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Carrefour, a supermarket chain, said the maker of Pepsi, Lay’s and 7-Up was keeping its food “unacceptably” expensive despite falling inflation.
The economic headlines in Europe have been glowing recently: Inflation, according to official statistics, is finally coming down. But tell that to consumers still facing runaway prices when they head to the supermarket.
On Thursday, France’s biggest food retailer took a drastic step to confront the situation, announcing that it would no longer sell PepsiCo products because the prices were “unacceptably” high for consumers, escalating a showdown by French retailers to name and shame brands that aren’t lowering prices as inflation eases.
Carrefour, a global retail giant, put up posters Thursday throughout its 3,440 supermarkets in France where Lay’s potato chips, Pepsi and 7-Up soft drinks, as well as Doritos, Quaker cereals and other PepsiCo products, are typically displayed. “We are no longer selling this brand due to an unacceptable price increase,” the signs said.
A spokesperson for PepsiCo said the company had “been in discussion with Carrefour for many months, and we will continue to engage in good faith in order to try to ensure that our products are available.”
The move was the latest broadside — encouraged by the French government — to try to strong-arm manufacturers to lower food costs that have continued to buffet families despite a broad slowdown in price increases across Europe.
Part of that campaign includes identifying brands that also engage in the practice of shrinkflation, in which manufacturers downsize food packages while maintaining or raising the price.
Inflation in the eurozone fell to a new two-year low in November, dropping much faster than expected as a result of an aggressive campaign of interest rate increases by the European Central Bank and efforts by European countries to ease prices for energy and food. In France, inflation rose at an annual rate of 3.7 percent in December, down a third from a year earlier.
But food price inflation is especially persistent. A typical basket of food basics in France, from pasta to yogurt, is still 7 percent higher than it was a year ago.
Some manufacturers have justified those costs by arguing that profit margins in Europe are below average because the costs of inputs are particularly high. Unilever’s chief financial officer, Graeme Pitkethly, told analysts in October that “the extent of price increases, whilst historically high, has still not been enough to cover the cost inflation that we have experienced.”
France, which is Europe’s biggest market for groceries by supermarket sales, has been pressuring manufacturers and retailers for over a year to force prices down.
President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to see food prices come down by at least 5 percent, to reflect an overall decline in raw material costs that has started to emerge after more than a year of record-high prices resulting in large part from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In November, he demanded that a deadline for once-a-year price negotiations between French retailers and manufacturers be moved up two months, to the end of January, to bring quicker relief for shoppers. France also recently submitted a proposal to the European Union that would force food retailers to carry out a shrinkflation labeling campaign. Carrefour has started marking its shelves with signs detailing the degree of shrinkage and how much consumers were getting gouged on prices.
“We have large companies that are jacking up the prices of some of their brands, and we want to get them around the table again and achieve price decreases as quickly as possible,” Mr. Macron said. “It is intolerable to see so many households having to make choices about essential goods.”
Many global consumer goods companies have raised prices by double-digit percentages in the past year. They have often attributed the increases to higher costs of ingredients and labor. At the same time, many of those companies have reported expanding profits as they sell fewer items at higher prices.
In recent months, companies have reported that shoppers are more weighed down by inflation and high interest rates. Companies that sell consumer goods, including PepsiCo, have reported noticing customers tighten their purse strings.
“I do think that we see the consumer right now being more selective,” Hugh Johnston, PepsiCo’s chief financial officer at the time, told analysts in an October earnings call. “You see some orientation toward value.”
Retailers are eager to see prices come down. Executives at Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer, welcomed the moderating prices of general merchandise leading into the holiday season, but worried about stubbornly high food prices.
“The pockets of disinflation we are seeing are helping, but we’d like to see more, faster, especially in the dry grocery and consumables categories,” Doug McMillon, chief executive of Walmart, told analysts in November.
The move in France comes amid broader momentum in Europe to tackle a cost-of-living crisis that has persisted even as the economy flags. While the U.S. economy has been expanding, Europe has been moving along a very different path: a drawn-out economic slowdown burdened by a double dose of high interest rates and the lingering impact of the energy crisis set off by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In Italy, the government has sought to pressure retailers and manufacturers to reduce food prices. The Greek government has started requiring supermarkets to report the prices being charged for basic foods.
