No, the Mexican flag is not all-American

Powerline:

Violent mobs who have attacked Donald Trump supporters at one rally after another wave Mexican flags while burning American flags. The vast majority of Americans will disapprove, to say the least, so the Associated Press felt called upon to assure us that Mexican flags are really OK: “Mexican flag, seen at Trump protests, has long history in US.”

The flag of Mexico has a long history in the United States, despite being a symbol of a nation south of the border. It became a topic of discussion last week after a violent anti-Trump protest in Albuquerque.

Trump lashed out on Twitter after protests outside his Albuquerque rally sparked a riot that caused thousands of dollars in damage, condemning “thugs who were flying the Mexican flag.”

“Lashed out” is what reporters say when they want you to be skeptical of a remark that otherwise seems to be plain common sense.

The AP wants us to think that Mexico has legitimate grievances against the U.S., although how that is relevant remains unspoken:

After the United States took over a third of Mexico’s territory following the U.S-Mexican War in 1848, the flag remained a symbol of resistance due to broken promises outlined in Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, said David Correia, an American Studies professor at the University of New Mexico. That treaty said former Mexican citizens from New Mexico to California would be granted full American citizenship, but instead, they faced illegal land seizures by whites and decades of discrimination, Correia said.

Here, the AP relies on a left-wing activist who describes his academic interests as “Critical Environmental Politics, Critical Legal Studies, Marxism, New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest,” and who rejects the “the bourgeois notion that the individual is the privileged political actor in society.” In other words, the left-wing thug should be the privileged actor in society, which is what the anti-Trump rioters believe.

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