Now comes Richmond-area historian Ann McLean, [Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s] appointee to the Virginia Board of Historic Resources and an apparent magna cum laude graduate of the Jubal Early School of Lost Cause Revisionism.

Our moment of racial reckoning, teetering on the brink, does not need a Confederate apologist. But here comes McLean, who likened Abraham Lincoln’s attempt to preserve the Union to “Russia invading Ukraine” during a July 18 interview on John Reid’s talk show on WRVA radio. She also claimed that "slavery would have been outlawed in the South within five or 10 years, but they wanted to do it on their own time."

I can only assume that “they” were not considering the desired timetable of the enslaved.

Seven months earlier, on the same show, McLean defended Confederate monuments with a heaping helping of Lost Cause pablum.

“Fake news or false narratives are not new,” she said. “And this whole tragedy is that these statues were built to tell the true story of the American South to people 500 years from now.”

“But we have forces right here 150 years later that want to destroy the evidence of that story,” she said, framing the Civil War as a “fight for sovereignty of each state and constitutional law.”