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“It’s a symbol of racism,” McCain said of the Confederate flag.
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley sparked controversy this month when she seemingly contradicted her position on the Confederate flag and made comments shining it in a positive light. On “The View” Thursday, the co-hosts condemned her position.
Haley, who was also the governor of South Carolina, called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state’s capitol building in the wake of the June 17, 2015, massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. On that day, nine people attending a bible study were killed by Dylann Roof, who was sentenced to death in 2017, making it the first instance in which the death penalty was given for a federal hate crimes case. The confederate flag was removed from the state capitol on July 10, 2015.
Earlier this month, however, Haley said in an interview with The Blaze’s “The Glenn Beck Podcast” that the Confederate flag was about “service, and sacrifice and heritage” until the Charleston Church shooting “hijacked everything that people thought of” the flag.
Haley has defended her position on the Confederate flag, and on Wednesday, she wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post asserting that her position on the flag “has been constant” and that it is America’s culture that has changed.
“The View” co-hosts Meghan McCain and Sunny Hostin criticized her stance on the Confederate flag.
McCain said that Haley’s comments during her interview with The Blaze seemed “very bizarre” and her position on the subject was “strange.”
McCain went on to say that the issue of flying the Confederate flag is a “very, very deep issue” for her family because of the backlash her late father Senator John McCain received after he agreed that the flag should be flown above the South Carolina capitol in 1999. She said that his support for that became one of the biggest mistakes of his life and that “plagued him up until the day he died.”
“He had two big life regrets, this is one of them,” McCain said of her father. “It haunted him, this will haunt her. It will, trust me.”
The Arizona senator later renounced his comments on flying the flag.
“I don’t understand why we’re still debating the Confederate flag,” McCain added. “It’s a symbol of racism…it’s not about what people like me think.”
Hostin chimed in, saying Haley’s comments should disqualify her from running for national office.
“She’s now tried to diminish the very oppression of my community, of my ancestors, by calling it ‘outrage.’ Well, I am outraged by that position,” she said.
“For [Nikki Haley] to somehow say that people think that the Confederate flag is about service, and it’s about heritage — It is about slavery, it is about the oppression of black people” Hostin continued. “Nothing more and she knows that. She knows that, and she should never run for national office.”
McCain agreed with Hostin’s perspective, saying that Haley “does know better” than to make those assertions about the flag. She also said she believes the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is “clearly” planning to run for president in 2024.
“It’s very evident that she thinks Trump is the wave of the future and in order to do it [she’s] going to need his supporters,” McCain said.
“There’s a lot of young conservative women in the country that are not going to get on board with it,” she continued, “and defending the Confederate flag is Exhibit A of the best way to get people like me fleeing.”
Hostin doubled down on her stance that Haley shouldn’t run for office, saying that Haley also doesn’t have the qualities of a leader.
“These are not the actions or the words of a leader,” Hostin said. “A leader is someone who stands on morality, stands on conviction, doesn’t speak out of both sides of her mouth. She is just, quite simply, not a leader.”
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