Several leading conservative voices in the media have joined the broad call in the press to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s capitol grounds, after last week’s racially-motivated shooting left nine black churchgoers dead.
“It’s a flag of another country,” radio host Glenn Beck said on his show Monday. “Why are you flying that? Are you proud that you were another country at some point?” Beck said the flag is “a thing of the past.”
Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Monday that the flag should be removed from in front of the state’s capitol building, though she had defended its display in the past. “The events of this week call upon us to look at this in a different way,” she said.
Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer said that Haley did the right thing. “As a matter of policy, if I were a South Carolinian, I would do exactly as she did,” he said Monday on Fox News. “I would have done it five years ago. It’s a good thing that it’s being done.”
Jason Lee Steorts, managing editor of the conservative National Review magazine, wrote a blog post rebutting defenders of the flag, who say it is merely a piece of Southern history. “It was a banner of white supremacy, and of lawlessness, from the beginning,” Steorts said. “And that is more than enough to disqualify it from respectability.”
Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker said in her column printed Tuesday that the flag is “the racist symbol many have long thought it to be.”
Some of the Republican presidential candidates have been far more timid in their public declarations about the flag.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Saturday he understood people who see the flag as a symbol of oppression as well as those who revere it for its “historical traditions.”
He said South Carolina officials should decide for themselves whether to keep the flag on display.
Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson all offered similar answers.
Comparatively, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham have all said or suggested that the flag acts as a divisive symbol and should be taken down from State grounds.
