Keep Burning Flags — I Respect Your Freedoms, You Complete Arseholes
|I like Trump, I really, really do. But he’s wrong about this:

All in for Senator Steve Daines as he proposes an Amendment for a strong BAN on burning our American Flag. A no brainer!

Let’s start with the basics: Burning the flag is an utterly disgusting and contemptible act. You are, after all, not just destroying an emblem of state-power, but also a symbol that ordinary people have fought and died for. The flag doesn’t just represent the elite — It represents all of us. Disrespecting it, therefore, disrespects us.

Flag-burning is also, it has to be said, a rather scattergun approach to political warfare — If you hate Trump, then burn an effigy of Trump. If you hate Pelosi, then burn one of her. If you hate militarism, then burn an effigy of an F16 … But burning the flag? That certainly attacks Trump, Pelosi and the military-industrial complex — What it also does is attack 327.2,000,000 other, completely innocent people living underneath that flag. It’s like wanting to murder someone and concluding that the best way to accomplish this would be by nuking the city he lives in. Effective? Sure. But also somewhat overkill.

Alright. So I hope that everyone reading this now understands I do not, under any circumstances, approve of flag-burning. Let’s move on, because what I also do not approve of are restrictions on free speech.

See, this is what Trump is at least pretending not to understand: When conservatives and populists are thrown off social media, that’s wrong. He’s right to condemn this … So why, then, is he also condemning the speech of flag-burners? Because he agrees with us and disagrees with them?

That’s not how freedom of speech, if it’s going to work, um, works.

The moral test here, the moral test that Trump has failed, is that for free speech to remain a force for good, we have to be willing to defend all speech. If the lefties at Google and Twitter just defend other lefties, and Trump just defends other conservatives, then we’re hurtling into a world where speech only belongs to the people who have the most money or wield the most power.

I, for one, don’t want to live in that world. I rather liked growing up and living in a West where people took pride in tolerating speech they hated on account of the (rather obvious) fact that this tolerance also guaranteed their own freedom to speak.

I think the kind of people who burn their own country’s flags are arseholes. The people who do it think I’m a dick for wanting to protect symbols of colonial oppression. So, fine. We get to agree to disagree. We get to grudgingly put up with each other … Which is the whole fucking point of free speech.

Take it away, and all we’re left with is a battle over money and power — Winner decides which mouths have a hand over them and which mouths don’t. Jack from Twitter, and, as it weirdly turns out, President Trump, want to live in such a world. I. Do. Not.

As always, let’s #FreeAssange who cares about free speech, and therefore needs to be allowed to keep talking.
['John Gray']
['Flag Burning', 'Donald Trump', 'Julian Assange', 'Free Expression', 'Free Speech']