Nikki Haley Serves Up a Hilarious Bowl of Civil War Word Salad

Nikki Haley is so confused about what caused the Civil War that she had to ask a potential voter to help her out. During a New Hampshire campaign event on Wednesday, one of the voters on hand had a simple question for Haley: What was the proximate cause of the Civil War?

Thus began the former South Carolina Governor’s strained intellectual journey. “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how the government was gonna run, the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said. “What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?”

When the voter, who has remained anonymous, politely reminded Haley that it was she, and not they, who was running for president, Haley dug deep and brought forward another few sentences of balderdash.

“I think it always comes down to the role of government,” she said. “We need to have capitalism, we need to have economic freedom, we need to make sure that we do all things so that individuals have the liberties, so that they can have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do or be anything they want to be without government getting in the way.”

The questioner pushed back, saying, “In the year 2023, it’s astonishing to me that you answer that question without mentioning the word ‘slavery.’”

“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley snapped back.

Haley’s not wrong to assert that the Civil War was about certain “freedoms” and economic rights. It’s just that the main division, as far as rights and freedoms are concerned, centered on whether the South could continue to have an economy based on owning other human beings as chattel.

It’s not as if the states that provoked the conflict were trying to be secretive about their grievances. When South Carolina, Haley’s home state, seceded from the Union in 1860, the secessionists explicitly stated that their decision was rooted in “increasing hostility on the part of the nonslaveholding States to the institution of slavery.”

This isn’t the first time that Haley has tried to downplay the role of slavery and racism in the Civil War. When she ran for South Carolina governor in 2010, Haley said the war was between sides fighting for “tradition” versus “change” and insisted the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.”

After she was elected, Haley continued to fly the Confederate flag on the statehouse grounds until 2015, when another uniquely American tradition—a mass shooting perpetrated by a white supremacist gunman that resulted in the deaths of eight Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina—finally forced her hand. But even as she ordered the flag removed, Haley said the shooter had “hijacked” the Confederate flag from people who saw it as a symbol of “sacrifice and heritage.”

While Haley’s wilful blindness about the Civil War is upsetting, it shouldn’t be a surprise. Her comments came just hours after her fellow South Carolinian Lindsay Graham insisted the conservatives are “tolerant.” The senator seemed to forget the hundreds of bills across the country restricting people from living their lives as they wanted (that is to say, differently from how Republicans want them).

Senator Lindsay Graham has an interesting (that is to say, delusional) opinion of how his fellow Republicans treat people with views that are different from their own.

The South Carolina Republican embarked on a remarkable intellectual journey to arrive at this destination. On Wednesday, Graham made an appearance on Fox News to complain about a new bill being considered by the New York state legislature that would require the restaurants located in the state’s highway rest areas to be open seven days a week. The only firm that runs afoul of this law appears to be Chick-fil-A, which is closed on Sundays as an extension of its founder’s conservative Christian values.

Graham made a specific demand of the Democrats seated in the state legislature: Do as conservatives do and just leave well enough alone. “Bottom line is, conservatives are tolerant,” he said. “We are, you know, kind of, get out of your business, you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone.”

To find proof of just how wrong Graham is, look no further than the company he’s defending. Chick-fil-A donated considerably to anti-LGBTQ organizations for years. While the company stopped those donations in 2019, owner Dan Cathy still contributes to anti-LGBTQ groups.

Meanwhile, across the country, Republicans have pushed bill after bill limiting LGBTQ people’s rights to perform in drag, access health care, or simply be in public. They have passed laws preventing people from getting abortions, forcing them to flee out of state for medical treatments—if they can afford to, that is. Graham himself tried last fall to pass a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks.

All of those things—how someone dresses, what health care they seek, whom they choose to love—are arguably just “their business.” And yet despite Graham’s claim of tolerance, Republicans seem to feel justified in legislating all of that away.

It is, however, genuinely good that the Republican Party has become a haven for those who lack self-awareness. Baby steps!

Pharmaceutical company executive-turned-Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy is facing a fresh round of speculation that his long shot bid for the White House’s days are numbered, with multiple news outlets reporting that his campaign has suspended all of its plans to spend money on television advertising, even as the first critical contests of the GOP primary loom on the calendar—the Iowa caucuses are scheduled for January 15, with the New Hampshire primary following eight days later.

As NBC News reported on Wednesday, Ramaswamy’s campaign has conspicuously stopped spending on television advertisements and currently has no airtime reserved for any future television spots. The report notes that the candidate spent “more than $200,000” on television ads the first full week of December, after an early November announcement that the campaign had plans to spend upwards of $10 million on combined advertising in the early primary states. “Since that announcement, the campaign has spent $2.2 million on TV, digital and radio ads, according to AdImpact,” NBC News reports.

While the cessation of ad buys is traditionally associated with campaigns that are on or near the proverbial ropes, Ramaswamy is spinning the decision as an innovation rather than a setback. The Daily Beast reported that the candidate defiantly confirmed NBC’s report with a post on X (formerly Twitter) that characterized television ad buys as an “idiotic” waste of money. Per the Daily Beast:

“Presidential TV ad spending is idiotic, low-ROI & a trick that political consultants use to bamboozle candidates who suffer from low IQ,” Ramaswamy posted to X on Tuesday night, confirming an NBC report that first broke the story of his pivot.