Other big French supermarket chains said they might follow suit. “It’s not over,” Michel-Édouard Leclerc, the president of Leclerc, a major food retailer, said in an interview on French radio Tuesday. He added that many food manufacturers were still asking for price increases of 6 to 8 percent.
Both sides are trying to profit from reducing this moment to a whole lotta merch.
After the mug shot, the marketing.
Since former President Donald J. Trump’s booking photo was released by the Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff’s Office late on Aug. 23, it has exploded across hundreds of T-shirts and tchotchkes.
First out of the gate, not surprisingly, was the Trump campaign itself, which overnight splashed the picture on a variety of merch. Hours later, the Never Trumpers, otherwise known as the Lincoln Project, had also reproduced the mug shot on a — pun alert — shot glass, along with the acronym “F.A.F.O.” and the exhortation to “Raise a glass to justice.” Not long after that, Green Day, the punk band, offered a T-shirt on Instagram that had swapped out the portraits on the cover of its 1997 “Nimrod” album with the mug shot.
Between the two poles is a veritable bonanza of stuff on sites like Redbubble and Etsy, where if you search “Trump mug shot,” more than a dozen pages of products come up, pro-Trump and anti-Trump alike. See, for example, a T-shirt by LemonGoats that features the booking photo and the line “Grab him by the penal code.”
But what does it mean, exactly, that no matter our allegiances at this particular moment, or our different versions of recent history, we share a common ground right in the middle of an ocean of consumer kitsch? That while we may have lost the skill of constructive dialogue, we all still speak T-shirt?
“It shows the cynicism of late capitalism and the era we are in,” said Wendy A. Woloson, a professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of “Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America.”
“Normally you would be ashamed of a mug shot and what it represents,” Ms. Woloson said, “but this is a way for both sides to own it. Literally. To domesticate it and make it safe by turning it into a commodity.”
Who benefits, really, from such transubstantiation is a more complicated question.
The day after the mug shot was taken, Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s advisers, posted a warning on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to anyone considering “raising money off the mug shot of @realDonaldTrump.” If you have not received an official OK, he wrote, “WE ARE COMING AFTER YOU.”
But, Susan Scafidi, the founder of the Fashion Law Institute, said that federal law does not protect the right to publicize your own likeness — albeit in some cases “protection against false endorsement or association may apply.”
“Trump could, in theory, attempt to shut down sales of merch with his mug shot,” Ms. Scafidi said, “not unlike the way Obama objected to appearing on a Weatherproof Garment Company billboard, but I suspect his legal team is busy with other matters.”
Besides, she continued, “the U.S. Copyright Act excludes from protection any works created by the federal government, but not state or local governments, so technically the state of Georgia owns the photo, subject to fair use limitations.” In any case, neither concern appears to have stopped anyone.
The Trump campaign has made out very well, as you might expect from a man whose greatest product has always been himself, and whose view on the world often seems to involve the monetization of all things.
Buying any product from a candidate’s store equates directly to money in their campaign bank account, since under federal law any such purchase is actually a donation; the object is the premium you get in return. On Aug. 26, Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, posted on X that since the mug shot was taken, the campaign had taken in $7.1 million, with “$4.18 million yesterday (Friday) alone, the highest grossing day of the entire campaign.”
It’s the same story at the Lincoln Project, where Rick Wilson, a co-founder, said that shot glasses (one of 10 possible mug shot-related products the creative team had tested) were the fastest-selling product the organization had made since 2020. All proceeds, he said, would go toward their media campaign to raise awareness about the “threat to the Republic” they believe Mr. Trump represents.
“It’s a way to capture a moment like this in a way that turns Trump’s notoriety and infamy back on itself,” Mr. Wilson said. To use that notoriety to a different end, the Green Day tee is being sold to benefit Greater Good Music, a charity helping the victims of the Maui wildfires.
What they and all those involved, including the Etsy and Redbubble sellers — who are simply profiting off a cultural convulsion — understand is that, increasingly, our politics aren’t real unless they are advertised. Or maybe they are too real, until they are reduced to the digestible level of advertising.
“It’s a way to trivialize a larger issue, to reduce a complex context to the status of a simplistic message,” said Marita Sturken, the author of “Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero” and a professor at N.Y.U. Steinhardt. It is, she noted, a hallmark of early 21st-century American culture.
