The most common modern “Confederate flag” is a horizontal version of the Battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was incorporated into the third official flag of the Confederacy. It was not until the 100th anniversary of South Carolina having triggered the Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter that a version of the Confederate flag would begin flying above the S.C. state Capitol.
Last week, Arizona Senatorial candidate Kari Lake (R) held a campaign event at a Trump merchandise store where the modern Confederate flag was both displayed behind her and for sale.
Like a broken record, Lake claimed that she won the 2022 gubernatorial race and that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential contest, despite repeated court decisions that should have buried those lies.
In addition, the Arizona Supreme Court suspended her lawyer today. Chief Justice Robert Brutinel fined Bryan Blehm $2,000 for making an “unequivocally false” claim about widespread “fraudulent ballots” in the 2022 gubernatorial election. The Court also suspended Blehm from practicing law for two months and put him on one-year probation.
Lake and Blehm are not isolated purveyors of lies about the 2020 and 2024 election. From ABC:
Former President Donald Trump has ramped up his claims that the 2024 election will be stolen — even above and beyond his typical portending. The cast of the 2024 veepstakes have all been toeing the line on election denialism. And let’s not forget the hundreds of election-denying candidates running for election or reelection up and down the ballot.
The Republican National Committee, headed by Laura Trump, has hired Ed Martin, a former chair of the Missouri Republican Party and 2020 election denier, as deputy policy director of the platform committee, “which drafts the policies the party will run on in November.”
He gave a speech to Trump supporters in Washington on the eve of the Capitol attack, calling on “die-hard true Americans” to work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal,” according to video posted on social media.
Repetition leads to belief, especially since many of us live in information silos.
Despite audits in multiple states and nationally televised congressional hearings in which state officials and aides to Trump confirmed there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, more Americans question Biden’s victory than they did two years ago. When The [Washington] Post and [University of Maryland] asked in December 2021 whether Biden was legitimately elected, 69 percent of Americans said he was. [In January 2024], that’s down to 62 percent (emphasis added).
In January 2024, “90% of Trump voters didn’t believe Biden legitimately won the election in 2020.”
About Lake and Trumped Store
The Guardian broke the story about Lake’s campaign stop. Reporters reviewed a video of the event held at Trumped Store, “which sells an array of merchandise with the former president’s name and likeness.”
Reached for comment about the video, a spokesperson for Kari Lake told the Guardian: ‘The Kari Lake campaign does not respond to British propaganda outlets. We stopped doing that in 1776.’
I don’t need to say that The Guardian is not a “propaganda outlet,” do I?
Let’s be clear: White supremacists started the civil war when they formed the Confederate States of America. They did so to maintain slavery, to subjugate Black people. Those are their words.
The original Battle Flag flew over “an army raised to kill in defense of slavery.” It was “revived by a movement that killed in defense of segregation.”
The fact that a modern version of the Battle Flag shows up on trucks across the country tells us that White supremacy is a long-lived virus.
I’ve said for some time that White supremacists lost a battle, not the war. German fascism borrowed from Confederate blood law. Trump’s railings about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” rests on the same biases as the South’s “one drop rule” or Hitler’s Reich Citizenship Law. Two Jewish grandparents? Not a Jew. Three or four? Not a German.
It is not hyperbole to see that we are in an existential crisis.
Vote for democracy, not authoritarians, in November.
Vote Blue.
