To say that the Trump administration is in a downward spiral is an understatement. President Donald Trump’s approval rating is at 37 percent, with a 59 percent disapproval, the lowest they have been since the existence of said poll. On top of that, his staffers are constantly under fire since they continue to promote and defend Trump’s daily doses of bull crap.

One of the many steaming platters this administration has tried serving is the idea that white supremacists are fine people. This all started in Charlottesville when those lovable neo-Nazis gathered together to protest the removal of a Confederate statue.

“You can’t erase history” they cry as they beat defenseless college students. And they’re absolutely right, you can’t erase history. The Civil War was an integral part of America’s past, but taking down monuments that celebrate men who fought for slavery isn’t an erasure of history.

The real erasure? Watering down the truth about the Civil War to make it easier to digest for fragile white people.

Recently, the White House’s chief of staff John Kelly did just that: he said that the Civil War happened because of a “lack of compromise.” To an extent, that is true. However, Kelly’s analysis of the Civil War lacks one teeny tiny little detail that many seem to forget.

Oh right, it was slavery. Slave labor was a huge part of the South’s economy, and many people in the North, the Republicans, were rightfully against said labor. They acknowledged the fact that prosperity should not be built on the backs of enslaved people. The South wanted to spread slave labor to new territories whereas the North wanted to contain it, and end it.

Many will say, “No! The Civil War happened because the South wanted states rights!” Yeah, the right to own slaves. Though there were several causes for the Civil War, the main one was slavery, and a Republican president being elected into office was pretty much a red flag for the Southerners, which is why they seceded.

Beating around the bush when it comes to the cause of the Civil War is dangerous because it shows just how easy it is to change history. Though Kelly can’t go back in time and alter the past in any way, shape or form, he can be part of a system that makes little changes to the truth here and there as time goes on.

In the past we’ve heard about schools refusing to teach about slavery or the Civil War, or other important aspects of American history. This is all a part of that. If you systematically change what the country’s youth is learning about in their history classes, you can potentially “change the past.”

It’s like if you were to start teaching children everywhere in America that Benjamin Franklin spent his Sunday nights fighting black bears with his bare hands, that would become a part of history, no matter how false it is.

Even though Kelly’s not going so far as to say that slavery never existed, he is still changing a key part of the history behind the Civil War. And that is something that we, as a nation that has failed at making reparations for slavery, cannot afford to do.