Major free speech fight in river city.

My Hudson Valley village is trying to force a Vietnam vet to take down a Trump flag on his property, citing an allegedly "content-neutral" code violation.

I’ve been working on a story for “Words for the Wise” about the New Yorker’s factchecking department, inspired by a recent vanity piece in that publication, but it has been delayed by some major drama here where I live in Croton-on-Hudson. And we are talking about drama that is going national, although the story was first broken by The Croton Chronicle, the online newspaper I publish and edit.

The basics (see the link above for details) are that Croton is largely dominated by liberal Democrats who fully control the five member Board of Trustees, including the mayoralty. Since 2021, a local disabled Vietnam vet, Leonard Amicola (or “Lenny” as he is known here, where he graduated high school in 1966 and has lived for 67 years) has been flying various forms of Trump or MAGA flags on his property in the heart of the village.

Village officials tried to force him to remove the flag back then, but backed down after it became clear it would likely be an expensive court battle (Lenny has refused to take it down.)

But last week, after Lenny ignored a violation notice issued last July, the village filed a criminal complaint against him. Our mayor claimed in his statement to the Chronicle (and has repeated it for the growing number of media outlets that are covering the story) that the village code Lenny is accused of violating—which forbids banners but not flags under most circumstances—was “content-neutral” and had nothing to do with free speech.

Since the first story, I have reported on a number of developments, including a reliable report that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has taken an interest in the case. There are also reports that President Trump himself has been informed of the situation; and of course, the right-wing media are getting happily involved, including a story by NewsMax just today (Libs of TikTok and other right-wing social media are on it as well.)

Do not be surprised if Trump comments about the situation on Truth Social before very long.

Also today, the Chronicle published a Guest Editorial by Lenny himself about why he won’t take the flag down. It’s worth a read.

There are few subjects in which the left and the right in this country share a more common hypocrisy than that of free speech. Even if there were really such a thing as “content-neutral” laws—which I would argue do not exist—this is certainly not an application of them. Liberal Democrats in Croton have been trying to get the village to force Lenny to take his flag down for years, and Lenny’s attorney—should the case get into legal discovery—should be able to find proof of that fairly easily.

Context is everything, in the law and in politics. One of the ironies of this case is that Lenny’s flag is factually correct: For better or worse, Trump is his president and all of ours, democratically elected even if by a small margin of the popular vote.

To be blunt, how foolish is it for our village to turn a Trump supporter into a national hero and his free speech fight into a cause célèbre? The net effect of this will be to help Trump and his MAGA supporters claim the moral high ground on free speech issues, even as Trump is in overdrive dismantling not only our free speech rights but most other rights as well.

Just today, for example, the media reported on Trump’s order to dismantle (“partially”) the peace vigil that has been held outside the White House for decades. I think most readers here are familiar with the many other examples, including attempts to deport foreign students for engaging in peaceful protests against the war in Gaza. Trump is an enemy of free speech, full stop.

I am not a free speech absolutist, but then I do not claim to be. One person who did make such a claim, the late journalist Nat Hentoff, did not make any exceptions that I recall. He would have just laughed at the idea of a “content-neutral” village code that required a Vietnam vet, or anyone for that matter, to take down his Trump flag or any other flag.

So the right-wing will make a lot of hay out of this situation for weeks and perhaps months to come, as Lenny’s case winds its way through the courts (he and his local attorney, Roseann Schuyler, seem pretty determined to take it as far as necessary.)

Will local Democrats, or any Democrats for that matter, learn something from having made yet another political miscalculation? I’m not very confident that they will.

Stay tuned. I may be reporting locally, but the issues and the stakes are global.

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