If you were hewing to the delusion that Nikki Haley might be an enlightened post-Trump Republican, someone with the moral courage to rescue the GOP from its authoritarian trough, I strongly advise you to let it go.
The ex-South Carolina governor, clearly eyeing a future presidential bid (assuming that Trump ever leaves, voluntarily or otherwise), has already started playing the long game. The first crucial task was to suck up to Trump (she recently claimed that he’s a “truthful” guy who has done nothing impeachable). The second crucial task – undertaken last week – was to suck up to the white racists in the Republican base.
Haley apparently believes that the best way to rise as a Republican is to go full MAGA. During a conversation last week with conservative podcast host Glenn Beck, she referenced the horrific 2015 massacre of nine black Charleston churchgoers, all of whom were shot dead by Dylann Roof, a Confederate flag-waving white supremacist.
Haley’s message: That flag was a perfectly noble symbol until Roof “hijacked” it for the cause of racism.
In her words: “Here is this guy who comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of…People saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it.”
Haley’s riff on the meaning of the Confederate flag (“service, sacrifice, and heritage”) might’ve passed muster at Trump University, and it surely feeds white racists’ persistent fantasies, but it does not jibe with reality. The MAGA mindset doesn’t accommodate reality.
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history, or at least a willingness to spend five minutes surfing the Internet, understands the import of the Confederate flag. Dylann Roof didn’t “hijack” its meaning, he inherited it. He acted in the spirit of its founding message – that treason against the United States of America was necessary in order to enforce white supremacy, in order to sustain the enslavement and forced labor of human beings, and to permit the capricious punishment, often unto death, of human beings.
The founding Confederate documents speak for themselves. For what cause were the citizens called to the Stars and Bars, summoned to “service” and “sacrifice”? Take a wild guess.
Haley’s South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States, did so in order to defend “the right of property in slaves.” Article I of the Confederate Constitution, codified a month before the war began, declared that no law shall ever be enacted “impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” A prewar speech, delivered by Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, decreed that the new government’s “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.”
And after Abraham Lincoln freed slaves in his Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, fired back with this riposte: “The day is not distant when the old Union will be restored with slavery nationally declared to be the proper condition of all of African descent.”
Speaking of Lincoln, our first GOP president, rated number one by most historians…A new national poll says that most current Republicans – 53 to 47 percent – think that Trump is a better president than the guy who freed the slaves. No wonder Nikki Haley whitewashed the Confederate flag. She (and other ambitious Republicans) won’t dare to defy the MAGA ethos. Courage is political suicide. Speaking truth to power is a luxury she will not abide.
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But at least we have Linda Rondstadt.
This past weekend, the legendary singer (whose prodigious vocal range has been stilled by a form of Parkinson’s disease) was honored at Washington’s Kennedy Center. During a pre-event dinner hosted by the State Department and attended by 200 guests, Mike Pompeo referenced one of her hits – When Will I Be Loved – and said: “Ms. Ronstadt, thank you and congratulations. And I will say my job, as I travel the world, I just want to know when I will be loved?”
When Ronstadt had her turn at the mic, she turned toward the Secretary of State and replied: “I’d like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump.”
That’s how you speak truth to power.
If only those beholden to the cult had the guts to free themselves.