In a sense, consumption has become a way to process our experience, to reduce what could be an overwhelming sense of anxiety or fear sparked by a national event involving allegations of insurrection and threats to the constitution by remaking it and recoding it as a joke product.
“Americans have been defining themselves through their consumption patterns for centuries,” Ms. Woloson said. “Other cultures do it too, but we do it on steroids.” This is simply what she calls the ultimate “encrapification” of that tendency.
The problem is, in reducing big issues to the level of cheapish everyday stuff, both sides are also normalizing them. They are creating a situation in which we all get suckered into the idea that the current turmoil is a souvenir to be acquired and then stuck in a drawer, rather than confronted. Is that really something to be proud about buying into?
Early in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an Osage woman named Mollie gives her gravely unsuitable white suitor, Ernest, a Stetson. It’s a large off-white hat with a bound-edge brim and a wide ribbon around the band. It’s a gift but it feels more like a benediction, and anyone who’s ever watched an old western film (or “Star Wars”) will recognize the symbolism of her largess. Mollie is telling Ernest that she sees him as a good guy, even if the movie has already violently upended the familiar dualism of the white hat vs. black.
That dichotomy shapes “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a deeply American story of greed, betrayal and murder told through the anguished relationship between Mollie (Lily Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio). It’s around 1919 and Ernest is wearing his World War I uniform when he dismounts a train in Fairfax, an Oklahoma boomtown where luxury cars rumble down dirt roads. He’s come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a smooth-talking rancher who, in one breath, asks him if he has seen bloodshed and, in the next, describes the Osage as the finest and “and most beautiful people on God’s earth.”
The movie is based on David Grann’s appalling, all-too-true crime book from 2017, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.” In adapting it to the screen, Scorsese and Eric Roth have dramatically narrowed the role of the F.B.I. to focus on the multiple murders — scores, perhaps hundreds — of Osage members that took place largely in the 1920s on the tribe’s oil-rich reservation in northern Oklahoma. As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, oil made the tribe among the wealthiest people in the world. It also made them the target of numerous white predators. As a 1920 article in Harper’s ominously put it: “The Osage Indians are becoming so rich that something will have to be done about it.”
The following year, Congress passed a law that required the Osage to prove they could handle their reserves “responsibly.” If they couldn’t, they were declared incompetent and appointed a guardian; it was a status, as Grann explains, that was usually given to full-blooded Osage like Mollie. It’s instructive then that the first time you see Mollie in “Killers,” she is in an office being asked to state her name by an unseen man. “I’m Mollie Kyle, incompetent,” she says, her face a serene blank. The man is her guardian, yet another smooth talker, though one with a picture of a Ku Klux Klan rider on his wall. When Mollie leaves his office, Scorsese cuts to a shot of her feet on a doormat imprinted with “KIGY,” an abbreviation for “Klansman, I greet you.”
Mollie gives Ernest the Stetson soon afterward in a sequence that both lays out many of the story’s themes and beautifully illustrates dialectical filmmaking in four or so revelatory minutes. It opens at the 22-minute mark with Mollie walking away from the camera while coyly looking over her shoulder at Ernest, who’s watching her from a car. By that point, he has started working as a chauffeur ferrying around locals. She’s one of his regulars, and he thinks she’s sweet on him, which pleases Hale. If “we mix these families together,” he tells Ernest, Mollie’s money “will come to us.” As he often does, Ernest looks utterly baffled by his uncle.
As Mollie walks toward her house, a pulsing bass line revs up. The soundtrack includes original music by Scorsese’s friend and frequent collaborator Robbie Robertson (who died in August), as well as old songs like the jumpy blues number that’s playing when Ernest and Mollie first meet in town. The notes that begin pulsing now create an entirely different mood and feeling simply because they sound like a heartbeat, if one that sometimes skips. And for good reason: The song is “Heartbeat Theme/Ni-U-Kon-Ska,” the meaning of which becomes clear when, after a few more cuts, the camera settles on Ernest’s face. “I am an Osage brave,” he says in halting voice-over, his words creating an odd counter-rhythm to the thumping.
