December 6, 2019

Nikki Haley Says Dylann Roof Ruined the Confederate Flag for Everyone Else

“People saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage.”

Nikki Haley

Evan Vucci / Associated Press

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Nikki Haley—the former South Carolina governor and Trump administration UN ambassador—is out with a new book called With All Due Respect, because those are the words you’ll mouth to yourself when you watch this interview she gave to Glenn Beck:

Here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto holding the Confederate flag, and had just hijacked everything that people thought of. And we don’t have hateful people in South Carolina—there’s always the small minority that’s always gonna be there. People saw it as service, and sacrifice, and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it. And the national media came in in droves. They wanted to define what happened. They wanted to make this about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make it about the death penalty. And I really pushed off the national media and said there will be a time and place where we talk about this but it is not now. We’re gonna get through the funerals, we’re gonna respect them, and then we will have that conversation. And we had a really tough few weeks of debate. But we didn’t have riots, we had vigils. We didn’t have protests, we had hugs.

That’s Haley discussing the 2015 massacre of nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston by Dylann Roof, a white supremacist. Haley was governor at the time, and in aftermath of the shooting, she made the decision to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol. It was the right decision, and a long time coming. The flag had been installed in the 1960s, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Its message was as clear as the statues of the white supremacist senator, Strom Thurmond, and the white-supremacist terrorist, Wade Hampton, that grace the state house grounds—this state belongs to us, and you all know who “us” is.

But in explaining what was perhaps her most exemplary moment in public life Haley comes off a bit like Homer Stokes in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, chiding the Soggy Bottom Boys for “desecrating a fiery cross” by crashing a Klan rally—she’s whitewashing the flag and what it always stood for. The words she used with Beck were similar to the language she used in her 2015 announcement—Roof, she said then, had a “sick and twisted view of the flag.” But that’s too charitable. It was the flag of a treasonous government created for the express purpose of keeping humans in bondage. It was kept alive over the generations as an expression of white-power, and a perpetual reminder—like all those statues—of who the state, or the region, was supposed to belong to. Roof didn’t hijack the flag and change its meaning; he lived up to it.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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