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