Bikers Against Flag-Burning

Jazz Shaw has some video and commentary about a scuffle in New York this weekend, in which some bikers and veterans got together to disrupt a flag-burning. The group burning the flag looks to be an offshoot of the Black Lives Matter movement, one that claims its purposes is to disarm the NYPD. This group has put together a hoary collection of activists that makes this look just like an episode from the late 1960s, including devoted communists as you can see from their placards about capitalism.

Adding to the nostalgia, the veterans among the bikers seem to be Vietnam veterans. The largest group, though, are Hallowed Sons MC, which isn't an old group at all:

I’ve been riding for almost fifty years, but I’ve only been with the Hallowed Sons for a couple years. The club is new - we started up a few years in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. We got together to help. I spent two months living on the street in New Dorp (a neighborhood of Staten Island hard hit by Sandy) serving people food, helping with mold removal, doing whatever people needed. The Hallowed Sons are hard guys and we’ll fight when we have to but we don’t have to because we stand with strength and unity and brotherhood. We put our energy into the community, supporting first responders, vets, cleaning up the neighborhood, cleaning up the highways. We’re community driven.

This is the kind of guy whose conservatism and patriotism -- indeed whose presence, whose alliance -- is often found embarrassing by the well-educated Republican. Like early volunteer firefighters (who also have a very rough and tumble history entangled with a certain amount of brawling and politics), these guys put themselves together in response to a natural disaster to help their community. The kind of guys who do that have a sort of native love of home, of neighborhood, of village, of city, of country. It's not necessarily closely examined, but it is deeply felt, and they'll fight you if you insult it.

You know, these guys.



A lot of people find them embarrassing, but I love guys like this. It is important, in the right place and time, to reflect soberly on the history and be able to criticize your own where they deserve it. You might be able to analyze in a sophisticated way the history of American, and indeed of Western, policy in the Middle East and the way in which it ties in to the phenomena of terrorism and radical Islamic revival. That's important. It can even be helpful.

All the same, don't go talking about the queen on Independence Day.

UPDATE:  Heh.

"Weenies burn flag to protest cops, get attacked by bikers, need cops to save their asses."