We live in interesting times.
After committing an act of violent insurrection against the nation, the people who participated in that shameful act were allowed to go home with no consequences for their actions. The insurrectionist leaders were defiant and immediately got to work pushing racist, violent, anti-democratic rhetoric. They rewrote their history, vilifying the nation’s defenders and making heroes of traitors to the flag.
The ending of the Civil War was a hot mess.
The inability of the federal government to properly address the insurrectionists of the Civil War created a mythology that has fed into white nationalism ever since — the Lost Cause Myth.
The lie that the Confederacy fought the Civil War for states’ rights was perpetuated by racist organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who “became the philosophical foundation for the racial violence and terrorism employed to reverse Reconstruction,” pushing the Lost Cause myth into textbooks, according to the Thurgood Marshall Institute.
The myth of states’ rights was easily disputed by the words of the Confederates themselves, which mentions slavery 10 times and enshrines it into the Constitution of the Confederate States.
“No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed,” reads the Confederate Constitution.
After decades of promoting the Lost Cause myth, mythology supplanted the history of the Civil War for many Americans.
This brings us to Trump’s recent spate of pardons.
Releasing the Jan. 6 criminals was not about free speech or due process. It was about undermining belief in the justice system and cosigning violence committed in the name of Trump.
Many of those who were released were imprisoned for violent attacks on police, which included assaults on over 140 police officers, according to the Justice Department. Vice President J.D. Vance told Americans it would be “case by case” and they would not release violent offenders.
“If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned,” said Vance in an interview with FOX News, “and we are very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”
Stuart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, a far-right organization pushing violent, anti-democratic rhetoric, was one of the people released by Trump’s pardon. Rhodes had been convicted of seditious conspiracy and for planning some of the most violent aspects of the assault on the Capitol Building, according to an article in PBS.
After his pardon, he was brought to the Capitol as a returning hero.
Trump’s pardons from Jan.6 were condemned by police organizations who have pointed out the hypocrisy of Trump’s claimed affinity for police while releasing those who have attacked officers. The Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police backed Trump in 2024, but in 2025, they backtracked after experiencing FAFO.
“The IACP and FOP are deeply discouraged by the recent pardons and commutations granted by both the Biden and Trump administrations to individuals convicted of killing or assaulting law enforcement officers,” reads their statement. “The IACP and FOP firmly believe that those convicted of such crimes should serve their full sentences.”
Releasing these violent criminals while persecuting the poor, the disenfranchised, and the defenseless is not surprising. In Trump’s America, Brownshirts and red hats are interchangeable.
When Trump released the most violent conspirators and then invited them to the White House, he sent a message— but not to the majority of America— to a small, dedicated group willing to commit violence on his behalf.
The message? “Stand back and stand by.”