civil war

Revealed: Europeans are worried about 'an armed uprising' brewing in the US

Correspondent Andrew Buncombe tells the I Paper that our neighbors across the ocean are half-expecting a second Civil War to break out in the U.S. if tempers continue to flare.

The assassination of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk prompted many to demand an end to political violence and the rhetoric that led to it. But President Donald Trump blamed the “radical left,” for the majority of political violence: “[Kirk] did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”

Buncombe says British readers were already aware of violence escalating in the U.S., including an attack on Minnesota legislators and an April arson incident at the home of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro. Then Trump seized on Kirk’s killing to justify sending troops into cities such as Chicago, Portland and threatens to invade New York.

His invasion has spurred local outcry from state governors like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who accused Trump of following a playbook to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them … to create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”

The Insurrection Act allows Trump to call up federal troops to put down domestic rebellion or insurrection, and U.S. courts could allow Trump to paint anything he wants as an “insurrection.”

“An armed uprising,” reports Buncombe, “is entirely possible.”

Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, tells The i Paper that the definition for a civil war used by modern scholars is a conflict in which at least 1,000 people are killed. But what’s more likely is “something similar to the 1791 armed uprising known as the Whiskey Rebellion,” which lasted two years with hundreds of rebels taking up arms, with casualties.

Jensen said the rebellion could take the form of “sporadic acts of violence that will not be neatly defined by right or left but that stop short of becoming formal, organized parties locked in civil conflict.”

When asked to name a circumstances in which a violent conflict might take place, Coventry University political sociology professor Joel Busher proffered Republicans refusing to step down after losing “the next election.”

“Would they accept the result and support the process of democratic transition?” asked Busher. “I hope so, but if they did not, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that decentralized networks of armed actors would seek to mete out violence against their political enemies – Democratic lawmakers, minorities identified as being somehow less ‘American’.”

“If such violence were not condemned by senior Republicans, we would be looking at a potential civil war scenario,” Busher said.

Read the i-Paper report at this link.

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'What is going on?' Trump appears to confuse the Revolutionary War with the Civil War

President Donald Trump, speaking about war as he attempts to decide whether or not to actively support Israel by bombing Iran, appeared to confuse America’s war for independence —the Revolutionary War—with America’s Civil War.

Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon if he’s made a decision about what, if anything, he will do regarding Iran, the President told reporters, “I have ideas as to what to do, but I haven’t made a final.”

“I like to make the final decisions one second before it’s due, you know, ’cause things change. I mean, especially with war, things change with war, it can go from one extreme to the other.”

“War’s very bad. There was no reason for this to be a war,” he said, apparently about Israel and Iran.

“There was no reason for Russia, Ukraine. A lot of wars, there was no reason for.”

“You look right up there,” Trump said, pointing to the wall, “I don’t know, you see the Declaration of Independence, and I say, I wonder if you, you know, the Civil War always seemed to me maybe that could have been solved without losing 600,000 plus people.”

The Declaration of Independence was America’s declaration it would no longer be ruled by England. It effectively became a declaration of war: the American Revolutionary War, or the American War of Independence, which lasted from 1775 to 1783.

By contrast, the American Civil War was fought in the following century, from 1861 to 1865, over slavery.

Critics were quick to mock the President.

“I think we all remember our schooling, when we learned how the Declaration of Independence led to the Civil War,” snarked former journalist Landon Hall.

“As a Canadian, even I know that the Declaration of Independence has absolutely zero to do with the Civil War, what is going on down there?” asked filmmaker Robert Fantinatto.

“Does he think the Declaration of Independence was written in response to the Civil War?
What is he talking about?” asked attorney Robyn J Leader.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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'Civil war is coming to the Trump movement': Expert says MAGA could soon tear itself apart

President Donald Trump's base of support may soon fracture into two competing far-right factions, according to one expert.

The Wall Street Journal's Joshua Chaffin and Zusha Elinson reported Friday that two camps within the MAGA world are emerging and will likely battle for supremacy during Trump's second term. They wrote that on one side are "tech bros racing to create a new future," with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as the quintessential example. On the other side are "conservative Catholics who yearn for an imagined past," like Vice President JD Vance, who seek to upend the liberal establishment and return America to a "bygone era."

