It's no surprise that San Francisco is run by a bunch of insurrectionists.

How many of us secretly believed that the city was only barely American in the first place? There is even a Nelson DeMille book in which the ultra-conservative baddies plan on nuking San Francisco because it was full of anti-American zealots. It's hard to argue with their reasoning about S.F., but I would never endorse nuking any city, no less one as beautiful as the City by the Bay. 

Still, you wouldn't expect the city fathers (mothers? Nonbinary caregivers? Degenerate lawmakers? What should I call them?) to be flying an ultra-MAGA January 6th insurrectionist flag. I would have expected a modified Cuban flag with rainbows and a keffiyeh or something. 

But sure enough, until this weekend, the city was flying the "Appeal to Heaven" flag, showing their support for a violent insurrection to install Donald Trump as El Supremo Maximal Dictator Extraordinaire. 

EXCLUSIVE:

Guess where else the ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag of Alito vacation home fame flew in recent years?

Outside San Francisco City Hall — until this past Saturday...

By @rachelswan https://t.co/6oFxnRAbYi

— Demian Bulwa (@demianbulwa) May 29, 2024

A flag that had caused zero controversy for much of its time in a San Francisco city-owned collection of historic flags, which have flown outside City Hall since the 1960s, has been quietly removed by Rec & Park staff after it has come to take on new meaning.

A flag that was one of several historic flags coopted by the Stop the Steal movement following the 2020 election — and specifically associated with a far-right segment of the Christian right — has made headlines in the last week since it was revealed that it had been flying outside the vacation home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. For many years, it has been one of a collection of 18 flags representing different moments in American history that have flown on flagpoles in what's known as the Pavilion of American Flags in Civic Center Plaza.

Known as the Pine Tree Flag, it was created in 1775 at the request of George Washington, with the phrase "An Appeal to Heaven" on it, to be flown on colonial fighters' ships so that they could recognize one another.

Normally, my surprise at San Francisco flying the flag would be the result of the city acknowledging that it is in the same country as Florida and Texas, but since I have been reliably informed that only the most scandalously Trump-besotted would ever consider flying it, I now worry that nobody to the Right of Karl Marx is even safe in the city. 

San Francisco is MAGA COUNTRY! Jussie Smollett should stay away, right?

As this history of the Pavilion of American Flags, posted by KQED in 2017, explains, "The flagpoles were installed during a period of great nationalism, especially in San Francisco," and the flags were first raised in 1964. The American flag as we know it had just been redesigned following the statehoods of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, and a local service club, called the Sertoma Club, came up with the idea of a collection of flags — which included obscure ones from the country's history, including the now ubiquitous "Don't Tread on Me" snake flag, known as the Gadsen Flag, which also dates to 1775.

It is, I suppose, just possible that nobody had any idea that the 'Appeal to Heaven' flag had anything to do with Donald Trump, MAGA, Republicans, or any insurrection aside from the one led by George Washington against the British. After all, nobody I know, including myself, a reasonably well-informed news junkie, had any idea that the flag was even controversial before being informed by the media. 

The whole Alito flag coverage is kind of a textbook example of the way that the weaponization of press coverage contributes to the deterioration of political norms. https://t.co/F175lsgHBH

— Fred Bauer (@fredbauerblog) May 29, 2024

But that only proves that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and MSNBC have a much better understanding of conservatives than I or any other actual conservative. 

It is well known that these guys are always spot-on regarding such matters. They certainly wouldn't invent a story out of whole cloth just to smear a Supreme Court Justice, would they? 

Never! That would be like suggesting that the Steele Dossier isn't real or that the Hunter Biden laptop isn't Russian disinformation. 

It is now something of a tagline on Instapundit that you don't hate the mainstream media enough, and that is indisputably true. They lie all day, every day. You can trust nothing that they say. If they can get what they want with a hoax, they will invent a hoax, or take one ready-made for them by scumbag Democrat operatives and amplify it. 

Millions of Americans woke up last week to discover that the Appeal to Heaven flag is a MAGA cult symbol, which must have been a surprise, since most of those millions had never even heard of it. They thought, oddly, that it was red baseball caps that said "Make America Great Again" that symbolized fealty to Trump. 

Who knew? Except the secret right-wingers in San Francisco city hall. They knew, the MAGATs.