Simulposted on Substack
We all now know what happened. Nikki Haley was asked a simple question about the Civil War and she completely whiffed it.
Asked during a town hall in Berlin, New Hampshire, what she believed had caused the war — the first shots of which were fired in her home state of South Carolina — Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”
It was about “Freedom?” Whose “Freedom?” Freedom to do what?
Here’s a little bit more of what she said.
I think it always comes down to the role of government. I will always stand by the fact that I think the 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. It can't tell you what you can and can’t do. They need to make sure you have freedom. We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom.
We have to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties so they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want without government getting in the way.
If you look at this, this is exactly the point that would be made by abolitionists. They would clearly argue that government should "secure the rights and freedoms of the people”, including the enslaved. They would absolutely argue government should make sure “you have freedom.”
But again, whose “freedom” is she talking about?
Well, that becomes clear when she says “We need to have capitalism, economic freedom.” She argues against government intervention, which means she is not suggesting that the government *stop* the slave trade. So she’s not talking about the freedom of the enslaved people, she talking about government getting in the way of people being allowed to do commerce in the way they see fit.
At their center, these people are Confederates.
It may seem obvious to us here, but the truth is that there is a clear split between Liberals and Conservatives over the origins of the Civil War. It’s not just Nikki Haley.
There are various things that conservatives and liberals disagree over, and for some insane reason, whether or not the Civil War was about slavery is one of them. Sure, the war ended with the abolition of slavery, but many individuals still claim that the entire war was over states' rights as opposed to the tradition of owning another human being.
Sadly, this isn't a random extremist ideology that is pervasive only amongst the most racist of individuals. The Pew Research Center actually found that 48% of Americans believed that the Civil War was about state's rights, and only 38% thought it was over slavery. Even more alarming is the fact that young people are the ones driving these numbers. A full 60% of those surveyed under 30 felt the war had nothing to do with owning slaves.
Unfortunately for those who want to rewrite history, America was pretty good at record keeping, and this holds true even in the South during their "we wanna be our own country" phase. Revisionists and those they have tricked into believing untruths can argue all they want, but the states that seceded from the Union were very clear on why they did so. This might make that whole yearly Confederate History Month seem a bit more racist. (a BIT? - ed)
Haley’s arguing in favor of the Slavers. She’s saying they had a right to do commerce the way they wish, including using human tracking, torture, terrorism, rape and murder as a way to make money.
The reason she couldn’t actually say the word “Slavery” was because doing that would have made it exactly obvious what context she was working within and what she was advocating. The freedom to be free of government preventing you from taking the freedom away from others.
It was never meant to be all things to all people.
It should be noted that this isn’t the first time that she’s provided this type of answer.
Besides proclaiming that the Confederate Flag “was not racist” and that it stood for “heritage” — she also answered in the same way to a similar question about the Civil War in 2010 when she was running for governor.
You have passions on different sides. I think what they do is, they do things out of tradition and what they believe is right. It’s tradition vs change is the way I see it.
[Change] on the individual rights of people.
Again, no use of the S-word in an answer about the Civil War.
And as shown in the video, Haley’s more recent attempts to “clean up” what she said originally “Oh, everyone in the South knows the Civil War was about Slavery — but I was trying to make a larger point.”
Yeah, you made a point all right. And sure, the guy who asked the question was obviously a “Democrat plant.” Uh-huh.
It’s obvious that this “pro-freedom for individuals” position that Haley exposes should also line up exactly with a pro-choice position. If you believe the government shouldn’t intrude on your choices, and it can’t tell you “what you can and can’t do” then it can’t tell you you can’t have an abortion. It can’t tell you that you can’t go to another state for reproductive health care. It can't tell you that you can’t have birth control or contraception or gender-affirming care. It can't tell you not to read a certain book, it can’t tell you must pledge allegiance, or salute the flag from a standing position, or to have a moment of prayer, it can’t say that you can't study a certain subject including accurate American history.
And yet not surprisingly, Haley is not Pro-choice.
During her time in the state House of Representatives from 2004 to 2010, Haley backed two “right to life” bills that would have significantly limited abortion access statewide, although neither bill ultimately became law.
In 2010, Haley co-sponsored a bill proposing that life begins at fertilization, with due process and equal protection both applying to embryos, essentially imposing a complete ban on abortion. The bill, which died in committee, did not include any exceptions — not for rape, incest or the life and health of the mother.
And in 2005, Haley voted in favor of another bill that made a similar due process and equal protection proposal beginning at fertilization, but included an exception for rape victims taking a morning-after pill.
[...]
“Nikki is 100% pro-life. As president, she will bring people together to save as many babies and support as many moms as possible," Haley’s campaign responded in a statement. "She believes she can best accomplish that goal by working to find consensus at the national level and humanizing this issue instead of demonizing it.”
So true champion of “freedom?” Not so much. Suddenly, the government *can* tell you “what you can and can’t do.”
Shocking.
Of course, in the case of abortion, the “freedom” they choose to fight for is the freedom of the unborn, over and above the rights, health and life of the mother. What they apparently don’t do is recognize the “freedom of the enslaved” over and above the rights of their slavers. They also don't recognize the rights of employees over and above the rights of the employed or the consumer.
They side with the right to deny service — to deny making a cake, or building a website, or pay for birth control — as a freedom granted to a business owner, over and above the rights of their employee or customer not to be discriminated against. They believe in the "freedom to do commerce” but not really many other actual freedoms.
At the time, some “people” were not even considered to be people. Under the Dred Scott decision, certain people weren’t even considered to be citizens with any rights at all.
