Conspiracy Theory Time

One of my favourite guilty pleasures is conspiracy theories.  Not just any conspiracy theories though, but the ones often put forward by members of the Christian Patriot militia movement in the United States.  Of these theories, my favourite is the "That's not how you spell my name!" argument, that insists that "JOHN DOE," "John Doe,&quot "DOE, JOHN," and "Doe, John" all refer to different people.  (Ofttimes this is combined with the claim that a name all-in-caps represents a corporation.)  Second to that in my list of favourite conspiracy theories, and the one I'm addressing today, is the "That's not my flag!" argument.

Snipped from a piece of drivel that's gone 'round the 'net:

"The flags displayed in State courts and courts of the United States have gold or yellow fringes. That is your WARNING that you are entering into a foreign enclave, the same as if you are stepping into a foreign embassy and you will be under the jurisdiction of that flag. The flag with the gold or yellow fringe has no constitution, no laws, and no rules of court, and is not recognized by any nation on the earth, and is foreign to you and the United States of America."

From this point, the exact details of the claim start to diverge.  Although not the most common, some of the claims are based around the fact that the fringe represents a mutilation, as defined in Title 4, Chapter 1, § 3 of the U.S. Code (4 USC 1 § 3).  We'll get around to this argument in a moment, but first a far more common one:  the yellow/gold fringe on the flag represents a military flag, and therefore any court displaying it is an admiralty or military court, and any person present in said court is therefore subject to admiralty or martial law (or sometimes both are used interchangeably, ignoring the fact that the two are not the same).

(It's ok.  I'll wait for you to stop laughing.  Better now?  Ok, then on we go.)

This argument is usually accompanied by numerous citations of federal codes that the claimants insist prove that the fringe represents a military flag.  The normal ones are 4 USC 1 § 1, 2, 3 (although occasionally they appear to get their sources mixed up, and cite all of chapters 1, 2, and 3 of 4 USC — despite the fact that only chapter 1 deals with the flag, and chapters 2 and 3 deal with the seal and the seat of government, respectively), and Executive Order No. 10834 (signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on August 21, 1959) — either these is sometimes also referred to as 24 FR 6865 (page 6865 of volume 24 of the Federal Record, which contains the text of EO 10834).  These citations are also generally combined with a quote, supposedly from EO 10834, which is as follows:

"A military flag is a flag that resembles the regular flag of the United States, except that it has a yellow fringe border on three sides."

Decades ago, back when not everybody had access to the text of Executive Orders and the US Code, this might have been pretty convincing to some.  However, being that this is the early part of the 21st century, we have the World Wide Web at our disposal, and numerous sources for the text of these documents.  Which brings us to the quote: it doesn't actually exist.  It's completely and utterly manufactured.  You can search through the text of EO 10834 all you want, but you're not going to find it, or any reference to fringe for that matter.  The same goes for sections 1, 2, and 3 of 4 USC 1 — not a single mention of fringe to be found.

Of course, if you don't see where this is going, you haven't been thinking like a militiaman.  And that place is right back to argument that I said I'd get to eventually.  After all, if the appropriate EO and USC sections make no reference to yellow fringe, then therefore a flag with yellow fringe must not represent a flag of the United States.  For this one, we're going to have to turn to a Mar. 28, 1924 opinion of the United States Attorney General.  Unfortunately (like many others) this particular opinion isn't currently available online, so we'll have to be content with quoting from relevant court cases that reference it.  (For the curious: McCann v. Greenway, 952 F.Supp. 647 (W.D.Mo. 1997).  Sadlier v. Payne, 974 F.Supp. 1411 (D.Utah 1997), and Schneider v. Schlaefer, 975 F.Supp. 1160 (E.D.Wis. 1997) also contain the exact same text.)  To quote:

"[fringe on the flag] can not be said to constitute an unauthorized addition to the design prescribed by statute."

34 Op. Atty. Gen 483 (from 1925) supposedly goes into further details (but unfortunately isn't available online, except in quotes from various websites, such as the Institute of Heraldry):

"The fringe does not appear to be regarded as an integral part of the flag, and its presence cannot be said to constitute an unauthorized additional to the design prescribed by statute. An external fringe is to be distinguished from letters, words, or emblematic designs printed or superimposed upon the body of the flag itself. Under the law, such additions might be open to objection as unauthorized; but the same is not necessarily true of the fringe."

Well then, so much for the mutilation argument.

Of course, if it was that easy then the theory wouldn't still be floating around.  In order to explain away all the rulings against them, we get the argument that the flag being used does matter, and that the problem is that the people in the former cases either used the wrong arguments, or placed themselves under jurisdiction of the court to begin with (thereby ensuring that their arguments got rejected).  Sometimes the two arguments as to why there's been no successful challenge based on the fringe objection (and the ADL's Idiotic Legal Arguments has a list of cases as long as your arm to prove that) get combined — which, of course, makes no sense.  They placed themselves under the court's jurisdiction, thereby ensuring their arguments were rejected, yet at the same time those arguments that were rejected as they were the wrong arguments — ignoring the fact that the jurisdiction one implies that any argument, whether it was valid or not, would be rejected.

And that about sums up the fringe-on-the-flag conspiracy theory.  There are also variations of this regarding eagles or any bit of yellow on the top or any part of the flagpole, but the fringe argument is far more common.  Just because it has no laws, codes, or case judgments to back it up, doesn't stop it from spreading.  But then again, little things like facts and actual sources never stop these things, given that you can just claim that They don't want you to know the truth.