Ken Burns – Team Player in the Left’s Information Dominance Ecosystem
February 2026
The name Ken Burns’ is synonymous with American history documentaries. He’s been at it for over 40 years. One would think that by now, he would have gotten his facts straight, but in his latest series, The American Revolution, Burns strays off the beaten path with a turn to the left into identity politics.
Trashing the Founders
Probably the most egregious error Burns makes is his borderline trashing of the Founding Fathers and omission of their accomplishments. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay are hardly mentioned, and Samuel Adams is referred to as “a failed brewer” and “a master of propaganda.”
General George Washington, the father of our country, is presented as “a power-hungry slave owner.”
Burns tells a story about an encounter with a slave boy named Darby Vassall and Washington which casts the General as “no gentleman” when he scoffed at the boy’s suggestion that he should be paid for his work. The story first appeared in 1870 and is considered more of a legend than fact.
In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Burns says he had to let go of some of the myths surrounding the War, like the Molly Pitcher myth. Then why did Burns feel compelled to include the myth about Darby Vassall? The answer is that he needed to include that fictitious story to trash George Washington.
Burns incessantly hammers the Founders on slavery, even when he credits Thomas Jefferson with writing the Declaration of Independence. In the series, we hear (at the 50 sec. mark) that Jefferson’s writing “was fueled by cups of tea brought to him by his 14-year-old valet, Robert Hemmings, the son of an enslaved servant, Elizabeth Hemmings and Jefferson’s father-in-law.” Everybody knows the Founders had slaves, so what is the point of repeating it ad nauseam?
In The American Revolution series, the Founders are characterized as deists, or those who believed that God did not interfere in the affairs of men or distinguish between faiths, as between Christianity and Islam, as Burns suggests.
“On the contrary,” maintains Dr. Kody Cooper, Associate Professor in the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, each of [the A-list founders] were providentialist theists who clearly affirmed God’s omnipotence and particular providential governance of men.”
Dr. Cooper continued, “if the film directors had decided to spend more than twenty minutes of their 12-hour documentary on the Declaration of Independence and its theological and philosophical teachings, they would not have run into such errors.”
The Declaration of Independence
In Burns’ The American Revolution series, the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence, the document that formally separated the 13 colonies from the British monarchy and the mission statement for our new nation, is largely omitted.
Dr. Michael Schwarz, early American history professor and author, addresses Burns’ sparse coverage of the Declaration. “Woke leftists have many reasons for attacking our 18th century heroes. The most important reason lies in the opening lines of the Declaration where the rebels declared 4 principles: Equality; natural rights that come from God; Government by the consent of the governed; and the right of the people to alter or abolish an illegitimate government.”
Only enemies of liberty would reject the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence.
To Ken Burns’ credit, however, he includes Dr. Gordon S. Wood, a renowned historian, professor, and author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, in Episode 2, to give his learned perspective. Wood says that the Revolution was the defining event in our history and that the crucial line in the Declaration is “All men are created equal” which is the most important phrase in our history. “If we don’t celebrate it, we have no reason to be a people.”
Indian Land and Iroquois Influence Theories, Slavery, and Identity Politics
In his American Revolution series, Ken Burns gives undue prominence and attention to the stealing of Indian land theory, slavery, and identity politics.
Burns actually stated in an October NPR interview that the Revolution’s impetus wasn’t desire for freedom and rights. It wasn’t a yearning for self-determination. It was, rather, to steal Indian land.
Burns “believes the driving force of the American Revolution was not to secure for all Americans the ancient rights of Englishmen, but to steal land from the Indians.”
Numerous historians and experts have disputed Burns’ narrative.
“In 1766, when Ben Franklin testified to Parliament about why the colonists were in open revolt against Britain over the Stamp Act, he did not mention Indian Lands. He traced the unrest solely to Parliamentary acts taxing the colonists when the colonists were not represented in that body.”
