Who will own the past?
Reflections on my conversation with Dan Carlin
In 2020, I asked Hardcore History host, Dan Carlin, a question that’s gnawed at me for some time: The further back you go in history, the harder it is to offer a holistic picture of the world given how little information is available. Plus, history is often written by the winners (which destroy the cultures of the defeated). Are you afraid that future historians will have trouble piecing together the present given how much information is now flooding social media and media outlets?
Carlin didn’t think so. He told me the cream always rises to the top. He believes this will remain the case. I’m not sold on his answer, though I certainly respect his position as someone who spends so much time thinking about history. And to be clear, I hope he’s correct.
I just don’t have the same level of faith in the academic process, especially when the right’s candidate for president recently stated he wants to shut down the Department of Education.
This goal exceeds Trump: it’s one of the mandates of Project 2025.
A vibes-based administration where facts are irrelevant is endemic to this party. JD Vance was recently challenged by Jake Tapper on Trump’s statements regarding the “enemy within.” Witness a man, who could very well be one Big Mac away from the presidency, use deflection and whataboutism instead of addressing what Tapper (and all of us) saw with our eyes.
Then there’s Jan 6, which the right has been rewriting since Jan 7. And which Vance is actively weaponizing.
Trump has imprinted sleight of hand into the American consciousness. More than anything, this will be his legacy: saying listen to me clearly but don’t listen to me at all, claiming a range of provably false accomplishments as his own, inspiring a generation of politicians and citizens to tell everyone not to believe their lying ears.
He’s not alone. As jouranlist Talia Levin writes in her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, this generational project far exceeds what many of us can comprehend in a timeline dominated by the endless scrolling of targeted disinformation.
They have their own insular world, their own media apparatus. They have legislators who give fire-and-brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted rooms where laws are made. They have lawyers, too. And in case the lawyers fail, there is always the promise of congregations that might coalesce into mobs or arsonists whose burning holy zeal coalesces into the tiny pinpoint of a Molotov cocktail.
And, we can add, they have publishers printing books that rewrite the present as it unfolds, and which will likely inform the future in some capacity. How far this skewed history stretches remains to be seen.
These are difficult forces to challenge. Carlin is right in this sense: we often adopt the right historical understanding in hindsight. Even still, America is especially poor in this practice, for two reasons—probably more, but I’m simplifying:
As Anand Giridharadas recently stated on Morning Joe, many countries obsess over their history. America does the opposite: at every turn, our eyesight is ahead and above. And so we risk repeating the mistakes of a past we never reckon with. Perhaps obsessing over the past isn’t always the best idea, but at least reflection provides a framework for avoiding avoidable mistakes.
The right has done everything possible to deny the legitimacy of fields like critical race theory and corporate practices like diversity, equity, and inclusion. Right-wing politicians bend these disciplines into strange shapes, without fail aligning them with (whatever brand of) Marxism (they just heard about but don’t understand). This feature dovetails with the first: deny the history we can clearly identify ever occurred.
This cocktail doesn’t bode well for future historians, especially when entire media ecosystems are regularly pumping out content that works against the best interest of an honest history.
This is by design, as we covered on Saturday’s Conspirituality Brief: right-wing activists (led, in this instance, by Leonard Leo) are heavily invested in rewriting history in their favor in order to maintain power—and, as power dictates, acquire even more of it.
A confused history produces a present primed for manipulation.
This process began while the ink from New Deal legislation was still moist, ratcheting up after pesky movements like Civil Rights and feminism inserted themselves into the national discourse.
Carlin knows how this works. I talked to him when he was doing press for his book, The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses, in which he writes,
It takes time to get to a point of logical insanity. It doesn’t happen the moment war breaks out; it ratchets up over the course of time and events.
The question we have to grapple with, if we hope to get a clearer answer to my initial question: How effective will the right be in creating a media and academic ecosystem that trains future generations to believe a past we all know happened didn’t actually happen?
Unlike historical moments, the victors no longer need victories in order to write the past. They only require intellectual and moral dishonesty, which they’re showing in spades.
We’re living through the ramifications of this process right now. If you can convince a majority of people—or a minority operating within an outdated electoral college—that the present we see before our eyes isn’t real, then adapting the past is an easy lift. Holocaust deniers were around when gas chambers were still operational, as Rachel Maddow documents in S2 of Ultra.
Such denials, implemented widely enough, will shape the future.
There’s always historical cycles. In some sense, it’s also about how long the right’s blatant disinformation campaign will grip 47% of this country. It could fizzle after this election; it could be generational. As in, many of them.
That’s something that should concern us about the past and future—especially in this moment, right now.