What a doozy
Republicans have a real problem when it comes to simple questions about the civil war and slavery. Nikki Haley got caught in a major gaffe yesterday in New Hampshire but Ron DeSantis has a lot of nerve dinging her for it though. He’s the guy who said defended a high school AP curriculum that said slavery helped enslaved Black people develop skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. Please.
Here’s the whole Haley exchange:
This isn’t hard. As Ron Brownstein pointed out, “South Carolina’s 1860 proclamation outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union mentions slavery in its opening sentence & points to the ‘increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery’ as a reason for the state” seceding.”
She tried to clean it up today. First, she said it was a Democratic plant in the audience, as if that would make a difference. And she also said this:
“Of course the Civil War was about slavery … But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”
Hmm. “The freedoms of every individual” in this context would include the freedom of white people to own slaves. “The role of government” would be the role of government to allow the ownership of other human beings. She’s still not willing to speak the simple truth and is instead channeling the old Lost Cause narrative that the civil war was about the “principle” of states’ rights.
Haley should know better. She has a history with this stuff as the Gov. of S. Carolina.
Apparently, the story hit all the airwaves in New Hampshire last night. It wasn’t exactly a confederate state. It illustrates a central problem for the GOP — there are a lot of racists in the party and they demand to be catered to. But if you aren’t Trump (who’s allowed to vomit up anything and people in the party will excuse it) you’d better be able to smoothly dog whistle your way through it in places where Republicans prefer their racism to be more subtle. Haley just failed that test.