According to Chaffin and Elinson, the "dark prince" of the tech wing of MAGA is Curtis Yarvin — a pro-feudalist writer who has called for democracy to be replaced with a monarch who would rule the United States like a CEO leads a tech company. And the conservative Catholic faction upholds ideologies like that championed by University of Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen.

Catholic theologian David Deane told the Journal that Deneen's 2023 book "Regime Change" offered a prediction that the second Trump administration would put a torch to traditionally liberal institutions like universities, the media and the nonprofit sector. Deane opined that the ultimate goals of both factions are very different despite Trump managing to corral them under one tent.

“At some stage a civil war is coming to the Trump movement,” Deane said. “And I think Musk and Vance will be on two very different sides of that civil war.”

The Journal noted that during an appearance at Harvard University, Yarvin expanded on his view that democracy was "bunk" and defended his call for America to have a king unaccountable by law who could be free to impose reforms without Constitutional constraints. And he notably made a dig at modern conservative icon Christopher Rufo — who led the 2021 push against "critical race theory" and spearheaded the effort to oust former Harvard President Claudine Gay — as a "grifter."

Deneen, for his part, has unleashed on the technocratic wing of the far right, deriding them as out-of-touch elites who "like nice restaurants." While speaking at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Deneen said MAGA-aligned tech billionaires espouse “an ideology of rapine and plunder — the stripping of wealth from a ship that they are sinking while busily stocking the lifeboats until the last moment when they will be able to cut loose.”

Click here to read the Journal's full article (subscription required).

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JD Vance told far-right podcast the Civil War is still ongoing and he’s with the South

In an interview on a far-right podcast, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) invoked the Civil War, and suggested to the hosts that he's on the side of the Confederacy.

Conservative media outlet the Bulwark recently highlighted Vance's appearance in a 2021 episode of the Viva Frei podcast, in which he told hosts David Freiheit and Robert Barnes that in his view, the Civil War never really ended. Rather, the Hillbilly Elegy author posited that the North and the South are still battling for control of the cultural and political narrative. And he made it clear he was on the side battling the "Northern woke people."

"American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins," Vance said." And that’s kind of how I think about American politics today, is like, the Northern Yankees are now the hyper-woke, coastal elites. The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years. And it’s like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbons instead of the Northern woke people. That’s just a fundamental thing that’s happening in American politics."

The Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last remarked that he agrees with Vance, but was "just kind of shocked that he’s willing to admit that in this parallel, Democrats and liberals are the abolitionists and he’s on the side of the slaveholders."

"Actually, scratch that. I’m not shocked at all," he wrote.

Last contextualized Vance's 2021 remarks by putting them next to a key excerpt from his vice presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. In that speech, Vance echoed former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan's nativist rhetoric about immigrants (Buchanan ran for president in 1992 and 1996 on closing the Southern border and calling immigration an "illegal invasion").

"America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation," Vance said. "Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms."

As Last noted, Vance's comments on the 2021 podcast episode and at the RNC have a similar theme: Allowing new people into the country is up to the "American family," which naturally establishes a hierarchy between deserving "real Americans" and the undeserving others. And as the eventual 2024 Republican vice presidential nominee suggested to the Viva Frei hosts, the "Southern bourbons" and their "hillbilly" counterparts have more of a claim than the "Northern woke people."

Click here to read Last's analysis in the Bulwark. And watch the video of Vance's remarks below, or by clicking here.

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Far-right pastor: 'Civil war' would be 'worth it' to 'turn this nation back' if Trump wins

A far-right evangelical pastor recently suggested that if former President Donald Trump were to be elected to a second term, a "civil war" wouldn't be entirely unwelcome.

During a recent episode of his Truth & Liberty podcast posted by Right Wing Watch, televangelist Andrew Wommack was addressing a point made by a caller who asked how America could have another revolution to convert the United States to a nation that would "use the Bible as the constitution." Wommack then talked excitedly conversations he's had with fellow believers who would "physically fight" for Christian nationalist values.

"I've actually had people say that if Trump was to be elected if we got a conservative Congress, that they fear that we would have another civil war," Wommack said. "And you know what? I don't want a civil war, I don't know anybody that does, but would it be worth it? To turn this nation back? I believe it would."

The Civil War has become a common refrain during the 2024 presidential election cycle, with historians theorizing that it may be because the US is more divided than ever since the war that nearly split the union. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley shied away from naming slavery as the reason for the Civil War during a campaign speech in New Hampshire, prompting wide condemnation. And Trump suggested in an Iowa speech that he would have been able to avoid war entirely with his negotiating prowess.