Ernest’s voice-over continues as the movie cuts to a brief bird's-eye view of him pulling away from Mollie’s house followed by a close-up of his hand holding an opened illustrated book. Scorsese — working with his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker — holds on the shot long enough for you to scan both pages, the chapter heading (“Osage Culture & History”) and the simple illustrations, including of a woman near a tepee, some men dancing around a fire and others on horseback. As Ernest speaks, he turns the page, revealing other images — a buffalo hunt, a map of Indian Territory — and it becomes clear that he’s reading, either aloud or in his head, from this book. Ni-U-Kon-Ska, he says, means “children of the middle waters.”
Titled “Lilly’s Wild Tales Among the Indians,” the book belongs to Hale, who had earlier instructed Ernest to school himself on the Osage. It resembles the kind of old-fashioned children’s primers from the 19th and early 20th centuries that were still floating around the New York City school system midcentury, so it’s easy to imagine that a book like this drifted into Scorsese’s life at one point. (The main illustration in the movie is based on one such volume from 1901.) The book is as crudely simplistic as you would expect, yet when Ernest reads the words, “‘Move,’ said the Great White Father, from Missouri, from Arkansas, from Kansas,” he is also speaking to the grimly true history that informs Scorsese’s movie.
Ernest reads a caption on an illustration, his finger tracing the words, “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Just as he finishes the sentence, you hear the metallic jangling of a door opening, and the camera hurriedly pans up to find Ernest’s brother, Byron (Scott Shepherd) — in another light-colored hat — bursting into the room. “All right,” Byron says. “Let’s go.” The men rush to join a third, Blackie Thompson (Tommy Schultz), who’s waiting in an idling car. Ernest’s voice-over continues as they drive off, and a wailing harmonica joins the heartbeat, Ernest’s voice briefly dropping out when the men — now all wearing hoods over their heads — excitedly rob a wealthy Osage couple at gunpoint.
The men convene at a billiard parlor (Scorsese is working fast!) where Ernest, as will be his habit for the remainder of the movie, makes a catastrophically wrong bet. “I love money! I love money!” he exclaims just before losing his night’s take. It’s first light when the men leave the parlor, and as they walk out Ernest’s voice-over resumes: “Dawn was always a sacred time for prayers.” The movie then cuts to a long shot of Mollie praying at a riverbank, an image that’s followed by a rapid volley of shots — of the sun, moon and fire — that ends on a vast green field dotted with the purple and white flowers that give the movie its title. It’s as if, Ernest says, Wah’kon-tah, the Osage word for God, had sprinkled the Earth with sugar candy.
Although Ernest’s voice-over pauses during the robbery, it only fully ends when he and Mollie are at an outdoor christening, a nod at the life and the children they will soon make together. The strange heartbeat, though, continues as Ernest drives Mollie to her house, bringing the sequence full circle. This time, though, he walks Mollie to her front door, where she stops to give him the Stetson before they enter the house, where her mother is. Before they do, he puts on the hat. It’s preposterously large. It’s also a near-match for the pale 10-gallon hat that the John B. Stetson Company custom made for the silent-film star Tom Mix, a Hollywood hero who helped popularize the country’s romantic myth of itself that Scorsese furiously dismantles in this brilliant movie shot by shot, scene by scene, heartbeat by heartbeat.
Maybe you learned about Athletic Greens on an episode of “Pod Save America,” or between gruesome tales on “Crime Junkie.” Perhaps you heard an ad for it on Dax Shepard’s podcast, “Armchair Expert,” or Conan O’Brien’s or, if it’s more your style, Joe Rogan’s. You might have even caught wind of it on a New York Times podcast, like The Daily.
“The secret to making a successful podcast is you have to use Athletic Greens,” joked the writer and editor Clint Carter in a tweet.
For a company that’s been around for more than a decade, it seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Athletic Greens aggressively advertises (and sells) only one product: AG1, a moss-toned powder that costs $99 for a 30-serving bag and claims to be “all you really need, really.”
But it isn’t a meal replacement nor is it a pre- or post-workout drink, as the brand’s name implies. AG1 promises “75 vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics and adaptogens” in one scoop. The ingredient list is biblically long and rife with parentheses, its components categorized by wellness buzzwords: “Alkaline, Nutrient-Dense Raw Superfood Complex” (including spirulina, wheatgrass and broccoli flower powder), “Nutrient Dense Extracts” (pea protein isolate, ashwagandha extract) and “Digestive Enzyme & Super Mushroom Complex” (like dietary enzymes and mushroom powders).
