2015: The Year We Drove Old Dixie Down

Among the actual victories this year for Non-Jerkhole Americans was one we'd been waiting a long time for: we finally -- FINALLY -- wounded the myth of the benevolent Confederacy. And it only took the murder of nine African-Americans, in their church, for people to start coming to their fucking senses, hooray!

What Dumb Horseshit Did We Believe About Confederate Traitors?

A whole mess of us have, for well over a century, been laboring under the delusion that the traitor Confederacy was ever about anything but slavery. LOLNOPE; no matter how much your angry, defensive cousin from East Asshole, Georgia, likes to pretend otherwise, Confederates gave copious shits about slavery and precious few shits about fuck-all else. The painting of the Contraitoracy as the plucky heroes against the oppressive gubmint overdog was largely accomplished through the memoirs and public speeches of former Confederate Generals Jubal Early and Wade Hampton, who, decades after the war, were like "Slavery? Nossir, we were never all up in slavery's crotch, honest. We only cared about freedom and states' rights and fed'rul tyranny, praise Jesus E. Lee and pass the Jim Crow."

(Fun fact: my fiancee is directly descended from Wade Hampton, who also was a tacit supporter of the KKK after the war. Now his great-great-great-however-many-greats-granddaughter is boning a Jew on the regular. The weight of centuries makes for wonderful karma.)

So What Changed?

[contextly_sidebar id="XxZruYRVsCYjOTu7203v50ASHmYufxkm"]A piece of pus-felch named Dylann Roof, whose rotted soul was equaled for awfulness only by his awful haircut, murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina. Many white people across the country who had heretofore given zero fucks were shocked, just SHOCKED, we tell you, at Roof being inspired by both the Confederacy and apartheid South Africa. These same people had it pointed out to them that the Charleston statehouse had flown the goddamned Confederate traitor flag at full-mast the day after the massacre because of "heritage, not hate" laws, and a considerable percentage of them finally went "holy shit, we been some dumb sumbitches 'bout that flag, ain't we?"

[contextly_sidebar id="0Mo6Y26azcxI93hhM7iyiQUyLmvfHQYJ"]Suddenly, it became de rigeur that anyone who even wanted to pretend they were a decent human being couldn't defend a symbol of slavery, segregation, and hatred. Amazon, Sears, Kmart, and eBay all decided to stop carrying the Battle Flag of Losertopia, and they were even joined by Walmart, which is like having Satan himself go, "dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?" The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that Southern states couldn't be forced to manufacture Confederate flag license plates if they didn't want to, the first time we can remember Texas being on the right side of anything. States and localities started taking down Confederate statues and monuments,and even Alabama looked at the flag and went "hell nah, fuck this noise." Through it all,racist dipshits gloriously and hilariously outed themselves by raging, raging against the dying of the light of their burning crosses. 

Meanwhile, Back In South Carolina

[contextly_sidebar id="NV6jfXsnLIRVFX8kYiaogeCTirTgU6Pt"]Finally, after a moral assist from hero Bree Newsome, the South Carolina state Senate and House voted overwhelmingly and across party lines (94-20 in the House!) to remove the flag, and Republican Gov. Nikki Haley signed the bill into law. As it turned out, a mass murderer looking to avenge Confederate ideals in the birthplace of secession was the one who unfucked our obsolete tributes to the lies about the Confederacy.

Yay, We Solved Racism!

How dumb are you, of course we fucking haven't. General racism and even the lie of Confederate benevolence is far from dead; we have a long way to go if we want to kill either of them completely. But in 2015, for the first time, we saw a pernicious myth bleed. For all the terrible things that happened this year -- including the shooting that made this possible -- it's small solace that no one of public repute is saying "heritage, not hate" any more.