On his Daily Wire program Thursday, rabidly anti-LGBTQ+ extremist bigot Matt Walsh called the LGBTQ+ Pride Flag a “hate symbol.” This comes on the heels of fellow Daily Wire host Michael Knowles’s eliminationistanti-trans crusade calling for the eradication of “transgenderism” (aka trans people) and is par the course for The Daily Wire.
MATT WALSH (HOST): Let's just put this plainly. The Pride flag does not deserve our respect.
In fact, it deserves our disrespect. It deserves our contempt and mockery. It is not the flag of gay people. Okay? That's not what it is. Gay people in America, they already have a flag. It's called the American flag. It's the flag we all share or are supposed to share.
The Pride flag, which was invented by a far-left activist drag queen, represents not a person or a people or a community, but an agenda, a political and cultural agenda. It always has. It has from the very beginning. It still does now. And today, nearly all of the most depraved and perverse attacks on children, on tradition, on decency, on common sense are waged under this banner. That's what it signifies. Okay?
The gay pride flag signifies drag queens dancing for toddlers, males invading women's bathrooms. It signifies castration drugs given to children. It signifies the destruction of the nuclear family. When government officials send that thing up the flagpole or paint its ridiculous colors in the street, that is what they're promoting. It's what they're advertising. It is the cause they want us to salute.
Not only should we should we refuse to salute it, but we should treat it with disdain. We should treat it as a hate symbol because that's what it is. They fly the flag, that flag, because they hate you and your values and what you believe and everything you stand for.
And so we should respond in kind to this symbol. In other words, we should give the Pride flag all of the respect that the left shows the American flag. Let's just put it that way.
Dear Mr. Walsh, the LGBTQ+ Pride Flag is NOT a “hate symbol”. This also goes for the Trans Pride Flag and the Black Lives Matter Flag, as those flags are not symbols of oppression.
Wanna know what flags ARE hate symbols? The Nazi Flag, the Kekistan Flag, the QAnon Flag, and the Traitor Flag (commonly known as the Confederate Stars and Bars Flag).
Lindsay Lowe at Parade Magazine on the history of the LGBTQ+ Pride Flag:
The rainbow Pride flag was designed in 1978 by artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker. He came up with the design after prominent gay rights leader Harvey Milk urged him to create a new, positive symbol that the entire LGBTQIA+ community could rally behind.
Up until that point, a pink triangle had symbolized the gay rights movement, Baker explained in his memoir, Rainbow Warrior: My Life In Color.
However, that symbol “represented a dark chapter in the history of same-sex rights,” he wrote. “Adolph Hitler conceived the pink triangle during World War II as a stigma placed on homosexuals in the same way the Star of David was used against Jews. It functioned as a Nazi tool of oppression. We all felt that we needed something that was positive, that celebrated our love.”
Baker thought a rainbow flag would better represent the beautiful diversity of the LGBTQIA+ community. He also considered the powerful symbolic significance of rainbows throughout history.
Here’s a history lesson on the LGBTQ+ Pride Flag:
The first version of the LGBTQ+ Pride Flag was invented by Gilbert Baker in 1978, featuring 8 colors: hot pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo, and violet. One year later, however, two colors were dropped: hot pink due to the difficulty of finding fabric for it and turquoise to maintain an even number of stripes flanking each lamp pole. As a result, the remaining 6 colors formed the now-standard LGBTQ+ Pride Flag (and the base of the Progress Pride variant that has rapidly seen its prominence increase alongside the standard LGBTQ+ Pride Flag).
In 2017, to address concerns of the lack of inclusion of people of color in the LGBTQ+ rights movement, the Philadelphia Pride Flag added the colors black and brown on top of the standard 6-color LGBTQ+ Pride Flag.
One year later, in 2018, the Progress Pride Flag by Daniel Quasar was introduced. It kept the traditional 6-color LGBTQ+ Pride Flag base, with the Trans Pride Flag colors of light blue, white, and pink and the black and brown colors of the Philadelphia Pride Flag added to make a forward-facing arrow. This variant, alongside the standard 6-color variant, are the most common flags for LGBTQ+ expression.
From the 03.09.2023 edition of The Daily Wire’s The Matt Walsh Show: