On Wednesday night at a rally held for Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, members of the crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance to an American flag that they were told was present at the Capitol during the 1/6 insurrection.
Youngkin was not present at the rally, and on Thursday issued a statement denouncing the act.
“While I had no role in last night’s event, I have heard about it from many people in the media today,” he said. “It is weird and wrong to pledge allegiance to a flag connected to January 6.”
He added, “As I have said many times before, the violence that occurred on January 6 was sickening and wrong.”
Chris Hayes took the flag business to task as well, going so far as to draw a parallel between the reverence bestowed upon on it by the crowd to that of the Nazi Party’s so called “Blood Flag”:
Now, a bunch of people – historians and observers – on Twitter and elsewhere pointed out a really unnerving and jarring historical echo here. In 1923, Adolf Hitler carried out his own unsuccessful attempted coup. You probably know about this. It’s called the Beer Hall Putsch. It began in a beer hall in Munich and then Hitler led a mob of about 2,000 Nazis in a march through the city as he tried to seize power, and it ended in a clash with police that left several people dead.
And Hitler, he and a bunch of his confederates got away but then arrested, tried for his actions, convicted of high treason. He served less than a year in prison, but that’s when he wrote the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf. Hitler and the Nazis after the Beer Hall Putsch created a mythos around that failed coup. And a flag that was present that day, the so-called “Blood Flag,” stained from the violence, became a totemic relic for the Nazi party. Hitler used it to consecrate new Nazi flags.
Hayes added, “Now, of course the people at the Virginia rally yesterday are not Nazis, clearly. But when you hear the story, you look at them pledging allegiance to a flag used on the day of the insurrection at the Capitol, a day when the Trump mob tried to destroy more than 200 years of American democracy and people died? It does not give you a great feeling in the pit of your stomach.”
Watch above via MSNBC.