The Republican Party was embarrassed when a tweet from its leader account celebrating independence day featured the wrong flag.
The tweet read: “247 years ago our ancestors told ‘Ol King George to get lost! Happy GOP Independence Day!
But the two flags the Grand Old Party featured in their tweet appeared to be flags of Liberia: similar to the Stars and Stripes but with a single white star in the upper left blue canton, alongside a field of red stripes.
The tweet was deleted, but not before screenshots preserved the error for posterity – and mockery.
Jezebel said, “Happy Independence Day! It’s time to poke fun at some nerds who can’t use social media to save their lives.
The site also asked, “What is that sound you just heard between the fireworks? Probably a social media intern who gets fired.
A later tweet from @GOP featured a sparkler in front of an American flag, with the message: “Thank you to all the men and women in uniform who continue to defend our freedom at home and abroad. Happy Independence Day!”‘
Wednesday morning, a tweet an image similar to the original GOP tweet, by the Austin, Texas Police Department remained live.
Under Austin’s tweet, referring to Republican states’ restrictive policies regarding teaching issues such as race in US history, a reviewer wrote“It’s the Liberian national flag, not the American flag. That’s what happens when you ban books.
Books would tell the Republican Party and Austin police why the Liberian flag is similar to stars and stripes.
As the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian has described, “Liberia’s founding in the early 1800s was motivated by the domestic politics of slavery and race in the United States as well as by the interests of American foreign policy”.
In short, the 1816 founding of the American Colonization Society, a doomed attempt by white Americans to solve the problem of slavery by sending slaves to Africa, led to an early group settling in the current Liberia. The West African county declared its independence in 1847.
According to Gettysburg Flag Works – a New York-based company that has manufactured “a wide range of the highest quality flag products… for over 20 years” – the similarity of the flag of Liberia to the stars and stripes “was a deliberate choice. from the government of Liberia to represent the country’s history and the high value the new nation placed on freedom.