If you find yourself at the White House this year for some reason, try to tear yourself away from one of the many, many new portraits of Donald J. Trump that have been crammed in everywhere. Head instead across the way to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. There, you can explore the administration’s vision for the future of patriotic education: a merger of generative A.I., classical art, and conservative myth-making known as the Founders Museum.

Essentially, what you will find are 18-by-24-inch printouts of various portraits of U.S. Founding Fathers (and 6 Founding Mothers), in gold frames, scattered through the halls. The big draw is the QR code on the labels. Scan these, and watch the paintings come to life on your phone in little A.I.-animated video clips.

This future, it must be said, looks pretty janky. The Founders Museum is the brainchild of PragerU, the online education initiative founded to evangelize right-wing values to the YouTube set, partnering with the Trump administration in preparation for the nation’s 250th birthday next year.

“From now and on, we are going to remember our nation’s history, and it’s really gonna matter, and we are not going to let anybody have a nation with amnesia—certainly not America,” said Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, at the June launch. The video promo shows Secretary of Education Linda McMahon being shown some of the PragerU Founders Museum content on a phone and declaring it “a new symbol of our love for America.”

Let’s take a look at the videos.

In each, one of the various 18th-century luminaries jerks to life with unblinking, all-black shark eyes. The reanimated Founders stiffly move their heads and awkwardly wrap their mouths around their words, like malfunctioning escapees from Disney’s Hall of Presidents. They speak in broad, community-theater British accents, offering first-person summaries of their accomplishments, though sometimes they adopt more modern American accents, as with revolutionary seamstress Betsy Ross, who sounds like she is auditioning for The Gilded Age, or poet Phillis Wheatley—notable as the only Black figure in the gallery of portraits—who just sounds like a millennial influencer.

There’s schmaltzy fiddle and rousing orchestra music. Stiff, picture-book illustrations are animated in the background.

By far the most comical moment comes when the nation’s second president, John Adams, is made to speak a contemporary mantra meant to mock “Social Justice Warriors.” “Facts are stubborn things,” A.I. Adams rumbles, “and whatever must be our wishes or inclination, they cannot alter their state of facts. In other words, friend: Facts do not care about your feelings.”

Not all the Founders Museum content is as trollish as this Easter egg for Ben Shapiro fans. On the whole, it’s pretty boring and could have passed for PBS content, a generation ago. I imagine it will excite the youth about as much.

But “facts don’t care about your feelings” is an especially funny statement for this particular initiative. Because it’s not hard to find places where the “feelings” that PragerU wants to convey absolutely do obscure historical facts.

Consider A.I. Thomas Lynch, Jr., a delegate from South Carolina to the Continental Congress and the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence. “He” gives a little précis of his role in the Revolutionary War that tugs at the heart. Lynch was tapped to substitute for his dad, who was ill, and left a space on the Declaration for the elder Lynch to sign later, should he recover. The young man was sickly, and was lost at sea a few years later with his wife, en route to Europe for medical treatment.

PragerU’s short video makes room for the stray detail that Lynch, Jr. had no children of his own and yet insisted in his will that any female family member who wished to inherit his property had to assume his surname. His A.I. voice intones this factoid as if it were truly righteous.

A.I. Lynch concludes, “I gave what little time I had because even the young and unwell can rise—when their country calls.” Almost every Founders Museum video ends like this, with some kind of exhortation to take inspiration from the speaker’s story as a model of patriotism.

But Lynch’s dedication to the United States was not actually quite so hardy. His loyalties were not with the revolutionary new nation but with the plantation owners of South Carolina. As historian Robin L. Einhorn writes, “On July 30, 1776—less than a month after the adoption of the declaration—Thomas Lynch of South Carolina issued an ultimatum on behalf of his constituents. ‘If it is debated, whether their Slaves are their Property,’ Lynch warned, ‘there is an End of the Confederation.'”

In general, when one of the Founding Fathers did something that fits contemporary standards of equality, such as speak out for the rights of women or enslaved Africans, their A.I. avatar mentions it. Anything that is more controversial about them is downplayed or passed over in silence. And if there is a patriotic myth, PragerU’s A.I. paintings show a decided tendency to conflate myth with reality.

Telling “his” story, A.I. Richard Stockton, a delegate from New Jersey, explains that because he was captured by Loyalists, “Some whisper that I begged a pardon. Let them whisper! I took no oath to any king, only to my country.”

The “some” who “whisper” this are the historians who have called Stockton “The Founder Who Recanted” (he was also a slave owner). But this isn’t modern bias: In his time, Stockton’s peers from the Continental Congress thought that he had betrayed the cause by taking the amnesty offered by British general William Howe, under pressure. They were bitter about it. John Witherspoon, first president of Princeton University (who gets his own A.I. portrait), wrote at the time, “Judge Stockton is not very well in health & much spoken against for his conduct. He signed Howe’s declaration & also gave his word of honor that he would not meddle in the least in American affairs during the war.”

The underlying principle of the videos seems to be that anything that doesn’t make you feel fully worshipful towards these Founders can only be unfair fault-finding—even if it’s a basic fact that, in the Stockton case, actually makes the other Founders look better by contrast!

The whole cursed initiative bears all the signs of having been written as well as animated with A.I. Some of its mishmash of fact and fable might be chalked up to that. As usual, generative A.I. creates material that sounds coherent, synthesized indiscriminately from various sources. For instance, the quote “Resolve to serve no man more faithfully than your country,” ascribed by PragerU to Rhode Islander William Ellery, sounds Founding Father-y. But I can find no proof anywhere that he (or anyone else) said it.

Goony as they are, the Founders’ A.I. voices have conviction—it all sounds internally coherent if you’re just scanning for a general impression. When you really listen to what they are saying, though, the facts are often smeary.

Thus, A.I. Thomas Nelson Jr., a Virginian, recounts the following anecdote about the British occupation of his hometown: “Cornwallis made his headquarters in Yorktown. And as I like to tell it, I pointed to my own house, and said, ‘fire there!’ Some say it never happened. But my house still stands—with cannonballs in the walls!”

This particular heroic tale has been described as “likely apocryphal” (and those cannonballs were added later). But the main point is that A.I. Nelson leaves out the key detail that makes the whole myth make sense: that General Cornwallis was supposedly occupying Nelson’s house! Unless you mention this, it just sounds like Nelson randomly told soldiers to fire at his own house because the British were in town. He sounds like he’s lost his mind. Did no one who actually understands the history watch these videos before they were deployed at the Capitol?

PragerU says it is trying to fight cultural amnesia with patriotic history. The Founders Museum instead suggests a nation with light brain damage.

The display is explicitly pitched as a tool for schools to recreate in their own halls. A “Create Your Own Founders Museum” section of the White House’s website offers educators pdf files for the portraits and labels to print out themselves. Generously, it also includes a link to Amazon so that they can purchase their own gold-colored frames.