Former South Carolina governor, former UN ambassador, and the hope of every Republican who believes their party is so much more than Trump ("See? A woman! And she's not white! We're not racist or sexist now!") Nikki Haley was talking to Glenn "Fooled you with that brief bout of sanity" Beck on his internet concern, The Blaze, about her decision to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the SC state capital. She did this in the wake of racist Dylann Roof's mass shooting of the members of the congregation of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a traditionally black place of worship, in Charleston in 2015. Roof hoped to start a race war, as he said in his racist manifesto.
And Haley's response to Beck today is one of the stupidest fucking things I've heard a supposedly mainstream politician say in a long time. She said, "Here is this guy who comes out with this manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people had thought of [it]...People saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it."
Not once did Haley acknowledge that those who saw it as "service and sacrifice and heritage" are fucking wrong, that they are the very racist fuckholes who helped create someone like Dylann Roof. No, she's gotta kiss the asses of the racists in her party if she hopes to have any career as an elected official, whether in South Carolina or the nation, and so she's gonna go with this bullshit. She's gonna say with utter seriousness that the flag was just fine until Roof massacred a bunch of black people.
Haley wasn't done, though. She continued, "And the national media came in in droves—they wanted to define what happened. They wanted it to make this about racism. They wanted to make it about gun control. They wanted to make it about the death penalty." That's right. It wasn't the racist with a gun who made it about racism and guns. It was the media reporting that the racist with a gun was a fucking racist with a fucking gun. This blaming the media for every time a reporter calls out something for being fucked up is shameless. But that's Haley. It's always been Haley. It's how she could say, "We don't have hateful people in South Carolina" with a straight face. Anyone who displays a Confederate flag is, by definition, hateful. That's a fuck-ton of people in the state.
She talked about how she believes South Carolinians behaved after the shooting. She told Beck, "We didn't have protests. We had hugs." And that would be totally right if it weren't totally wrong. See, there were protests. In Charleston, there was a "March for Black Lives" three days after the shooting. In the capital, Columbia, there was a protest against the display of the Confederate flag on the same day. It's just a fuckin' lie to say that it was all hugs after the racist murder of 9 people.
Haley tried to defend herself on Twitter by saying she was proud of having had the flag removed from the grounds of the state capital. Despite the "national media" being the problem, she linked to a New York Times transcript of her speech calling for its removal. And even that speech was more about appeasing the racists. "The hate filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag," she said in 2015. "In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect and, in many ways, revere it." The flag itself is sick and twisted. If you view it any other way, you are sick and twisted. It is a flag that represents racism and violence and traitors. If you "revere it," you are a violent, racist traitor or you don't have a problem with violent, racist traitors.
And, as I've said before, who gives a fuck if your family died fighting for the South in the Civil War and you want to honor them? Who gives a fuck? Your family was fighting to keep slavery legal. Your ancestors were wrong. They're assholes. Fuck 'em. (I grew up in the south. I know my people.)
Why call this one of the stupidest fucking things I've heard lately, especially on a day when Trump complained about how much some people have to flush a toilet? Is this being graded on a curve? Sure. Haley is allegedly part of the sane sect of the Republican Party, the intellectual center of it or some such shit. But what Haley's comments show is that the GOP cannot escape its racist heart. Without the racists assholes who elected Trump, there is no Republican Party. And we should be grateful that they're not even trying to hide that fact anymore.
The line from Dylann Roof to Donald Trump is not very long.
