The Flag That Flies Over Every Cause and Jimmy Carter’s Second Term

Erick-Woods Erickson

---------------------------------------------------------------
Meet the Omnicause
An Iowa accountant named Alysia Ames coined the term “Omnicause” to describe the amalgamation of protests on the Left. Ames coined the term out of frustration with her fellow progressives who made every crusade the same. The British journalist Hadley Freeman sharpened the definition: a good progressive must care about trans rights, Palestinian rights, and the environment all at once, because in the progressive imagination everything is connected.

Everything is connected because every cause in the Omnicause can be reduced to the same story. There is an oppressor and there are the oppressed. The oppressor is always, in the end, the West — its capitalism, its Christianity, its borders, its Jews, and its carbon emissions. The oppressed are everyone the West supposedly victimizes. Once you embrace critical theory, fuel prices in Lyon and rockets out of Gaza are the same fight, and a single flag can stand for all of it.

A decade ago, the rainbow flag was the universal banner of progressive protest, flown at marches that had nothing to do with gay rights. Then it gave way to the Progress Pride flag, with the trans colors and chevrons stitched onto the old rainbow, as the movement moved on to its next cause. Today, both have been pushed aside by the Palestinian flag, which now shows up at nearly every protest in the Western world, regardless of its subject.

In June 2024, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters brought Philadelphia’s Pride march to a halt, and one of them carried a Pride flag with “No Pride in Genocide” scrawled across it. The new cause was written over the old one in marker. Each new banner absorbs the causes that came before it, and each one is more hostile to the West than the last. The rainbow asked Western societies for tolerance. The trans flag demands acceptance. The Palestinian flag, as it is flown in Paris and on American campuses, demands the surrender of everyone and every cause into itself.

LINK