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Gettysburg College, located adjacent to the momentous Civil War battlefield, recently hosted a festival celebrating the films of documentary historian Ken Burns, whose own 1990 PBS series on the Civil War garnered more than 40 major film and TV awards and remains the highest rated and most celebrated documentary in public television’s history.

Burns himself kicked off the film festival weekend with an event specifically designed for Gettysburg College students, according to a school news report. The talk-and-film-clip presentation was tellingly titled “Activism and Protest,” presumably because something along the lines of “Understanding and Appreciating American History” didn’t sound sufficiently politicized or sexy for a college crowd. School President Bob Iuliano introduced Burns by noting “the importance of advancing the unfinished work of our democracy” – another nod to the social justice crowd, which sees the American experiment as having failed its own ideals. “Students, we tell stories for a reason,” Iuliano continued. “There is power in narrative. It is a catalyst for change. Today, you will hear from one of the best to ever do it.” [All emphases added]

Burns took the stage and reiterated that storytelling is the ultimate tool for creating meaningful change, according to the report. Change – not history or legacy or wisdom or some other concept that would have been more compelling to a conservative audience – seems to have been the buzzword of the event; indeed, it was reportedly a life-changing experience for many of the students who were awed by Burns.

Ken Burns, of course, is the undeniably talented filmmaker behind at least 40 documentaries dating back over more than 40 years. Having covered such distinctly American topics and icons as the Statue of Liberty, the American Experience, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, the Civil War, Ernest Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, and histories of jazz and baseball and the Vietnam War, it is easy to see why he is often lionized as “America’s storyteller.”

And therein lies the complicated significance of Burns’ work: in ways both good and bad, his films will have a far greater impact on the ways the next generation, and likely the next after that and so on, perceive American history than any other source. As is often lamented, most young people today do not get their history anymore, when they get it at all, from textbooks or classrooms, and certainly not from reading history for pleasure and edification, but from movies and TV shows. The Left has long been fully aware of this impact, which is why cultural Marxists have spent the last half-century or more striving successfully to dominate the field of entertainment. And so, American youth’s perspective on much of the sweeping panorama of American history will be Ken Burns’ perspective.

And Ken Burns’ perspective is Progressive. A longtime Democrat donor, Burns has compared Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln and hailed the late Senator Ted Kennedy, at the Democratic National Convention of 2008, as “a modern-day Ulysses bringing his party home to port.” Conversely, in an October 2022 interview, he smeared the entire Republican Party as “the party of white supremacy.”

It’s one thing for a storyteller of Burns’ magnitude to be a partisan donor – that’s certainly his right – but another to dismiss half the country as racist deplorables. How can a filmmaker with such an unhinged perspective on his political opponents, and who views his films as vehicles for the sort of change Barack Obama called for, be a fair, impartial chronicler of the American Experience?

Needless to say, he is hardly a Trump fan. Delivering the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2016, Burns devoted an inordinate amount of his talk to the then-candidacy of Donald Trump as the nadir of American presidential election history.

“For 216 years, our elections, though bitterly contested, have featured the philosophies and character of candidates who were clearly qualified,” the filmmaker declared. “That is not the case this year. One is glaringly not qualified.” Burns never identified Trump by name in his speech, but his descriptors echoed all the tropes about Trump spread by the leftist mainstream media: he “insults veterans, threatens a free press, mocks the handicapped, denigrates women, immigrants and all Muslims,” and so forth.

“This is not a liberal or conservative issue, a red state, blue state divide,” Burns said of the threat Darth Trump apparently posed to democracy itself. “This is an American issue.” Funny how Democrats always label their own positions as centrist “American issues” but Republicans are always “partisan” and “extremist.”

Burns went on to “implore those ‘Vichy Republicans’ who have endorsed him to please, please reconsider. We must remain committed to the kindness and community that are the hallmarks of civilization and reject the troubling, unfiltered Tourette’s of his tribalism.”

Okay, we got it, Ken: you’re not Team MAGA. But Burns, who was letting his Trump Derangement Syndrome dominate what should have been an inspirational speech about the bright future of the graduating Stanford class, didn’t stop there. Calling him “an infantile, bullying man” and “a spoiled, misbehaving child,” Burns ramped up his denunciation of Trump, painting him as a dark, Hitlerian archetype who as president would drag civilization down into the murky depths of our darkest nature:

As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras. We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong.

In a subsequent interview with The Daily Beast to discuss a retrospective of his films, Burns again vented outrage about The Donald – this time, about the religious right’s support for Hillary Clinton’s opponent:

Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ? Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women’s bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the ‘other’ the enemy, how is that Christian?

Fast forward through the Trump presidency, which utterly failed to collapse civilization, to today. Burns’ most recent produced work is The U.S. and the Holocaust, released last fall on PBS, the publicly-funded outlet for Progressive propaganda and Burns’ longtime home. The three-part, six-hour series “examines America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century,” as PBS puts it:

Americans consider themselves a “nation of immigrants,” but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge… Did the nation fail to live up to its ideals? This is a history to be reckoned with.

Even in a program about the Holocaust, Burns couldn’t resist inserting Trump. The series ends on images of white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, whom the Left falsely claims Trump did not condemn; and what the Left insists on calling the “insurrection” by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In an interview with the U.S. branch of the UK Guardian, Burns explained the inclusion of these scenes:

We were obligated to do that because the way we mount this series is, we begin with antisemitism in America and racism and the pernicious slave trade and xenophobia and nativism and eugenics. We’re obligated then to not close our eyes and pretend this is some comfortable thing in the past that doesn’t rhyme with the present.

