The floodgates are open, and craziness is pouring out. The Democrats’ Confederate flag victory has them lusting for more. Hillary Clinton says South Carolina is only the beginning:

“It shouldn’t fly there. It shouldn’t fly anywhere,” Mrs. Clinton said of South Carolina…. In her discussion Tuesday with community leaders at Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Mo., Mrs. Clinton said the flag’s removal would be “just the beginning of what we have to do” to combat racism.

Of course it is. Everywhere, people preemptively abandoned the Stars and Bars. Alabama’s governor directed that it be taken down from that states’s capitol grounds. Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Sears all dropped the flag like a hot potato. Flag manufacturers terminated their Stars and Bars products. One leftist wrote Pope Francis to request that he denounce the use of St. Andrew’s Cross on the Confederate flag:

Doesn’t the fact that Saint Andrew’s cross appears on this evil symbol serve as an insult to the Catholic church which you lead?

But of course, it’s not just the flag. Shouldn’t every reminder of the Confederacy be eradicated? The New York Times headlines: “Calls to Drop Confederate Emblems Spread Nationwide.”

What began as scattered calls for removing the Confederate battle flag from a single state capitol intensified with striking speed and scope on Tuesday into an emotional, nationwide movement to strip symbols of the Confederacy from public parks and buildings, license plates, Internet shopping sites and retail stores. … In Tennessee, political leaders from both parties said a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early Ku Klux Klan leader, should be moved out of the State House. In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, ordered that the Confederate flag no longer appear on license plates, and political leaders in Maryland, North Carolina and Tennessee vowed to do the same. … In Minnesota, activists demanded that a lake named after John C. Calhoun, a senator and vice president from South Carolina who was a proponent of slavery, be renamed.

Some of the current frenzy is unintentionally humorous. Senator Harry Reid “declined to take a position on the mascot of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas: the rebel, whose nickname is “Hey Reb.” “I believe that the Board of Regents should take that up and take a look at it,” Reid said at a news conference.

It isn’t just the states who are participating in this historical cleansing:

Democratic Senators are reviewing the inventory of 100 statues and a few flags in the U.S. Capitol to identify and remove anything representing the Confederacy, in the wake of the Charleston, S.C. shootings in an historic black church.

Some who live in the South can see the tidal wave coming:

Lawmakers in South Carolina who voted against opening the placement of the flag to debate said they were concerned that the flag’s rushed removal would lead to the renaming of countless streets and the destruction of Confederate monuments that are strewn across the state.

Yes, it will.

“You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents were monsters,” said Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the executive director of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis.

That’s the idea, all right.

But of course, the real target here is not the Confederacy, which existed for less than five years and has been extinct for 150. The real target is America. On CNN, hosts questioned whether the Jefferson Memorial needs to be torn down:

Jefferson owned slaves…and there’s a monument to him in the capital of the United States, no one ever asks for that to come down – is it equal?

Another host responded:

There may come a day when we want to re-think Jefferson…when we get to that point, I’ll be happy to partake in that particular discussion.

Rush Limbaugh said yesterday:

[I]t’s not gonna stop with the Confederate flag because it’s not about the Confederate flag. It is about destroying the South as a political force. It’s about isolating, targeting, and identifying the South as Dylann Roof. Not Charleston, South Carolina, the South. That’s what the leftists’ effort on the Confederate flag is. … And I’ll make another prediction to you. The next flag that will come under assault, and it will not be long, is the American flag. … If you take a look at the timeline of progressive events, their speed and rapidity with which the left is conducting this assault on all of these American traditions and institutions, if you don’t think the American flag’s in their crosshairs down the road, you had better stop and reconsider. The American flag is what? It’s the symbol of America. The left doesn’t like this country very much and never has, and it’s getting angrier and angrier about it seemingly every day. The American flag stands for the United States of America and, as such, everything that’s wrong with it. And you wait. It isn’t gonna be long before the American flag is gonna cause chills, fear, scary thoughts, it’s gonna make me nervous, the American flag, when I see the American flag, it’s a symbol of hate. … Can you just hear it now? I can hear it now. “The United States flag has flown over slavery and symbolized racism, discrimination, bigotry, homophobia for hundreds of years; the Confederate flag flew only four years, and we’re getting rid of the Confederate flag.”

The American flag is already under attack on some university campuses. A reader writes:

You have to abjure your ancestors. AND all their works and pomps. But that’s just a start, comrade! We have to reject ALL our ancestors, and everywhere, too, not just the South. Oh, and the “ancestors” are both literal and constructive: ALL white people benefited from and continue to benefit from the “systemic system” [sic, per Jesse Jackson] of racial oppression no matter who their actual ancestors were — that’s what White Privilege is, after all. Just go to any college campus in Amerika, they’ll explain it. So…Andrew Jackson must come off the $20 bill, Washington off the greenback, Jefferson off the $2 bill and any and all public, ceremonial or monumental references to them other than as genocidal slaveholders and architects of racism must be eradicated. Lake Calhoun is the least of it and, of course, an entirely new history must be written and children taught indoctrinated. A lot of work ahead for Black Studies majors —- AND Queer Studies, too, comrade, don’t forget. And then we have reparations….

The Democrats, having sown the wind, may reap the whirlwind. After all, they are the party of slavery and Jim Crow. Every one of the the Confederates now being scrubbed from memory was a Democrat. And Thomas Jefferson was a slaveowner who, unlike George Washington, never did free his slaves. Andrew Jackson, the real founder of the Democratic Party, makes Phil Sheridan look like a multiculturalist. But we don’t have to go back into our nation’s history for embarrassing Democrats: Robert Byrd, who served as an honored Democrat in the United States Senate until 2010–two years into the Obama administration!–was an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan. Just about every federal building and highway rest stop in West Virginia is named after Byrd. I look forward to the day when they are all renamed or torn down.

It is no coincidence that the South is now the most patriotic region of the United States. That is the sin for which liberals hate the South: not some fictitious affection for a long-gone Confederacy, but a very real love of country–our country–today. It is the South’s current patriotism, not its 19th-century rebellion, that drives the Democrats’ hate, and for which the South will now pay a terrible price. I don’t know, maybe the Democrats calculate that they never again need to carry a single Southern state. That seems like a bad bet to me.