As children raced through the halls of the Trump Kennedy Center waving miniature American flags and wearing Minuteman hats, Dr. Ben Carson stood at the center of what he hopes will become a new movement in children’s education.
The former Housing and Urban Development secretary, 2016 presidential candidate, and renowned neurosurgeon premiered “Star Spangled Adventures: The Movie” on Sunday as part of the American Cornerstone Institute’s Little Patriots initiative, an effort designed to teach American history to children through books, films, and educational resources ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
For Carson, the animated feature is about far more than entertainment. “In order for people to really develop patriotism, they need to know their history,” Carson said in an interview with The Daily Wire before the screening. “I was noticing that fewer and fewer people seem to know their history.”
The concern is one that animated nearly every aspect of the event. Throughout the afternoon, families packed the venue for patriotic activities before gathering for a screening of the film, which follows Liberty the Eagle through key moments in American history.
Carson argued that too many young Americans are being taught a distorted understanding of the country’s past. “Probably the biggest thing that’s missing is that we have a country with an honorable history,” Carson said. “There are those who have taken some of the bad things that have happened and tried to make that characterizing.”
While acknowledging that America has experienced failures throughout its history, Carson said modern education often focuses exclusively on those failures while ignoring the nation’s achievements.
The result, he warned, is a generation increasingly vulnerable to ideological movements hostile to America’s founding principles. “We look around and we see socialism and communism becoming acceptable,” Carson said. “Those things are not compatible with our Constitution.”
That concern helps explain why Carson chose animation as the medium for his latest project. The challenge, he said, was finding a way to communicate history to children without sacrificing historical accuracy. “We throw some humor in there, but it’s heavily weighted with facts,” Carson said. “We did it that way so that not only would the little kids enjoy it, but the parents, the grandparents, the teachers would learn also.”
The film boasts an unusually star-studded cast for an independent patriotic project. Kevin Sorbo voices George Washington, Gary Sinise portrays Robert E. Lee, Pat Boone appears as Abraham Lincoln, and actor John Schneider lends his voice to Revolutionary War militia commander Captain John Parker.
For Schneider, best known for his role on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” joining the project required little persuasion. “I love this country. I was raised to love this country and honor this country,” Schneider told The Daily Wire on the red carpet.
What motivated him, he said, was seeing what he described as a growing effort to rewrite American history. “After I turned 50 or so, I started seeing this revisionist history coming in and saying that our country was bad,” Schneider said. “It really aggravated me.”
Standing just steps away from children wearing colonial-era hats and red, white, and blue outfits, Schneider said the event represented something increasingly rare in modern American culture: an unapologetic celebration of the nation itself. “It’s so great to be part of something that is defending our history,” he said.
Among those attending the premiere was longtime Carson mentee and ally Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, who described the event as representative of the “heartbeat of America.”
“Patriots — even young patriots, little children — families coming together, celebrating our great country together, celebrating our faith in God together,” Turner added.
The premiere also served as a launch point for Carson’s broader educational ambitions. Alongside the film, Carson released a new book, “Built on Faith,” a children’s book discussing America’s founders and the influence of religious belief in their lives.
According to Carson, “Star Spangled Adventures” is only the beginning. “There are a lot of creative ventures in the works,” he said. As America approaches its semiquincentennial celebration in 2026, Carson hopes those projects will help create a generation that understands not only the nation’s history but its responsibilities.
When asked what he hopes families discuss on the drive home after watching the film, Carson’s answer was simple. “How can we see more of this?” he said. “How can we get more involved?”
For Dr. Ben Carson, that conversation may ultimately be the point of all his efforts going forward; the movie itself is only one chapter in a much larger effort to convince America’s youngest citizens that their country’s story is worth knowing — and worth defending.
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