The Daily Reid: the Control-Alt-Delete regime

By deleting anything uncomfortable or inclusive about the U.S., the Christian nationalists currently running things hope to return us to the 19th century. That's bad news for everyone but billionaires

The Big House at the Whitney Plantation Historic District. The house was used in the movie "Django Unchained." Photo from Wikipedia.

My assistant recently visited one of those old plantations that have been converted into living museums, where actors bring to life the era when the site was active and populated by wealthy planters, their wives and children, and their enslaved captives.

When she returned, I asked if she enjoyed the trip. Her answer was that it was hard to, as some of her fellow visitors spent the tour complaining that the actors portraying enslaved folk were making America’s peculiar institution seem too harsh. What these white American tourists had come to the plantation to enjoy was the fantasy of pastoral American goodness; not an accurate re-enactment of American villainy.

Make the world go away

My mom used to enjoy watching TV variety shows — like “The Carol Burnett Show,” The Osmonds, and “Sonny and Cher.” And since she controlled The TV in the family room, we grew up watching them, too. When I was a young kid in the 1970s, one of the artists who’d make his way onto those shows was Eddy Arnold. I only know him for one song: “Make the world go away.” It could be a theme for the Trump-Elon regime and their doge gang.

When they’re not ripping apart the federal government, driving out as much of the federal workforce as they can, and breaking the federal workers unions, abducting people with beliefs inconvenient to their donors right off of U.S. streets using their ICE secret police and disappearing them … deporting people seemingly pulled at random based on the color of their skin, their accents or their tattoos and shipping them off to a Salvadoran gulag … or plotting the largest tax increase in world history (AKA Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in order to shovel through a $4.7 TRILLION permanent tax cut for the super rich — they are rapidly deleting the recorded memory of any Black, female, indigenous, gay or otherwise non white, male, straight American from the official records of the United States.

They’ve done it on the website for Arlington cemetery and the military web writ large … they’ve done it at NASA … they appear to be preparing to sell off the physical manifestations of the history of Black struggles for equality, (they’re now hiding the ball on the fire sale) … women’s, gay people’s and nonwhite Americans’ contributions to the sciences, and indigenous peoples’ and other nonwhite valor during wartime Even if the individual entries are ultimately restored, you can be assured they will be sanitized of any uncomfortable truths about race or gender in America’s past. The whitewashing will neutralize the power of these stories. And that’s the point. As far as this regime is concerned, to the extent that people besides white, straight, Christian conservative and especially wealthy men have existed in America at all, they must only be recalled as silent, smiling window dressing to the main characters in the story of the United States.

This isn’t new.

After the civil war, the well-heeled daughters and spouses of traitorous confederate soldiers formed auxiliary groups in Tennessee and Missouri that ultimately coalesced into a powerful national organization called the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Their mission was to rewrite the history of the American South, to make their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers both the victims of an unjust and brutish North, and the valiant generals and war fighters who ought to be deemed America’s real heroes — and the true inheritors of the battles of 1776 to liberate the American colonies from the British Crown.

Here’s how the organization — which still exists as a tax-exempt 501C3 — describes itself on their website:

Ah yes, the “war between the states…”

Pause to watch this excellent Vox.com summary of how the losing side in the civil war rewrote themselves into our history books and our physical landscape as the winners:

The United Daughters of the confederacy were founded during the Gilded Age, as wealthy women, lacking the right to vote, organized into associations that brought them influence and power despite their lack of electoral authority. Oh, and it was also about preserving the privileges of their race — a mission that continued into the 20th century.

At a time when the region was immersed in a new round of racial conflict as African Americans challenged the strictures of segregation, disfranchisement, and the extralegal violence of lynching, the Lost Cause sought a nostalgic elevation of the antebellum South with the effect of minimizing the agency and importance of African Americans. Within this context, the Daughters commemorated the traditional privileges of race, gender, and class by casting them as “natural” parts of the region’s history. The group’s members looked to the region’s past as a means to shape race and gender relations in the New South. The UDC historian-general Mildred Lewis Rutherford, for one, firmly believed that African Americans needed to behave as faithful “servants” if the New South were ever to approximate the Old (and supposedly racially harmonious) South the Daughters sought to venerate.

