>>18094396
>>18094389
>>18094382
It really started with the Dylan Roof church shooting in 2015. There was a massive movement in the wake of that shooting to remove confederate flags for purchase from places like Walmart or Target or Amazon from liberals. Then, there was a counter move to promote the confederate flag by the right in reaction to this. Im from the south and I've never seen more confederate flags than in the aftermath of this, like every other house had a confederate flag as a fuck you to libs.

Then there was a big move to remove confederate monuments after this too, then George Floyd riots happened in 2020 and Confederate imagery was made into such a hot button culture war issue that something like the OP image became unthinkable.

To give you more of a sense of how normalized it was, there was a viral buzzfeed video from like 2012 about quirky southern saying the the video used the confederate flag in a pretty ambivalent fashion thats unthinkable now, especially for a left leaning publication like that.


Fun Fact: It was President Jimmy Carter, darling of the lib-left and southerner, who granted US citizenship back to Jefferson Davis.