One day prior to the release of his American Revolution series, Ken Burns said this: “The biggest losers are the Native Americans on whose land this whole thing has been fought over.” Totally lost on him is the irony he is one of the biggest winners, profiting handsomely from a country built on ‘stolen land’. If he weren’t such a cliched virtue-signaling hypocrite, he would apologize and turn his entire fortune over to ‘native peoples’. How could anyone who supposedly holds those beliefs go on living?
Burns falls all over himself in the series to link the Iroquois Confederacy to Ben Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union of 1754. Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Jonathan Barth: “The Iroquois influence thesis,” suggested by Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Revolution, “has been thoroughly debunked by academics and historians.”
“There is not a single primary source document that supports any of that. The notion that Franklin linked the Albany Plan to the Iroquois is pure modern revisionism. To say that British colonists only discovered confederations, or democracy, or the separation of powers from the Iroquois Confederacy is laughable,” considering the Founders were scholars and well-versed in history and government.
In episode 2, Burns adopts the 1619 Project falsehood that slavery was a cause of the American Revolution, and portrays slavery as an unchallenged colonial evil, ignoring the colonies’ abolitionist movement.
“What makes this particularly scurrilous is that, while Burns condemns George Washington and slavery, Burns ignores the reality that an abolitionist movement was being born in colonial America, for the first time in world history. This was a great moment for Western civilization, and Burns ignores it to slander George Washington.”
“Slavery didn’t begin with the African slave trade. Instead, Western slavery ended with the African slave trade, and it did so because John Locke spurred an abolitionist movement that the American colonies then developed.”
S. David Sultzer: “What an odious person Ken Burns is. His history of the American Revolution is as false and libelous as the 1619 Project itself.”
Writer Emina Melonic: “The entire series is devised around an oppressor-oppressed dialectic…. The ideas presented are solely based on race and identity politics, and as a result, history as a discipline doesn’t seem stable or rooted in facts.”
On Revolutionary women, Burns highlights the story of Margaret Corbin who takes over her husband’s cannon on the battlefield and is subsequently wounded. Instead of focusing on her bravery, the series stresses the point (at 26:45) that Corbin did not receive a pension equivalent to that of a man.
Burns, in an interview with Lauren Daley of Boston.com, said “…it was an inexcusable 144 years before women get the right to vote.” He ignores the fact that the Declaration of Independence gave birth to Women’s Right to Vote and the Emancipation Proclamation.
What is missing in The American Revolution? Emina Melonic says it is “joy, zest for life, and the importance of ‘the pursuit of happiness’” that is absent. “One is not left hating or loving America. One is left with something far darker: indifference.”
Sean Durns of the Washington Examiner also offers insight into the series: “Burns’ gravest sin isn’t the glaring – and it must be said intentionally misleading – historical narrative. Rather, it is the film’s insistence on stripping the majesty away from the Revolution and our Founders.”
Teacher Resources
Ken Burns and his promoters are reinforcing his distortion of American history through providing readily-accessible and downloadable classroom materials.
When we teach children to hate their country, and, themselves, this happens: a 2023 poll showing that only 16 percent of Gen Z is proud to live in America; a 2024 poll showing that 40 percent of that generation considers the Founders more villainous than heroic.
Not a Neutral Player
5/28/24: As the commencement speaker at Brandeis University last year, Ken Burns, the American history and documentary filmmaker who says he’s politically neutral, said this, “[This] brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality. There is no real choice this November.”
He said, referring to President Trump, “The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of opioids.”
This was not Mr. Burns’ first rodeo at parading his blatant partisanship, despite his laughable claim of having a “longstanding attempt at neutrality.”
2008: Ken Burns produced the Ted Kennedy tribute film for the 2008 Democrat convention in which he omitted the murder of Mary Jo Kopechne and other such Kennedy scandals, painting the Kennedys as moral pillars of America.
6/13/2016: In Burns’ commencement speech at Stanford University in June of 2016, he couldn’t contain his hatred in a venomous diatribe, calling Trump “an infantile, bullying man” and ”a spoiled, misbehaving child.”