Simply put, it is a drinkable multivitamin and probiotic.
Within the sleek, emerald packaging — designed, it seems, to make opening it feel ceremonial — is a bag of AG1 and a clear branded bottle. The instructions recommend mixing one 12-gram scoop of powder with eight to 12 ounces of cold water and drinking the concoction on an empty stomach (“or as recommended by your health care professional”).
After a purchase, Athletic Greens sends customers an email suggesting ways to make the dietary supplement taste better: Add juice, mix it with plant-based milk or blend it into a smoothie. Sweetened with stevia and flavored with pineapple and vanilla, the powder tastes exactly how it sounds: like broccoli pretending to be a milkshake.
In a sponsored TikTok for the brand, Callie Jardine, a fitness influencer, uses AG1 to make what she calls her “hot girl green smoothie.” Adding the green powder, she says in the video, helps with her “really intense digestive problems.” (Everyone knows hot girls have stomach issues.)
But Athletic Greens is not just for hot girls and athletes. Current customers are “50 percent women and 50 percent male,” and range from ages 20 to 70, the company said in an email, with the largest proportion of consumers falling between 30 and 50 years old. The breadth of podcasts the product has appeared on makes one thing clear: Chris Ashenden, Athletic Greens’s founder, wants everyone to drink his product.
“There’s this cultural phenom where people want to be in control of their own health,” said Mr. Ashenden, an entrepreneur from New Zealand, where AG1 is produced. “And I don’t think the genie is going back in the bottle.”
As Covid-19 spread in March 2020, sales for multivitamins in the United States rose by more than 50 percent compared with the same period the previous year, and the supplement industry was valued at $151.9 billion in 2021 by Grand View Research, a market research company. In January, it was announced that Athletic Greens, which Mr. Ashenden started in 2010, had raised $115 million in venture capital, and that the company’s valuation had hit $1.2 billion.
Influencer partnerships on TikTok, along with podcasts, seem to be a high priority for the brand’s marketing — posts bearing the hashtag #agpartner proliferated on the platform after the funding announcement and have been viewed more than 38 million times.
“It would literally pop up on all of my social medias,” said Lexi Fadel, a 27-year-old physical therapist in Los Angeles. After struggling with hormonal acne and bloating, she said, “I was willing to try anything.” Influencers convinced her that AG1 was the answer. Ms. Fadel purchased AG1 twice — despite the taste. “Not the best,” she said. “It was to my benefit, so I forced it down.”
After three months without changes, she decided to give it up. “I consume enough greens on my own,” she said.
There’s nothing novel about people craving control of their health, and marketing food and beverages as comprehensive health solutions is not a new phenomenon: One-stop-shop predecessors include Soylent, beloved by bio-hacking tech bros, and Daily Harvest, a smoothie company and influencer darling recently embroiled in a recall scandal.
AG1’s purported benefits are vague enough to compel credulous consumers. It “promotes gut health,” “supports immunity,” “boosts energy” and “helps recovery,” the company claims. Of course, there’s fine print: “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”
“The overarching drive to buy something like that is not feeling good enough about your body,” said Christy Harrison, a dietitian and author whose forthcoming book focuses on the traps of the wellness industry. “It’s a slippery slope. You feel bad about yourself, you want to self-optimize and you think that you can do that through this wellness phenomena, like Athletic Greens or Soylent or intermittent fasting.”
At the core of our obsession with wellness, and the proliferation of these products, said Alissa Rumsey, a dietitian and author of the book “Unapologetic Eating,” is the very human fear of death and desire for control. The wellness industry perpetuates both. “It can make people feel like their health is 100 percent in their control,” she said. “But it’s not.”
“We know what happens when we eat the whole fruit or the whole vegetable,” Ms. Rumsey said. “It’s not quite as clear when they’re broken down into the compounds in these powders.”
So how, in the rapidly expanding and highly unregulated world of wellness, is a consumer to make an informed choice?
