Suppose trump took down all the American flags in the whitehouse and replaced them with Russian flag, or if Obama had taken them down and replaced them with the Isis flag.
There's no world in which that would be taken lightly
And I'm not American in case you were referring to me.
At best you can say that one is simply being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda, but to claim that the public display of such a strong political symbol as a flag is not intended to spread and reinforce what it represents is just absurd.
While propaganda requires displaying symbols, displaying symbols does not necessarily entail propaganda. The entailment is simply not bidirectional, ie. surgery requires a scalpel, but cutting my steak with a scalpel does not make it surgery.
> At best you can say that one is simply being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda, but to claim that the public display of such a strong political symbol as a flag is not intended to spread and reinforce what it represents is just absurd.
No it's not. Someone who grew up on the Dukes of Hazzard maybe just really loved that car and associates it with great memories of a happy childhood. To call this "being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda" is losing the plot completely.
Merely displaying a flag seems like a pretty generous interpretation of "propaganda". It certainly doesn't fit any definition of which I'm aware.
Perhaps there's an argument for banning such symbols, but don't use hyperbole to try and prove your point, you just undermine the legitimacy of this effort.