“As a student of history, I recognize this type,” Burns said. “He [Trump] 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.”
10/1/22: In an interview with Max Raskin, Ken Burns said, “… the Republican party, for example, born on the idea of liberating the black man has completely flipped and become the party of white supremacy.”
3/7/2023: On CNN This Morning, Burns called Ron DeSantis’ policies “Nazi” and “Soviet” and said Tucker Carlson is rewriting history with his footage from 1/6/21. Conservative efforts to teach true American history is dismissed as a “narrowing” of history in the service of “white supremacy”.
If all of these examples point to neutrality, then one may have a hard time trusting anything Mr. Burns is involved with.
Funding Sources for Ken Burns' Documentaries
Some of the contributors to Ken Burns’ American Revolution have supported broader racial justice, equity, and community initiatives that align with Black Lives Matter goals addressing “systemic racism,” etc.
In Conclusion
The Left has achieved information dominance in media, Hollywood, and beyond. With an assist from Ken Burns, the dominance extends to schools. What we have in The American Revolution is a warped, vitriolic view of American history from a biased left-wing advocate funded by corporate players who throw billions at left-wing social justice causes. None of this is secret but, unfortunately, will escape the notice of the general public and, worse, of the generations of students whom Ken Burns is teaching to hate their country.
February 2026
The name Ken Burns’ is synonymous with American history documentaries. He’s been at it for over 40 years. One would think that by now, he would have gotten his facts straight, but in his latest series, The American Revolution, Burns strays off the beaten path with a turn to the left into identity politics.
Trashing the Founders
Probably the most egregious error Burns makes is his borderline trashing of the Founding Fathers and omission of their accomplishments. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay are hardly mentioned, and Samuel Adams is referred to as “a failed brewer” and “a master of propaganda.”
General George Washington, the father of our country, is presented as “a power-hungry slave owner.”
Burns tells a story about an encounter with a slave boy named Darby Vassall and Washington which casts the General as “no gentleman” when he scoffed at the boy’s suggestion that he should be paid for his work. The story first appeared in 1870 and is considered more of a legend than fact.
In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Burns says he had to let go of some of the myths surrounding the War, like the Molly Pitcher myth. Then why did Burns feel compelled to include the myth about Darby Vassall? The answer is that he needed to include that fictitious story to trash George Washington.
Burns incessantly hammers the Founders on slavery, even when he credits Thomas Jefferson with writing the Declaration of Independence. In the series, we hear (at the 50 sec. mark) that Jefferson’s writing “was fueled by cups of tea brought to him by his 14-year-old valet, Robert Hemmings, the son of an enslaved servant, Elizabeth Hemmings and Jefferson’s father-in-law.” Everybody knows the Founders had slaves, so what is the point of repeating it ad nauseam?
In The American Revolution series, the Founders are characterized as deists, or those who believed that God did not interfere in the affairs of men or distinguish between faiths, as between Christianity and Islam, as Burns suggests.
“On the contrary,” maintains Dr. Kody Cooper, Associate Professor in the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, each of [the A-list founders] were providentialist theists who clearly affirmed God’s omnipotence and particular providential governance of men.”
Dr. Cooper continued, “if the film directors had decided to spend more than twenty minutes of their 12-hour documentary on the Declaration of Independence and its theological and philosophical teachings, they would not have run into such errors.”
The Declaration of Independence
In Burns’ The American Revolution series, the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence, the document that formally separated the 13 colonies from the British monarchy and the mission statement for our new nation, is largely omitted.
Dr. Michael Schwarz, early American history professor and author, addresses Burns’ sparse coverage of the Declaration. “Woke leftists have many reasons for attacking our 18th century heroes. The most important reason lies in the opening lines of the Declaration where the rebels declared 4 principles: Equality; natural rights that come from God; Government by the consent of the governed; and the right of the people to alter or abolish an illegitimate government.”
Only enemies of liberty would reject the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence.
