I’m Worried About the Gadsden Flag Kid

Garion Frankel

Garion "Gary" Frankel is a Young Voices contributor, and a Ph.D. student in PK-12 educational leadership at Texas A&M University, where he researches arts, civics, and humanities education. He also used to be involved in Republican politics, which means he loves complaining about all the things he used to have to keep quiet about.

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36 Responses

  1. DensityDuck says:

    “Drugs, alcohol, sex, and virulent racism” actually sounds like what both sides are into these days, although one of them involves more crossdressing.Report

  2. John Puccio says:

    Are you worried about the Greta Thunbergs and David Hoggs of the world as well? Shouldn’t the parents in progressive movements know better?Report

    • Pinky in reply to John Puccio says:

      I may have misread this, but I inferred that the author expects better parenting from conservatives because they’re wiser.Report

      • Garion Frankel in reply to Pinky says:

        Slight misread. It’s more that with all the talk about parent’s rights, which I broadly support, I would (naively) expect more people to put their money where their mouth is.Report

      • texasaggie in reply to Pinky says:

        Hardly. The conservative parents here in College Station aren’t playing with a full bag of marbles. In fact, a lot of them are playing with an empty bag.Report

    • InMD in reply to John Puccio says:

      Honestly? Yes. If you’re throwing your minor child into the maelstrom of culture war and politics you are making the wrong decision, whatever the cause.Report

    • Garion Frankel in reply to John Puccio says:

      Yes, I am. I said much the same about Greta Thunberg. Hogg was two months away from being 18 when he became famous, so it’s a little different. Still destructive, but he was making an informed choice as a near-adult.Report

      • texasaggie in reply to Garion Frankel says:

        Also, he was faced with a situation where he could have ended up dead, and he is trying to prevent other kids from facing the same situation. The kid with the patch wasn’t facing anything even close to the same. If the school hadn’t made an issue of it, nothing would have happened. There is a big difference between a 12 year old wearing a patch and an 18 year old surviving a school shooting. As for Greta, she’s way more mature than the vast majority of the people criticizing her.Report

        • Garion H Frankel in reply to texasaggie says:

          Fair points!

          Greta has turned into a mature activist (though I do not agree with her at all), but I did not like the way adults were using her when she first started (age 15/16).Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    I’m remembering a great comment from a few months back.

    “Quit making wild pitches and they’ll quit stealing bases.”

    The teachers were dumb, the administration was dumb, and the kid pushed a point and got what appears to be a pyrrhic victory. Well, for himself. He got minor (non-phrrhic?) victories across the nation and, I’m sure, started a trend for Middle School backpacks everywhere.

    This part: “Teachers, rightly or wrongly, are not happy with the student.”

    This strikes me as where the problem is likely to fester. I mean, assuming they can’t be trusted to put any prejudices aside. They probably can, though. Professionals would.Report

    • Kristin Devine in reply to Jaybird says:

      It’s funny how parents are supposed to believe that teachers with clear political agendas posting TikToks about how they love indoctrinating their students are absolute professionals who would never ever let their feelz affect their in-class behavior and yet somehow the author of this piece is wringing his hands about whether the teachers can set aside their prejudices because a kid stuck a sticker on their backpack.

      Which is it? Are teachers impartial, impeachable professionals who would never let their personal opinions affect their ability to teach, or are they lunatics who cannot control themselves when faced with a tiny piece of cloth??Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        The kid did something much more unforgivable than “wear a patch after being told not to”.

        He made the teachers and the administration look bad.

        Worse than a crime. It’s a mistake.Report

      • texasaggie in reply to Kristin Devine says:

        You have a point. In my schooling through grad school, the teachers and professors who were most emphatic about indoctrinating us were right wing to far right wing. One of the worst was one who spent the whole semester lecturing about how going off the gold standard was going to destroy the country and if that didn’t happen, the protesters against the Viet Nam war would destroy us. This was a course in science.

        The others were less obvious, but it was still there.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

      There was a great deal of Discourse back in the Covington Catholic thing about how that one kid was Very Clearly Smiling Smugly Because He Knew He Was Making The Grownups Mad.

      And, y’know. Looking at the pictures of this kid? That is a kid who is Smiling Smugly Because He Knows He Is Making The Grownups Mad.Report

    • Hoosegow Flask in reply to Jaybird says:

      It was a charter school.

      Seems to me like the parents could simply have chosen to enroll their kid in a different school if they didn’t approve of the current one.Report

  4. Greta Thunberg just absolutely LOVED this article! So brave! So insightful.Report

  5. Chip Daniels says:

    In this case, I side with the kid.

    There isnt anything inflammatory about the Gadsden flag that warrants such a response. For the record, I’d say the same if it was a rainbow flag.Report

  6. Saul Degraw says:

    The teacher in this story seems particularly dumb. Truth be told, I have always had a soft spot for the Gadsden Flag and dislike that it has become associated with right-wingers. It should be noted that Colorado’s Democratic Governor defended the flag and the kibosh was put on this very quickly: https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/29/gadsden-flag-vanguard-school-colorado-springspolis/Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      If you look at the pictures, you see that the kid’s backpack is covered with right-wing-Online references, so what’s happening here is that the teacher was trying to squelch a shit-starter (an important part of classroom management, and one which I fully support) but felt like school policy required that there be an objective reason to do it, and they weren’t smart enough to game out the rubber after playing the Racism card.Report

  7. Garion H Frankel says:

    Completely agreed. It’s the lionization I have a problem with.Report

  8. Fish says:

    Sigh.

    Everything is stupid, all the time.Report

  9. Saul Degraw says:

    I agree with your observations that being at the center of this is not good for kids in general but it is going to be more common in our increasingly negative partisan driven future. Kids make great political theatre unfortunately. The teacher here was being incredibly dumb with her reasoning.

    Interestingly, I did not hear about this particular tempest in a teapot until your post.Report

  10. LeeEsq says:

    I can see how at least some liberals are going to be turned off by the Gadsden Flag since it is being adopted rapidly by the Right as a symbol of limited government or whatever. Since college educated liberals tend to be very skeptical about the meaning of symbols and ceremony, they are also often too quick to concede them.Report

    • Pinky in reply to LeeEsq says:

      Fifteen years ago, there was a large yard I used to drive past that had five flags flying: two current American, one Confederate, one Gadsden, and one Israeli.Report

  11. LeeEsq says:

    I’m wondering if association the Gadsden Flag is indirectly something that comes from the 1619 project. There is a growing but erroneous pop culture idea that the American Revolution was all about preserving slavery in certain quarters of the online left. Therefore, anything related to the American Revolution is a de facto symbol of slavery and white supremacy because reasons. It is basically Bearded Spock American Exceptionalism.Report

  12. This finally motivated me to look up something that I’ve often wondered about.

    Turns out the flag Gadsden was the grandfather of the purchase Gadsden.Report

  13. A report about the situation from a news source not invested in inflaming culture war:

    https://www.koaa.com/news/covering-colorado/colorado-springs-mom-says-son-kicked-out-of-class-over-gadsden-flag-patch

    The mistake made by the school is easier to understand in the context presented here, though it was still a mistake.Report