Massachusetts Hits New Low With Latest Self-Hating Flag Designs

Never underestimate the creativity of the virtue-signaling Bay State pseudo-intellectual

Clockwise from top left: a mayflower, The Mayflower, culturally significant turkey feathers, culturally insignificant turkey

It warmed my heart to read in the Boston Globe that my home state of Massachusetts has redefined peak stupid. At least in something, we’re still Titletown, U.S.A. The money quotes involve two of the three finalist submissions for state emblem:

Massachusetts is getting a new seal, flag, and motto this year and voters just narrowed the choices down to three options in each category… The state’s current emblem has drawn controversy due to its use of colonial imagery…

This design displays the state’s flower, the mayflower. The petals are in the same shape of the shield on the current state flag. The blue evokes the Massachusetts’ coastal waters, while the gold reflects the iconic dome atop the state house… This design features six turkey feathers which hold cultural significance in some Indigenous traditions, often representing health and well-being. They face clockwise in a circle to show forward progress and community.

The crimson is commonly associated with education in Massachusetts—schools that use the color include MIT, Harvard University, UMass Amherst, and Arlington Public Schools…

You read right: Massachusetts is replacing the Mayflower with a mayflower. If the upper-left finalist entry wins for the state seal, the word in Bay State lore will henceforth refer to a plant, not a ship. Yes, it’s the state flower, but every native once knew why it was the state flower. Now, Masshole children will peer at the Mayflower image the way a dog looks at a television.

Surpassing that hideous agitprop for sheer self-satisfied Yankee pomposity are the six clockwise turkey feathers. Why turkey feathers? The bird, it seems, holds cultural significance in some Indigenous traditions. Turkeys obviously have no other relevance to Massachusetts, to the national holiday based on one of its famed historical events, or the Stockbridge painter whose turkey-themed painting helped make him a national icon (I speak of infamous settler-colonialist Norman Rockwell). Impressively, even the Globe got through the section about turkey without mentioning Thanksgiving.

The wipeout of the Mayflower, Thanksgiving, and the long-ago excommunicated arrow-shot Pilgrim hat logo from the Massachusetts Turnpike (“The Pike”) means the work is done. The state’s Brahmins have erased all vestiges of old Masshole tradition, with one conspicuous exception: Harvard. The culturally significant turkey-feather circle is gold on crimson, a color “associated with education” (a massive LOL at state pols and the Globe arguing with a straight face that Arlington public schools were the inspiration). After switching out a classic piece of Americana — the Pike entrance was the ‘65 GTO of road signs — Massachusetts wants to make its emblem an ode to Ivy League circle-jerking that looks suspiciously like a Comintern flag designed by Currier and Ives:

Left, the old Pike sign. Right, the new whatever

Once, Boston was known as a tough working class town with regrettable racial attitudes that happened also to be the enlightened capital of Western academia. Now the academics are the racists and the working class jobs are gone, though there’s still plenty of grant work apologizing for colonialism. The Back Bay “frustrated women” the Standells once sang about, who had to be “in by twelve o’clock,” used to compensate socially by inventing relatives on the Mayflower. Now they sit on committees to virtue-signal the Mayflower out of existence. The rest of Massachusetts, then as now, is just along for the ride.

The mania for reinvention, which in Minnesota arrived via a new flag that looks like a Somali swim team uniform, is marked by unconcealed desire to delegitimize the American story and reorder society to fit a white-guilt-inspired intersectional fantasy, airbrushing out the messy bits and fetishizing conquered peoples as magic marginalized pals, à la Avatar. We’re about ten minutes from a state commission declaring Plymouth Colony an illegal settlement. The latest evidence that America’s academics need to be sent out on an ice floe:

Massachusetts politicians also moved to eliminate the “racist” seal of Massachusetts. This depicted a Native American criticized for being a “hodgepodge,” since illustrator Edmund Garrett based it on a skeleton found in Winthrop and a head from the Dakotas, not that anyone in history ever noticed:

“By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.”

More offensive is the disembodied arm, which some say belongs to Myles Standish, depicted raised over the native’s head. Others say this is a misread of heraldry and that it represents the Arm of God, protecting the republic. Either way, critics say it’s a “constant reminder” that “the sword was not a friend to the Indigenous people.”

Right. No shit. The Pilgrims were not friends of Native Americans. They were conquerors. There were intermittent periods of détente and cooperation, but for the most part Europeans came to this country, moved steadily West through bloody wars of conquest, and eventually seized 3.12 million square miles stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The colonists were brutal, and so were many conquered tribes. The great historian Robert Caro wrote at length about life in Texas Hill Country in the mid-1800s:

Those who died were luckier than those who were captured. The Comanches were masters of human torture for its own sake; many Hill Country families saw with their own eyes—and the rest heard about—the results of Comanche raids: women impaled on fenceposts and burned; men staked out to die under the blazing sun with eyelids removed, or with burning coals heaped on their genitals. Many women captured by the Comanches were raped, and afterward they might be scalped but left alive—so the Comanches could hold red-hot tomahawks against their naked skulls.

