Coming soon to a roadside near you?
This quaint little emporium just north of Travelers Rest, SC is identified as run by a neo-confederate hate group associated with The League of the South and “The Lost Cause.”
How is that even a thing 160 years after the South lost the Civil War? Paul Waldman explains:
The answer, of course, is an extraordinarily successful decades-long propaganda campaign known as the Lost Cause, which sought to recast the Civil War as having nothing to do with slavery; instead, it was presented as a principled crusade by virtuous Southerners to defend their land and way of life.
The damn Yankees were to blame for the South firing the first shots, dontcha know?
Today, Donald Trump and his party are waging a new Lost Cause, over the history and meaning of the January 6 insurrection. Now they have the power of the federal government behind that effort, and they are using it with a vengeance.
The lie that the 2020 election was stolen — which all Republicans are still required to pledge allegiance to, either in full or in its supposedly more moderate “There are lots of questions about what happened” form — is the wellspring from which the insurrection itself flowed, and the fuel that sustains the effort to undo history. After all, if the presidential election really was stolen by a sinister cabal of conspirators, wouldn’t violence be a reasonable response in order to keep the rightful winner in office?
It’s the same playbook the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded three decades after Appomattox, ran successfully — nay, very successfully — to whitewash treason as honorable and owning other human beings as “heritage.” So successfully that Jim Crow did not fall for a hundred years after the South’s surrender.
Which should have us asking: When a high school student in U.S. history class opens up a textbook 20 or 30 years from now (or turns on their tablet, or dons their VR goggles), what are they going to be taught about January 6? Will they learn about the lies and the violence and the fundamental fact that a crowd of thugs tried to overthrow an election at the behest of the biggest thug of all? Or will they get a sanitized, both-sides version of the insurrection?
That’s why it’s hard not to think about the Lost Cause, which put propagandizing to children at the center of its mission. As one official from the United Daughters of the Confederacy said in 1909, “We must see that the correct history is taught our children and train them…until the whole civilized world will come to know that our cause was just and right.”
Their fake history was indeed taught to children, generations of whom were given history textbooks that presented a version of the Civil War story in which the Confederacy was not a group of traitorous enslavers willing to plunge the nation into its bloodiest war in order to preserve their ability to own other human beings, but noble gentlemen wanting nothing more than to preserve their “heritage” and their homes. The Lost Cause story began in Southern textbooks, but before long it spread to textbooks used by students in the North as well.
The thing about such efforts, like Trump’s “Stop the Steal” program, is that the very lack of attempts to conceal them prompts us not treat them seriously, like Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run or his 2024 run as a twice-impeached, convicted felon. When they show you who they are, etc.
Waldman continues:
So the right is practiced at this sort of thing, and committed to the idea that history is never settled if it makes them and their ideas look bad. Their own rhetoric about January 6 is all over the place — sometimes they say there was no violence at all, sometimes they say all the violence was committed by antifa — but that fits right in with our chaotic media age, in which the maintenance of a single coherent narrative is less important than creation of chaos and uncertainty. And don’t be surprised if a half-dozen of the insurrectionists run for Congress in 2026.
You might think that in our age of surveillance, you couldn’t pull off this kind of lie. After all, the whole thing was caught on video — every smashed window, every cloud of bear spray, every cop getting pummeled with batons and flagpoles and whatever else the mob had at hand. But one of the key lessons of the Lost Cause is that the fight over history is never over; even when it looks like the liars have lost, with the proper timing, organization, and power they can renew arguments we thought had been settled.
The UDC was as relentless as a Jack Russell terrier with a knotted rope: “The thing is, conservatives often beat the left, not simply with money, but with sheer relentlessness. They play tortoise. Liberals choose hare.”
The rewriting begins with erasing (ProPublica):
On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”
“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”
Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
[…]
The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.
Look for the monuments to the Confederacy that the UDC erected across the nation over decades. Look again at the Dixie Republic up top. It’s not the only such establishment peddling white grievance and nostalgia for the days of ‘massa’ and docile ‘darkies’. For years in Columbia, SC, Maurice Bessinger’s BBQ joints had little nooks where he sold alternate Civil War histories and related odes to the mythic days of Tara.
Soon enough there will be January 6th roadside shops and websites selling MAGA “alternative facts” as truthy history. Buy fan fiction about principled Jan. 6 patriots, righteous defenders of the MAGA cause whose only crime was loving their king. Read how these peaceful protesters were violently attacked on Jan. 6 by jackbooted thugs of the Deep State.
Do not laugh off these people. One of their own sits in the Oval Office.
