"Leftist logic" is a doozy, but thanks to the diligent, and most importantly the informed efforts of an American Thinker reader, we have the receipts.

On August 29, I penned a blog post on 12-year-old Jaiden, a student at a Colorado charter school who'd been removed from class, castigated by administration officials, and his education held hostage unless he removed a Gadsden flag patch from his backpack.  In the school's estimation, the image was rooted in "slavery and [the] slave trade."  Of course, it's not, so Jaiden and his family didn't back down, the story went viral, and the school quickly did a u-turn and allowed little Jaiden to return to class, with the patch.

Little did we all know at the time, though, that just a few short weeks before Jaiden's story went viral, a small local paper in Washington state had waged an almost identical war against another historical American flag, and a conservative who dared stand for it.  However, this wrong is yet to be righted.

On July 28, the Snoqualmie Valley Record published an article by Conor Wilson, who reported that a local city had decided to remove its public "Pride" displays after an icon of "extremism" and "white supremac[y]" had mysteriously appeared.  Wilson also stated that according to city spokesperson Jason Grenn, the symbol was "threatening to people of color."

Images courtesy of the reader.

So what was it? Perhaps a swastika ensign?  A symbol adopted by the Nazi party, the leftist extremists of 1930s Germany who believed in the supremacy of the white "master race"?  Maybe a Planned Parenthood pennant?  After all, the organization is rooted in the Malthusian eugenics embraced by the radically left Margaret Sanger and the white supremacist ideals of Lothrop Stoddard, and it is a tentacle of an industry that disproportionately victimizes black families.

None of those!  It was the Pine Tree flag, a banner born during the revolutionary slogan adopted from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government:

[W]here an appeal to the law, and constituted judges ... but the remedy is denied by a manifest perverting of justice ... for wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is still violence and injury, however coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven.

Locke believed that the purpose of law is to preserve the natural rights of the individual, and when by the law or executors of the law become tyrannical, the oppressed has nowhere else to turn except to the highest moral authority, and that is the Lord of heaven.  Per Wilson, though, the flag is emblematic of white supremacy because it's a "symbol of far right Christian extremism" and because it was flown by "rioters" during the "insurrection" on January 6 — how's that for false equivalence?

A local reader took exception to the "egregious errors" in Wilson's misinformed report and penned a Letter to the Editor in response, an excerpt of which is below:

To state the obvious, it was, and is, one of many American symbols of independence and liberty. It appeals to God's authority and has nothing to do with white supremacy, extremism, or hate. ...

Conflating the Pine Tree flag with white supremacy is not only historically wrong, it is the height of intellectual dishonesty. To slander American citizens who fly such flags as radicals and extremists is insulting and tiresome.

Wilson replied, saying they would not run the reader's response, because it was "inaccurate" and noted that the "we [the outlet] stand by our reporting and feel the language used to describe the flag was fair and accurate."  When the reader asked for clarification on what was "inaccurate," Wilson ignored him, so after several days, the reader wrote this:

Your claim that the Pine Tree flag is a white supremacist flag, without giving any facts other than referencing the Phoenix News Times article, which, by the way, doesn't refer to white supremacy at all, is an extremely serious and inflammatory charge. You are basically calling ... anyone who flies that flag is a racist of the most vile and vicious kind. Incendiary rhetoric like that can have very dangerous consequences.

Unsurprisingly, Wilson dug his heels into the manure and began to roll in it.  Despite the history that countless blacks, both free and enslaved, fought the British under that banner, and black Americans also showed up in Washington, D.C. to support President Trump and voice their outrage over a highly suspicious election result, somehow, this flag is a symbol of white supremacy, and that's that.  Wilson is like a petulant child who's just been told something he doesn't want to hear, so he stamps his feet, plugs his ears, and refuses to listen.  Willful ignorance to the nth degree is seemingly exclusive to certain political leanings...

Never mind the black Americans who love and fly this flag — oh, that's right, I almost forgot, you can be black and a white supremacist!

Postscript: Tremendous thanks to a Fall City, Washington reader for defending American heritage and sharing this story with AT.

Image: Public domain.