Mark Twain once wrote, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” Far be it from me to disagree with one of my comedic idols, but I do have to disagree, thanks to the actions of one Donald J. Trump. And in Twain’s defense, he hadn’t experienced modern politicians.
While everyone else was obsessed with changing the Cracker Barrel logo, our President issued an Executive Order announcing his Administration would start prosecuting people who burned the American flag. Which caused Seattle Leftists (which is pretty much redundant) to…say it with me now…plan to burn the American flag.
But remember, kids. They’re smarter than we are. Just ask them.
While people on the Left and the Right debate this topic, I’d like to approach this week’s Lexicon entry with a bit more insight, and maybe a little more humor if you can dig that.
flag burning
What the Left thinks it means – burning a symbol of the country because it’s our First Amendment right to protest
What the Right thinks it means – burning a symbol of our country that shouldn’t be done because it shows disrespect for the county
What it really means – burning a symbol of the country because…reasons, I guess?
And just like that, I’m back in the early 1990s. A time when grunge started to fill the airwaves with more distortion than a Jen Psaki interview, but well before boy bands and Nickelback became the scourges we know them to be today. Flannel was a fashion staple, which surprised many lumberjacks who had been wearing it for centuries. Things were on the cusp of being EXTREEEEEEEEME!
And a young man named Gregory Lee Johnson was at the epicenter of a Supreme Court ruling regarding flag burning. Johnson burned a flag at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, and was fined and imprisoned under Texas law. After a prolonged legal battle (or in other words anything more complicated than a jaywalking ticket), the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that flag burning was protected speech.
Which, to me, it is. The First Amendment protects our right to redress grievances with the government. Although I’m not sure the Founding Fathers would think an American citizen would resort to burning a flag as a means to make grievances known, I’m pretty sure they might not object to it as much as many on the Right do.
Meanwhile back at the main point, the President’s Executive Order suggests he doesn’t agree with the Supreme Court and wants to make the practice illegal all over America. Having a President at odds with the High Court isn’t anything new, but at least with Trump it’s entertaining.
As predictable as a weather forecast from, oh, now, the Left is rushing to defend flag burning using the First Amendment as a shield. Which, of course, is to be expected and supported…up to a point. More on that later.
Protest has been a part of the American life since, well, before there was a United States of America. Our very foundation was an act of defiance against England, and we’ve weathered the storms of everything from the Whiskey Rebellion to whatever the hell you want to call Queen Kamala the Appointed’s 2024 Presidential run. America isn’t a Fabrege egg; we are built on being able to take an asswhupping, standing up, and saying, “I can do this all day.“
And if you can’t trust America’s Ass, I don’t know who you could trust.
With all that being said, the Left has a teensy little issue regarding the desecration of a flag. And by teensy, I mean a rainbow colored or an off colored one. Seems the Left is perfectly fine burning, destroying, pissing on, or otherwise not respecting the American flag, but don’t you dare do anything to a gay or trans pride flag! That would be horrible, a sign of a deranged person consumed by sheer hatred of what that flag represents.
You know, like how the Right feels about people burning the American flag?
So, I hope you Leftists out there will excuse me for telling you to take a seat. Or two. Or a few million for that matter. And if you don’t excuse me, take the fucking seats anyway because you have fewer legs to stand on than Lieutenant Dan.
The Right is only marginally better than the Left here because they’re just playing by the rules the Left have set regarding flag burning, except for the American flag. That’s the issue a lot of people today have with the First Amendment, particularly the freedom of speech part. The First Amendment is supposed to protect all speech, even speech you find wrong. Today, you’re more likely to find a coherent sentence from President Brick Tamland than you are to find someone who actually understands this concept.
And since I’m one of them, the former President has some catching up to do.
So, we’re left with both the Left and the Right not getting this concept well enough to leave well enough alone, which is not unfamiliar territory for your humble provider of bloggy goodness, unfortunately. Both extremes agree on one thing: they protect their speech and fuck anyone else’s. Of course, that’s not how it works at all. If you want free speech for yourself, you have to allow free speech for others. This isn’t Golden Corral, where you can pick and choose what you get. When it comes to free speech, it’s all or nothing.
And when it comes to flag burning, I’m all in favor of it as a form of protest. Of course, it also allows me to use my “heckler’s veto” to mock it mercilessly. Really, has anybody watched a burning flag and said, “You know, I should really change my opinion on [insert name of issue here]”? Sure, it’s provocative, but it’s as edgy as a Nerf ball these days. These days, anything less than a burning Tesla recharging station is Hot Topic-level edginess. Seriously, all you’re doing is burning a symbolic piece of fabric. It’s as revolutionary as shoes with Velcro straps.
On second thought, Velcro straps are more revolutionary. And a lot more useful, now that I think about it.
If there’s anything from the 90s that should have made a comeback, it’s Hi-C Ecto Cooler. That shit was awesome! Instead, we get…flag burning.
And the worst thing? The Left finds itself yet again on the losing end of an 80-20 issue and they don’t even know it yet. Most Americans will side with the President on flag burning because they still feel some level of pride in this country and the flag over which it waves. They don’t hate it as much as the Left does, and with all the insane shit the Left is doing and finds itself supporting, people don’t have any other choice but to side with Trump.
Fucking. Brilliant.
At least we may be able to make it rhyme this time.
HEYYYYYYYY!
Tag: protest
Leftist Lexicon Word of the Week
With everything going on in the world today, it’s a good bet someone is going to get upset about something. And if that person is motivated enough, he or she may decide to whip up support by protesting that thing.
For Leftists, it happens on a day ending in, well, “day.”
