The Confederate flag has been temporarily removed from in front of the South Carolina Statehouse.
A black woman was about halfway up the more than 30-foot steel flagpole just after dawn Saturday when State Capitol police told her to come down. Instead, she continued up and removed the flag before returning to the ground.
The woman and another man who had entered the wrought-iron fence surrounding the flag were arrested.
This is Bree. An amazing black woman who climbed the pole and took down the racist flag. pic.twitter.com/DK07mcXRMo
— Ferguson Action (@fergusonaction) June 27, 2015
More:
The woman, who has not been named by local authorities, was identified on social media as Brittany “Bree” Newsome, an activist from North Carolina. Her actions inspired the hashtag #keepitdown, which was a one of the top trending topics in the United States on Twitter Saturday. Later in the day the hashtag #FreeBree was also trending in the United States.
According to website BreeNewsome.com, which was linked to by a Twitter account belonging to a user with the name Bree Newsome and mentioned by numerous users in conjunction with the #keepitdown hashtag, Newsome is an activist and graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
I don't know what's going to happen to her. Given the way the Republican Party has (mostly) retreated on the Confederate flag, I suspect she won't be severely punished. She can be defined as an "outsider," however, so it's hard to know what will happen.
In any case, she was arrested. An observer from another planet whose understanding of America was based solely on the ranting of right-wingers might assume, from the wingers' apocalyptic cries of pain this week, that we lefties were now forming bloodthirsty mobs to enforce liberal correctness, and therefore the state employees who raise and lower the Confederate flag in Columbia are now at risk of being seized and beheaded by those mobs, after first being forcibly gay-married. Apparently that's not happening.
Yet.
(I'm kidding, righties!)
Just a reminder: Gay marriage and Obamacare are the law of the land, but some things are still in the process of changing, and feral crowds of lefties aren't running amok enforcing conformity just because some political and legal battles haven't gone conservatives' way. Bill Kristol is wrong:
We see a French Revolution-like tendency to move with the speed of light from a reasonable and perhaps overdue change (taking down the Confederate flag over state buildings) to an all-out determination to expunge from our history any recognition or respect for that which doesn’t fully comport with contemporary progressive sentiment.
French Revolution? Even now, it's being reported that the flag is back up now at the South Carolina capitol grounds. I guess we're gonna need a bigger tumbrel.