I’m being Dixie-fried!
Apt. flag flier cries free-speech ‘abuse’
The East Village resident who sparked outrage by hanging Confederate flags in the windows of his apartment defiantly asserted his First Amendment rights on Tuesday.
“It’s a Southern flag,” Will Green, 43, explained to The Post. “It flies many places in the South, but they only show it on TV when a racist is talking.”
Green refused to appease his neighbors, who are insisting he remove his banners.
“It’s a criminal abuse of freedom of speech,” he said about their requests.
Green, who claims he was expelled from the College of Staten Island for a controversial thesis about Thomas Jefferson, said the deaths of 400,000 Confederate soldiers during the Civil War should not be forgotten.
“It’s never going to go away. There was too much suffering behind it,” he said. “There’s too much history behind it.”
Green said he returned home from a trip to the Poconos on Tuesday night to find his fifthfloor unit in disarray.
“My apartment was broken into last Friday or Saturday night because I had a Dixieland flag,” he said.
A local DJ, Darren Keen, was arrested the night of Aug. 18 for smashing Green’s window with his fist, according to police.
Green said he hasn’t yet decided if he’ll put the flags back up.
“I don’t know. Right now I have to sweep the glass up,” he said.
Green, who also has a sticker of President Trump in one of his windows, has had the flags up for about a year.
They drew attention after the recent rally in Charlottesville, Va., that turned deadly when a neoNazi mowed down 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Hayer with his car.
When asked about the controversy, Green said, “Slavery was unfortunate.”