The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.
Joe Biden gave a speech in South Carolina on Monday, and Nikki Haley isn’t happy about it. Specifically, she’s not happy about the part where the president called her out for her extremely cringeworthy comments about the Civil War, saying, “Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War.”
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The issue of the Civil War—and her commentary on it—has come up for Haley in the past. While running for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she described the war as a matter of two sides fighting over “tradition” and “change,” adding that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.” She also claimed there was no reason to take the flag down from the statehouse grounds (until five years later, after the mass shooting at the Charleston church). After Haley’s gaffe in December, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that her failure to mention slavery was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”
Although I agree with you that the use of the confederate flag back in the day isn’t necessarily proof that people doing so were dyed-in-the-wool racists, I think it’s an overstatement to say with such confidence that their use was something other than that. As a Southerner myself, I’m well aware of the vast difference in scope between what some folks (especially older folks) think counts as racism and what it actually is in objective reality.