It had to be a chilling sight — indeed, a deeply disturbing sight. Like something out of 1930s Nuremberg. There, on Long Island, in deep-blue New York, were … trucks. And white people. With “dozens of American flags.”

Yikes.

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend,” recounted New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay, “and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [she meant "expletives”] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which, y'know, is also just disturbing, because essentially the message was clear. It was, ‘This is my country. This is not your country. I own this.’“

It’s not clear whether Gay actually saw any signs that said, "This is my country, this is not your country, I own this,” or whether she simply gets triggered when she sees a group of Americans flying American flags in America.

Might she be suffering from flagophobia? Or crackerphobia? Or are these simply symptoms of the dreaded Trump Derangement Syndrome?

The above remarks by Gay were preceded by her opining on the outrageous lack of a congressional investigation into the unarmed non-insurrection of January 6. “The reality is, here, that, uh, we have … tens of millions of Trump voters who, uh, continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others. Um, I think, uh, as long as they see Americanness as the same, as one, with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy, but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness.”

Why is it that the Left keeps calling the American experiment a “democracy”? It’s a R-E-P-U-B-L-I-C. Perhaps they just like the idea of “democracy,” given their deep affinity for mobs and mob rule. As James Madison put it in Federalist 55, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

And where does Gay get her notion of “tens of millions of Trump voters” who won’t play nice with others? There’s exactly zero evidence to support this smear. (We should remind our readers that Gay is mathematically challenged. We take no pleasure in saying it, but this is the same genius who last year lamented, along with MSNBC’s Brian Williams, that Mike Bloomberg “could’ve given every American $1 million” instead of having spent it on his pathetic presidential campaign.)

And what’s with the baseless smear of white folks? Does anyone think that had Gay, last weekend on Long Island, amid all those trucks and “whiteness” and American flags, simply walked up and said Hello that she’d have been set upon or chased off? Nonsense. And despicable.

But we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that the Times came indignantly to Gay’s defense, huffing that her comments “have been irresponsibly taken out of context.” What’s the context? “Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith.”

To this we say, pound sand, you schmucks. And we ask, who’s politicized the flag? Her comments are her comments, and they’re there for everyone to see and evaluate. The “out-of-context” canard is the last refuge of leftist scoundrels and fact-checkers. But we repeat ourselves.

Finally, then, we’ll offer a bit of friendly, compassionate advice from our humble shop to Gay and her colleagues on the Times editorial board: Shelter in place. Following Memorial Day and D-Day, and with Flag Day coming up and Independence Day soon to follow, it’s gonna be a mighty tough stretch for folks who hate this country.