January 6 Is the New "Lost Cause"

The federal government is working to secure Trump's fake history so future generations will forget there was a violent insurrection.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section, and if you find my work valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. Thanks.

How is it, you might ask yourself, that 160 years after the Civil War we’re still arguing about whether military bases should be named for Confederate generals who waged war against America? 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.

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?

But up until now, there was still room for some narrow difference of opinion within the Republican Party about what happened that day in the Capitol. A Republican in good standing could say that some people got a little out of control; that beating up, pepper spraying, and tasing cops is not something they approve of; and that the worst offenders should indeed have been held accountable for their crimes. Even J.D. Vance said a month ago that “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

But they will not be allowed to say those things for long. Let’s review all of what the Trump administration has been doing with regard to January 6:

• Trump pardoned or commuted the sentence of every last insurrectionist, including those convicted of violent crimes and ringleaders found guilty of seditious conspiracy.

• Candidates for high-ranking national security positions in the Trump administration have been administered a kind of January 6 loyalty test, asked during the hiring process whether they believe the 2020 election was “stolen” and January 6 was “an inside job.”

• The Justice Department demanded that the FBI turn over the names of every agent who participated in the January 6 investigation; they were subsequently told to fill out questionnaires detailing exactly what their participation consisted of. This was clearly intended to assemble a list of agents to be purged; Trump himself admitted that he would “fire some of them because some of them were corrupt.”

• Attorney General Pam Bondi created a Weaponization Working Group, the explicit purpose of which is to target Donald Trump’s enemies for retribution. In the memo announcing the move, she mentions “The pursuit of improper investigative tactics and unethical prosecutions relating to events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021” as one of the matters she will pursue.

• Emil Bove, who was one of Trump’s personal lawyers and now serves as the acting #2 official at the Justice Department, fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases.

• Trump named Ed Martin, a far-right podcaster and election conspiracy theorist who had worked with January 6 defendants and was present at the Capitol that day protesting the election, to oversee the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, where these very investigations were carried out. Martin “has declared he wants punishment for officials in the Justice Department who devised the legal theory behind the Jan. 6 prosecutions, which he considers an improper use of the system.”

• The Justice Department deleted from its website a searchable database of January 6 cases, where you used to be able to look up the offenders and see details on their crimes and the cases against them.

Where history goes from here

This all feeds Trump’s desire for revenge, but it’s also about rewriting history, with the goal that one day January 6 will be understood not as the violent riot fed by lies that it was, but, as Trump says, “a day of love” in which patriotic Americans sought justice for themselves and their king. The real wrongdoers were those who sought to hold the insurrectionists accountable.

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.

In many of these books, not only were the enslavers virtuous and civilized, the slaves themselves had it good, given all the amenities of life in exchange for their labor. Not only did the use of those obscene books persist well into the second half of the 20th century, even now some are trying to bring back something like them. In 2023, the Florida State Board of Education approved new standards for teaching black history recommending that students be taught that slaves “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit” once they were freed, as though slavery was really just a job-training program. (One of the many lies of this fake history is that it describes slavery as though it existed for just a few years before the Emancipation Proclamation, whereupon all the enslaved people went on their way, rather than a horror of over two centuries in which generation after generation of people were born, lived, and died in bondage.)

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.

So they are trying to bury the evidence, punish those who stood up against Trump’s putsch, and replace real history with their lie. They very well could pull it off, or at the very least fight the truth to a draw, so each successive generation knows only that there was some sort of big protest at the Capitol after the 2020 election, but can’t remember the details. And that, when we’re talking about a president and a movement that tried to drive a stun gun into the neck of the American electoral system, will be enough for them to claim victory.