After a New York jury returned a historic responsible verdict in opposition to former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday, many People selected to rally across the flag. The upside-down flag.
Social media overflowed on Thursday afternoon with photographs of Previous Glory hung with the celebrities on the underside, posted by elected Republicans, right-wing activists and common People upset by the information {that a} former president was now a felon.
The upside-down flag historically signifies misery and, from time to time, has been used as an indication of protest. The appropriate to show a U.S. flag in that method was even upheld by a Supreme Courtroom resolution in 1974.
However after The New York Occasions revealed two weeks in the past that an inverted flag flew exterior Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr’s house within the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, the image has gained traction on the fitting — and Thursday’s verdict seemingly pushed it into the middle of the conservative mainstream.
Simply six minutes after the jury in Manhattan discovered the previous president responsible on all 34 felony counts of falsifying enterprise information, Consultant Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a picture of the upside flag on social media. The put up had been considered greater than 1.8 million instances in a matter of hours.
That very same image was quickly posted on Telegram by Ali Alexander, one of many major organizers of the marketing campaign to persuade voters that the 2020 election had been rigged, together with the caption “Nobody is coming to avoid wasting us.” Man Benson, a Fox Information contributor, posted one too.
The response was not restricted to public figures, and plenty of lower-profile People had been posting pictures of precise flipped flags suspended from poles exterior their houses. The accompanying textual content usually pointed to the flag serving as an act of protest in opposition to the decision, the American justice system, President Biden and the so-called Deep State.
The inverted stars-and-bars was not the one protest banner proliferating on-line after the jury’s conviction. Many individuals loyal to Mr. Trump took to social media on Thursday to say that they’d adopted the “Attraction to Heaven” flag, a Revolutionary Struggle period image referring to a phrase by the thinker John Locke.
Also referred to as the Pine Tree Flag, the as soon as obscure pennant got here to contemporary consideration final week when it was additionally revealed that Mr. Alito had raised it above his New Jersey trip house in 2023. Now, dozens of distributors on Amazon are providing the green-and-white flag for as little as $9.