After months of campaigning and with less than three weeks to go until the New Hampshire primary and Iowa caucuses, Ramaswamy now says he plans on “doing it differently.”

His campaign said it intends to focus in on mail, text and door-to-door outreach, spending “$$ in a way that follows data…apparently a crazy idea in US politics,” Ramaswamy said in his tweet.   

Following the data, it would appear that Ramaswamy is running a distant fourth in the most recent Real Clear Politics polling average of the last three weeks of the race—58 points behind former President Donald Trump and seven points behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; he remains slightly ahead of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. In recent weeks, his campaign has left the impression that it is not actually trying to win anymore, and his debate performances have strayed into bizarre, conspiratorial territory. 

Trump greeted the news of Ramaswamy’s ad buy suspension with a prediction of his own: “He will, I am sure, Endorse me. But Vivek is a good man, and is not done yet!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Republicans have begun to push a wild new conspiracy about Jack Smith, trying to discredit the special counsel who has been investigating Donald Trump for the past year.

The latest bizarre claim that’s been percolating on the right contends that Smith participated in a multimillion-dollar extortion scheme in the late 2010s when he worked as the chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague investigating war crimes committed during the Kosovo War.

Despite a lack of evidence to support this accusation, it has already begun to make its way into the Republican mainstream. Trump’s former national security advisor (and pardon recipient) Michael Flynn has tweeted multiple times about the conspiracy in an attempt to lend it a veneer of credibility.

This latest bit of rumormongering began to circulate in early December when a former DEA employee named John Moynihan filed what he called a “whistleblower complaint” against Smith. (Since Moynihan no longer works for the DEA, he’s not technically a department whistleblower anymore.)

Moynihan alleges that a blackmail ring set up in the special Kosovo court “extorted millions of dollars from wealthy individuals targeted for investigation and/or prosecution by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office,” also referred to as the SPO. Smith worked as the SPO’s chief prosecutor from 2018 until 2022. Moynihan says he has witness testimony proving Smith was an “active participant” in the ring.

Moynihan’s primary witnesses are Kosovar businessman Halit Sahitaj and Kosovo-born journalist Milaim Zeka. Sahitaj was arrested in Spain in August for extortion and money laundering, while Zeka has been accused over the past decade of witness intimidation, money laundering, threatening a prosecutor, and wiretapping.

Both men say they were approached by a man claiming to be a U.S. intelligence official as part of the investigation into Kosovo war crimes. The man then pushed them to send money to a secret bank account, supposedly at Smith’s behest. Neither Sahitaj nor Zeka were able to confirm if the man was indeed an intelligence official, and they never had any face-to-face interaction with Smith.

But the cast of characters involved in backing Moynihan’s allegations don’t do much to lend them credibility. One of the first websites to report Moynihan’s complaint was Deep Capture, which was founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Byrne is an ardent 2020 election denier and Trump supporter who participated in a December 2020 White House meeting, during which Trump mulled how to overturn the election.

When news of Moynihan’s complaint began to break, Byrne tweeted, “I DID THAT!”

Moynihan’s lawyer is also representing John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a Delaware computer shop who turned Hunter Biden’s laptop over to Rudy Giuliani. And Moynihan himself is no stranger to making wild claims of his own.

In 2018, he and an associate insisted they had 6,000 pages worth of evidence that the Clinton Foundation had engaged in financial crimes. The pair testified before the House Oversight Committee that the foundation was operating as an agent of a foreign government—but they refused to turn over a single page of proof to the committee.

Committee member Jody Hice, a Republican, accused Moynihan at the time of “using us for your own benefit.” Hice added it seemed like there was “a little game going on here.” It seems like Moynihan may be at it again.

Donald Trump seemingly wants voters to know that he has a plan for his potential second term. It’s not a good plan, and it’s entirely self-serving, but it’s a plan nonetheless.

On Tuesday, Trump shared a word cloud on his Truth Social account, offering little explanation about its origin and meaning. The graphic, a throwback to early-2010s internet obsessions, featured words such as “revenge,” “dictatorship,” and “corruption” floating prominently in the center of the blob.

This word cloud originally came from a Daily Mail story published Tuesday, in which voters were asked to offer descriptions of what they felt the potential second terms of both Trump and President Joe Biden—who are expected to face off again in 2024 as their party’s nominees for president—might look like. The Mail then generated word clouds to show what one-word descriptors featured most prominently in their readers’ responses.

The word most used to describe Trump’s return to the White House was “revenge.” The word used most to describe what to expect from a second Biden term was “nothing.”

Trump’s posting of the word cloud seems to imply at least some acknowledgment that these respondents have correctly surmised his intentions. There’s little doubt that he’s gone to some length to steer voters to this specific understanding of what his return to office will be like: The former president has made it clear that if he is reelected, his second term will primarily be about getting revenge on people he feels have wronged him.

Trump has explicitly stated that his 2024 campaign is about “retribution.” And he has left little to the imagination as far as his plans to govern with an iron fist, having lately made a fetish of openly modeling his rhetoric on that of Adolf Hitler.

On Tuesday, pollster and election soothsayer Kristin Soltis Anderson suggested that Trump’s 2024 success will largely depend on his ability to cast himself as the more sane and stable alternative for “an electorate that seems to be craving stability” as opposed to chaos. Trump’s constant touting of his own plans for illiberal retribution suggests that this will be a tall order.