Go to Long Island, and you may see some disturbing things, such as Trump voters or even American flags.
That was the report from New York Times editorial board writer Mara Gay. The New York Times explained that this wasn’t anti-American; it’s just that President Donald Trump had “politicized the American flag.” It’s an odd claim.
“Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag,” the New York Times PR account tweeted. “The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith.”
New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay’s comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context. Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith.
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 8, 2021
Trump did not politicize the flag. Betsy Ross probably first politicized the flag, creating it explicitly as a rebuke to the British Empire.
But if we are using “politicized” to mean “made into a partisan culture-war totem,” well, that wasn’t Trump, either. That was Colin Kaepernick and his woke supporters, such as the New York Times.
Kaepernick, a football-player-turned-Nike-spokesman, said in 2016 that he would not “stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” America was irredeemably racist in his eyes, and so, he made the flag the symbol of that racism. It had nothing to do with Trump, and the cultural battle Trump waged against the NFL over the U.S. flag didn’t begin in earnest until 2017.
After the killing of George Floyd, sports figures across the country embraced the same view, to the point that WNBA players and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban no longer wanted the national anthem to be played at their games. Kaepernick maintained his hatred for the flag, demanding Nike to spike a shoe design that featured the Betsy Ross flag.
Trump and his supporters did not tie “American-ness” to “whiteness.” The most prominent culprit of that was the New York Times, whose 1619 Project was based on the false premise that the United States was founded to protect slavery.
Protesters in Hong Kong resisting Chinese tyranny did not wave the American flag for “whiteness.” The flag has not changed in meaning: Liberals have decided to redefine it in order to exaggerate the issue of “whiteness” and white supremacy in the U.S. and to argue that America never really stood for freedom at all (a marked difference from the civil rights movement, in which Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream”).
It isn’t Trump’s fault that Mara Gay and the New York Times have rejected the American flag. The culprit is their ideology.
