Last year, when the shooting at a black church in Charleston led state governments to debate removing Confederate flags and other symbols from state property, Fox News commentator Todd Starnes decried the “full-fledged cultural cleansing of the Southern states” and compared the effort to remove Confederate flags to the destruction wreaked by ISIS.
Now Starnes is up in arms again, this time over the University of Mississippi’s decision to stop playing the Confederate anthem “Dixie” at football games, warning in a column this weekend, “It would be foolish to think the progressive academic elites have concluded their quest to eradicate Southern culture and traditions.
Starnes fumed that “progressive liberals continue to bulldoze across the Southern states burning, torching and tearing down every vestige and cultural tradition of the Deep South much like General Sherman did during the Civil War.”
In an interview with St. Louis radio host Jamie Allman about the subject today, Starnes repeated the General Sherman point. “Look, the Islamic State’s doing that in Iraq right now,” he added. “Is that what we really want in our country?”