Yet, for all of the protesting the Left does, they don’t always support protesting, as we’ll see in a bit. But first, a little housekeeping in the form of a definition.
protest
What the Left thinks it means – exercising a First Amendment right to express an opinion
What it really means – exercising a First Amendment right to express a Leftist-approved opinion
Among the myriad rights outlined in the aforementioned Amendment are freedom of speech and the right to redress grievances with the government. (Although, I’m not sure I want to know how the grievances got naked in the first place.) These combine like Zords into a Megazord we call protesting, and it’s a right many Americans exercise more than they exercise, literally.
Protesting is one of the rights the Left hold dear because otherwise they might have to get jobs and be productive. However, they have a two-tiered approach to it, and as the definition I provided shows, it’s based on ideology.
I’m going to call this next section “A Tale of Two Protests.” And hopefully the estate of Charles Dickens doesn’t sue me into oblivion. Our first protest is one that has made the rounds in conservative media circles because of its sheer intensity and literal volume. Jeff Younger is running for the Texas State House in large part because of the way the courts treated him. You see, Younger is the father of a young boy who has been convinced by his mother he’s a girl. After a lengthy court battle, he won a small victory by a judge’s decision barring his now ex-wife from giving his son drugs that would restrict puberty and essentially transition him from male to female.
Well, Younger appeared on the campus of the University of North Texas and the Left showed up in droves to disrupt his speech because…transphobe? Actually, I can’t quite make out the logical arguments they made because a) I don’t speak Shrill Leftist Harpy, and b) they didn’t make any. They were simply there to cause chaos, go viral, and take a stand against trans hate. As a fan of the First Amendment, I can’t begrudge their protest, no matter how asinine it was, and the Left agreed. The students protesting were in the right.
Now, we move on to a different protest, the American version of the Freedom Convoy. If it’s anything like the Canadian version, be prepared for the utter chaos of…honking horns, music, and a sense of community. A worse hellscape than anything Clive Barker could come up with, I assure you.
Seriously, though, the Freedom Convoy by and large was and is a peaceful event with generally good fellowship mixed with a good helping of traffic disruption. Sure, there were some asshats who went overboard, but you’ll get that and they were the exception instead of the rule. And as you might expect, the Left has gone out of their way to denigrate this protest, insinuating it’s backed by Russians, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, conservative media, the Koch Brothers, and a few other groups. As of this writing, I’m not sure if the Freemasons (or even the Reasonably Priced Masons) have been invoked, but it’s still early in the year. And now that the impending war over Ukraine is looming like Michael Moore’s shadow over an all-you-can-eat buffet, Leftists are dismissing the Freedom Convoy protest because “there’s more important things to worry about right now.”
Like…allowing young boys to transition to young girls, apparently?
The thing to remember is both the UNT students and the Freedom Convoy should be allowed to protest, even if we don’t agree with them. The thing the Left doesn’t get about the First Amendment is it goes both ways, not just the way they want it to go. Kinda like Dennis Rodman, but with better fashion sense in wedding dresses. If the Left values the right to protest, they have to allow for the right to protest against them, but they don’t. Otherwise, I would have to be boring you with a different Lexicon topic.
The reason for the Left’s two-faced approach to protesting involves their desire to control the narrative. Once you control how events are presented, you control how they’re perceived and what the audience sees, hears, and feels. That’s creepy enough as it is, but it gets worse when an event is 180 degrees out of phase from reality. Then, the outcome gets messy and even expensive if legal recourse is initiated.
Just ask CNN or its new owner, Nick Sandmann.
Controlling the narrative is essential in protesting as well as in the media/court of public opinion. The chaos and destruction left by Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA protests is hard to ignore, but surprisingly many people only focus on the narrative presented by those groups. Instead of garnering scorn for trying to turn city streets into Beirut on a good day, they garnered sympathy because of the cause. But here’s the thing: no matter how righteous your cause, it loses its righteousness when the resulting protest turns destructive. Blocking the street with a march protesting police brutality and the unnecessary killing of citizens is inconvenient, but doesn’t cross that line. When the protest includes destruction of public property, assault, and arson…well, let’s just say you’ve missed your turn and are zooming down the highway to the Destruction Zone.
The right to protest can be a tightrope walk because of the implications of letting different sides speak their minds. If you allow, say, a Nazi rally in your town, does that mean the town is totally pro-Nazi? Not at all, but with the advent of incredibly fast social media posting and incredibly slow thinkers using them, it can become one faster than you can type OMG. That’s where we need to be a lot more libertarian in our approach to protests, meaning we support what we support and ignore what we don’t. Trust me, it makes life a lot simpler and stops you from having to continually apologize to people who wouldn’t accept your apology under any circumstances.
As with the right to free speech, the right to protest comes with some responsibilities. Just because you can carry a rifle in public doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to do so while voicing displeasure over a public official’s actions. If you feel the need to protest, put your best foot forward (and not to trip someone else, by the way). Be willing to discuss your position in a calm, rational manner. Even if those protesting your protest are screaming like banshees listening to a Yoko Ono CD on repeat, you’ll come off better by keeping cool. Plus, it drives Leftists nuts when they can’t rile you into emotional outbursts, so there’s that.
In the end, though, it cannot be overstated how the right to protest has lead to positive change in this country. It’s one I wholeheartedly endorse and support because of that fact. Even if the Left puts ideological conditions on its valid usage, we don’t need to follow their lead. We just need to allow them to march along to the beat of their own drummers so they can enjoy the fruits of their labor.
And we can enjoy mocking them. Thanks, First Amendment!