Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel is a video blogger at the conservative blog Town Hall Patriots. In this video, Zo takes a college student to task for putting a confederate flag in his dorm room. The student (who is African American) argued that he was just showing his Southern pride. But Zo says that the student should fly the Stars and Stripes, “the only flag that should matter in America.”
I’ve watched a couple of Byron Thomas’ YouTube videos, and read a lot of blogs/Facebook postings about him from the Confederate Heritage crowd. The kid’s put out the flag and taken it down several times, and I’ve concluded that he’s every bit as muddled about the whole thing as he comes across in his videos. It’s all a word salad of cliches and vague generalizations.
To a large degree, I think a lot of folks are reading too much into Thomas’ actions. College is, after all, where many young people try on new ideas and behaviors, often for no other reason than they know it flaunts conventional wisdom or expectations. Someties it’s just for shock value. They embrace these things and, once the “new” wears off, move on. I suspect that’s what’s happening here.