Make No Law, Episode One: Fighting Words

Jesse, it may seem radical, but the "salute the flag or get out" -- and, just a little further along, "salute the flag or maybe we'll kill you, is very real and very American and very familiar. /1

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Know it's standard conservative bullshit and a big chunk of his base likely agrees, but it's important to step back into reality for a moment and reflect on how radical and insane a position it is to say that people who protest the flag "Maybe ... shouldn't be in the country."

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/2 In the first episode of Make No Law, I talked about how refusal to salute the flag sparked a huge, nationwide, brutal, and now mostly forgotten wave of bigotry and violence against Jehovas Witnesses in the 1930s and 1940s.

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/3 To a sense of how bad it was -- something, again, I think we've mostly collectively forgotten -- check out this 1941 ACLU pamphlet collecting the stories of Americans who were persecuted -- by both citizens and government -- for being Witnesses

https://www.popehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ACLU-pamphlet.pdf …

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/4 This notion -- that if you don't joint our nationalist rituals, you'd better shut up, you'd better get out, and maybe -- just maybe -- we're going to kill you, is as American as baseball and apple pie.

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