A horde of ignorant, but racially motivated, men infest the Wisconsin GOP. Brian Westrate is a good example of playing to this bad condition: in an attempt to discourage racist Republicans from displaying Confederate banners at a protest, he erroneously (and outrageously) contended that he did “well understand that the Confederacy was more about states rights than slavery.”
This is, of course, false: the Confederacy began, and fought for four years, for the preservation of slavery. Lumpen white southerners, and their ilk elsewhere in America, have for generations dishonestly tried to refashion a violent, racist rebellion against the United States as a color-blind political dispute. It wasn’t, and as it wasn’t, it never will honestly be so described.
Assuming Westrate, and the horde who believes these lies, are of average reading comprehension, they might consider What This Cruel War Was Over (‘The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it’).
Westrate has since tried to rationalize his remarks as mere messaging.
Indeed: dishonest messaging of the ignorant and bigoted.