A marathon city council meeting in Orange County, California, ended in the early hours of Thursday morning last week with a dramatic victory for free speech advocates.
Right-wing city council member Mike Munzing, known among his opponents as “MAGA Mike,” lured a standing-room-only audience to council chambers Wednesday night with his proposal to ban all flags on city property in the town of Aliso Viejo, nestled just east of seaside Laguna Beach, with one exception: the American flag.
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Munzing’s main target in the proposed ban: the Pride flag.
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At the proposal’s introduction, the MAGA loyalist was joined by two other far-right members on the five-person council in support. By the end of the six-hour meeting, MAGA Mike’s Pride flag ban was literally in tatters: Munzing himself shredded the document in a fit of red-faced rage.
Over several hours of testimony extending well past midnight, 164 people spoke in opposition to the proposal, eviscerating Munzing and his allies as “mean,” “small,” “ignorant,” and “pathetic.”
Just 13 speakers expressed their support.
Speakers included Chris Kluwe, the onetime Vikings punter and Orange County resident who’s made a name for himself as a fierce warrior for equality and same-sex marriage.
“This is not what America’s about. We have a president that is proclaiming executive orders trying to erase trans people from existence, and you say that the American flag includes everyone,” Kluwe told the council. “For over 100 years, the American flag stood for slavery, and we had a war to fix that. For 90 years after that, it stood for segregation, and people took to the streets to get rid of that.”
“I do not want the American flag to stand for hatred and discrimination, and flying the Pride flag shows people that we understand that,” Kluwe said in his speech.
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Aliso Viejo resident Jeff was unsparing in his description of Munzing, who watched alternately bemused, stoic, and blushing from his podium chair.
Munzing, he said, “doesn’t get how mean this is. But the meanness is 100% the point. The meanness is everything to you. You revel in it, you lather in it. And I know how you love this packed room. And I know you love how everyone is here to see this. It’s like a carnival for you,” he told Munzing.
“But you look small. I’m looking at you, and you look small and ignorant and pathetic.”
Munzing has turned the American flag “into a MAGA infomercial,” Jeff said. “You know what this is, and you f*ckin’ love it.”
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Orange County resident Noelle Carney Campbell applauded Also Viejo Mayor Tiffany Ackley for “the freaking amazing moment of this night,” when she disassembled Munzing’s proposal for its sloppy moral and legal arguments. She said they would open the small city to legal challenges like those in neighboring Huntington Beach, which has been overwhelmed with lawsuits challenging the beach city’s MAGA-majority town council.
@missnoellealways Banning the Pride Flag is WRONG!!! So proud to look MAGA Mike Munzing in the eyes at the Aliso Viejo City Council Meeting and remind him of LGBTQ history and that we are not going anywhere!!! #pride #alisoviejo
♬ original sound – Noelle Carney Campbell
The meeting was halted halfway through so Munzing and the city attorney could clean up the proposal’s careless language, including a definition of what a flag actually is and clarifying that the ban didn’t apply to any flag flown anywhere by anyone in the city.
In a summary of the night’s events, Campbell said the council members pushing for the flag ban complained that speakers in opposition had “hate in their hearts.”
“It was a very white-men-victim-mansplaining-mentality,” she said. “It was pretty gross.”
The proposal, Campbell told Munzing in her own statement, “makes you look insecure and weak, and like someone who spends an uncomfortable amount of time thinking about gay people.”
The ultimate victim at the carnival he’d assembled was Munzing himself, who finally spoke at 12:45 in the morning. In a fit of rage, MAGA Mike ripped up the revised proposal to cheers and a standing ovation. The flag ban was voted down 5-0.
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