While the left is busy shoving every person from American history through an impossible purity test of wokeness, and gleefully canceling every figure from the past regardless of their contributions, one matter seems to be beyond contention. The question of whether or not the Confederate Battle Flag represents unbridled racism and hatred seems to have been answered: Yes, or at least no one from any political camp has launched any kind of defense of the flag in quite some time.
Any nuance about the Confederacy, its military leaders, and the soldiers who fought for it seems to have completely dissolved by this point. Even in Richmond, Virginia, once the capital city of the Confederacy, the acknowledgment of its Civil War past is quickly being scrubbed - even against the whim of the city council and residents.
With the blessing of city and state leaders, even the most traditionally southern states seem to have ceased defense of Confederate imagery, including South Carolina and Mississippi, where they recently opted to change their state flag. In fact, erasing the flags and statues nodding to the brief existence of the CSA seems to be a favored acquiescence by conservative leaders to the woke mob hungry for statue destruction. Something along the lines of, "Ok, we'll all pretend Stonewall Jackson never existed if you could maybe leave that George Washington statue alone. Does that work?"
It won't work, of course, conceding to the mob in anyway only makes them crave further destruction and power. But yes, everyone seems to be on board with deep-sixing any recognition of the Confederacy and now signing off on the hardline historical note that the sole cause of the Civil War was slavery. Any attempt to mount an argument against that ahistorical notion is only met with accusations of bigotry.
But, until recently, this simply wasn't the case. Confederate flags waved on many state Capitols in the south, in front of homes, and in battlefields where southern rebels breathed their last breath.
As recently as the 1990s, nearly 130 years after the final battle of the Civil War and decades after the Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act in the 1960s, the Confederate flag was still thought of as a symbol of southern America. And before you argue that the flag was only embraced by racist southern America, look which party happily used the imagery to reach out for southern votes.
Ahem. #ConfederateFlag pic.twitter.com/nLrTv2fAxv
— DemonNinjaLlama (@DemonNinjaLlama) June 21, 2015
Another popular campaign button for the Clinton-Gore ticket featured the men's heads superimposed on confederate soldiers' bodies with the phrase, "Sons of the New South."
No, Clinton's name on the flag doesn't mean he or his eventual vice president Al Gore were racists. Clearly, they were not. But their names emblazoned on an image now firmly rejected as only a symbol of hatred was just an attempt by Democrats to reach the south, a region that had recently shifted away from their Democrat-led history and moved toward the GOP. It only looks crazy now because we've been told, without question, by everyone in recent years that the flag is bad, bad, bad.
Bill Clinton carried six southern states in the 1992 election that his wife Hillary did not in 2016. So the woke mob, the warriors for justice, and now all the politicians that have dutifully fallen in line can continue their quest to cleanse the country of all images of the Confederacy, but at what cost?
It is just a flag, after all. A flag that some awful people hijacked to represent white power, a flag that the left now sees as a symbol of racism and celebration of slavery. For many, however, the flag represented their ancestors who died in battle more than 100 years ago.
Now in 2020, as the time for defending the flag has passed away, allow me to launch one, very rare defense of Bill Clinton before the purity hoard comes for him.
No, Clinton wasn't a racist, a Confederate sympathizer, or a bigot. He was just a southern politician looking to connect with his southern base. And it worked.
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