Many conservatives rightly took offense to President Joe Biden’s decision to fly the LGBT pride flag in between two American flags on the South Lawn of the White House and declare that “America is a nation of pride.”
The flag not only included the typical rainbow colors that represent sexuality but also the blue-and-pink design indicative of the transgender movement. To take a symbol with such partisan significance related to issues on which America is deeply divided and exalt it next to a flag that represents common values is disgraceful.
BIDEN'S LAND GRAB HURTS WORKING PEOPLE
Unfortunately, the contempt that the president has for so many people is shared by our toxic legacy media, resulting in an article from a staff writer at the New Republic titled “Why Conservatives Are Losing Their Minds Over Biden’s Pride Flag — And Ignoring Pro-DeSantis Neo-Nazis.”
In summary, the columnist is angry that conservatives aren’t talking more about a few crazy people who have flown Nazi flags in Florida, including on the same day the White House bore the pride flag.
“You don’t have to guess which flag the leading right-wing sycophants were up in arms about,” she writes.
The antisemitic demonstration on Saturday happened outside of Disney World, where people also happened to spot a flag supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for president. The author claims that “was no coincidence” and proceeded to compare DeSantis’s conservative policy agenda to “sex and gender authoritarianism” in Nazi Germany.
The author of this diatribe, like so many in the out-of-touch media, can’t stop for one moment to try and understand those she is smearing. The fact that we’re even talking about these political issues is part of what makes Biden’s pride stunt so appalling to people. It stokes unnecessary division in a country that is already coming apart at the seams, and the entire situation is completely avoidable.
Nonetheless, she makes the case that conservatives have no right to complain until they prove they don't support Nazism. “DeSantis has not condemned or even commented” on the neo-Nazis from Saturday, she charges.
DeSantis has condemned neo-Nazi demonstrators before and signed anti-hate crime legislation in Israel with the explicit intent of targeting “acts of antisemitism,” facts that the New Republic leaves out. But alas, we are still in the exhausting, “guilty until proven innocent” era of Nazi-related smears from the media that began under former President Donald Trump, whom journalists accused of “refusal to condemn” whenever he didn’t bother to do it again for the umpteenth time.
Unlike neo-Nazis, whom almost everyone sees as evil, hateful idiots, the president of the United States has higher authority and stature than almost anyone. The statements he makes carry immense weight.
What the New Republic calls “a nice gesture” by Biden’s White House was an insult to soldiers who have fought or died for what the American flag means to them, including those who fought actual Nazis. That’s why military veterans spoke out against it.
A president should not shoehorn irrelevant, modern political symbolism into something as timeless as White House flag displays. No amount of whataboutism from the media will change that.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.