The office of historian-general was created in 1908 in part to review histories and textbooks for material that the UDC deemed “unjust to the South.” Rutherford, a Georgian who served in the position from 1911 to 1916, gave speeches, published pamphlets, and wrote newspaper columns that promulgated the Lost Cause view of the war. In one address, delivered on October 22, 1915, she told her audience that “true history” would erase any further sectional conflict.

Toward that end, in the Wrongs of History Righted, a pamphlet published in 1914, Rutherford argued that Africans brought to America had been “savage to the last degree” and “sometimes cannibals,” while under slavery “they were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe.” In Civilization of the Old South (1916), she noted that when faced with the challenges of freedom, African Americans “as a race” had “become disorderly, idle, vicious and diseased.” She then suggested that the South’s large population of Black people helped explain the prevalence of lynching there. S. E. F. Rose, a prominent UDC member from Mississippi, authored The Ku Klux Klan; or Invisible Empire (1914), and with the UDC’s unanimous endorsement described Klan violence as having “delivered the South from a bondage worse than death.”

Mildred Rutherford also published A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries (1919), which was updated by Marion Salley during her term as historian-general, from 1928 to 1931. In conjunction with the United Confederate Veterans, the UDC advocated for history of which they approved, seeking changes to or the removal of books that didn’t meet their standards. As the historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae has pointed out, they benefited from free textbook programs adopted by many states by the end of the 1930s. “While providing the state’s schoolchildren with free [often UDC-approved] textbooks,” she has written, “the programs also recycled the state-owned textbooks from white schools to black ones, eroding black control over the textbooks in their segregated schools.”

This insistence on “a correct and impartial history of the Confederate side” continued through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. While distancing itself from the phrase “white supremacy” and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the UDC continued to voice objections to histories it deemed “unjust to the South.” In 2018, for example, the Virginia Division urged its members to write letters to a museum devoted to African American military service asking that it honor Black Confederates alongside those who served in the United States Colored Troops.

Pro tip: there’s no such thing as a “Black confederate…” these men were forced labor.

Fast forward to today, and the battle is on again over the story America will tell about itself, through its government-controlled institutions. And the Christian nationalists who run our government see a fitting example of “greatness” in the very era during which the United Daughters of the Confederacy were born.

Russ Vought, the Christian nationalist former and current Trump budget director and Project 2025 co-author helpfully spelled out the plan when he spoke at Trump’s infamous MSG pre-election rally, where he declared exactly when America was great:

Ah yes … the late 19th century … otherwise known to the far right as “the good old days,” before women had the right to vote, when Blacks were under the heel of the redemption movement and being terrorized, lynched, bombed and burned out of their homes and communities all around the country by the Klan and by racist mobs … when there were no child labor laws, unions could be busted by brute militaristic force and Gilded Age oligarchs raked in unlimited wealth from their 12 hour a day low paid workforces income tax and regulation free. Good times!

Not only to men like Vought openly dream of returning America to that hideous era, he and his fellow white Christian nationalists seem particularly determined to ensure that American children never learn a version of history that fails to hold particularly wealthy white, straight, Christian men in abject reverence; or that gives even a glimpse at villainy on the part of America’s founders and slaveholders.

Christian nationalists are the United Sons and Daughters of the Neoconfederacy

For these conservatives, The 1619 Project — the brilliant and bombshell historical essay series from Nikole Hannah Jones in the New York Times that seemed to shake the earth’s very foundatons during the heart of the Pandemic and the outcry over the police murder of George Floyd — was so deeply dangerous, its residue must be cleansed from school books, museums, government websites, and from the very minds of Americans, Black and white, just as surely as Medgar Evers, the Tuskegee Airmen and Jackie Robinson must be expunged from military history. Generations from now, true Americans must believe that there has been no honor or national valor among anyone but those designated as “non-DEI” and that to the extent nonwhite people, women, and gays get to exist at all in the American story (trans people get erased entirely) they will return their status as silent, smiling and noble window dressing on the broad and valiant shoulders of America’s uber class, just as they have in the decades when the United Daughters controlled our textbooks and erected our monuments.