All’s fair in love and war. The Comanche had every right to fight as they saw fit. They also lost, and became part of America’s violent creation story — unless you’re asking Google’s AI, which insists Caro didn’t write about Comanche and Apache raids, which took place “before Lyndon B. Johnson’s life, the focus of Caro’s work”:

Google even recommends readers skip Caro and instead read S.C. Gwynne, author of Empire of the Comanche Moon, which frames the story from the point of view of the Comanche and Quanah Parker, saluting their skill in slowing the advance of the American frontier.

There’s nothing wrong with a laudatory history of the Comanche. The problem is decades of books and movies have flowed downstream from one of the dumbest academic movements ever, with Boston its epicenter. This alchemist mix of postmodern lunacies long ago moved past the assumption that history as once taught is normative oppression and moved to theorists furiously attacking each other for failing to properly “privilege” each other’s marginalized status.

Did feminists fail to “consider the particular experiences” of “women who are not raced as white, not economically privileged, not able-bodied, not heterosexual, not immigrant, not gender-conforming, and not Christian?” Did Catherine MacKinnon obscure “fundamental realities” of “Black women’s social experiences” to an “addition problem” by seeing multiple forms of oppression as just racism added to sexism? When you’re this far down the road of oppression-scoring, the idea that the Mayflower was anything but floating Rape Culture becomes absurd.

But the Pilgrim story is heroic. A handful of kooky religious separatists crossed the Atlantic on a vomit-soaked raft to escape a society that levied fines for missing Church of England services and against enormous odds built a thriving society. They were bastards in their own way, but also tough and industrious and the end result of their experiment was the first non-monarchy with free press and free speech, which became a refuge for hundreds of millions of people around the world, including refugees escaping a long list of tyrannies. Harvard’s current beehive of miserable theorists isn’t getting paid to bicker with one another if there’s no Enlightenment first, but instead of celebrating their state’s role in establishing its foothold, they’ve chosen both to erase history and misrepresent it.

The Globe explained that the effort to change the flag “gained momentum in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd,” when protesters demanded removal of “imagery considered offensive.” But the Massachusetts flag didn’t symbolize racist rebellion like the Confederate-themed Mississippi flag, whose dull new magnolia looks like the Massachusetts mayflower. Even the most ungenerous reading of the old flag tells a true story, like the discarded Pike sign. The state’s Executive Director on Indian Affairs, John Peters, even says he regrets voting to get rid of “a true depiction of what happened to the Native people here,” because changing it “gives the Commonwealth an opportunity to forget about that history.” Meanwhile former state representative Byron Rushing says, “There is this kind of conservatism about the flag and the seal.” Again, no kidding. Flags should be timeless.

We’re recoiling from our history and falsely portraying Massachusetts as a bloodless panacea, like a third-rate community college that somehow noiselessly appeared in time without a backstory. It’s impossible to imagine a society that feels any kind of emotional grounding in such vague and generic imagery. The best of the proposed new flags looks like an AI result for “Seaside nuclear accident”:

A finalist for the new motto is “We honor all life guided by the First Light,” chosen in honor of the Wampanoag tribe, massacred in King Philip’s War after attacking colonists in Swansea. I worked with Wampanoags in a demolition crew once, but that was a freak rare occurrence. Most Massholes, and the bulk of the officials making this decision, probably wouldn’t know a Wampanoag from a Whammy Bar. They would do better with a Latin translation for the Big Papi outburst, “This is our fuckin’ city.” (For that matter, if you’re determined to use kid-friendly imagery, make the state emblem a Green Monster.)

I’ve been critical of the Trump administration’s Executive Order on “Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag” on First Amendment grounds, but another reason is that mandating reverence won’t work. It wouldn’t address the reasons that citizens of a superpower nation are suddenly so desperate to wrap themselves in Pride or BLM or Palestinian flags (occasionally demanding equally stupid legal protections for those symbols) and cosplay as oppressed minorities fighting the hegemon, even if they’re wealthy white kids from Weston or Marblehead. Some of it’s Trump, but really this was inevitable once self-hating campus intellectuals were given free rein to teach that America is the villain in its own national story, while virtue only follows oppression down a sliding scale of misery.

There’s virtue in success and nation-building, too, and you don’t do that by sending fruit baskets from Yankee Candle. It can be dirty business. You’d think Boston, of all places, would appreciate that.