Sept 15-21 Mockumentary Week: “Ladies and gentlemen, by way of introduction, this is a film about trickery – and fraud. About lies. Tell it by the fireside, in a marketplace, or in a movie. Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. But not this time. No, this is a promise. During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really *true* and based on solid facts.”

Directed and written by Kevin Willmott, this is a history documentary in a parallel world where the South won and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation failed. Confederate President Jefferson Davis got British and French aid for the Confederacy, giving them the ability to win the Battle of Gettysburg, destroy Washington, D.C. and capture the White House. Slavery still exists in 2004.

Sherman Hoyle, a conservative Southerner (think Shelby Foote from Ken Burns’ The Civil War) and Patricia Johnson, a black Canadian, tell this story. In the world that we’re watching, Canada has allowed slaves and even Lincoln within its borders, allowing them to savor freedom, which doesn’t exist in the U.S. It’s also why JFK died, trying to make black men free.

If this offends you, realize something: most of the products in it are real products from American history, as explained in the closing disclaimers.

The film’s website goes even deeper: President William McKinley is assassinated by an abolitionist, rather than the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. The CSA wins the space race after recruiting German scientists after Operation Paperclip. Rosa Parks is a Canadian member of the John Brown Underground. Pope John Paul II is wounded in New York by a Southern Baptist gunman. Timothy McVeigh blows up the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and is executed on pay-per-view television. The CSA fights crusades in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan with the express goal of Christianizing the Islamic world and getting their oil.

The sad thing is, this was thought to be silly when it came out in 2004. Watching it today in 2025, it felt like CNN.

You can watch this on YouTube.