Control - Alt - Delete

The National Museum of African American History. and Culture in Washington D.C.

In order to have their way, and re-rewrite the American narrative, new and more accurate tellings of our collective past must be erased. Like the plantation visitor, the neoconfederates want the past told in hazy hagiographies, not cold, hard facts. They plan a national reset that involves hitting “control-alt-delete” like resetting a misbehaving PC … so that what comes back to life is a bland national organism that never questions the greatness of people who look like Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr. and Elon Musk, and never elevates people who look, sound and think like Medgar Evers, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers or Jackie Robinson.

Enter the Blacksonian — that’s what Black Americans call the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington D.C. It’s an exquisite structure outside and in — with exhibits on the history of Black existence in the Americas that will plunge deep into your soul and stay there for a long time after you’ve visited. Trump last week issued an executive order putting none other than JD Vance, someone who has in my experience has never publicly exhibited any respect whatsoever for any American not named Donald Trump, in charge of radically shifting the focus of its exhibits, along with those of the entire revered collection of museums known as the Smithsonian institution.

From the order:

President Trump aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud.

• The Order directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

• The Order directs the Administration to work with Congress to ensure that future Smithsonian appropriations: (1) prohibit funding for exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law; and (2) celebrate women’s achievements in the American Women’s History Museum and do not recognize men as women.

• The Vice President will work with congressional leaders to appoint members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents who are committed to advancing the celebration of America’s extraordinary heritage and progress.

The Order also directs the Secretary of the Interior restore Federal parks, monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties that have been improperly removed or changed in the last five years to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events.

In preparation for the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2026, the Order directs the Secretary of the Interior to complete restorations and improvements to Independence Hall by that date.

So the UDC’s confederate monuments honoring secessionist traitors and intended to intimidate Black Americans into submission are coming back. But wait, there’s more…

• The prior administration pushed a divisive ideology that reconstrued America’s promotion of liberty as fundamentally flawed, infecting revered institutions like the Smithsonian and national parks with false narratives.

• At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the Biden Administration sponsored training by an organization that advocates for dismantling “Western foundations” and that taught Park Rangers that their racial identity should dictate how they present history to visitors.

• The Smithsonian Institution—once revered throughout the world as a symbol of American excellence—has recently promoted divisive ideology that American and Western values are harmful.

  • The American Art Museum currently features an exhibit that purports to address how “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and claims that the United States has “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”

  • The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.”

  • The American Women’s History Museum plans to celebrate male athletes participating in women’s sports.

And since James David will be in charge of remaking these revered institutions into ones Trump and his friends can enjoy, free from psychic torment, we should know where he gets his ideas. The answer won’t be comforting. He has claimed that part of his personal philosophy comes from listening to a murky wannabe intellectual named Curtis Yarvin, whom I’ve discussed before in this newsletter. But for a refresher, here’s a flashback to Rachel Maddow’s excellent rundown:

More Yarvin, who beyond being weird, creepy and dismal… is quite popular among the white Christian nationalist podcast crowd…

And he also seems to believe that life was better before what he, like old Mildred Rutherford, refers to as “the war between the states.” Here is part of his long interview with the New York Times reporter David Marchese:

I noticed when I was going through your stuff that you make these historical claims, like the one you just made about no genocide in Europe between 1,000 A.D. and the Holocaust, and then I poke around, and it’s like, Huh, is that true? My skepticism comes from what I feel is a pretty strong cherry-picking of historical incidents to support your arguments, and the incidents you’re pointing to are either not factually settled or there’s a different way of looking at them. But I want to ask a couple of questions about stuff that you’ve written about race. Mm.

