$9 million to restore the Lost Cause at Arlington. Hegseth calls the Confederate memorial the “Reconciliation Monument.” In 1988, my college threw a “Reconciliation Ball 1865.” Same word, same job.
There is no portrait of Philip Meredith, only an X on a government form. Lee wouldn't file the paperwork to free him, so Meredith filed it himself.
William & Mary owned a man named Lemon. It named a scholarship for him and reckoned, at last, with its slaveholding past. The Justice Department has now entered that reckoning into evidence—and opened a civil-rights investigation into the college for it.
The Lost Cause didn't need a museum. It had something better: an entire campus organized around a single, uncontested interpretation. Immersion without interpretation isn't education. It's indoctrination.
Virginia's 2026 legislature passed bills stripping Confederate tax exemptions, ending rebel license plates, and removing statues from Capitol Square. The Lost Cause infrastructure was built piece by piece. Now it's coming down the same way.
How five Virginia Republicans asked the federal government to protect VMI from the one thing it has always resisted: accountability.
The flag is only a visible symptom of the disease that has wracked out society since the end of reconstruction—a disease that is becoming as virulent than ever with power behind it.
The Virginia House of Delegates passed legislation this week that asks ask a question the state should have asked decades ago. That is, should taxpayers continue funding an institution that spent generations celebrating treason in defense of slavery?
Frederick Douglass still has something to say for the current moment. Although these words were written after Lee's death, the bombast is all to present again today.
