After leaving the hated Abraham Lincoln off the 1860 presidential ballot in their states, eleven southern states seceded from the Union citing Lincoln’s tyrannical intention to restrict slavery from spreading across the new western territories. Each state declared, in their articles of secession, that slavery was protected by the Constitution and the Supreme Court (it was) and that, therefore nobody was going to restrict their rights to own as many damned slaves as they liked and work those slaves wherever they saw fit.

After the bloody civil war (The War of Northern Aggression, as it is called in the former Confederacy), after the surrender by those who had taken up arms against their country (generally called ‘traitors’) and the assassination of the hated Lincoln, the myth of the glorious Lost Cause sprung up across the south, and within decades across the entire country. The war, the Lost Cause narrative stated, had never been about slavery, it had been about protecting constitutional freedom and liberty. Secession and warfare had not been an act of bloody treason but an act of supreme patriotism, a small group of liberty lovers fighting a much larger force in the name of States’ rights, as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

This propaganda campaign worked so well that the Lost Cause narrative is believed by millions of Americans to this day. We can see its present day analogue in the myth of the Stolen Election that Trump actually won in a LANDSLIDE, although proof of this huge conspiracy involving Democrats and Republicans engaging in widespread voter fraud and a coordinated cover-up of this fraud has never been produced.

Proof, friends, is not needed. What is needed is belief, passion, faith, hard work and the willingness to do things others might find horrible, in the name of the highest ideals. You can then fight a bloody war and blame the people you attacked for their aggression. You can erect monuments to traitors with blood on their hands and righteously argue that they are great local and national heroes.

Anyway, here is a very good short video on the pernicious myth of the Lost Cause, the one many textbooks still teach. Enemies of critical race theory, or any theory that makes America look like a deeply divided country with an ugly racist streak, have their issue for 2022. We’ll wait to see if Youngkin can unseat the Clintonite governor of Virginia, running on the myth that the only racism in this country is the racism of the damned angry colored people. If they can pull that one off, the South may rise again.