@philokalia said
The action is the same, but the motive is different.
Conservatives boycotted Nike for canceling a shoe that simply showed a classic American flag on it -- a historic symbol that people associate with the glory of our country.
The Liberals are trying to organize a boycott of a man who simply said we're all blessed that the current President is the President.
You'd agree that the difference here is pretty stark, yeh?
When you put it that way, conservatives are even stupider and more petty for complaining about the failure to put a flag on a sneaker when that flag hasn't been used officially for more than 240 years. At least the "liberals" are dealing with a issue
now.
But, in fact, various extremist right wing groups have used the Betsy Ross flag recently:
"It [the Betsy Ross flag] has, however, been associated with the Patriot Movement, an anti-government, extremist right-wing movement that encompasses smaller fringe movements such as the militia movement, the sovereign citizen movement, and the tax protest movement. (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was highly influenced by militia movement ideology.) The militia movement, says Pitcavage, is the youngest of the three, dating from about the mid-1990s, and has been using the Betsy Ross flag, among other Revolutionary War-era symbols, since its inception. “Because they view themselves as analogous to American revolutionaries, they love to use old flags from that era,” he says, citing the Revolutionary War-era “don’t tread on me” flag as another example. The Betsy Ross flag is apparently so closely identified with the Patriot Movement that until this morning, it was the main image of its Wikipedia page, according to reporter Charles Robinson. (It has since been removed, but is viewable on a cached version of the webpage.)
While the white supremacist movement and the Patriot movement are not synonymous, there is some overlap between the two. The flag has also been used or reinterpreted by groups like the American Identity Movement (formerly Identity Evropa) and Patriot Front, both of which have been classified as hate groups by the SPLC and were founded within the past few years. Pitcavage says that
the Knight Riders, a now-defunct West Virginia-based Ku Klux Klan group, at one point required that every chapter of the group had to use either the Confederate flag or the Betsy Ross flag to cover the “altar” during meetings with Klan rituals; most recently, the Betsy Ross flag was depicted in a 2018 flier allegedly distributed in upstate New York for the United Northern & Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which depicts a Klansman on horseback carrying a Confederate flag in one hand and a Betsy Ross flag in another. Such groups “[brand] themselves in the trappings of Americana with the aim of creating a more marketable image for their dedication to creating an all-white nation,” says Hankes."
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/betsy-ross-flag-nike-colin-kaepernick-patriot-movement-ku-klux-klan-854612/
I doubt that most people have even seen a Betsy Ross flag, never mind associate it "with the glory of our country." By contrast, most Hispanics are aware of the types of positions Donald Trump has publicly taken that are hostile to Hispanics and thus a boycott of a company who's CEO said the country is "blessed" by his Presidency is a lot more rational than screeching about what is or isn't on a shoe.