Bondi's firing of top DOJ ethics official led me to decide it was time to turn my protest flag upside down, by Hal M. Brown

I was going back and forth about how to display my American flag at protests as I saw more people with their flags upside down signalling that the coutry was in severe distress. The next national protest is Thurday (link).

The photos above show our flags at the No Kings demonstration. You can see someone with their flag upside down.

I wasn’t sure whether enough people understood what the upside down flag meant for me to follow suit.

I wrote about this on April 26th here:

I didn’t want anyone to think I was disrespecting the flag, hence my indecision about how to display it.

I flew it this way at home on Flag Day:

I want to stop MAGA from owning the flag and their flying it as proof that it was them who were the true patriots.

There is no doubt that American democracy is in distress. Historically, at sea flags were inverted as a signal that the ship was in dire need of assistance.

If we’d been on a ship, the ship of state, and it was about to sink and we were trying to call for help by inverting the flag, we’d have already watched our vessel go down and the flag being submerged beneath the waves. We’d be trying to stay afloat in icy waters and we’d soon freeze to death, pun intended. The icebergs in our waters now carry guns.

Readers of this do not need a list of the reasons I say that Old Ironsides, the USS Constitution, and all it represents, has been cannonballed by Trump and MAGA.

I am just writing about the final wave which, for me, crashed over the ship of democracy.

We are going to one of the Thursday nationwide protests against the Trump administration which are planned for this Thursday, July 17th, to observe the five year anniversary of the death of John Lewis. We will take our flags (the USA flag above a smaller Pride flag) and signs.

This HuffPost story was what made me decide to change the position of the flag.

See what Joseph Tirrell posted on LinkedIn in response to being notified that he was fired by clicking here ¹

The term ethics is often used interchangeably with morality (see the Britannica). Ethics is typically associated with societal and institutional standards of correct and right conduct. I’ve never seen an American entity called “The Office of Morality.” The Taliban, however, does have a morality police (officially “The Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”). It enforces strict interpretations of Islamic law in Afghanistan. They impose regulations on personal behavior, mostly suppressing the rights of women. They often severely punish those who violate their rules.

If we had morality police enforcing the views about how people should treat each other with respect, the old fashioned Golden Rule, Trump who fancies himself to be the golden president, would be severely punished.

In the United States we don’t have a Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Instead we have The Department of Justice.

I wonder what a Taliban scholar who believes that their version of a department of justice is enforcing righteous values would say about the values of a country whose own department of justice just fired their top morality official.

A certain irony:

Russian dictators sent their enemies to Siberia where the winter months were nothing to sneeze at (so to speak):

Reference.

Trump and henchman Homan, along with his henchwoman Kristi-cream Noem, are sending their enemies to a hellishly hot Everglades swamp with dime sized mosquitos (reference).

Read previous Substacks

Recent:

1. On Friday, July 11th, I received the below letter from Attorney General Pamela Bondi.

Until Friday evening, I was the senior ethics attorney at the Department of Justice responsible for advising the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General directly on federal employee ethics. I was also responsible for the day-to-day operations of the ethics program across the Department. I led a small, dedicated team of professionals and coordinated the work of some 30 other full-time ethics officials, attorneys, paralegals and other specialists across the Department of Justice, ensuring that the 117,000 Department employees were properly advised on and supported in how to follow the Federal employee ethics rules.

My career in public service has so far spanned a quarter of a century. I started as a United States Naval Officer, graduating from the ROTC program at the University of Michigan. After a 6-year military career, I earned a law Degree from the Detroit School of Law at Michigan State University. I started at the FBI in 2006 in the Presidential Management Fellows Program. At the FBI, I worked in a variety of offices thanks to the PMF program and eventually I went to work for the FBI’s Office of Integrity and Compliance. From there, I moved to the Departmental Ethics Office at Main Justice as Deputy Director. Finally, in 2023, I was promoted to the Senior Executive Service and the Position of Director of the Ethics Office.

My public service is not over, and my career as a Federal civil servant is not finished. I took the oath at 18 as a Midshipman to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I have taken that oath at least five more times since then. That oath did not come with the caveat that I need only support the Constitution when it is easy or convenient. I look forward to finding ways to continue in my personal calling of service to my country. I encouraged anyone who is reading this to do the same. I believe in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I also believe that Edmund Burke is right and that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."

I received a number of calls and messages of support in the last few days. Thank you to everyone who has reached out. Be well.