Haley, who was running for South Carolina governor at the time, made the comments during an interview with the now defunct “The Palmetto Patriots,” a group which included a one-time board member of a White nationalist organization.
The former UN ambassador also described the Civil War as two sides fighting for different values, one for “tradition” and one for “change.”
The interview was posted on the group’s YouTube at the time and resurfaced over the years, most recently by Patriots Takes, an anonymous Twitter account that monitors right wing extremism. CNN’s KFile reviewed the interviews as part of a look into Haley’s early political career.
One of the Palmetto Patriots’ interviewers was Robert Slimp, a pastor and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and one-time board member and active member of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a White nationalist group. The CCC is a self-described White-rights group that opposes non-White immigration and advocates a White nationalist ideology. The group reportedly inspired Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, the White nationalist who killed nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Defends the flag
In the 2010 interview, Haley said the Confederate flag was not “racist” but part of heritage and tradition within the state. She called the flag’s location a “compromise of all people, that everybody should accept a part of South Carolina.”