We’re often given the commentary of historians as “proof by authority.” It's come with a cultural shift on the left where “doing your own research” is mockable, while elevating left wing sources without question. But in the last couple of weeks, some of the most widely read and prestigious historians have exposed themselves as not even having a cursory interest in truth.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt in Vanity Fair to analogize the Lost Cause to the defense of Charlie Kirk is not merely a flawed interpretation; it is an inversion of history and truth. His case is built on a foundation of journalistic malpractice—a collage of decontextualized fragments rummaged from the Media Matters parts bin and, in a desperate hail-marry, even the private text messages of people who are not even the subject of his indictment. 

This flimsy evidence, however, pales in comparison to the foundational ignorance at the heart of his argument. The hollow desperation in Coates’s personal accusations toward Kirk is clear, but Coates presses his point on the Lost Cause even further, concluding the article with this forced analogy:

Coates fundamentally misunderstands what the Lost Cause was. It was not, as he claims, a passive act of ignoring “words." Coates, correctly defines the 20th century continuation of the Lost Cause as being perpetrated by “this country’s most storied intellectuals.” But why? Why would Dunning at Columbia and all the Ivy League schools actively try to cover for the Confederates? Because it was an active, aggressive, and brilliantly successful political campaign to systematically rewrite the past. It was a moral shield, wielded by guilty Democrats to combat the unassailable truth of the waving of the post Civil War Republican "bloody shirt." Its purpose was not evasion, but absolution of political terror.

To see this weapon in its most effective form, one need not look at the caricatures of today, but at the calculated prose of the most powerful of the left. There is an objectively straight line from the Lost Cause, to Woodrow Wilson, to FDR, all the way to John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. In a book that paved his path to the presidency, and was filled with Lost Cause mythology, Kennedy even commends and profiles the courage of Lucius Q.C. Lamar—a Mississippi Plantation Democrat who literally wrote his state's articles of secession and architected its violent "Redemption"—while JFK simultaneously vilifies Adelbert Ames, a New England Republican hero of racial equality before the law.¹

This was not a mistake. It was the Lost Cause in action. It was a political necessity for a man who needed to unite a national party still shackled to its own dark history, and who understood that laundering that history was the prerequisite for power. The profound irony is that Coates wields the Lost Cause as a cudgel against his opponents, all while ignoring that the myth's most skillful and high-stakes practitioners were not the ancestors of his targets, but of his own political allies. To understand American history one must understand what Coates does not: the Lost Cause was never about what was “ignored,” but about who was absolved. It was a true Southern Strategy used by people like Jimmy Carter, not Richard Nixon, the subject of our upcoming book, The Donkey’s Shadow.

It is the left that seeks to rewrite the narrative to absolve themselves. Although its current form is very different from previous generations, it is a mere mutation of a new Lost Cause.

A subset of this absolution has been the ongoing attempt to frame the story around not just Kirk, but the shooter. This event has been a test, and left wing historians have utterly failed this test. 

Heather Cox Richardson, who boasts the most widely read newsletter on the subject of history, has made a brand out of clumsily tying current affairs with misunderstandings of historical references, with the byproduct of providing proof that she doesn’t understand the history she references.

She has reached a new low in her commentary of Kirk’s assassin:

Many on the right have been dumbfounded by responses like this. It’s hard to imagine just how deeply stupid you have to be in order to believe the shooter was on the right. Perhaps the explanation is given that it is not stupidity, but a deliberate lie. But this doesn’t evade the charge of stupidity, because to even offer such a dumb lie, and expect it to be believed, means that one has to be incredibly stupid. 

Yet “stupidity” doesn’t seem to capture the essence of the problem. After all, people like Heather Cox Richardson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Kevin Kruse who compared Kirk to the White Citizens Council, are not low-IQ. The problem is rather a shocking level of cognitive dissonance. A supernatural ability to misinterpret the past in order to block out the reality of the present.

What becomes clear is that the interpretations of reality from Richardson and others, people that come from a prestigious background of history, are not aberrations in their desperation to shape narratives. As we have covered, and will continue to cover, Richardson has a long record of fictitious takes. For too long we have allowed leftist historians to manipulate historical interpretations unchallenged, which has led to the self-deluded image that the left is carrying on the battle waged through history, and that their enemies are the evils of the past.