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This is not clear at all (except for literal neo-confederates who want to bring things like slavery back). The confederacy is a completely different culture from the modern south and making the connection from destroying a statue of a confederate leader to somehow teabagging modern southerners is almost a non-sequitur! Sure, some people mistaken about who actually represents their values might be upset but this is an unfortunate side-effect and really the fault of those people. It's definitely not anyone's intention in melting down the statue and really confusing if it's referred to by such a motivated word as "teabagging"---to the point where the most natural thing is to immediately dismiss that as a possibility.
Again, the far-and-away most reasonable interpretation for which group is being teabagged by a statue being destroyed....is group the person led/was part of.
I'm clearly missing something here that made modern southerners an at-all reasonable interpretation for that group: which of the following is it?
Like maybe it was clear to you he was talking about one thing, but that's completely opaque to anyone who doesn't share the politics of this place.
I thought he was referring to neo-confederates as moderates and trying to double-check this because that isn't really a reasonable definition of moderate.
My explanation for the modern southerners being the intended target:
Most modern southerners are the descendants of Confederate soldiers. They live in the same places, have the same names, sing the same songs and sometimes wave the same flags. Like most people, they generally prefer to venerate their ancestor's impressive deeds whilst downplaying or forgetting the ones they disagree with.
Taking their statues, deliberately mutilating them, and then melting them down can be seen as, and was seen as, an attack on those people. It's saying, "This is what I think of your history, this is what I think of your pride," and it's also saying, "you can't stop me from destroying things that matter to you".
You may think that southerners shouldn't have taken it personally, but they did. And on observing this fact, the Left did not go, "Shit, dude, I'm sorry. I didn't realise this stuff mattered to you." They went, "Ha! Suck it, racists." Which to my mind tells you who they were aiming at.
In other words, it's 1.
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If a lot of people complain about Jews who eat Christian babies, it's fair for Jews to feel targeted even though they don't eat babies.
Whether someone is attacking the outgroup doesn't depend on whether they are accurately characterizing the outgroup. It can be simultaneously true that 1) southerners don't have the values that Confederate statues represent and 2) they consider attacks on the statues as attacks on themselves. They can figure out what's in the minds of the people attacking the statues, and that's all that's needed.
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