People saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage
Trump’s first pick as ambassador to the UN (January 2017-January 2018), Nikki Haley, thinks Dylann Roof “hijacked” the Confederate flag.
Here is this guy that comes out with this manifesto, holding the Confederate flag [look of sorrow and anguish]. And had just hijacked everything that people thought of in – we don’t have hateful people in South Carolina, there’s always the small minority that’s always gonna be there, but you know people saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage, and – but once he did that there was no way to overcome it, and the national media came in in droves [in droves gesture], they wanted to define what happened, they wanted to make this about racism
Say what??? It was the media who made it about racism? It wasn’t the fact that Dylann Roof chose that church, and the fact that the victims were all black while Dylann Roof is so white he looks anemic, and the fact that he EXPLICITLY SAID THAT’S WHAT IT WAS ABOUT when he opened fire?
The Confederate flag represents Service, Sacrifice, and Heritage…
Refusing service to non-white people, sacrificing the Union on the altar of slavery, and a heritage of worshipping racist traitors.
Service and sacrifice to what? A heritage of what? You can try to twist history every which way but in the end it’s still service and sacrifice to evil. And a heritage of doing evil. The lost cause was the freedom to deny others even the most basic of them.
Imagine if post-WWII Germany proclaimed to the world:
“Okay, anti-Semitism is wrong … but you can’t expect us to take down all of our swastika flags, right?”
It all makes sense now. Dylan Roof chose to murder black people in a black church because of… [checks notes]… heritage. Heritage really is a serious problem in the US.
Coincidentally, I learned today of the existence of Monuments Across Dixie, an organization whose goal is to “create a National Confederate POW trail of their long journey to and from the Northern Prision Camps.” They are dedicating a new Confederate monument in a nearby town in Alabama sometime soon.
Hey Ms. Haley,
How about replacing the statue of Wade Hampton III on the State House grounds with one of Clementa Pinckney?
Don Lemon did a very good segment on CNN last night in which he replayed an interview he did with Haley after the massacre, in which she entirely got the problem with the flag and said it should not be flying on any public buildings. What she said yesterday is a dramatic shift.
Probably from political expediency. She doesn’t want to offend Trump voters, who are racists but get upset if you call them racists.