"The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible," Trump said in Newton, Iowa. "So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died, so many people died. You know, that was the disaster."

Talk of a potential civil war has been continuously bubbling in the wake of Texas' refusal to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that it remove razor wire placed along the Southern border, stating that national borders are the jurisdiction of the federal government rather than individual states. In a post to his Truth Social platform, Trump called on "all willing states" to send National Guard troops to Texas to help it continue its defiance of the Court's order.

Texas' refusal to obey the Supreme Court may be the most significant act of rebellion by a state against the federal government since the Nullification Crisis of 1832, when South Carolina defied tariffs imposed by then-President Andrew Jackson's administration. Jackson called South Carolina's bluff and threatened to send federal troops to the Palmetto State to enforce the tariffs directly, prompting the Southern state to back down. Of course, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the union in 1860 after Abraham Lincoln was elected, whereupon it launched an attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 and kicked off the Civil War.

Watch Wommack's remarks below, or by clicking this link.

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'Ultimate moment of division': Historian lays out reason for Civil War’s relevance in 2024

Even though it ended roughly 160 years ago, the Civil War continues to be a popular refrain in the 2024 presidential election. A historian and author recently noted that the reason for its ongoing relevance has a lot to do with the United States' current political moment.

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley recently found herself in hot water over her response to a question by a New Hampshire voter about the origins of the Civil War. While Haley mentioned the war was related to "what people could and couldn't do," she didn't mention slavery as the root cause. This resulted in sharp blowback — particularly from Black Republicans. Tim Galsworthy, who is a historian at Bishop Grosseteste University in the United Kingdom, told the Washington Post that "the Civil War has never really left American politics" but rather has "exploded in this moment."

"When the US is divided, the Civil War becomes that great reference point, because it’s the ultimate moment of division," Galsworthy said.

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As if to underscore that point, President Joe Biden seized on Haley's comments about the Civil War while campaigning at Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina — a historic Black church where a white supremacist gunman murdered multiple congregants during a Bible study meeting in 2015.

"Let me be clear for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War," Biden said. "Now we’re living in an era of a second Lost Cause. Once again, there are some in this country trying to turn a loss into a lie."

Former President Donald Trump also invoked the Civil War while stumping in Iowa last week. During a campaign stop in Newton, Trump suggested that had he been in power during the Civil War, he would've been able to broker a deal between the Union and the Confederacy and prevented bloodshed where Lincoln had failed to do so. Author Joshua Zeitz pointed out that multiple attempts had been made to reach an agreement with secessionist states, but that negotiations fell through specifically over the South's insistence on maintaining chattel slavery.

Haley later clarified that "of course the Civil War was about slavery." She has repeatedly reminded voters that the Confederate flag displayed outside the South Carolina Capitol was removed during her tenure as governor (after activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole and removed it herself). She added that "we came together as a state" following the flag's removal.

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'Ignorant': Historians mock Trump claim he would have handled Civil War better than Lincoln

Historians and scholars are criticizing former President Donald Trump over recent comments he made suggesting he could have negotiated a deal with the Confederacy to avoid the Civil War.

In a recent essay for Politico, author Joshua Zeitz commented on how historians were stunned at the former president's speech in Iowa last weekend, in which Trump claimed he would have handled the secession of Southern states and the belligerence of the Confederacy better than Abraham Lincoln.

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"Abraham Lincoln, of course, if he negotiated it, you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was," Trump added.

Yale professor and historian David Blight referred to Trump's comments as "historically ignorant," and American Historical Association executive director James Grossman said the South's insistence on maintaining the institution of chattel slavery simply "could not be 'negotiated.'"

"[D]eclarations of secession explicitly state that the seceding states were leaving the Union to maintain [slavery] and because many northern states were refusing to return escapees from that regime," Grossman said.

As Zeitz noted, the economy of the antebellum South was based entirely on the forced labor of enslaved human beings, the vast swaths of land they farmed and the crops produced from slave labor. He imagined a scenario in which Lincoln negotiated a compromise with the Confederacy instead of going to war: A proposed deal proffered by then-Sen. John Crittenden of Kentucky would have extended the Missouri Compromise westward to California, which drew a line between slave states and free states, and allowed for one slave state in exchange for every free state admitted to the union.

