A year ago we thought Confederate politics lined up with modern politics. Were we right?

The Confederate Identity Project launched on Aug. 3, 2017, less than two weeks before the violence in Charlottesville. What got it going was a Confederate Flag sticker on a local car, 2,900 miles from Richmond. But we didn’t know much about the Confederacy, the Civil War, Reconstruction, or really, the American South at all. Here’s …

The Russians posed as Confederates online. They don’t sell as well in real life.

Did the Russians rally folks down South with fake calls to the Confederacy? Seems so. But that doesn't mean the actual Russian government can win friends on the same ground. President Trump seemed to endorse of Russian President Vladimir Putin's denial of hacking the 2016 presidential campaign when the two met in Helsinki. The fallout …

From Cambridge Analytica to Johnny Reb in Four Steps

How to go from data mining Facebook to stirring up Confederate sympathizers in four steps.

California Secede? Never(ish).

Perhaps we should’ve mentioned that while we didn’t see a single confederate flag in California, we did spot approximately 10,000 Bear Flags. And they wave as something like a flag of the Trump “resistance.” California, today the world’s sixth largest economy, has been raising eyebrows for seeming to live up to the "Republic" title on …

Sorry Twitter, This is not the Russian Bot You’re Looking For

It's a little validating that our Twitter account was suspended this week on suspicion of being a Russian bot. Twitter wants to crack down on Russian troll farms spreading misinformation and widening division in the American political economy. Look at the news coverage and you'll see that the purge mostly affected conservative outfits, depriving the …

Russians indicted for plying Confederate crusades

Thirteen Russians were indicted this week as part of the special investigation into Kremlin efforts to sway the last presidential election. The legal details of the FBI's Russian investigation are fascinating, but consistently bury how these cyber operatives won American hearts and minds. As most people know, Russian fronts created innumerable fake social media accounts, …

When Confederates Wrote Tax Law

With the passage of a monumental package of tax changes on the horizon, the Republican Party has arguably taken another step in its Confederate transformation. Republicans like Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, and probably even more Democrats, may be befuddled at how the GOP party went from excoriating President Obama for his 2009 stimulus package …

Sex, identity and an Alabama Senate race

There’s a notable experiment in social identity theory in which people were asked to sign up for a program that offered a small amount of cash if their favorite team lost. There was virtually no downside. You signed the paper. If your team won, great. If your team lost, you got paid. But people wouldn’t …

When compromise ends, war begins

As unimportant as it may seem to left-side political commentators now, the Civil War was in fact brought on by an inability to compromise. It’s worth remembering that although slavery was widespread throughout the Western Hemisphere, only in the United States did it come to an end through war—the bloodiest conflict in American history. Why? …

What Catalonia and the Confederacy have in Common

The near-revolution in Catalonia, where violence broke out as Spanish authorities attempted to intervene in the region's independence vote, and the regional legislature has now voted for secession and drawn a rebuke from the federal government, has something to tell us about Confederacy. That is, it speaks to a version of nationalism the South once …