A few years ago, a friend of mine said, “Sometimes I forget Republican Meredith was a person.”
I responded that I was less a person and more a stack of delusions in a trench coat.
Republican Meredith does sound fake now.
Like a cryptid. Grainy footage filed somewhere between Bigfoot and a flying saucer in the X-Files.
Unfortunately, she was real.
The machine that produced her was real, too.
I worked in conservative media. I was part of the “new media” wing of the GOP, back when we still pretended “new media” meant we were “democratizing” political conversation and not manufacturing outrage faster with ring lights.
Conservatism didn’t sell itself to me as cruelty. That would have been easier to spot.
It sold itself as reason.
Common sense.
Freedom.
Limited government.
All those polished little phrases that sound sturdy until you press on them and realize they are mostly stage scenery.
That’s how the myth factory works.
It doesn’t begin by asking you to hate people.
It begins by handing you a very flattering story about yourself.
You aren’t selfish or hostile to equality. You’re sensible, you understand economics, you believe in small government and personal responsibility.
Except I started noticing that the people who talked most about small government didn’t actually want small government.
They wanted selective government.
Government small enough to stay out of corporate boardrooms and large enough to crawl into classrooms, doctors’ offices, and bedrooms.
And history was one of the main tools used to make that contradiction feel natural.
I watched the machinery at work from the inside. Culture war narratives pushed to distract while someone else was dismantling social safety nets and consolidating power.
I watched history get cherry-picked to justify policies that harmed the most vulnerable.
I watched talking heads confidently repeat historical nonsense they either knew was false or didn’t care enough to fact-check.
The point was never accuracy, it was repetition.
Say it often enough, loud enough, and with enough patriotic wallpaper and eventually the lie sticks.
The right doesn’t fight over history because it’s sentimental. They do it because the past is politically useful. The myths we tell about what happened then become the policies we accept now.
If you can convince people that feminism destroyed the family or racism ended with a few speeches and a federal holiday, you can make attacks on women’s rights sound like restoration and civil rights enforcement sound like special treatment.
Historical erasure isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy.
That is what I eventually had to face. I hadn’t just been lied to. The lie had been useful to me.
It let me feel reasonable. Moderate. Sophisticated. It let me imagine I was standing above the mess, when really I was standing on top of people the system had already pushed down.
The myth factory doesn’t ask you to become a monster.
It asks you to become comfortable.
My breaking point came in 2016, when I watched Trump win the Florida Republican primary and realized this was not an intellectual movement that had been hijacked. It was not a good-faith policy debate that had temporarily gone off the rails.
This was the product.
The fear. The cruelty. The historical illiteracy. That had been the point the entire time.
My mother, sensing either political disaster or impending personal growth, handed me tequila.
The next morning, hungover, I changed my party affiliation and took a sledgehammer to load-bearing walls of my career.
But leaving wasn’t enough.
I had helped carry the myth, so I had to help dismantle it. You don’t get to walk out of the factory covered in soot and pretend you were only sightseeing.
I study history because history isn’t safely behind us. It’s alive, badly behaved, and currently being used in campaign emails.
I teach it, write about it, and yell about it online because people who understand the past are much harder to control in the present.
So when my friend says she forgets Republican Meredith was a person, I get it.
Sometimes I forget too.
But she was real.
She was a person standing in the myth factory, pulling the levers and pretending she wasn’t setting fires.
And now I spend my life loudly pulling the fire alarm.
