Eight months ago, if you said that the second coming of MAGA would, in broad daylight, wheel the Confederacy back in, you would have been called an alarmist. It would have seemed like overblown anxieties typical of the antiracist wingnuts or the “woke” to say that those who sought to make America great again would, like the first MAGA movement, the Redeemers, attempt to re-stage slavery.Eight months ago, it would have been unreasonable to assume that just because MAGA featured men and women waving the Confederate battle flag in a mob swarming the Capitol, who were interested in trad wives and the disenfranchisement of women, and sought to ensure textbooks repeat the slaveholder’s narrative that the people they enslaved enjoyed their enslavement, there were significant elements in the movement interested in a return to plantation life.But today, even for those who accused us of woke hysterics, certain things must seem odd. It must seem curious that the Confederate monument of an enslaved Black “mammy” loyal to her manly enslaver, rapist as he goes off to war in the battle to keep her back whip-opened, ordered removed from Arlington National Cemetery in 2019, has been ordered restored by the defense secretary. It must seem a bi …