Those who can afford to experiment with something like Athletic Greens — like Ms. Fadel — are probably eating enough fruits and vegetables, Ms. Harrison said.
“Most people don’t need supplements of any kind — whether it’s green powders or pill supplements.”
Among the banners that Donald Trump’s supporters carried as they stormed the Capitol three years ago — 2016’s Make America Great Again flags and 2020’s Keep America Great flags, Confederate battle flags, Gadsden flags, Pine Tree flags, the Stars and Stripes — appeared a now-familiar variant of the American flag: white stars on a black field, with alternating black and white stripes, except for the stripe immediately beneath the union, which is blue.
As a piece of design work, it is slightly awkward; the colored stripe attempts to impose symmetry on an image that is fundamentally asymmetric. But as a political totem it is undeniably powerful. A merger of the American flag with a symbol representing the police, the thin blue line flag has become a potent statement in its own right.
First introduced in the 2010s, it quickly became the dominant popular symbol of the police, flown in pride, solidarity, memoriam, defiance. It was something more than that, too. Beyond a marker of professional affiliation, it was a symbol of personal identity, one that was not restricted to members of law enforcement — one that could even, eventually, be used against them.
How a symbol of support for the police came to be borne by rioters as they smashed through a police line is a story that encompasses 70 years of rhetoric about policing, crime and politics in the creation of a new tribal identity — one that swept Mr. Trump into office and tried to keep him there. But it starts an ocean away, during the Crimean War, 169 years ago.
Allied Ottoman, British and French forces were trying to hold off a Russian attack on the small port city of Balaclava in 1854. The war correspondent William H. Russell observed the battle from an overlooking ridge, and his dispatch for The Times of London captured the scene with impressionistic immediacy — the Russian cavalry were “clouds of mounted skirmishers, whirling and wheeling in front of their march like autumn leaves tossed by the wind”; later, their advance was composed of “shifting trails of men, which played all over the valley like moonlight on the water.”
At what seemed a pivotal moment in the battle, the Russian cavalry advanced on the woefully outnumbered soldiers of the British 93rd Regiment standing between them and a base. Mr. Russell wrote that the scarlet-clad regiment — arranged in two lines rather than the usual four — looked like a “thin red streak topped with a line of steel.” The 93rd fired two volleys at the approaching Russian troops. At the second volley, the troops turned aside, the base was saved, and a legend was born.
A few months later, The Times reported that during a debate in the House of Lords about whose feats of valor should be honored with medals, the Earl of Ellenborough praised the heroism of “the ‘thin red line’ who had met and routed the Russian cavalry.” The earl was almost certainly referring to Mr. Russell’s account, but whether his poetic rewording was an accidental paraphrase or an intentional gloss is history’s secret. Either way, it was this version of the phrase that took hold in the popular lexicon, and so completely that even Mr. Russell, years later, seems to have forgotten that the line had ever been a streak.
Almost as soon as the phrase was coined, its definition was broadened to become shorthand for the British military more generally, particularly its courage in the face of long odds or superior numbers. Color-swapped one-off riffs followed — the thin white line of British colonizers, the thin yellow line of conservative activists.
In the United States, Willis John Abbot, a military journalist, wrote of how, at the Battle of Vicksburg, “the Confederates were seen to fall into confusion, waver, and give way before a thin blue line” — the advance guard of the Union troops. Other writers deployed the concept to refer to the Rough Riders at San Juan Heights and the American frontier garrisons that stretched across the West.
As old age thinned the ranks of the Civil War veterans, and drab olives and browns replaced the deep blue of the Army’s service uniforms, this “thin blue line” came to refer to a new group: police officers.
Almost a century after the Battle of Balaclava, William H. Parker, a career police officer and a World War II veteran who had been wounded in Normandy, became the head of the Los Angeles Police Department. His ascension in 1950 came with a mandate to root out corruption and rehabilitate the department’s battered image. And on the battlefields of Crimea, he found a metaphor to inform both tasks.
“Between the law-abiding elements of society and the criminals that prey upon them,” Mr. Parker said, “stands a thin blue line of defense — your police officer.” The police, in his vision, weren’t just protecting public safety; they were combating the decline of Western civilization, the rise of Communism, the moral laxity of postwar America, the decay of the nuclear family, and so on.