"In all likelihood, chattel slavery in North America would have persisted, even grown, well into the 20th century," Zeitz wrote. "It’s easy to imagine the Southern economy humming along, fueled in large part by plantation slavery and aided as it ever was by Northern textile, manufacturing and commercial interests."

"Would [slavery] die out gradually? Unlikely," he continued. "The only plausible program for gradual abolition was compensated emancipation, a scheme by which the government would pay slaveowners to emancipate their enslaved workers. White Southerners bitterly resisted that option... They wanted to keep their slaves. In the end, they lost them to the tide of war, without a dime in compensation."

Trump isn't the only Republican candidate to make widely panned comments about the Civil War. In New Hampshire, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley answered a question about the origins of the Civil War without once mentioning slavery. Of course, then-Confederate States of America Vice President Alexander Stephenson said slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Confederate cause in a speech delivered three days before the attack on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War — in Haley's home state of South Carolina.

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What Nikki Haley’s gaffe reveals about the GOP

The new Nikki Haley news is that she refused to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. During an event in New Hampshire, she said that the bloodiest conflict on US soil was about, well, anything but slavery: “how government was going to run, the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” she said, among other ridiculous things.

Magdi Jacobs, an Editorial Board contributor, said that “the fascinating thing about Haley's response was her discomfort. You could feel her flailing as she reached for the perfect combo of a pre-Donald Trump conservative ‘states’ rights’ answer to appeal to centrist voters, all while knowing that the insurrectionists want more racist red meat.”

“This is a balance no one can strike,” Magdi concluded. “It shows how fundamentally weak the current GOP is, even if our political media doesn't want to admit it. You can't win without Trump. I firmly believe – and I think Haley does, too – that you can't win with him either.”

More precisely (and I think Magdi would agree) is that this balance is impossible to strike because there’s nowhere to put it. There’s no such thing as a moderate position inside today’s Republican Party. There’s no foundation on which to build the broad coalition of voters that’s necessary to winning (ie, candidates need more than a base.) If such a position existed, Haley would have found it. It doesn’t, so all she can do is reach for a reason, any reason, as the true cause of the Civil War.

To her credit, Haley quickly walked back her remarks. Perhaps she sensed something was at risk in sounding so unreasonable. “Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” she said. “We know that. That’s the easy part of it.” Then she went on to say that it was about “more than that,” citing, among other ridiculous things, “the role of government.”

That she walked back her initial remarks may seem “reasonable,” but it won’t matter. Remember, even if she wanted to strike a balance between “conservative states’ rights” and “racist red meat” – and that’s apparently what she wanted to do – there is no foundation inside the Republican Party on which to put it. There is no moderate position.

To be a moderate, you have to sound reasonable, but according to David Atkins, a frequent contributor to the Washington Monthly, the GOP base “doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.”

“Haley has zero chance of winning” the presidential election, David told me. “Even if she did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.”

There’s always makebelieve, though. Fortunately, Haley has a lot of help in that regard. The billionaire Koch brothers gave her their blessing. So did the popular governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu. They portray Haley as the champion of “conservative values,” as if “conservative values” was still shorthand for “moderate,” and as if Donald Trump’s gravity has not pulled the entire party to the far right.

While makebelieve is a powerful force in politics, it’s probably not going to be enough for Haley or any of the other GOP candidates. Oh, sure, they did OK while the neutral press was casting them as “legitimate alternatives” to Trump. But once the neutral press gets bored – and the neutral press always gets bored – whatever promise these “legitimate alternatives” once had melts into the air. It happened to Ron DeSantis. It happened to Vivek Ramaswamy. It will probably happen to Haley. Everything begins and ends with Trump. As Magdi said, the GOP can’t win with him and it can’t win without him.

In the following interview with me, David Atkins explains not only why he thinks Haley is doomed, but why, in 2024, the Republicans are, too.

JS: New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu endorsed Republican candidate Nikki Haley after the Koch network did. Could that be enough for her to win New Hampshire? And will that matter in the long run?

DA: GOP megadonors need to come to terms with the reality that their base cannot be controlled. They let the MAGA flames burn out of control and now they get to reap the whirlwind. Haley has zero chance of winning absent some issue impacting Trump’s health, because the GOP base doesn’t want even the perception of a more reasonable candidate. They want a dictator to punish their enemies.

