Three weeks after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, news broke about Americans. Decided to raise the Stars and Stripes againSome people folded and put away their flags during Donald Trump's presidency, a silent protest against MAGA, the bastion of racist hatred, violence, intolerance and insurrection that has corroded the country.
The American flag is supposed to represent something entirely different: “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Under the divisive Trump administration, America has failed to live up to that promise.
Some people are hesitant to fly the flag because the far-right has asserted its right to do so: the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, accelerationists and other extremist groups who seek to impose their extreme values on America, inciting fear and violence if necessary.
In 2019, African-American author Damon Young We talked about bicycle trips. He, his wife, and two friends passed through white communities on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail. Right-wing unity rally In Charlottesville, Virginia, American flags were displayed throughout the town, even though residents clearly do not welcome people of color.
“Those (white) people who are desperate to distinguish themselves as true Americans have weaponized the flag., “Americans are manipulating this sentiment to antagonize those they perceive as less American than themselves,” Young wrote in Time magazine. “Of course, Trump didn't create this dynamic — it's hard to ignore the prominent American flag when watching footage of lynchings and KKK rallies from the '40s, '50s and '60s — but Trump's political career has been based on relentlessly exacerbating this sentiment.”
Politico spoke about the 72-year-old Vietnam veteran. He took the flag down a year after Trump took office; he ordered a new one after Biden won in 2020. “I said, 'It's time to put our flag up,'” he told reporters. The reporters wrote that similar events were happening across the country, “with people voluntarily taking back symbols that, during the Trump administration, have come to represent only one side.”
A few weeks later, rioters carrying American flags stormed the Capitol.Explained them “Using a flagpole as a weapon and committing acts of violence while carrying the flag.”
“These people claimed the flag and called themselves patriots, yet they engaged in actions that are inconsistent with true patriotism,” she wrote. “Their actions have deepened divisions and turned many patriotic Americans against the symbol of our country.”
Now that Kamala Harris has won the Democratic nomination, New enthusiasm The flag on the left is New Embrace The promise of individual freedom has been broken, as if America had recently witnessed a national capture-the-flag contest dominated by extremist groups who have distorted the meaning of the Stars and Stripes while the rest of us have allowed it.
Now is the time for all Americans to reclaim our flag and fly it for the symbol it was meant to be: the flag of an indivisible nation.
William S. Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.
