Republican 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley said the Confederate flag is “not racist” in a 2010 interview, when she was running for South Carolina governor, that CNN’s “K-File” unearthed on Wednesday.
Haley also told the now-defunct Palmetto Patriots group, whose members included a white nationalist, that the Civil War was really about “tradition versus change,” and not slavery. She defended the right of states to secede and compared South Carolina’s Confederate History Month with Black History Month.
Five years later, then-Gov. Haley called for the removal of the flag from statehouse grounds following white nationalist Dylan Roof’s massacre of nine people at a Black church in Charleston.
