Nikki Haley, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations and a former South Carolina governor, on Wednesday wrote that today's "outrage culture" would not have allowed for the removal of the Confederate flag in her state.
Her opinion piece in The Washington Post comes on the heels of criticism she has faced since telling conservative radio host Glenn Beck last week that the confederate flag has long represented "service, sacrifice, and heritage" for some people in her state.
The symbol, she added, has been hijacked by Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist who killed nine people when he opened fire in a predominantly black Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015.
Haley called for the flag's removal from statehouse grounds following the shooting, and at the time she noted that the flag represented "a brutally oppressive past," but that others considered it to stand for "traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry."
She made similar comments to Beck last week: "Here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto, holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of. We don't have hateful people in South Carolina. There's always the small minority that's always going to be there, but people saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage. But once he did that, there was no way to overcome it."
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