Recently agitators in the United States along with officials in various government capacities have been exploiting a recent minor tragedy to in an effort to censor the most potent symbol of rebellion against the federal government of the United States. In mere anticipation of backlash retailers including Walmart, Ebay, Google shopping, and the Apple App Store have pre-emptively removed all merchandise with the image of the Rebel Flag from sale. What sort of crime could make the ultimate symbol of rebellion against the federal government of the United States, one which was actually flown in combat against the Axis powers in World War II.

One, Dylan Roof, in the heart of the Rebel Flag's cultural center of popularity shot and killed nine persons inside of an African Methodist Episcopal church. One very stupid man who in his manifest deplored crime committed by Black Americans decided with his complete lack of wisdom to shoot up a church instead of a crack house or meth lab. Mass shootings are an endemic part of American life. When James Holmes took up the mantel of the fictional villain the Joker and shot up a Colorado movie theater killing 12 and wounding 70 there was no mass outrage directed at removing the fictional villain from publications. When Adam Lanza shot up an elementary school killing 20 children and six educators there was no serious popular movement following which sought to restrain autists from public life nor was there any movement to restrict the size of gatherings in which children were allowed to congregate. The last major mass shooting event in which there was any popular movement at all to restrict cultural phenomena in the event's wake was the Columbine incident back in 1999.

The politically correct outrage machine has gone so far as to lead to the removal of the rebel flag from the roof of the iconic car, General Lee of Dukes of Hazzard fame. On the flag's removal from the roof of the General Lee Ben Jones who played Cooter on the series offered:

Some unnamed genius at the company feels that the flag is ‘offensive to some’ and therefore it has no business on a classic TV comedy about a bunch of good ol’ boys and girls in the Southern mountains… This is a new level of ‘P.C.’ idiocy. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being insulted by morons.

Long after the end of the American Civil War the Rebel Flag has served as a symbol of rebellion of authority and rugged individualism. For just as long social engineers bent on promoting compliance and social homogenization have tried to cast the Rebel Battle Flag as an overwhelmingly racist symbol when the Confederate government adopted a different flag when demonstrating racism, The Bloodstained Banner. The present Rebel Flag held up as the "Confederate Flag" only saw limited use in some Rebel military units and only returned to prominence when units from the Southern United States fighting in World War II incorporated the Rebel Battle Flag into unit insignia as the fought the Krauts in Europe and Japanese in the Pacific.

This knee jerk reaction to the recent Charleston tragedy is being used to suppress an emblem embraced by a largely poor and rural minority culture much to the delight of authoritarian advocates of a maximally controlling federal government. Almost a year after the population of Ferguson was violenced by police to the sound of Obama's silence, it is astounding no movement in black America has taken to reclaiming the symbol of the most effective rebellion against government violence in the history of the United States.

Although memorabilia featuring the image of the Rebel Flag is still available with some searching, more extremist agitators are suggesting an outright ban on all confederate imagery in the manner Germany once defeated banned all imagery associated with the Nazi party. A ban that in Germany went beyond banning mere imagery to the point entirely non-Nazi political parties can be suppressed as "unconstitutional" for incorporating certain idea into their party's platforms.

Control, compliance, and submission are the only actual goals this wave of censorship is promoting. The heritage of a poor, agrarian, and oppressed people whose homeland was stripped of its infrastructure and decimated by aggressor forces sent by a Federal government beholden to an Industrial economy in the cold North of the country. Freddie Gray, Akai Gurley, and Eric Garner were all black men killed by statal violence in states which remained loyal to the United States federal government during the civil war. No where in the United States are as many black men systemically made to suffer violence by state agents as they are made to in New York City, the economic heart of the Federal Government's loyalist forces. Yet no one talk about dismantling the cultural symbols and institutions of New York City for systemic racism. Instead they further marginalize an agrarian people building taboos around cherished symbols of the time they stood up against the Industrial meat grinder of the North.