The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.
Joe Biden gave a speech in South Carolina on Monday, and Nikki Haley isn’t happy about it. Specifically, she’s not happy about the part where the president called her out for her extremely cringeworthy comments about the Civil War, saying, “Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War.”
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The issue of the Civil War—and her commentary on it—has come up for Haley in the past. While running for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she described the war as a matter of two sides fighting over “tradition” and “change,” adding that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.” She also claimed there was no reason to take the flag down from the statehouse grounds (until five years later, after the mass shooting at the Charleston church). After Haley’s gaffe in December, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that her failure to mention slavery was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”
You ain’t wrong, but at the same time, if we define “tradition” as “doing certain things certain ways because we’ve always done those things those ways, and we don’t want to change”, then I guess they’re not wrong either…but by the same rationale, that same social inertia is also the reason we have climate science deniers, racists, homophobes, misogynists, xenophobes, and bigots of all other shapes and sizes. Basically: they’re used to it being accepted to do things we now know to be problematic, and rather than change, they’d simply rather not change…for no better reason than not changing means continuing to do things the way they’ve always done them.
“Tradition” is by definition the opposite of “progress”
It can be, but plenty of traditions are harmless things people find value in.