Mr. Parker remade the department in the professional, militaristic image of the thin blue line. (To help publicize this transformation, he also created a public access talk show by that name, along with effectively co-creating “Dragnet,” the ur-police procedural.) He withdrew his officers from community events and foot patrols, placing them instead in vehicles and insulating them from political oversight. These changes did reduce corruption, but they had another effect: They turned the L.A.P.D. into an occupying army.
The thin blue line would become the dominant metaphor for the police. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan said the thin blue line held back “a jungle which threatens to reclaim this clearing we call civilization”; in 1993, President Bill Clinton called it “nothing less than our buffer against chaos, against the worst impulses of this society.”
But Mr. Parker’s vision went beyond policing as a profession. In 1965, he told a civil rights commission investigating the Watts riots that “the police of this country, in my opinion, are the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America.” This belief, a half-century later, would animate an identity politics that blurred the blue line. For its adherents, being a police officer would not be necessary to be considered a soldier in the battle between order and chaos. Eventually, it would not even be sufficient. And in some cases it would even be disqualifying. This identity group would have a flag that would embody Parker’s favorite metaphor.
Since at least the 1980s, police officers had been adding a stripe of blue to the black mourning band they added to their badge to remember fallen colleagues. In the 1990s, Steve Bollinger, a police shooting instructor from DeKalb County, Ga., sold lapel pins and car decals that featured that blue stripe on a black field — but only to fellow officers (though enterprising civilians figured out that putting it on your bumper might help you avoid a speeding ticket). But in late 2014, Andrew Jacob, a University of Michigan student, saw the opportunity to market a different version of the symbol.
As the country was roiled by protests after decisions not to indict police officers for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, as well as the shooting of Tamir Rice, Mr. Jacob sketched out a black and white American flag with one blue stripe running just below the stars. Weeks later, after two New York police officers were killed by a man vowing to avenge Mr. Brown and Mr. Garner, he began producing and selling that flag and helped to catalyze a movement.
Blue Lives Matter is not just an expression of support and solidarity for the police, but a response to and rejection of Black Lives Matter. It suggests that it is not Black people whose lives are undervalued by society, but police officers.
The innocuous-sounding slogan Black Lives Matter can represent a range of political narratives, from the modest request to reduce the number of people killed by police officers to the expansive argument that the criminal justice system — and virtually every American institution — is irredeemably racist and must be abolished.
Similarly, Blue Lives Matter is a movement that belies the simplicity of its name: It can certainly mean that the police deserve respect for doing a critical and dangerous job. But it can also mean that overzealous racial politics have inverted the criminal justice system, punishing the peacekeepers, coddling the criminals and turning those who carry a badge into the most embattled and victimized group in the nation. Blue Lives Matter transformed policing into a tribal affiliation.
This is why the thin blue line flag fit so comfortably alongside the other symbols borne by the coalition of the far right that gathered in Charlottesville, Va., for the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017: the alt-right’s faux-ironic Nazi homage, the flag of Kekistan; an updated version of the cluttered mash-up of the Nazi Party and American flags that is the banner of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement; the teal and white Dragon’s Eye of the white nationalists of Identity Evropa; swastikas and Sonnenrads; Confederate battle flags. Mr. Jacob immediately denounced the use of the thin blue line flag’s use by white supremacists, but its symbolic potential had been demonstrated months earlier. When Representative Steve King was criticized for keeping a Confederate battle flag on his desk — he represented Iowa, a Union state with no Southern heritage — he quietly replaced it with a thin blue line flag.
The flag’s closest forebear is the now largely forgotten black and white American flag employed by Black Lives Matter protesters in the immediate wake of the killing of Mr. Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Functionally, it recalls the minimalist color swap of the artist David Hammons’s African American flag, which changes out the red, white and blue for the red, black and green of the pan-Africanist movement. With its minimalist palette, it powerfully evokes the desaturated American flag patches sometimes worn on military camouflage. As the L.G.B.T. American flag does, it exploits a visual pun, but much less playfully: The blue line divides America against itself.
Like other mash-ups of identity flags with the American flag, the thin blue line flag is a rallying point for a marginalized identity, a way to lay claim to the American birthright, a demand for long-denied respect. And you don’t have to be a police officer to wrap yourself in it.