on the other hand, “makes an entry, though it is presented as a sort of wrinkle in America’s perfect design that was ironed out in time, rather than the brutal mass crime that took years of bloody struggle to eradicate and whose consequences still loom large over the country.” Likewise, Native Americans, “the genocide of whom was the country’s original sin, get barely a look in.”
Basically, the whole thing is a Trump fever dream, filtered through — and underwritten by — PragerU, a rightwing education nonprofit that has been justly criticized for content that minimizes the impact of slavery on African Americans, promotes anti-gay and anti-feminist positions, denies the existence of climate change and pushes a Christian-centric version of America’s founding. PragerU has long pushed its ahistorical version of American history on schools, especially in Republican-led states.
The whole Freedom Truck is little more than PragerU’s bigoted and nonsensical YouTube videos turned into a display and branded with the imprimatur of Donald Trump. It’s propaganda, plain and simple.
Why, then, is it part of the Arkansas Folklife Festival? Because the Arkansas Department of Heritage asked for it to be, says festival director Rachel Reynolds.
“After the Department of Heritage had already signed on as a presenting sponsor,” Reynolds said, “[ADH Director] Marty Ryall sent me a note asking to include the Freedom Truck as part of the festival.”
According to Reynolds, Ryall said the state had been planning their own America 250 event, which was to include the Freedom Truck, but had decided not to do that for some reason.
Reynolds said that, before she approved the inclusion of the truck — which she stressed was not an official part of the festival programming, but will be held in a nearby parking lot separate from the event — she did some research into the contents of the truck.
“It seemed like a whitewashed version of history,” she said, “but there was nothing offensive that made me think I needed to keep it out entirely.”
Reynolds added that she hopes the truck will spur conversations, even if people disagree with how history is presented in the mobile museum.
“Whether you agree with the politics or not,” she said, “to move anything forward in this country, we have to set aside our differences and get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
Reynolds also said that she hopes that people will see how much the rest of the festival tries to lift up marginalized voices and won’t let the inclusion of the Freedom Truck sour them on the festival as a whole.
The festival’s decision to include the truck comes only day after a museum in Fort Smith — not exactly a bastion of liberal politics — cancelled a scheduled appearance by a Freedom Truck there scheduled for next month. According to Talk Business & Politics, “Caroline Spier, executive director of the Fort Smith Museum of History, said in a statement that the Freedom 250 truck ‘did not align with the standards and expectations we set for museum-sponsored programming.’”
