www.salon.com

And they say kids these days are too apathetic. They say they aren’t willing to take a stand. Well, I guess the students of Virginia’s Christiansburg High School have proved that wrong. This week more than two dozen students boldly defied their school dress code in protest of the policy, and most earned suspensions for it. Such passion. Such integrit… oh wait. This was about the right to display their Confederate flag gear. Never mind.

Montgomery County Public Schools Spokeswoman Brenda Drake told a local NBC News affiliate that the school originally banned students from wearing the symbol after “a year’s worth of fights that occurred from 2001 to 2002.” Drake said, “The fights were racially charged and racially motivated, and the Confederate flag was used as a symbol of intimidation in that specific case.” She added that “smaller” incidents persisted for years and that “Continued racial friction suggests that lifting the ban of this particular symbol would cause significant disruption at the school.”

www.salon.com

Even as we round the corner into the final year of the Obama administration, organized and semi-organized racists continue to rage against the election of the first African-American president. This Summer, their specified target is the Black Lives Matter movement, and the racist groups in question happen to be gun-toting Oath Keepers and Confederate flag fetishists.

Let’s start with the Confederate flag crackpots. This past weekend, Confederate flag supporters, who insisted they totally aren’t racists, trolled African-Americans in Sunrise, Florida. A group called the South Florida Rednecks launched a motorcycle convoy with their bikes and pickup trucks festooned in the Confederate flag, which is totally not inflammatory at all. But when Black Lives Matter protesters appeared, Raw Story reported that some of the Southern Florida Rednecks brandished knives and firearms, clearly to intimidate the protesters.

www.salon.com

The Confederates lost the Civil War, but their heirs won the South. As a show of their dominance, white southerners went about planting Confederate likenesses all across the region. They were not satisfied with a Jefferson Davis statue here and there; they had to mark the entire South with Davis monuments. And they didn’t stop with statues. They realized that political domination entailed more than just public symbols. They enacted an entire set of laws to disfranchise and otherwise oppress African Americans; they enforced such laws by threat of the rope, the whip, and the mob. Then they rewrote history. They transformed Confederate leaders from odious slaveholders into freedom fighters. They claimed that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. 

“This is where my grandfather shot and killed the Yankee soldier trying to rob us,” the retired Army colonel said, pointing to a bullet hole in the wood lining the entrance hall of his home. My Boy Scout troop was visiting to view this noble reminder of the Civil War and how Southerners had resisted Union soldiers.  It was 1970. I was fifteen. All of us gazed with reverence upon the hole as if medieval Catholics peering at the toe of a saint.

President Barack Obama is visiting Oklahoma today to promote his initiative to expand high-speed Internet access to low-income and rural Americans and later to make a historic visit to a federal prison, but he will first be greeted by a rally of Confederate flag supporters, The Tulsa Frontier reports.

The Facebook group “Stand By The Flag” features an image that reads “Confederate Lives Matter” and includes a post announcing today’s rally. The group, which has 10,000 likes, encourages visitors to “please post your events for this weekend directly to the page!!!”

Last Friday, in a muted, five-minute ceremony, an honor guard of gray-clad troopers removed the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state Capitol lawn. The flag’s long-running second act–taken down in 1865, hoisted back up in 1961– holds many lessons. One is that political correctness cuts both ways. The flag’s defenders say it stands for “states’ rights”or “Southern heritage,” the latter a harmless mix of hospitality, soldierly valor and regional cuisine. For 54 years even some liberals pretended to swallow this lie out of deference to the feelings of those spreading it. We can stop pretending now.  It’s a big win, to be sure, but it took long enough.

Last Friday, in a muted, five-minute ceremony, an honor guard of gray-clad troopers removed the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state Capitol lawn. The flag’s long-running second act–taken down in 1865, hoisted back up in 1961– holds many lessons. One is that political correctness cuts both ways. The flag’s defenders say it stands for “states’ rights”or “Southern heritage,” the latter a harmless mix of hospitality, soldierly valor and regional cuisine. For 54 years even some liberals pretended to swallow this lie out of deference to the feelings of those spreading it. We can stop pretending now.  It’s a big win, to be sure, but it took long enough.

Since the homicidal evil named Dylann Roof claimed the lives of nine black worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina, the country has commissioned a conversation about racial harmony and diversity. The audible defeat in President Obama’s voice when he made yet another call for gun control to millions of deaf ears was an early signal of legislative dysfunction, and the political system’s inability to react meaningfully to crisis.

Clickbait headlines and the general hyperbole inflation of the media today has devalued the word somewhat, but on Friday morning, something truly amazing happened: South Carolina, the birthplace of the Civil War and Southern rebellion,finally removed the Confederate battle flag from its capitol grounds. It did so in broad daylight, with the full backing of its conservative governor as well as the clear majority of its legislature, itself also quite conservative.

Like many discussions of American conservatism, this account misses the role endless war played in sustaining domestic racism. Starting around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck backlash, the Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an important pennant in the expanding American empire and a symbol of national unification, not polarization.

With the South Carolina House of Representatives voting to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the Statehouse this morning, further outrage from the League of the South (LOS), a neo-Confederate hate group, can be expected.

Since the announcement that South Carolina would be taking that vote and the news that Alabama had decided to remove the flag from its own Capitol grounds, the neo-secessionist group has been making a show of feeling sorry for itself. Complaining that Southern whites and their symbols are suffering a “cultural genocide,” the LOS has even drawn comparisons between criticism of the flag and ISIS’s destruction of historical landmarks in Iraq and Syria.

House Republicans are rarely successful in their underhanded attempts to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from protecting the environment. Usually, their downfall arrives when they run up against a firmly wielded veto threat from the White House.

That’s pretty much how things were supposed to go Thursday. The House Appropriations Committee had introduced, earlier this week, its fiscal 2016 budget. Intended to “stop job-crushing bureaucratic red tape and regulations at federal agencies” like the EPA, it would have reduced the agency’s funding by $718 million, or 9 percent below 2015 levels, on top of the 20 percent reduction in funding it’s already been slammed with since the GOP took over in 2011. It would, as House Republicans are constantly trying to do, prevent the EPA from enacting its rule to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, as well as its rule protecting the drinking water on which one third of Americans rely from polluters.