You Are the Boot: Reclaiming the Gadsden Flag from the People Who Pretend to Carry It

This is the longer version of the receipt.

What Gadsden actually did

In 1775, Christopher Gadsden, a merchant and South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress, designed a yellow flag for the first commanders of the new Continental Marines. The flag carried a coiled rattlesnake on a yellow field with the legend Don't Tread On Me. The image was borrowed: Benjamin Franklin had drawn a segmented snake in 1754, captioned Join, or Die, arguing that the colonies needed to act together against the French during the Seven Years' War. The Continental Marines who carried Gadsden's flag did so on board the first US naval squadron, on a raid against the British supply depot at New Providence in the Bahamas in March 1776.

This is what the flag was. A battle ensign. Carried by people about to take direct armed action against an actual empire. The empire was the British Crown. The rebels were unfunded, outnumbered, and within a year of an outcome that nobody at the time could guarantee. The rattle on the snake was a warning to people with vastly more power, from people with the courage to issue it anyway.

That is the only meaning the flag had for two hundred years.

What happened in the late 2000s

Around 2009, the flag was picked up by a new political movement. The Tea Party, and the right-wing political infrastructure that grew out of it, adopted the Gadsden flag as a visual signature for a politics whose actual content was: lower taxes, stricter immigration enforcement, support for the police, support for the military, opposition to the Affordable Care Act, and a generalized animus against the federal civilian agencies the flag's new carriers happened to dislike (the EPA, the Department of Education) — while supporting, at high volume, the federal agencies they happened to like (ICE, CBP, the military, the police).

The flag's new carriers were not fighting an empire. By the available evidence, they were supporting one. The signal value of the flag drifted accordingly. By the mid-2010s, it had become a near-reliable predictor of a specific political identity that had nothing in common with Christopher Gadsden's 1775 project.

This is what symbols do. They drift. They sometimes drift toward the opposite of their origin and remain functionally legible as the new meaning. The Gadsden flag's drift was complete enough that by the time the EEOC was asked in 2014 whether wearing a Gadsden patch at work constituted racial harassment, the commission could only answer it depends. It depended on who was wearing it. It depended on what they were wearing it about. The drift had outrun the symbol.

The masked-fed problem

The drift produced an internal contradiction the wearers have not yet been forced to confront. The flag, by its own logic, condemns federal overreach. The flag's modern carriers have spent the last decade cheering for federal overreach when the overreach has been pointed at people they disliked. Don't Tread On Me gets flown next to images of masked federal agents detaining immigrants without identifiable insignia, conducting raids on the wrong addresses, deploying tear gas at lawful protests, and arresting people for offenses ranging from civil-immigration matters to misdemeanors that, twenty years ago, would have generated a citation and a court date.

The flag is doing the opposite of what the flag was for. The wearer is, in the most literal sense, the boot. The snake on their bumper is being driven through the same town the bumper sticker was supposed to be protecting from the driver.

The You Are the Boot shirts name this directly. The Gadsden snake is preserved exactly. The four words underneath — YOU ARE THE BOOT — are the corrected reading of the flag for anyone who has been carrying it through the last decade. The reading is not optional. It is empirical.

Tread Daddy

The Tread Daddy shirt makes the same point with a sharper edge. It is the parodic reductio: if the carriers of the Gadsden flag are, in fact, fans of the boot, then the flag's actual sentiment is please tread more. The shirt prints that sentiment out. The snake is the same snake. The yellow field is the same field. The translation underneath is the modern one.

Parody and documentation are not in tension here. The parody is the documentation. The wearers of the original flag have been documenting, in their political behavior, that Tread Daddy is what they actually meant. The shirt is the corrected caption.

Reclamation, not abandonment

The shirts are not a rejection of the Gadsden flag. They are a reclamation. The flag belongs to people who do the work the flag was originally about — opposing actual overreach by actual empires, taking actual personal risk in service of a freedom that is portable across race, geography, religion, and party. The flag belongs to the people standing in the legal-aid line at the ICE detention center. The flag belongs to the journalists who are arrested for filming a protest. The flag belongs to the librarians being threatened by school board mobs for keeping books on the shelf. The flag belongs to the legal gun owner whose front door was kicked in by a no-knock raid on the wrong address.

The flag does not belong to the people who showed up in tactical cosplay to argue with a school board about library books. It does not belong to the pundits who spent ten years justifying every federal escalation against people who looked the wrong way. It does not belong to the legislators who voted for the surveillance authority their own bumper stickers protested against.

The flag belongs to the work. The shirts identify the work.

What the shirts ask

The shirts ask one question of every wearer: which side of the flag are you on, given what the flag actually meant? The question is not rhetorical. The answer is in the wardrobe. The answer is in the bumper. The answer is, increasingly, in whether the wearer can sit through Minneapolis 01.24.26 in silence.

Don't tread on me is the slogan. They already did is the receipt. You are the boot is the verdict. Tread Daddy is the punchline.

All four sentences are the same flag, read accurately, for the first time in fifteen years.