Eve Fairbanks excellent essay in The Washington Post on how so-called reasonable conservatives wrap themselves in the same rhetoric used by defenders of the Confederacy before, during and after the US Civil War:
Principles like freedom and equality have functioned, through time, as the American immune system, warding off sickness. But they can also be co-opted. As they were more than 150 years ago, ideas like freedom of speech, diversity and respect are now being used to turn opponents of conservatism into helpless hosts, transmitting its ideas.