NPS Staffers Hang Upside-Down Flag in Yosemite to Protest Firings -- They Don't Get Reaction They Expect

redstate.com

My colleague Streiff wrote about some of the firings in the National Park Service including this fascinating paragraph that he cited from the original Washington Post story. 

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At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.

How does any of that make sense? Why do you have only one guy with the keys and what kind of knowledge do you need to be able to open a bathroom door? Instead of being the plaintive appeal perhaps they hoped, it was a glaring example of exactly why things need to be reformed. 

READ MORE: Danger of Being Locked in a Toilet Faces Visitors to Our National Parks After 1,000 Employees Are Fired

There was another example in Yosemite National Park. Some NPS employees took the time to hang a flag upside down off El Capitan.

In a statement, the group of six who hung the flag said: 

“The purpose of this exercise of free speech is to disrupt without violence and draw attention to the fact that public lands in the United States are under attack,” it reads. “The Department of the Interior issued a series of secretarial orders that position drilling and mining interests as the favored uses of America’s public lands and threaten to scrap existing land protections and conservation measures. Firing 1,000s of staff regardless of position or performance across the nation is the first step in destabilizing the protections in place for these great places.”

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They continued: 

“These losses, while deeply personal and impactful, may also be invisible to visitors and the public — we are shining a spotlight on them by putting a distress flag on El Capitan in view of Firefall. Think of it as your public lands on strike.”

There were also pictures of other people protesting the cuts. Notice the signs with that "silence is violence" -- a typical leftist protest expression -- as well as "ACAB" which is "All cops are bastards."

This of course is exactly the wrong approach. The reaction to this on X was largely along the lines of, "Your actions suggest you should have been fired long before now." Some on X asked if any of this was being done on the taxpayer dime, and noted that if it was, the staffers proved they were non-essential. Additionally, aren't they supposed to be protecting the lands, not hanging flags off them to make political statements? 

One might also note that wasn't it the left who attacked such use of the flag when it came to the flag hanging at Justice Samuel Alito's home? 

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Now I get that losing a job is not a happy thing. But we're also over $35 trillion in debt and need to get our house in order. We've needed someone to come in with an axe for some time, to care about spending and get things under control. In the private sector, no one has a guaranteed job, but somehow people in the federal government seem to think they do. There are also people who seem to think that the vast unelected bureaucracy gets to tell the duly elected president what to do, rather than the other way around. 

That's not the way our constitutional system works.