And let’s be clear: Haley is also a radical rightwing extremist, as her embrace of a six-week abortion ban makes clear. She just doesn’t seem like she wants to destroy the entire federal bureaucracy, send Democrats to gulags, weaponize the Justice Department and the IRS against all their domestic opponents, and institute mass deportation camps of immigrants. So she’s not the candidate of the GOP base, which does want those things and wants Trump to deliver them.

The Republican Party’s base isn’t in the thrall of Trumpism; Trump is the avatar of their desires, which is why he will be the nominee. Also, even if Haley did win New Hampshire, it wouldn’t help her any more than it did Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Pete Buttigieg in 2020.

JS: You said the culture war is over. Taylor Swift won, Elon Musk lost. I have written that obituary, too, only to see myself proven wrong.

DA: The culture war is over in the sense that people under the age of 50 in the areas of the country that make up more than 80 percent of the national GDP despise the theocratic conservatism that animates Republican activists. That isn’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t win elections, and institute rearguard policy actions, like restricting abortion and LGBT rights. They can. The threat of hard-right fascist dictatorship is very real.

But most of the culture wars can be explained by the fact that the marketplace responds primarily to 18- to 45-year-old consumers in cities, while the electoral system responds primarily to 65-plus-year-olds in exurbia. The electoral system can produce a fascist takeover, but it will do so by oppressing a majority that wants nothing to do with it. Such tyrannies rarely last for long.

In the meantime, the weight of popular culture is increasingly shifting to treat cultural progressivism as normative, if for no other reason than that’s the population advertisers want to appeal to. The engines of capitalism are working against social conservatives now, which is why you see such a growing rift between the evangelical base and the urbanite business Republican crowd.

JS: You said the GOP will lose 2024. You cited the fact that they have lost every special election. Special elections attract partisans. Presidential election attracts everyone. Am I wrong in noting the difference?

DA: It’s no secret that Trump and Biden at the top of the ticket will make for an interesting dynamic in 2024, since neither are popular, at least at the moment. But in this environment, a generic Democrat is consistently beating a generic Republican. If the public’s concerns about both Trump and Biden as individuals were sidelined, and the voters were to choose a party and its policies, Democrats would be marching into a confident victory in 2024.

The key will be to remind voters of the tremendous legislative accomplishments of the Biden administration, emphasize Trump’s rampant criminality and danger to democracy, and remind people that no matter what they think of the candidates, the policy choices are very real. Republican rule would be a cruel disaster.

JS: I think the GOP is going to impeach Biden. How does that factor into your thinking, if it does, that the Republicans are going to lose 2024?

DA: Republicans want to play tit-for-tat by impeaching Biden to take some of the sting out of Trump’s double impeachments. More generally, if they can make impeachment into a routine partisan clown show, then it minimizes and defangs the one tool in the Constitution that’s designed to stop an authoritarian, criminal unitary executive.

The flip side of doing this is that any impeachment of Biden by Republicans on flimsy pretexts is likely to have as minimal an impact on voters as Trump’s impeachments apparently have.

JS: What if there's a major polling error and Trump isn't really a mile ahead of every other Republican candidate? Most of us just assume he's going to be the nominee. Iowa and New Hampshire might be stunners?

DA: What’s particularly interesting about Trump seizing the GOP nomination is the low-key panic among many Republican activists. While Trump’s indictments have so far not impacted his popularity, we are in uncharted territory. It’s impossible to predict what impact multiple public trials and possible felony convictions of the sitting GOP nominee might have on public polling and electoral outcomes.

One could speculate that the polling might be wrong, and GOP voters in Iowa and New Hampshire might choose a different nominee out of self-preservation. But Trump has developed a cult-like following, and one thing that we know about cults is that they are largely impervious to even their leaders going to jail. If anything, it makes them feel like martyrs. So I find it extremely unlikely that Iowa and New Hampshire will surprise us by selecting a Haley or Ron DeSantis.

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'Ignorant and stupid': GOP senator dragged on social media for comment about Civil War and slavery

After presidential candidate and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley failed to condemn slavery when answering a question about the cause of the Civil War, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) decided to weigh in with a comment of his own.

"The Civil War started because the American people elected an anti-slavery Republican as president and Democrats revolted rather than accept minor restrictions on the expansion of slavery to the western territories," Cotton posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.

