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Fox Nation’s new series Crazy American History with Eric Shawn is stirring the pot by airing a clip that bluntly declares, “George Washington was NOT our first president,” and conservative viewers should take notice when patriots speak plainly about history that the mainstream media has long sanitized. The segment doesn’t deny Washington’s towering place in our story; it challenges the lazy shorthand taught in classrooms and pushes viewers to ask tougher questions about the foundations of our republic. This kind of pushback against historical groupthink is exactly what conservative media should be doing — defending the truth of our past while refusing to let it be gaslit.
What the episode actually digs into is the technicality that under the Articles of Confederation the Confederation Congress had a presiding officer — men like John Hanson served as “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” for a year-long term after the Articles were ratified. Reasonable historians and museums acknowledge these pre-Constitution offices and the important, if limited, role they played in keeping the fragile union from collapsing during the critical postwar decade. Pointing this out isn’t an attack on Washington; it’s a corrective to simplistic history that treats 1789 as if nothing meaningful came before it.
Make no mistake, George Washington is the first President of the United States as created by the Constitution — the man who took the oath on April 30, 1789, and set the standard for civilian leadership and sacrificial service for the office we revere today. Washington’s unanimous election and his decision to step down after two terms cemented the constitutional presidency and the peaceful transfer of power that conservatives rightly celebrate as the backbone of American liberty. Any attempt to blur that milestone should be met with clarity: Washington established the presidency we honor, and his legacy is not diminished by honest discussion of the governmental experiments that preceded the Constitution.
That said, conservative patriots should also call out sloppy sensationalism when it appears. The internet has long been full of clickbait claims elevating John Hanson or others as “the first president” in ways that ignore legal context and invite confusion, and fact-checkers have repeatedly pushed back against those overreaches. We can both celebrate a show that encourages Americans to learn and demand that it avoid fanning revisionist flames that feed the left’s appetite for tearing down our founders rather than understanding them. Honest historical nuance strengthens our faith in the American experiment; false equivalencies do not.
Ultimately, Crazy American History is doing a necessary conservative service by reminding citizens that America’s past is richer and more complicated than the soft-focus version the cultural elites prefer. Patriots ought to welcome shows that provoke curiosity, bolster national pride, and insist on teaching the whole story — Articles of Confederation and all — so the next generation knows why the Constitution mattered and why men like Washington deserve undiminished respect. If this series gets even a few more Americans into the archives and into civic debate, it will have done precisely what conservatives have always done: defend our history, reclaim our narrative, and pass on a love of liberty worth fighting for.
