The New York Times is defending their editorial board member who called American flags “disturbing.”
Their staff member, Mara Gay, caused a firestorm after her appearance on MSNBC Tuesday.
“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing … Essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this,” Gay said.
NYT/MSNBC’s @MaraGay: In Long Island last weekend, I saw “dozens of American flags,” which was “just disturbing” pic.twitter.com/RhGdqqJope
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 8, 2021
Gay went on to trash white people and “whiteness.”
“I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue,” she said, adding that many people don’t understand the “danger” of “whiteness.”
“That is the real concern. Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re all in really bad shape,” Gay said.
In response to the outrage, the New York Times released a statement claiming that people defending the flag are acting in “bad faith.”
New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay’s comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context. Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith.
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) June 8, 2021
“New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay’s comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context. Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith,” the publication wrote.
