On today’s edition of TheBlaze’s The Glenn Beck Podcast, former South Carolina Governor and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haleybaselessly claimed that the Confederate Flag (aka the Traitor Flag or Flag of Treason) was a symbol of “service, and sacrifice, and heritage” until the white supremacist Charleston shooter committed the act of killing 9 Black churchgoers at Emanuel AME in June 2015, when in fact the flag stood for (and still does stand for) treason against the United States and for White supremacy.
That changed Friday, after a clip of a recent interview with Glenn Beck went viral. In the snippet, Haley appears to suggest the Confederate flag was not a symbol of racism until the Charleston shooter made it so.
The Charleston shooter, of course, is the 25-year-old white supremacist who massacred nine black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 (Haley was the state’s governor at the time).
“Here is this guy that comes out with this manifesto, holding the Confederate flag,” Haley said. “And had just hijacked everything that people thought of—we don’t have hateful people in South Carolina. It’s a small minority; it’s always going to be there.”
“People saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage,” she said—the “it” seeming to refer to the Confederate flag. “But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”
Justin Baragona at The Daily Beast:
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley seemed to suggest on Friday that the Confederate flag did not have racist overtones until the white supremacist Charleston shooter “hijacked” it with his 2015 murder of nine black churchgoers.
Speaking to Blaze TV’s Glenn Beck, Haley recounted her decision as South Carolina governor to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House following Roof’s massacre at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston.
Brad Reed at The Raw Story on why Haley’s reasoning is wrong:
Civil War historian Kevin Levin, however, called Haley’s claim about the flag “nonsense” and pointed out that it has always been used by racists to intimidate black Americans.
“Tell that to the white men who in 1920 forced a young African American man to kiss a Confederate flag before they lynched him,” Levin said.
He then posted photos of demonstrators waving the American flag during a protest aimed at maintaining school segregation, as well as white people taunting civil rights marchers by similarly brandishing the flag.
“Is Nikki Haley really prepared to suggest that all of these sightings have nothing to do with white supremacy?” he asked. “There is a reason why Dylann Roof embraced the flag. He understood its history.”
People saw the Confederate flag “as service, and sacrifice, and heritage,” Haley told Beck, lamenting that mass shooter and mass murder “hijacked” the Confederate flag when he held it up in photos that spread online as part of his manifesto. The killer is a white supremacist who massacred nine people, all Black, in a Charleston, South Carolina church during a Bible study meeting.
From the 12.06.2019 edition of TheBlaze’s The Glenn Beck Podcast: