The Truth About Mississippi's Giant Mosquito State Flag

The story begins with Mississippi, the last state in the U.S. to finally throw its hands up and admit that including Confederate iconography on their state flag was, at best, tone deaf. In June of 2020, a scant 155 years after the end of the Civil War, Governor Tate Reeves signed a bill officially retiring the design, according to the Guardian. The hunt was on for a new set of colors to fly above the capital.

The marketplace of ideas being a vast and glorious force for good, some 3,000 submissions for potential replacements were received in the following weeks. The committee in charge of deciding on a new flag managed to parse their options down to a gentleman's 147 — some, per Slate, were almost instantly set to the side, owing to their prominent use of images like electric guitars and meme typography, but in theory, there were only two rules: submissions could not feature the Confederate stars and bars, and they had to feature the words "In God We Trust."

Then, in an Air Bud-adjacent maneuver, it was pointed out that there wasn't a rule in the book that said a state flag couldn't feature the silhouette of a giant Kaiju monster mosquito with a presumed unquenchable thirst for human blood.

After the round two picks were posted online, eagle-eyed viewers noticed that one of the entries was, put bluntly, just a big fat mosquito surrounded by stars. It did also display "In God We Trust," just in a miniscule font at the bottom of the flag. In a statement made by the Mississippi Flag Commission, it then was explained that "The mosquito flag advanced to Round Two due to a typo in a list of flag numbers submitted by one commissioner." Unfortunately for both itchiness enthusiasts and John Hammond, the perplexing design was quickly pulled from the website.

There's a silver lining here. If there is any justice left in the universe, this will clear the way for a flag that truly captures the majesty of the Magnolia State. Something like a riverboat made out of electricity, with Peter Criss riding on top of it, jamming on the drums, against a lenticular flame background. It would open the door to renaming the state "Crississippi." Let's make KISS-tory, folks.