I hear defenders of the confederate flag insist we don’t make assumptions about what it means to those who fly it so I stopped to ask the owner of this one in Killington VT. “Heritage,” he said, & also it’s more socially acceptable than the Nazi flags he hangs inside his house.

Then he asked me “what” I was, which turned out to mean he wanted to know if I was a Jew. I am. “Half,” which meant, he said, I’m also half white, so he showed me his swastika tattoo. And his loaded gun. Then he said again his confederate flag isn’t racist at all, it’s “history.”

— Jeff Sharlet (@JeffSharlet) July 20, 2020