The culture war has reached a whole new depth of stupidity

How pickled in far-right ultranationalism would you have to be to imagine that it's patriotic to scrawl your national flag on the ground for cars to drive over?

The culture war has reached a whole new depth of stupidity, with a spate of deluded vigilantes somehow imagining that it’s patriotic to vandalise mini-roundabouts with red paint to turn them into impromptu St George’s flags for cars to drive over.

If you look at the correct protocol for British flags on the Flag Institute website, they don’t even have a section on putting flags on the floor, because aside from burning a flag, putting it on the floor where it can be walked or driven over is pretty much the ultimate insult.

If the Flag Institute did have a section on floor flags, it would probably just say don’t do it, and if it said anything beyond that, it’d probably be to advise that if you do absolutely insist on placing your national flag on the floor for whatever insane reason, please do it in a place where people can’t walk or drive over the top of it.

None of this seems to matter to the vigilante flag painters though, given that this weird trend is spreading like wildfire, and being boosted by far-right operations like Turning Point UK.

The top post beneath a Daily Express article on the flag vigilante craze reads "well done those people painting the mini roundabouts in the likeness of the George cross, give all of them a medal, we should be proud of our flags" which demonstrates extremely messy thinking from both the writer, and the dozens of people who have liked it.

If you really hated England, you could hardly come up with a better plan to ensure as many people as possible walk and drive on the English flag, right?

If you’re actually "proud" of your flag, it seems quite obvious that you don’t messily daub it onto the ground for cars to drive over, and if you hold the British honours system in any regard whatever, surely handing out medals to literally anyone who vandalises a roundabout would severely devalue whatever award you’re giving them?

In their weird little culture war world, it’s the woke thought police who are trying to stop them from creating floor flags. So in their minds, every vandalised mini-roundabout is a glorious victory against the left!

As if anyone on the genuine left actually cares about such absurd nonsense over real issues like low wages, unaffordable housing, austerity-wrecked public services, soaring inequality, privatisation profiteering, workers’ rights, etc.

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for these sad, ignorant, mini-roundabout flag vigilantes.

They’ve had their minds so addled by extreme-right content that they honestly seem to believe that their mini-roundabout vandalism constitutes some kind of brave fightback against the intolerant left, when in reality, the only people really recoiling in horror at what they’re doing are the poor flag nerds, who actually care about correct flag protocol.

This whole weird phenomenon proves absolutely nothing beyond the fact that some people are so stewed in extreme-right ultranationalism that they can’t even grasp that it’s hardly patriotic to scrawl your national flag on the ground for cars to drive over.