If America wants to purge distorted history, let’s start with the biggest, ugliest distortion of them all: the Lost Cause. Because the Lost Cause isn’t some quaint relic of “Southern heritage.” It’s the longest-running con job in American history — a mass-scale gaslighting campaign that rewrote treason into honor, slavery into benevolence, and violent white supremacy into nostalgia.
When I was at the University of Georgia, someone cracked a joke — “Oh, are you teaching about the War of Northern Aggression?” Everyone chuckled, including me, because it sounds absurd. But here’s the thing: it isn’t a joke in the South. That narrative, that “alternative history,” has been engineered. And it’s been taught, reinforced, carved into granite, and literally set in bronze on courthouse lawns for more than a century.
The Lost Cause insists the Civil War wasn’t about slavery — no, it was about “states’ rights.” Right. States’ rights to own people. States’ rights to rape, whip, sell, and kill human beings as property. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. And this myth goes further — it paints the Confederacy as a noble David facing down the Northern Goliath, supposedly fighting off economic domination.
In reality? They were fighting to preserve a slave empire that was the economic backbone of their wealth. They gambled the Union, and when they lost, they cried victim. And here’s the kicker: they weren’t just rebels. Men like Lee and Jackson were U.S. Army officers. They swore loyalty to the United States of America, and then they broke it. That’s called treason. They weren’t freedom fighters, they were traitors.
And yet, because of the Lost Cause, Americans still drive down highways named for them, send their kids to schools named for them, and until very recently, trained soldiers at federal bases named for them. Imagine Germany naming a barracks after Rommel.
The South didn’t win the war — but it won the memory of it. I know because I’ve seen it up close. I taught students in Georgia and Virginia, and I watched firsthand how deeply this poison runs. Generations have been raised on textbooks scrubbed clean of slavery, on statues that glorify men who fought to destroy the Union, on church sermons and political speeches steeped in Confederate nostalgia. It isn’t harmless myth-making — it’s the foundation stone of Jim Crow, of segregation, of modern white nationalism.
And here we are again. The same forces that once dressed treason up as honor are back, marching under new banners but preaching the same gospel of racial hierarchy. The Lost Cause isn’t just history — it’s the live virus still coursing through our politics. It’s why “heritage not hate” gets trotted out to defend Confederate flags. It’s why MAGA rallies echo secessionist rhetoric.
So yeah, if we’re going to start fixing distorted history, let’s rip this one out first. Let’s call the Lost Cause what it was: a propaganda campaign to launder slavery, treason, and white supremacy into something honorable. And let’s stop pretending it’s anything but a Big Lie.
It wasn't The War of Northern Aggression. It was The War of Southern Treason. The big problem is we let the traitors off entirely too easily. Every senior officer of the traitor army, every politician of the traitor state, should have been hanged, drawn and quartered. Publicly.
Agreed.Brutal clarity in this post . Every 'lean across the aisle' person should read it.The Republican's 'Southern Strategy' started in the 1970s as a way to co-opt southern conservatives to the party to found a Republican majority. The belief was the southerners would be a supporting chorus. They ended up taking over the whole show. The Republican party is now primarily a southern party. It's a key part of why we have Trump.