"Historians have devoted generations to Christopher Gadsden’s coiled rattlesnake and his warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.” Yet no surviving document answers my question: Why yellow?"
"Whatever one’s political perspective, the EU’s communication pattern in attacking X’s free speech offerings is strikingly familiar to the lead-up to the American Revolution, when European bureaucrats believed certain American ideas were so dangerous that their spread must be censored, or at least quarantined to North America.
"Indeed, in the years preceding the Revolution, British officials and Loyalists also described colonial freedoms and their resistance to the King in the language of contagion. The “spirit of rebellion” was spreading from colony to colony, infecting minds and threatening the stability of the Empire. Loyalist writers decried how “the violent Spirit in the Whigs… raged with… unbridled Fury,” while officials warned of rebellion as a contagion that could lead to “total Ruin and Destruction.”
"The concern went beyond protests over taxes or Parliament. The greater fear in Britain was that the underlying idea of self-government might prove contagious.
"Only a generation earlier, Britain had watched disease devastate its Caribbean expeditions against Spain, where tropical illnesses destroyed armies on a scale that shocked the Empire, altered imperial strategy, and contributed to political upheaval in London.
"For Britain’s Atlantic leadership, contagion was not merely a medical problem. It had become a strategic one. This observation led me to reconsider one of the most recognizable flags in American history." . . .More...
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