Mississippi took an image of the Confederate battle flag off its state flag. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. The Marine Corps ordered the Confederate flag be removed from its public and work spaces, and the Navy is moving toward doing the same. The Defense Department overall, though? Ehhh … it’s starting to think about maybe possibly banning the flag of a traitor nation at some point.
An unnamed official “said the draft policy being considered at the Pentagon’s highest levels would build on recent moves by military services to bar Confederate symbols on facilities they control and, if approved, would represent the first Defense Department-wide prohibition of such iconography,” The Washington Post reports.
Donald Trump will not be happy, and Defense Department leaders know that. Trump has railed against NASCAR for its Confederate flag ban, and he has railed against moves to rename military bases that currently bear the names of Confederate leaders. Trump has even threatened to veto a defense authorization bill over the issue.
That’s how much Donald Trump loves this symbol of racism and slavery.
“For more than a century, the flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against Black Americans after the Civil War and during the civil rights movement, as segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of discriminatory Jim Crow laws, and in the continuance of a false narrative of white racial superiority,” the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lecia Brooks wrote last month. “Our public entities, especially our military assets, should no longer play a role in distorting history by honoring a secessionist government that waged war against the United States to preserve white supremacy and the enslavement of millions of people.”
The ban the Pentagon is considering would not apply to the inside of barracks rooms or to things like bumper stickers on personal vehicles. Just the public, official spaces of the United States military.