Brunswick Beacon, 02.01.24
At a New Hampshire Town Hall, when asked, “What caused the Civil War?” Nikki Haley talked about “government getting in the way” without mentioning slavery. South Carolina’s secession started the Civil War. Its Declaration of Secession gave the reason as “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” As SC’s former Governor, Haley knew that. Town Hall attendees said they were “horrified she’s whitewashing this” and concluded she was “concerned about alienating the MAGA base.”
Having dug a hole, Haley kept digging, telling Fox’s Brian Kilmeade, “We’ve never been a racist country.”
For America’s first 84 years, the Constitution said otherwise. It counted a slave as three-fifths of a person, giving slave states extra members in the House of Representatives and extra votes in the Electoral College. It prohibited Congress from outlawing the slave trade for twenty years. It required the return of runaway slaves to their owners. SC said, “This stipulation was so material” it would not have ratified the Constitution without it.
The Supreme Court also said otherwise. Its Dred Scott decision (1857) said even freed slaves were not citizens and declared them “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
While Haley ignored slavery and whitewashed America’s past to avoid offending MAGA, Trump kept chucking them red meat. Eighty-one percent of Republican primary voters agree with Trump that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. So, Trump recycled the same racist birther lie he used against Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, claimed Haley is ineligible to be president because her parents were immigrants and bastardized her name as “Nimbra” to make her sound un-American.
Haley was born here. Trump’s attack is baseless, but, said Trump, “very effective” with his MAGA base, “wherever she may come from.” Trump will be the Republican nominee because, unlike Haley, he delivers the unadulterated, unapologetic, unabashed racism MAGA craves.
Vince Amoroso
Sunset Beach