Free Speech Lover Donald Trump Pretends To Make Flag Burning Illegal
The fact that he can't actually do that is not a bug, it's a feature.
Yesterday, among about 10,000 other appalling things, Donald Trump signed an executive order making it “illegal” to burn the American flag and directing the US Attorney General to “vigorously prosecute” flag-burners to the full extent of the law. While it’s not in the actual order, he also said he wants to see them spend at least a year in prison.
“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail,” Trump told reporters. “You will see flag burning stop immediately.”
Now, as anyone with even a passing knowledge of our First Amendment rights is aware … he can’t actually do that. The Supreme Court found in 1989’s Texas v. Johnson that burning the flag is protected symbolic and political speech. The deciding vote in that case? Antonin Scalia.
“If it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag,” Scalia famously said at a Union League event. “But I am not king.”
In an interview with Piers Morgan, Scalia explained that the whole purpose of the First Amendment was to protect speech that was critical of the government, and people burn the flag in order to criticize the government.
Well, now we have a president who does believe he’s a king, so he’s going to go ahead and do it.
I’d like to note that I actually found that clip on the Xitter page of one Glenn Greenwald, who appears to be slowly learning that Republicans might not have been the heroic defenders of free speech he believed them to be. Indeed, it’s almost as if they really just wanted to use racial slurs without any social consequences and were pretending to love speech in order to achieve that goal. So weird!
But how did our great freeze peach lovers really feel about Trump making it “illegal” to burn a flag? They loved it! Mostly for the following reasons:
It’s illegal to burn a Pride flag, so it should be illegal to burn an American flag! It’s only fair! (It is entirely legal to burn a Pride flag, so long as it’s your Pride flag and you’re not endangering anyone — same rules as setting literally anything else on fire.)
Well, if you read the actual executive order, he’s not actually making it illegal, just asking prosecutors to find other crimes they can pin on people who do it! So therefore it’s all on the up and up!
It’s not actually going to happen, but it’s great because it’s going to make liberals defend flag-burning, and people who love America will hate them for that!
It should absolutely be illegal, for reasons.
Like so:
Matt Walsh was on Team Claim It’s Illegal To Burn A Pride Flag, which is not remotely surprising.
Here is what the geniuses on Xitter describe as “a master class in trolling.” You see, it’s not actually violating the First Amendment because he said “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” the words “content-neutral.”
The Attorney General shall prioritize the enforcement to the fullest extent possible of our Nation’s criminal and civil laws against acts of American Flag desecration that violate applicable, content-neutral laws, while causing harm unrelated to expression, consistent with the First Amendment. This may include, but is not limited to, violent crimes; hate crimes, illegal discrimination against American citizens, or other violations of Americans’ civil rights; and crimes against property and the peace, as well as conspiracies and attempts to violate, and aiding and abetting others to violate, such laws.
Ah yes, pure genius. 5D chess!
The fact that the executive order is plainly unconstitutional did not stop law enforcement from arresting an American veteran for burning the flag in protest of the executive order.
Of course, none of this matters. The people who claim that he’s just rallying his base and getting the libs to defend flag-burning are exactly right — other than the fact that they’re creeps who think that’s a good thing.
But you know what? I absolutely will defend flag-burning until my last breath, because — unlike conservatives who just wanted to use racial slurs without anyone calling them racist — I actually do believe in free speech and the First Amendment. We should all defend it. We’ve had to live through an entire decade of people not understanding that the First Amendment is meant to protect them from the government restricting or punishing their speech, not from people blocking them on social media, students protesting their campus lectures, “cancel culture,” or women who don’t laugh at their jokes.
The Trump administration has unabashedly sought to punish people because of their views, from students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza to demanding that NBC and ABC lose their FCC licenses for the crime of criticizing conservatives.
Any voters who would be put off by defending the First Amendment are not going to vote for Democrats anyway. We should absolutely use this as an opportunity to make it clear what that right does and does not protect, and repeatedly remind the Right that speech doesn’t just become illegal because they don’t like it. There are very, very few things I agree with Antonin Scalia on. In fact, the only other one is from the otherwise entirely execrable opinion in Heller vs. DC that it’s okay to ban machine guns. But the whole point of the First Amendment is to protect the right to protest our government, and if we lose that, we lose everything.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Hey, it's not illegal to burn effigies of the bloated orange pussucker, and I'm surprised that isn't happening constantly. But sure, it's important to address that flag burning epidemic that is apparently happening everywhere all the time but somehow is never shown.
If burning the flag actually is somehow made illegal, I'll start marketing a product called I Can't Believe It's Not the American Flag™. It will have 51 stars and 12 stripes, making it perfectly legal to burn.
(joke lifted from Neil Steinberg, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times)