The whole "South won the Civil War" narrative puts people on fundamentally the wrong scent. It misrepresents the North's goal in the war as anti-racism when it was anti-slavery and it misrepresents who made the world we live in: it sure wasn't the South, it was Northern capital.

It requires real ignorance of the 20th century South to imagine it won the Civil War. Indoor plumbing and electricity only came to signifiant parts of the South in living memory. It went from one of the richest places in the world to a provincial backwater. That is not winning.
It tells you a lot about the cause of "disinformation" that the people pushing it as a big problem have spent years claiming the South won the Civil War, misleading people about the consequences of the war, the political goals of the North, and who has had and still has power.
The zombie Confederacy thesis is a way to misdirect attention from the long and enduring history of Northern racism. Boston today, for example, is more segregated than the Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital. The Northeast is more segregated than the South.
The whole "South won the Civil War" narrative is New Englanders again deploying the Puritans' special skills of literacy and writing toward a narrative that puts them and Northern capital in the most flattering possible light. But this requires major distortions of reality.

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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."


We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.

Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)

It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.

Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".