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Thanks detective,

Believe me, as a first-edition Trump defender surrounded by Trump haters where I live, I am used to staking out a position that everyone around me disagrees with.

I don’t think I’m generally knowledgeable about history, but I am blessed with a skeptical mind, and I do enjoy casting doubt on consensus views.

My mother was a history professor and turned me on at an early age to Kenneth Roberts’ Arundel and Northwest Passage. I was fascinated by the huge gap between his characterization of Benedict Arnold vs. the caracature of him seen in school and the cartoons as a kid.

As a young adult I watched the ‘history’ of JFK and Nixon being written in real time - and was again fascinated by the way many differing and blurry observations of complex events and people eventually seem to coalesce into a fairly single-minded, simple-minded and politically-correct ‘history’.

Part of it is data loss over time - fewer and fewer first-hand accounts, confirmation bias - self-referencing of the same articles. Part of it is the political correct police, punishing and shaming of unpopular views.

Part of it is “poisoning the well” - false association of a person or event with a bad thing like slavery or racism taints a person group or event so that nobody wants to say anything positive about it for fear of being misunderstood.

I notice the phrase “freedom of religion” has become interchangeable with the term “anti LGBT”. So, years from now, students learning the history of this period will be unable to distinguish between the two.

I assume that when we are taught civil war history we fall prey to many lost distinctions and much missing context - as well as to agenda driven subjectivity.

I don’t consider myself knowledgeable about American history - I just know the so-called history we are taught is not the objective accounting that it claims to be.

Why would it be? Just as opinion polls, which claim to report what people think, are more often tools for affecting what people think, history is never agenda-free.

The history of a war is taught differently in the schools of the victorious nation than in the schools of the defeated nation. In a civil war where the same nation is both defeated and victorious, things get complicated.

That’s really all I’m saying. And I would hope my fellow Trump supporters would understand - after a hundred and fifty years, fake news eventually turns into fake history.