Haley’s gaffe on slavery hides even more irony in her response
Nikki Haley was asked a question at a Town Hall in New Hampshire about what was the cause of the Civil War. I was unable to find a transcript online so I created a transcript below see her answer to the question and you can verify with the Youtube link below.[1]
“The cause of the civil war was basically how government was going to be run- the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.
It always comes down to the role of government what the rights of the people are. I will always stand by the fact that government was created to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.
Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life.They don’t need to tell you what you can and can’t do. They don’t need to be a part of your life, they need to make sure you have freedom.
We need to have capitalism. We need to have economic freedom. We need to make sure that we do all the things so that individuals have the liberties so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, free to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
Haley later claims that the questioner was a plant from the Democratic Party but even if so that’s irrelevant to how she answered the question. The question was the biggest softball she could have gotten that day and she totally missed it. She could have shut it down with one word: slavery.
Instead she decided to try to create some sort of grand Paradigm about government and freedoms etc etc etc.
Even her comments the following day where she says “of course it was about slavery,” she still has to ramble on with the same kind of talking points illustrated in the transcript.
While everyone is focusing on the slavery issue in the commentary, I would like to focus more on some of her other talking points because there’s a large component of irony in her response.
“Government doesn’t need to tell you how to live your life.
We need to make sure that we do all the things so that individuals have the liberties …. to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”
These comments come from a candidate of the Republican Party -the very party that’s trying to tell people how to live their lives whether it be with regards to their sexuality, their gender, or their reproductive rights. The party that is making various kinds of health care (gender affirming care) illegal. The party that is actively banning books and censoring libraries.
As I said- Irony.
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