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On 7 September 2018, conservative web sites including TheResurgent.com and RedState.com reported that U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke's campaign had asked if American flags at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hall it had rented for a town hall could be taken down. The event in Navasota, Texas, on 25 August 2018 came amid what has been a closely-watched campaign leading up to the November 2018 midterm elections. It was covered by the local newspaper, the Navasota Examiner, which on 4 September 2018 ran a story containing the following quote from VFW Post 4006 Commander Carl Dry. Dry said he received two requests from unidentified people right before the event was set to start: Political websites circulated that quote widely in stories that accused O'Rourke of being a hard-leftist who is going directly after the American flag. It remains unclear however who made the request to take the flags down and why, and it's also unclear which flags they were referring to. We spoke to Dry by phone on 7 September 2018. He said that two people asked him to take the VFW post's flags down, but he didn't know who the people who approached him were: We reached out to Chris Evans, O'Rourke's campaign spokesman, who strongly denied anyone from their camp had made the request: We reached out by email to Joe Cunningham, the managing editor of RedState.com (we were unable to locate contact information for TheResurgent.com). Cunningham said that with the information currently available, they were standing by the story: He invited the O'Rourke campaign to contact him with further evidence. Dry told us that the VFW is non-partisan and will rent space for events to anyone who isn't threatening to burn it down. Rental contracts include language that bars event organizers from removing anything from the walls or rearranging the venue's decor. Of the fuss over the flag, he added, Things have a tendency to get blown out context.
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