Cotton's tweet was met with almost universal scorn on the social media platform, with journalists and pundits pointing out the Arkansas Republican's false equivalency of antebellum-era politics with today's very different political environment.

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"MAGA propagandists like Tom Cotton don't want you to understand that Southern racists used to be Democrats but are Republicans now. This partisan sea change happened through the 1960s, '70s and '80s," former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob tweeted. "It's explained in those history books that Republicans don't want you to read."

Liberal social media personality Ron Filipowski piled on in a similar fashion, calling Cotton's tweet "another ignorant and stupid analogy."

"This Republican Party doesn’t even resemble the one from 2015 much less 1860," Filipowski tweeted. "And the white southern Dixiecrats all switched to Republicans in the 1970-80s, so the Democratic Party today also in no way resembles that of 1860."

Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali went even further, reminding his followers that it isn't Democrats but Republicans that today are defending the preservation of Confederate monuments.

"Democrats today aren't waving or defending the Confederate flag or lamenting about the 'lost cause.' That's Tom Cotton's GOP," Ali tweeted. "If Lincoln was a Republican today, the MAGA extremists would probably try to assassinate him."

And in response to Cotton's follow-up tweet in which he wrote that "Democrats would sooner tear the country apart than treat all citizens equally before the law, regardless of color," Ali fired back.

"Tom Cotton will support Trump for President who cited Hitler and said immigrants poison the blood of this country and incited a failed insurrection, but go on about equality and tearing the country apart," he wrote.

South Carolina-based pediatrician Dr. Michael O'Brien was simple in his criticism, tweeting, "Tom Cotton is a prime example of why we should never ban books."

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George Conway says Nikki Haley’s 'slavery' gaffe 'worse' due to Confederate flag removal

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s Wednesday night gaffe where she neglected to name “slavery” as a cause of the Civil War is “worse” given that she removed the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol during her time as governor.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire, Haley was asked by a voter identified only as “Patrick” by CBS News, what the cause of the Civil War was.

“Well, don’t come with an easy question,” Haley said. “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do. What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?”

Patrick declined to answer as he wasn’t a candidate, and Haley continued.

“I think it always comes down to the role of government, and what the rights of the people are,” Haley said. “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people. Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life.”

Patrick then asked why she hadn’t said “slavery” in her answer, and she replied “What do you want me to say about slavery?”

On Thursday, Haley clarified her recent comments on a local radio interview, saying “Yes, I know it was about slavery.”

“I’m from the South, of course, you know it’s about slavery,” she continued, according to USA Today.

She then suggested Patrick was “definitely a Democrat plant.”

“That’s why I said ‘What does it mean to you?’ And if you notice, he didn’t answer anything,” Haley added. “We see these guys when they come in, we know what they’re doing.”

But the original gaffe quickly went viral, with many mocking Haley for declining to mention slavery. President Joe Biden even weighed in on X, formerly Twitter, posting the video clip with a four-word comment.

“It was about slavery,” the president wrote.

But Lincoln Project cofounder George Conway had perhaps the harshest comment, given that he’s a fellow Republican. His comment came in response to a tweet from Commentary editor John Podhoretz.

“Does anyone truly believe that the child of Indian immigrants to the United States, who took down the Confederate flag flying over her state capital, is a pro-slavery racist? I say this fully knowing it was a dreadful answer and that dreadful answers sometimes tank campaigns,” Podhoretz asked.

“She’s not. That’s what makes it worse. She’s knowingly pandering to a base base,” Conway quote-tweeted.

Podhoretz is correct that Haley removed the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capitol building. The flag was first flown at the capitol after the Civil War in 1961, according to Time. Historians said the flag was initially flown as a symbol of defiance to the civil rights movement, the magazine reported.

Then-Governor Haley ordered the flag to be taken down in 2015, following the Charleston mass shooting where nine Black people were killed by a white supremacist at the Mother Emanuel AME Church.

In 2010, five years before the removal of the flag, she defended Confederate History Month and the flag in an interview with The Palmetto Patriots, according to CNN. The group describes themselves as fighting “attacks against Southern Culture.” At the time, she denied that the flag was racist, and said that the flag should be flown at the capitol as a “compromise of all people, that everybody should accept a part of South Carolina.”

She changed her opinion after attending the funerals of those killed in the shooting, telling CNN that though “there is a place for that flag,” that place was a history museum, “not in a place that represents all people in South Carolina.”

“It should have never been there,” she said.

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