“I think we’re in the fourth and perhaps the most difficult crisis in the history of America,” Burns continued about what he apparently considers the ongoing threat Trump presents. “The three being the Civil War, the Great Depression and the Second World War, the institutions were not under assault as they are today and that makes the fragility of Benjamin Franklin’s statement, ‘A republic, if you can keep it,’ all the more relevant.

“But I am also talking about Britain,” he hastened to add for the Guardian audience. “I am also talking about the rise of the right in France. I’m talking about Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil and a tendency.” This is typical of the Left’s fear-mongering about right-leaning populists like Trump who reject the globalist elitism of Burns’ side of the political aisle.

In “Shaming Americans,” a detailed takedown of Burns’ Holocaust series in the Winter 2023 edition of City-Journal, historian Amity Shlaes blasts the filmmaker for distorting the historical record in service of a political message. Acknowledging that Burns’ take on the European side of the story is “magisterial,” she then asks of the American side of the story, “What, precisely, should Americans remember about the massacre of 6 million Jews and their own nation’s role in that fate? Since The U.S. and the Holocaust stands a chance of becoming the history of the Holocaust, the question warrants serious consideration.”

Noting that “[s]hame is the film’s main theme,” her conclusion is that the documentary is “disconcertingly partisan. Through omission and emphasis, the filmmakers assign responsibility for bigotry or bad policy to Republicans and exonerate Democrats”*:

The initial premise of The U.S. and the Holocaust—that only bigots back immigration restrictions—is itself deeply flawed and doubtless is emphasized with an eye to discrediting modern-day conservatives advocating similar restrictions. In Burns’s film, all Republicans, especially Anglo-Saxon Protestants, are suspect, and its makers could not resist closing with a cheap second or two of Donald Trump shouting something or other, along with making a reference to January 6.

Shlaes then delivers the coup de grace – comparing Burns’ documentary to the discredited but influential 1619 Project which attempted to reframe America’s founding as rooted in racism:

Like the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that emphasizes America’s record of slavery, The U.S. and the Holocaust aims not only to attract viewers but also to recast American history. In effect, it tells American viewers that to prove that they are not “deplorables,” they must accept that the United States failed Europe’s Jews, acknowledge America’s collective guilt for the world’s racism—including racism and anti-Semitism today—and deny association with everything that does not accord with the agenda of today’s progressive movement.

In the November 2022 Commentary, Jonathan S. Tobin concurs with Shlaes that Burns’ take on the Holocaust “is a beautifully crafted piece of filmmaking” but “misuses” it to score present-day political points:

He has remained the most important nonfiction filmmaker in America because of the way he and his colleagues use the historical subjects they explore to make points about contemporary political and social issues—points that usually reinforce the preexisting biases of Burns’s liberal viewing audience.

With the Holocaust miniseries, Tobin writes, “Once again, Burns shows he is entirely in tune with the sensibilities of those eager to trace a link between the political villains of the past and the people his audience despises right now.” Noting that Burns, in a CNN interview, linked the spirit of evil behind the Holocaust to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to ship illegal immigrants to the affluent “sanctuary destination” of Martha’s Vineyard, Tobin called the comparison a “moral calamity”:

That Burns, a longtime supporter of the Democrats and liberal causes, would be guilty of playing along with such an inappropriate Holocaust analogy demonstrates that the filmmaker’s efforts to frame the question of American guilt in this context should be viewed with suspicion. The same is true of his attempt to claim that current political opponents of open borders—such as Trump, DeSantis, and their supporters—are figures who conjure up the threats that America and the Jews faced in the past.

Among Burns’ upcoming projects is another slice of Americana: the history of the buffalo in the American West, for which Burns intends to emphasize the “indigenous” perspective and remove “the perpetual European gaze,” as he put it in an interview. Another planned project is Emancipation to Exodus, described as examining “the African American struggle for opportunity and freedom, from the end of slavery and the Civil War, through Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Migration out of the South in the early 20th century.” Do not doubt that he will manage to turn both historical narratives into commentaries on current events in a way that will advance his party’s anti-American agenda and demonize its opponents.

Ken Burns is correct that storytelling is the ultimate tool for defining and shaping the soul of a nation. And the 69-year-old’s legacy – his gift to the Left – will be an unparalleled body of cinematic narratives that will be the final word on literally dozens of major themes and characters from American history. Unless, that is, we throw the full weight of our support behind the work of talented storytellers whose aim is not to heed Barack Obama’s call to “fundamentally transform” America, but to bring the truth to light, honor our country’s flawed greatness, and unite Americans on the path to our exceptional destiny.

 

* For an alternative viewpoint to The U.S. and the Holocaust, check out filmmaker Larry Jarvik’s 1982 documentary Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? now available for a limited period on YouTube. Unlike Burns, Jarvik does not blame the American people for the Holocaust; instead, he credits Peter Bergson (pen name of Hillel Kook), his organization, and supporters for persuading the American people to support the creation of the War Refugee Board, which saved thousands of lives. Had other American leaders – especially Jewish leaders – joined him, Jarvik argues, many more lives could have been saved. More information on the film is HERE.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.