In the three years since armed insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump and his allies have rewritten history to portray the rioters as patriots seeking to prevent an illegitimate government from taking power.

The Jan. 6 attack was supported by 147 Republican members of Congress, 70 of them from Southern states, a geographical sorting with echoes of the Civil War.

There’s no mistaking which part of the country has the most vested in the ongoing resistance to President Joe Biden’s legitimacy. “Southern Republicans are the sun around which the other planets revolve,” says Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He explains how the old segregationist Democrats of the South switched parties beginning in the late sixties after Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation.

“There were certain sentiments no longer respectable to voice publicly, but they did not change their views,” says Galston. “In the modern South, the fewer minority voters you have, the harder-edged conservative you can be.” Gerrymandering finished the job, locking in much of the South behind Trump’s Big Lie that he was somehow cheated out of the presidency.

U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) delivers remarks at the U.S. Capitol Building on October 17, 2023 in Washington, DC.

A stunning graphic prepared by The Washington Post finds that 117 of the 147 proponents of the Big Lie are running for reelection, and though the vast majority of those running are from the south, there are Big Lie proponents running from every region of the country—including the northeast, where Rep. Elise Stefanik........

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