Two college students who posted a viral video of an alleged unidentified faculty member removing a Thin Blue Line flag and an American flag emblazoned with the Gadsden symbol – resurrected to ubiquity by the Tea Party – joined "Jesse Watters Primetime" to react to the incident.
Finn McCole and Lucas Turco of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., said they had noticed other students festooning LGBT pride and Black Lives Matter flags, and wanted to present their own symbol of personal self-expression – but that their particular viewpoint wasn't welcomed the same way.
Turco said despite the woman, reported to be a university employee, claiming hanging flags in such a manner was a safety concern, the woman refused to take the same tact when asked about a nearby LGBT flag.
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"We believe everyone has a right to their own opinion and their own beliefs and that everyone should be able to put their flags up. And so we thought, why don't we put up some flags that we personally believe in?" he told Jesse Watters, who along with Fox News' Tucker Carlson are also Trinity alumni.
The university employee objected to being filmed while attempting to take custody of the flags, later saying they could be retrieved from the Dean's office.
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"They said that the reason that they were taken down was because some people viewed the flags as offensive. And I think that's absolutely a shame that those flags could be offensive. And, you know, they're just about loving our country and the people who protect us," Turco said on that note.
McCole said the dean's office later seemed "very open to apologizing" for the incident, but added that their purported remorse doesn't change the fact their office tried to forcibly remove patriotic symbols in what was seen as hypocritical selective enforcement of rules.
"It's a sad state of affairs, but, you know, we don't hold hate in our hearts for these people. The incident occurred. But, you know, we're we're open to having productive conversations with them going forward," he said.
Watters, who graduated in 2001, later remarked that when he was at Trinity, there wasn't so much politicization and that the campus engendered the typical college experience with emphasis on football and socializing.