I’ll read you some examples: “This is the trouble with white nationalism. It is strategically barren. It offers no effective political program.” To me, the trouble with white nationalism is that it’s racist, not that it’s strategically unsophisticated. Well —

There’s two more. “It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.” Come on. [Yarvin’s actual quote called it “the War of Secession,” not the Civil War.] The third one: “If you ask me to condemn Anders Breivik” — the Norwegian mass murderer — “but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to [expletive].” When you look at Mandela, the reason I said that — most people don’t know this — there was a little contretemps when Mandela was released because he actually had to be taken off the terrorist list.

Maybe the more relevant point is that Nelson Mandela was in jail for opposing a viciously racist apartheid regime. The viciously racist apartheid regime, they had him on the terrorist list.

What does this have to do with equating Anders Breivik, who shot people on some bizarre, deluded mission to rid Norway of Islam, with Nelson Mandela? Because they’re both terrorists, and they both violated the rules of war in the same way, and they both basically killed innocent people. We valorize terrorism all the time.

So Gandhi is your model? Martin Luther King? Nonviolence? It’s more complicated than that.

Is it? I could say things about either, but let’s move on to one of your other examples. I think the best way to grapple with African Americans in the 1860s — just Google slave narratives. Go and read random slave narratives and get their experience of the time. There was a recent historian who published a thing — and I would dispute this, this number is too high — but his estimate was something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically died between 1865 and 1870.

I can’t speak to the veracity of that. But you’re saying there are historical examples in slave narratives where the freed slaves expressed regret at having been freed. This to me is another prime example of how you selectively read history, because other slave narratives talk about the horrible brutality. Absolutely.

“Difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including freed slaves”? OK, first of all, when I said “anyone,” I was talking about a population group rather than individuals.

Are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than — If you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very bad because basically this economic system has been disrupted.

I can’t believe I’m arguing this. Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war, so when you look at the cost of the war or the meaning of the war, it visited this huge amount of destruction on all sorts of people, Black and white. All of these evils and all of these goods existed in people at this time, and what I’m fighting against in both of those quotes, also in the way the people respond to Breivik — basically you’re responding in this cartoonish way. What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? That’s a really important question in 20th-century history. To say that I’m going to have a strong opinion about this stuff without having an answer to that question, I think is really difficult and wrong.

Sounds like just the person we want influencing the guy who is remaking our national historical memory.

Among Yarvin’s apparent defenders is this guy: Doug Wilson, an Idaho based Christian nationalist church leader and content producer who happens to have ties to weekend host-turned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A bit more about Pastor Wilson:

Wilson and his allies have a rigid patriarchal belief system and don’t believe in the separation of church and state. They support taking away the right to vote from most women, barring non-Christians from holding office and criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community.

Wilson apparently also believes that empathy is a sin and slavery wasn’t always so bad:

So are these the ideas that will guide the new, Trumped out Blacksonian? And will anyone be able to trust the history coming out of any of the once grand museums in Washington D.C.? Will the currently moving and phenomenal exhibits on slavery be reduced to happy talk about slaves singing in the fields and writing plaintive letters during Reconstruction about how much they missed the old plantation life and their kindly “massah?” Will there be exhibits on the red riders and white knights of the Klan, or will those be washed away? Will Reconstruction be rewritten as a crime against the South? Will exhibits inside the Blacksonian be replaced by laudatory exhibits about Clarence Thomas? Will we even recognize the place when James David is done? And what will happen to the other great museums? Will there be any women’s, indigenous or other histories left in Washington?

I wish these weren’t real questions.

As I said to Steve Schmidt during our live last week on The Warning, it’s not just Black Americans who are losing our history — we happen to be used to America doing that. White Americans who are having their history erased, too. They’re just not used to knowing it’s happening.

(Here’s Steve’s essay, written as he and his wife drive across America, including visiting Medgar Evers’ home and National Parks Service site … which is currently in danger of being sold off by doge.)

And note that this year, 2025, is a jubilee year — with 60 year anniversaries of not just the Selma to Montgomery March, but also the Voting Rights Act, the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney, the 70th anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till, and what would be the 100th birthday of Medgar Evers in June.

What a tragedy to have a regime ruling us that respects none of that history.