Fashy flags

Capturing a long-running Twitter thread about weird flags flown by the far right in the US.

This started when I needed a flag image for another long thread of mine about American fascist iconography more broadly —

We should not pretend that we do not know what these signify.

Führerprinzip

This flag started my quest, because I had seen it obliquely in photos of a pro-Trump street action. What, precisely, do Trump and police “keep America safe” from? Fascism promises to rescue the nation from corrupting influences. Followers don’t need to say who.

The personality cult of Trump inclines toward fascism. He is the nation.

A fantasy of Trump as hyper-masculine hyper-violent warlord, in defiance of democratic institutions.

Trump as a Totenkopf symbol of a literal supervillain, representing ruthless vigilante violence against those he sees as corrupting society. This is also, perversely, reflective of support for police violence, as police have embraced the Punisher skull.

The anti-democratic impulse laid bare. Note that the rifle-bearing knights which flank King Trump evoke the Crusades, an image favored by the far right to reflect the need for war for “Western values” …

Christian nationalism

To much of the far right, the truth behind the nation is revealed to be Christianity, as manifested specifically with American Evangelical imagery. The claim that the fundamental truth of the nation is Christianity is fascist Christian Nationalism.

The Hospitallers’ Cross reflects the far right’s fascination with symbols of the Crusades, hunger to “defend” with violence “the West” against foreign corruption encroaching on what they claim to be their territory. Para-fascist sentiments again.

An aside about kitsch

It is tempting to laugh at a variation on that theme like this and dismiss it, but it is important to recognize a pattern here. Not all kitsch is fascist, but one should recognize how the fascist sensibility is attracted to kitschy & schmaltzy over-sentimental imagery, and they enjoy how the leftish intellectuals they hate dislike it.

The thin blue flag

A lot of these flags include a reference to the Thin Blue Line flag, representing “support for police” in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jacob said the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests — an idea suggested by a previous origin story in Harper’s — but he allows he may have first seen the thin blue line image after those protests spurred the circulation of pro-police imagery online. “That’s maybe why it came to my eyes,” he said.

As Jacob built the company, a “Blue Lives Matter” movement was growing in the wake of news stories of multiple officers shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.”

American fascism often presents superficially as anti-authoritarian, but the embrace of a police state is telling.

Here we get our themes combined: nation defined by guns for vigilante violence, support of the state’s agents of violence, Maximum Leader. Which opens another theme …

Gun fetishism

The naming of weapons as central to the soul of the nation is enthusiasm for violence.

Often literally just guns

More explicitly fascist sensibilities

Far right use of “We the People” bends the democratic sentiment to hint that they are the only true American people. The nation is white conservatives and their instruments of violence. A para-fascist sentiment.

This flag brings our themes together to tell us that the True American People are defined by their adherence to true religion plus their enthusiasm for violence, which is necessary because they face unnamed threats. This is a fascist sentiment.

This flag combines far right symbols with only a hint of the US flag remaining. The “III” is a reference to Three Percenters, far right paramilitary gun nuts who say that only 3% of Americans who took up arms for the Revolution against England.

This variant is not simply a claim of popular support. It is a threat.

Additional flag vocabulary

This inversion of normal US flag symbolizes the sovereign citizen movement, a far right conspiracy theory which holds that the US government is illegitimate. If you have ever had someone rant about gold fringe on a US flag and admiralty law, you have encountered them.

This is the “no quarter” flag symbolizing a fascist desire to mass murder their political enemies.

This flag from the Whiskey Rebellion — y’know, the one that was put down when President Washington personally rode to Pennsylvania at the head of an army — has been turning up a bit, reflecting a sentiment of violently rebelling against the Federal government in rejection of its legitimate right to tax citizens.

Two symbols for the same thing appear on this flag. The “Hawai’ian” floral print evokes a “big luau”, which rhymes with both “big igloo” and “boogaloo”, reflecting the far right militias eager to fight in “Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo”.

More on fashy American aesthetics

I eventually need to capture this post’s sister thread on Twitter. For now, I’ll just add the single best thing in it, a link to Nate Powell’s sophisticated meditation on American masculinity and far right aesthetics, About Face.