To Ken Burns’ credit, however, he includes Dr. Gordon S. Wood, a renowned historian, professor, and author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, in Episode 2, to give his learned perspective. Wood says that the Revolution was the defining event in our history and that the crucial line in the Declaration is “All men are created equal” which is the most important phrase in our history. “If we don’t celebrate it, we have no reason to be a people.”
Indian Land and Iroquois Influence Theories, Slavery, and Identity Politics
In his American Revolution series, Ken Burns gives undue prominence and attention to the stealing of Indian land theory, slavery, and identity politics.
Burns actually stated in an October NPR interview that the Revolution’s impetus wasn’t desire for freedom and rights. It wasn’t a yearning for self-determination. It was, rather, to steal Indian land.
Burns “believes the driving force of the American Revolution was not to secure for all Americans the ancient rights of Englishmen, but to steal land from the Indians.”
Numerous historians and experts have disputed Burns’ narrative.
“In 1766, when Ben Franklin testified to Parliament about why the colonists were in open revolt against Britain over the Stamp Act, he did not mention Indian Lands. He traced the unrest solely to Parliamentary acts taxing the colonists when the colonists were not represented in that body.”
One day prior to the release of his American Revolution series, Ken Burns said this: “The biggest losers are the Native Americans on whose land this whole thing has been fought over.” Totally lost on him is the irony he is one of the biggest winners, profiting handsomely from a country built on ‘stolen land’. If he weren’t such a cliched virtue-signaling hypocrite, he would apologize and turn his entire fortune over to ‘native peoples’. How could anyone who supposedly holds those beliefs go on living?
Burns falls all over himself in the series to link the Iroquois Confederacy to Ben Franklin’s Albany Plan of Union of 1754. Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, Jonathan Barth: “The Iroquois influence thesis,” suggested by Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Revolution, “has been thoroughly debunked by academics and historians.”
“There is not a single primary source document that supports any of that. The notion that Franklin linked the Albany Plan to the Iroquois is pure modern revisionism. To say that British colonists only discovered confederations, or democracy, or the separation of powers from the Iroquois Confederacy is laughable,” considering the Founders were scholars and well-versed in history and government.
In episode 2, Burns adopts the 1619 Project falsehood that slavery was a cause of the American Revolution, and portrays slavery as an unchallenged colonial evil, ignoring the colonies’ abolitionist movement.
“What makes this particularly scurrilous is that, while Burns condemns George Washington and slavery, Burns ignores the reality that an abolitionist movement was being born in colonial America, for the first time in world history. This was a great moment for Western civilization, and Burns ignores it to slander George Washington.”
“Slavery didn’t begin with the African slave trade. Instead, Western slavery ended with the African slave trade, and it did so because John Locke spurred an abolitionist movement that the American colonies then developed.”
S. David Sultzer: “What an odious person Ken Burns is. His history of the American Revolution is as false and libelous as the 1619 Project itself.”
Writer Emina Melonic: “The entire series is devised around an oppressor-oppressed dialectic…. The ideas presented are solely based on race and identity politics, and as a result, history as a discipline doesn’t seem stable or rooted in facts.”
On Revolutionary women, Burns highlights the story of Margaret Corbin who takes over her husband’s cannon on the battlefield and is subsequently wounded. Instead of focusing on her bravery, the series stresses the point (at 26:45) that Corbin did not receive a pension equivalent to that of a man.
Burns, in an interview with Lauren Daley of Boston.com, said “…it was an inexcusable 144 years before women get the right to vote.” He ignores the fact that the Declaration of Independence gave birth to Women’s Right to Vote and the Emancipation Proclamation.
What is missing in The American Revolution? Emina Melonic says it is “joy, zest for life, and the importance of ‘the pursuit of happiness’” that is absent. “One is not left hating or loving America. One is left with something far darker: indifference.”
Sean Durns of the Washington Examiner also offers insight into the series: “Burns’ gravest sin isn’t the glaring – and it must be said intentionally misleading – historical narrative. Rather, it is the film’s insistence on stripping the majesty away from the Revolution and our Founders.”
