IT'S THE SAME RACIST CAUSE:

The South may have lost the Civil War, but it won the post-war narrative, painting its Lost Cause as just and its plantation life --built on torture, rape and cruel exploitation -- as the height of genteel living. After an all-too-brief period of Reconstruction that attempted to provide a semblance of equality to the country's citizens, Jim Crow crushed all-American freedoms for African Americans for the greater part of the last century.

In just one example, in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, an elected, integrated city government was overturned in a planned, murderous coup, an event, as described by David Zucchino in Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, that was shocking for its brutality and for how long it remained distorted and justified in the retelling.

Preserving the myth is far from harmless.

Yet Trump is among many who prefer the lie, naming Gone with the Wind, with its rosy depictions of plantation life and enslaved humans, one of his favorite films. That he disliked the thought of the South Korean film Parasite, with its critique of class inequality, winning top Oscar honors this year is almost too on brand for The Donald.

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