Taney's "Opinion of the Court" stated that Negroes were not citizens of the United States and had no right to bring suit in a federal court. In addition, Dred Scott had not become a free man as a result of his residence at Fort Snelling because the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional; Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the federal territories. Furthermore, Dred Scott did not become free based on his residence at Fort Armstrong (Rock Island), because his status, upon return to Missouri, depended upon Missouri law as determined in Scott v. Emerson. Because Dred Scott was not free under either the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 or the 1820 Missouri Compromise, he was still a slave, not a citizen with the right to bring suit in the federal court system. According to Taney's opinion, African Americans were "beings of an inferior order. so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." (Kaufman 221). Taney returned the case to the circuit court with instructions to dismiss it for want of jurisdiction.
What Haley presented here is boilerplate Conservatism, but it’s also boilerplate hypocrisy. It’s also a near pitch-perfect articulation of the Lost Cause Ideology.
The Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War typically includes the following six assertions:
1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
2. African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.
So when Haley says the Civil War was about “government and freedom” she’s making a Noble Lost Cause argument. The Civil War wasn’t the result of a moral failing on the part of Southern Slave owners, it was a righteous and principled fight over the appropriate role of government. She’s essentially arguing in favor of the Southern Slave Drivers who simply didn’t want the mean Federal Government to tell them what to do.
But that’s not factually what happened. And no, I don’t mean just that the issue was Slavery and not government intervention, I mean that the government intervention that was being ignored was by the North, not the South. The South, in their orders of secession specifically complained that the North was not implementing their portion of the slave trade under the Fugitive Slave Clause.
This was made most clear by the Orders of Secession for Mississippi.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
The Fugitive Slave clause in the Constitution required all states in the union to hunt down and return escaped slaves back into captivity.
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due. Id.
Northern states were required by the clause to spend their resources capturing slaves and the fact is, several states, refused to do it leading to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law where that responsibility was transfered to the Federal Government using U.S. Marshals.
Passed on September 18, 1850 by Congress, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of the Compromise of 1850. The act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves.
At the time the South seceded, newly elected President Lincoln specifically stated that he had no plans or the ability to abolish slavery.
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
So the South was not being threatened with being forced to abandon slavery by the Federal government. The North did have many abolitionists, and the abolitionist Republican party had elected their candidate President, but the South’s “Freedom” was not in serious peril. They were not fighting to preserve that “freedom.” They were fighting and seceding because the North wasn’t energetically supporting the continued slave trade enough for their tastes.
The North was dragging its feet and not supporting that clause of the Constitution. So as a result, the South declared the entire Constitution null and void due to the North’s intransigence. Again, from Mississippi.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Again, Lincoln was not threatening to end Slavery. This fear was only in their own imagination. They simply panicked and didn’t want to lose their property.
Certainly, there were a multitude of reasons for the ultimate conflict, and different states gave different reasons. But Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and Haley’s own South Carolina all included Slavery as part of their reasons.
Haley frames this not as a battle for the freedom of the enslaved, but essentially as the “freedom” to hold others in slavery. There is no other rational interpretation of her statements in that context.
This framing is not accidental, it’s the same perspective as those who attacked the 1619 Project which — correctly — stated that *some* of those who wished to originally form the union and break away from England did so in order to protect and preserve the practice of Slavery.
In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.
At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”
Haley’s answer doesn’t just white-wash Slavery from the Civil War, it white-washes Slavery as being fundamental and foundational to the creation of America. It ignores the core hypocrisy of proclaiming on one hand “all men are created equal” while still holding some of those men in bondage.
This is why we’ve seen books on African-American history banned in Florida. This is why Donald Trump has proposed an entirely new curriculum to teach “Americanism” and “Patriotism” without including the stain of Slavery or ongoing discrimination with his 1776 Project.
We are a political action committee dedicated to electing school board members nationwide who want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history. We are committed to abolishing critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from the public school curriculum.
--— Activists, scholars, and politicians are currently attempting to socially engineer our society and its relation to race, racism, and power. Their political ideology known as Critical Race Theory or Anti-Racism should not be confused with the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr., or any form of tolerance. They believe we need to undo the cornerstones of American society including classical liberalism, legal reasoning, and capitalism in order to promote their version of cultural Marxism based on race rather than class. They believe that every fabric of American society is based on race. They believe every factor of inequality is socially constructed exclusively based on the topic of race. So all differences between the races were created with the sole purpose of disadvantaging non-white people.
Yeah, uh, no — the truth is that most of American history has been a situation which has been to the sole purpose of disadvantaging non-white people. That’s been our history, that’s been our reality. It’s only been by using the force of the government that that has been curbed, somewhat. And not frankly, by much.
What Haley did was say the quiet part out loud. She admitted that her idea of “freedom” is only for those who are owners, not for those who are owned.
We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom.
She admitted everything they truly believe, not that “all men are created equal” — but that some men are granted “freedom” and some people — women, minorities and gays — are not just as it was at the founding of the nation, so it is now.
And now we have some piling on and blame-shifting by Tom Cotton because of course, we do.
"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.
"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."
I've yet to meet a Republican who can admit that the Dixiecrats were ever a thing, let alone the fact that they ran Strom Thurmond for President against Truman, and most of them jumped ship to the Republican party after Goldwater came out against the Civil Rights Act and Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy.
Since then we had the “Welfare Queen” panic, the Willie Horton Ad, David Duke running for office as a Republican, the continued hysteria over (black) crime in “Democrat Cities”, the claim that Barack Obama is really a foreign Muslim, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act by Republicans, the claim that George Floyd died of Fentanyl poisoning despite the fact he had someones knee on his neck, and the repeated false claims that the Floyd Riots were “more violent” than the J6 Insurrection even though they injured 40 times as many police officers as the mean Floyd riot.
They refuse to admit that any of that even happened, so it's not shocking they can't admit the truth about the Civil War either.