Last night, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly resorted to ahistorical Lost Cause of the Confederacy fallacies during an interview in which he suggested that compromising on the issue of slavery would have prevented the American Civil War. In response, DNC Deputy Press Secretary Brian Gabriel released the following statement:

“As Trump’s ‘both sides’ mentality rears its shameful head again, John Kelly’s comments prove once again that this administration lacks the moral courage to confront injustice and abandon its crutch of false equivalency.

“Facts are facts, no matter how ugly—the Confederacy fought to preserve an economy that ran on the bloodied backs of shackled and enslaved black people. What sort of compromise is possible when men and women, made of the same flesh and blood as you, have their bodies and spirits broken for the sake of the wealthy?

“For an administration that insists on associating only with winners, Kelly and his boss seem to be quite fond of digging up vile relics of history that lost out to the ‘better angels of our nature.’”