Teacher Resources
Ken Burns and his promoters are reinforcing his distortion of American history through providing readily-accessible and downloadable classroom materials.
- PBS and “Ken Burns in the Classroom” materials displays a CAUTION about SENSITIVE CONTENT concerning “violence” and “firearms” in the Seven Years’ War
- Resources for Teachers and Students https://tn.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/kenburnsclassroom/film/the-american-revolution/
- Land was what the colonists were fighting the Revolution over https://tn.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/conflict-over-land-american-revolution-gallery/the-american-revolution/kenburnsclassroom/
- Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation and the lie that it was responsible for Southerners joining the patriots (Episode 2 at 9:20).
https://tn.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/influence-dunmores-proclamation-revolution-video/the-american-revolution/kenburnsclassroom/ - The Darby Vassall story is reiterated in the first two discussion questions for students here: https://tn.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/influence-dunmores-proclamation-revolution-video/the-american-revolution/ (at 0:33)
- Included in resources for teachers and students are many biased lesson plans/videos/information. For example, this resource, “What the American Revolution Can Teach Us About Media Literacy” which includes many leftist views on media like this video, and other propaganda.
When we teach children to hate their country, and, themselves, this happens: a 2023 poll showing that only 16 percent of Gen Z is proud to live in America; a 2024 poll showing that 40 percent of that generation considers the Founders more villainous than heroic.
Not a Neutral Player
5/28/24: As the commencement speaker at Brandeis University last year, Ken Burns, the American history and documentary filmmaker who says he’s politically neutral, said this, “[This] brings me to a moment I’ve dreaded and forces me to suspend my longstanding attempt at neutrality. There is no real choice this November.”
He said, referring to President Trump, “The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of opioids.”
This was not Mr. Burns’ first rodeo at parading his blatant partisanship, despite his laughable claim of having a “longstanding attempt at neutrality.”
2008: Ken Burns produced the Ted Kennedy tribute film for the 2008 Democrat convention in which he omitted the murder of Mary Jo Kopechne and other such Kennedy scandals, painting the Kennedys as moral pillars of America.
6/13/2016: In Burns’ commencement speech at Stanford University in June of 2016, he couldn’t contain his hatred in a venomous diatribe, calling Trump “an infantile, bullying man” and ”a spoiled, misbehaving child.”
“As a student of history, I recognize this type,” Burns said. “He [Trump] 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.”
10/1/22: In an interview with Max Raskin, Ken Burns said, “… the Republican party, for example, born on the idea of liberating the black man has completely flipped and become the party of white supremacy.”
3/7/2023: On CNN This Morning, Burns called Ron DeSantis’ policies “Nazi” and “Soviet” and said Tucker Carlson is rewriting history with his footage from 1/6/21. Conservative efforts to teach true American history is dismissed as a “narrowing” of history in the service of “white supremacy”.
If all of these examples point to neutrality, then one may have a hard time trusting anything Mr. Burns is involved with.
Funding Sources for Ken Burns' Documentaries
Some of the contributors to Ken Burns’ American Revolution have supported broader racial justice, equity, and community initiatives that align with Black Lives Matter goals addressing “systemic racism,” etc.
- Bank of America – Pledged $1.25 Billion to racial equality programs like the Equal Justice Initiative
- Blavatnik Family Foundation – Launched a $100 million social justice fund in 2020
- Lily Endowment, Inc. – Funded social justice research
- Pew Charitable Trusts – Funds research on racial disparities
In Conclusion
The Left has achieved information dominance in media, Hollywood, and beyond. With an assist from Ken Burns, the dominance extends to schools. What we have in The American Revolution is a warped, vitriolic view of American history from a biased left-wing advocate funded by corporate players who throw billions at left-wing social justice causes. None of this is secret but, unfortunately, will escape the notice of the general public and, worse, of the generations of students whom Ken Burns is teaching to hate their country.