Removing Confederate Flag Makes Us Like ISIL? This Republican Thinks So (Video)


Over the past year, the country has publicly wrestled with the place the Confederate flags and symbols should have in our society. In the wake of the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina last summer, the momentum shifted suddenly toward expunging it from the public sphere. The VA cemetery is the latest battleground, and it wasn’t much of a fight.


Last week, when the House voted to limit the display of the Confederate flag at national cemeteries in a vote that fell mostly among partisan lines, there was actually very little discusion on the floor. But outside of the deliberations, the legislative director to Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) had plenty to say.

“You know who else supports destroying history so that they can advance their own agenda? ISIL. Don’t be like ISIL. I urge you to vote NO,” Westmoreland’s legislative director, Pete Sanborn, wrote in a missive provided to The Hill, using an alternate acronym for ISIS.

He signed the email as “Yours in freedom from the PC police.”

Republicans have been frustrated by Democrats who have turned to adding amendments to appropriations bills to limit or altogether remove, the places where the Confederate flag can be flown on government property.


The Los Angeles Times supported the proposal in an eloquent op-ed piece.

The U.S. government should not be flying the flag of the secessionists whose traitorous actions more than 150 years ago posed the most serious threat to the nation’s existence…The Confederate soldiers, even those who also fought in service of the United States, opted during those four bloody years to fight against the United States. White Southerners may see the flag as a symbol of Southern heritage, but for African Americans and others it is a fluttering reminder of one of the lowest moments in this country’s history.

As the shrieking but shrinking supporters of the Confederate flag, like Sanborn, make racial reconciliation more difficult, it appears that public discourse is more aligned with removal.

Featured Image, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons