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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Rebel Without A Clue

Allen, 54, said he did not see racial overtones in the Confederate flag. He said he was a rebellious youth and viewed the banner as a “symbol against authority.” As a history major at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, he said, he also began to see the flag as a proud heritage […]

Allen, 54, said he did not see racial overtones in the Confederate flag. He said he was a rebellious youth and viewed the banner as a “symbol against authority.” As a history major at the University of Virginia in the early 1970s, he said, he also began to see the flag as a proud heritage symbol for those with ancestors from the South who fought in the Civil War.

“What I appreciate, and wish I had sooner, is that that symbol, which for me was fit for simply rebelling against authority, and for others was fit for pride in heritage, was and is for black Americans an emblem of hate and terror, an emblem of intolerance and discrimination,” he said. ~The Virginian-Pilot

What a monumental fraud the man is.  You can’t tell me he has honestly been unaware how black Americans viewed the Confederate battle flag.  It is something that no one, no matter his own view of the flag, can fail to be aware of, and to act as if this were some recent discovery is to be not much better than a fraud. 

It is one thing to fly the flag proudly or respect and defend it as the flag that your ancestors fought under or even to fly it in the conviction that it represented the better cause in the War, but to embrace it childishly as a symbol of “rebelling against authority” (as if the Confederates were spoiled teenagers or anarchists) and then pretend (and it is all pretense) that you didn’t know that black Americans would view the flag very differently is to be both frivolous and a liar.  What is worse is that this is all clearly desperate, purely cynical pandering designed to prevent his defeat in the election in a little under two months.  No one this gutless should be in the Senate (a standard which, I realise, also disqualifies a great many other Senators).  Down with Allen.

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