Earlier this month, California Senator Kamala Harris dropped a tantalizing truth bomb during a speech: many official flags in use in California were made by state prisoners. Via Mother Jones:

Harris was referring to the visit she made to the Central California Women’s Facility in July, a visit on which I tagged along. It was a surreal experience to watch dozens of women, mostly women of color, at work stations inside of the country’s largest prison for women, laying out and printing fabric and then dyeing it royal blue. It was just as surreal, if not more so, to hear prison officials point out that these flags would one day fly atop every state and federal building in California, describing this with something almost adjacent to pride.

• There’s a Pretty Good Chance Your American Flag Was Made by a Prisoner (Mother Jones)

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Maybe next presidential election, it would behoove pollsters to check in with flagmakers of Yiwu, China's main manufacturing center for flags exported to America. One manufacturer told a Chinese video site he knew Trump would win because they were exporting so many more Trump flags. Read the rest

South Carolina's Senate passed legislation Tuesday to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state house, where it has flown for five decades despite being viewed by many as a symbol of slavery.

On June 25, 1978, Gilbert Baker raised the first Rainbow Pride flag in San Francisco. Last week, MoMA acquired the flag for their collection, and they have a terrific interview with the designer. Get some vexillographic insight!

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Four of Amazon's ten top-selling flags are currently Confederate in the wake of proposed bans across the U.S. The trend echoes spikes in gun sales when 'Muricans fear the government is going to impose new restrictions on firearms, or when Coca-Cola announces a new formulation. Maybe it's people buying them to burn, but probably not. Read the rest