Why Flags Matter
Cede The Flag, Lose The Argument
Look, Twitter is an open septic tank at the best of times, and honestly, the discourse is little more than a match to light it up so internet trolls and the terminally online can huddle around the flames and occasionally fling burning feces at each other. But on occasion, important, salient points appear through the feces, and it’s worth unpacking those, because they’re pretty rare these days. So, with trepidation, let’s begin.
Consider:
Now, before you think: “Oh, here’s the whitest guy in the world coming in here to try and tone police protests and direct action undertaken by primarily brown people in a city that’s eighteen hundred miles away from where he lives,” let me be clear: as a first-generation immigrant, I despise this administration’s immigration policy. It will solve no problems. It will make nothing better. At best, it is cheap nativism, designed to appeal to a vanishingly small minority of voters, and at worst, it’s just explicitly racist. I did not vote for this. As someone who has been on the receieiving end of this country’s immigration system with white skin and the privileges that go along with that, I can assure you if it wasn’t fun for me and my family, I’m sure the non-fun factor multiplies exponentially if you’re not the whitest people on the planet.
At the end of this administration, the system will still be broken. The borders will still be unsecured. The ports will be uninspected. Legal immigration (the kind we want some of) will still be a massive pain in the ass to our economic detriment and illegal immigration will continue (mainly to the benefit of large agribusiness corporations.)
But all of that being said, this is why flags matter. This is why optics matter despite protestations of the online Twitterati of the Left. In an age where we’re all being constantly sprayed in the face with a firehose of content, sometimes all people have to go on to shape their opinions are short thirty-second video clips or photos they see randomly scrolling through their phones.
I am tired of ceding the flag to one side of the political spectrum. I am tired of people dismissing the American flag as ‘just another Trump hat’ because it’s not. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again and again: the flag is for all of us. It doesn’t belong to any one political party or ideology.
For all the post-mortems about the 2024 Election, one of the many things that Kamala Harris got right was grabbing the flag with both hands and refusing to let it go. The Democratic National Convention was awash with American flags. She was dropping lines in speeches that twenty years ago would have seemed insanely out of place at a DNC and far more at home at the RNC. She had Bon Iver playing the Battle Cry of Freedom1 at rallies— because they got it.
You cede the flag, you lose the argument.
Consider this quote from the Wall Street Journal2:
Federal agents make warrantless arrests. Masked agents take people into custody without identifying themselves. Plainclothes agents in at least a dozen cities have arrested migrants who showed up to their court hearings. And across the U.S., people suspected of being in the country illegally are disappearing into the federal detention system without notice to families or lawyers, according to attorneys, witnesses, and officials.
In Coral Springs, Fla., at least eight agents in tactical gear, shields, and rifles surrounded a home with guns raised to arrest a father with no criminal history. In Irvine, Calif., ICE agents drove a phalanx of military vehicles in the Orange County suburb to arrest a person, though not for illegal immigration. They were seeking a resident’s son who had allegedly posted fliers alerting neighbors to the presence of ICE agents.
This is the real problem, and when pollsters started to break down the issues and not just over-broad questions like, ‘Do you think illegal immigration is bad?’, polling reflects that. When Kilmar Abrego Garcia was on every algorithm, the President’s numbers on immigration tanked. People don’t want cops in masks. People don’t like cops who don’t wear uniforms. They don’t like people getting snatched off the streets and whisked away into custody to god only knows where. It’s penetrating the public consciousness, and you can click the link above and read the Twitter thread to see for yourself. You can search the internet and find some truly disturbing shit about how this is being done.
If the argument is about that, then they lose.
The guy in the picture above? Change the Mexican flag to the American flag, and the story changes. But it also exposes two massive problems that are distorting both ends of the political spectrum.
One is that the Left needs someone to smack the shit out of them and get them to realize that the act of protesting (while important) is not the end all be all of achieving meaningful social change or any of their goals. None of it matters if you don’t fucking win- and waving Mexican flags on the streets of LA is not how you win.
Two is that the Right desperately needs to stop getting high on its own supply. Not every protest is funded by a shadowy network of leftist NGOs and George Soros. Have you seen the Left? Have you watched footage of DSA caucuses? Half the time the Left can barely get organized enough to tie it’s fucking shoes, never mind organize and coordinate a protest/riot. Quit gaslighting yourselves into believing your farts smell like roses, because they don’t.
Okay, okay: I’ll get down off my political soapbox now (my apologies if that got a bit too ‘in the news’ for you— I get wanting an escape from all that, believe me)— but my underlying point remains the same: this is why flags matter. The visual power of flags and what they represent has the power to shift public opinion and inspire people to rally behind something or against something.
Flags belong to everyone: it’s something I believe very, very strongly. If you are a granola-eating, vegan, Trump-hating hippie, you should get a Gadsden Flag or a Pine Tree Flag or whatever flag you damn well please! You should have a rainbow snake on it for Pride Month or a happy tree on it because you love Bob Ross! You shouldn’t cede an entire flag to one side of the political spectrum! This is your country too! Take back those flags!
(As we head towards the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution, everyone should look into the flags of the American Revolution, and I think you should find your favorite one and buy it— reclaim your revolutionary heritage! I think I might put my money where my mouth is and get myself a Gadsden Flag or a Serapis Flag!)
The beauty of America- and yes, I know those are words that don’t often get typed a lot these days- is that if America isn’t measuring up to what you think it should be, you can work on that. God knows, we could all work on that— it seems like an immense task a lot of days, but there’s a naive, capra-esque part of me that still believes. Someday, we’ll all wake up and decide to push the crazy people back to the edges where they belong and just be fucking sensible again. If we all collectively decide to wake up and do one small thing a day to make the world a better place, that can add up pretty quickly.
Happy 250th Birthday to the United States Army!
Happy Flag Day, Everybody!
~
True story: I did not know this was an actual song— I just thought it was instrumental music from the Ken Burns Civil War documentary.
A famously liberal and progressive outlet— /s