Salon, the far-left media outlet, has declared that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is America’s national anthem because “neo-Confederates elevated” the song “as a way of honoring southern slaveowners’ rebellion.”

Salon staff writer Jefferson Morley’s meandering essay, published Sunday, charges that “neo-Confederates developed” the concept of “singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner'” — and also Memorial Day.

The recent removal of a statue of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in Maryland “is the manifestation of a popular awakening that goes beyond bringing down statues of Confederate heroes like Stonewall Jackson,” Salon says.

The leftist website that has hailed socialist basket case Venezuela as an ‘economic miracle’ spends a great deal of time discussing Taney, who served as chief justice from 1836 to 1864 and earned notoriety for writing the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which found that blacks were not citizens. The completely overturned ruling is widely regarded as one of the worst in the history of American jurisprudence.

President Andrew Jackson appointed Taney to the Supreme Court, Salon notes. Jackson also appointed Francis Scott Key, a slave-owning attorney and a dabbling poet, as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in 1833.

Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” 19 years before Jackson appointed him to the federal government position and 22 years before Taney became a Supreme Court judge — and 47 years before the outbreak of the Civil War.

Salon claims that “Key’s ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ with its lyrics deriding black people who took up arms to gain their freedom in the War of 1812, became a point of pride for Southerners.”

According to Salon, “In the decades following the Civil War, the defeated South strove to establish rituals such as Memorial Day, which honored the veterans of northern and southern armies equally, implying equality of respect for their causes.”

Then, in 1914, 49 years after the conclusion of the Civil War and a century after Key composed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “supporters launched a campaign to designate “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the one and only national anthem.”

Salon fails to discuss the complex details concerning how “The Star-Spangled Banner” actually became the national anthem. These details involve two U.S. military branches (the Army and the Navy), the 1918 World Series, American patriotic fervor centered around World War I, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, the Veterans of Foreign Wars organization, John Philip Sousa and, allegedly, a parade ground at Fort Meade, South Dakota.

Instead, Salon suggests that “Confederate sympathizers” — in the 1920s, some 60 years after the end of the Civil War — campaigned to make “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem as “a way to wrap the ideology of the Confederacy in the red, white and blue bunting of American patriotism.”

“African Americans were especially resistant to the appeal,” Salon says — using as evidence a quote by James Weldon Johnson, the author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (which is often called “Black American National Anthem”), describing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as “difficult to sing” as well as “boastful and bloodthirsty.”

Salon says “The Star-Spangled Banner” — and Memorial Day — should not “necessarily… be jettisoned, along with Robert. E. Lee statues, only that their historical roots should be recognized and taught.”

On his Facebook page, Morley, the author of the Salon essay, likes Occupy Democrats, Climate Progress and, of course, Spike Lee. He also appears to be exceedingly interested in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

America’s hard-to-sing national anthem is never far from the news. Last year, for example, security guards at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City ordered a North Carolina middle school choir to stop its rendition of the song because, as one guard explained, such an outburst of patriotism honoring dead Americans requires a permit. (RELATED: Guards Demand Permit For Middle School Choir Rendition Of National Anthem AT 9/11 MEMORIAL)

In 2014, CNN put a trigger warning before a downright tearjerker story — during the week of Veterans Day — entitled “Sailor mom surprises daughter at school” because the story featured “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Prior to CNN’s presentation of the video, a stern warning message appeared for several seconds in bold font atop a two-tone black background. “Please be advised you are about to hear an excerpt of the national anthem,” the warning declared. (CNN Warns America: You Are About To Hear The NATIONAL ANTHEM)

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