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This Saturday, June 14, is Flag Day, the day Americans annually celebrate our national symbol of freedom. Flags aren’t like mere corporate logos; they are potent emblems of identity, allegiance, and shared purpose. A nation’s flag reflects the history, values, and aspirations of its people. It encapsulates a country’s story of struggle, triumph, and sacrifice. It is, or should be, an almost sacred anchor grounding us in our loyalty to a collective ideal greater than our individual selves.

Flags unite people under a common banner but can also divide us, because they are rallying points that help identify who is with us or against us. That is why they spark fervent devotion or fierce opposition – and that is as it should be.

Over the last week, what the media like to disingenuously refer to as “unrest” has broken out in the city of Los Angeles (soon to be nationwide) to protest and resist the enforcement of immigration law by ICE agents, whom Left-wing media and Democrat politicians are smearing as Nazis hunting down innocent migrant families. Flags have become a heated flashpoint in that conflict, as rioters display them prominently to signal their allegiance to foreign homelands and their defiance of U.S. law.

Indeed, a CNN article titled “The Mexican flag has become a defining symbol of the LA protests” notes that demonstrators amid the violence and destruction have proudly waved flags from Mexico and other Latin American countries to show their alliance with the cause of illegal aliens.

The CNN article made sure to highlight Republican disapproval. Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, for example, told CNN’s Dana Bash, “They were literally out there protesting, carrying a foreign flag. That is absolutely insane. They’re not just peaceful protesters. These are illegals.”

Similarly, Vice President JD Vance posted on X Saturday that “Insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers.”

President Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller described the protesters on social media as “foreign nationals, waving foreign flags, rioting and obstructing federal law enforcement attempting to expel illegal foreign invaders.”

CNN’s tepid attempt at a rebuttal was to make the diversionary point that “Waving a foreign flag – or even destroying an American one – is legal.” No one has said it isn’t. The reality that CNN wants to gloss over is that the rioters – not “protesters” or “demonstrators” – are using foreign flags to declare their defiant contempt for American law, culture, and national sovereignty.

“The flags mean their families. The flags mean their communities. It’s not about having an international invasion,” claimed Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, associate professor of Chicana, Chicano and Central American Studies at UCLA (as an aside: any university program that ends in “Studies” is not an actual scholarly discipline but a training ground for cultural Marxism and political activism).

Antonio Rodriguez, an organizer with the Brown Berets, a far-Left pro-Chicano paramilitary movement, similarly told CNN, “I don’t necessarily think just because somebody has pride in their culture that they’re un-American. Waving a Mexican flag, for us, is showing pride in our culture and our family.”

This talking point is demonstrably false. Masked rioters trying to kill law enforcement officers with bricks, rocks, and Molotov cocktails are not expressing love of family and community, but waging violent revolution.

Nobody has an issue with showing pride in one’s culture and family. But if you are or want to be an assimilated citizen in this country, the Stars and Stripes is your flag. Waving a Mexican or other national flag in literally incendiary confrontations with law enforcement, in defense of people who are here illegally, including felons, gang members, drug and human traffickers, and repeat sex offenders is a provocative, clear statement that you reject American law and order, you reject American values, you reject American allegiance.

This is all part of the broader reality that the Stars and Stripes is the only flag Democrats and their millions of illegal minions do not proudly wave. That’s because unlike the MAGA movement, they believe the American flag represents a systemically racist, uniquely oppressive and exploitative force in history, an illegitimate nation built by white colonialists on land stolen from noble indigenous tribes, one which can only be redeemed by being burned to the ground and “fundamentally transformed” into a social justice utopia.

And thus the Left demonizes the Stars and Stripes. “How I Came to View the American Flag as a Threat,” reads the headline of a TIME opinion piece. “Weaponizing the American flag as a tool of hate,” CBS wrote in 2023. On the Fourth of July, 2021, Black Lives Matter Utah denounced the American flag as a “symbol of hatred.”

But other flags are just fine and dandy. Remember in 2024 when Democrats ecstatically waved little Ukrainian flags in Congress after voting for a $60 billion bill to line the pockets of fraudster Volodymyr “Please, Call Me Churchill” Zelensky? In your wildest imagination, can you picture those Democrat leaders ever waving little American flags with such gusto?

Remember when the George Floyd riots teemed with Black Lives Matter flags and banners? Remember the ubiquitous Palestinian flags in the pro-Hamas demonstrations across American campuses in the wake of the barbaric October 7 attacks in Israel? Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib even has a Palestinian flag hanging outside her Congressional office. How is that not treasonous?

And then, of course, there are the LGBTQ flags. All across the country, blue-haired, nose-ringed, non-binary activists posing as educators plaster their classroom walls with various permutations of “pride” rainbow flags, grooming children into the anti-family cult known as gender ideology.

Remember when Chasten Buttigieg, whose husband Pete, astonishingly, is the Democrats’ leading potential presidential candidate for 2028, led an LGBTQ youth group in a pledge of allegiance to a pride flag? He had the children repeat after him as they held right hands over their hearts, “I pledge my heart to the rainbow of the not-so-typical gay camp. One camp, full of pride, indivisible, with affirmation and equal rights for all.” He wasn’t just being cutesy; he was intentionally subverting the traditional pledge to the flag of the United States of America to indoctrinate children into his perverse gender cult.

During Joe Biden’s tenure as president, government buildings here and abroad flew pride and BLM flags alongside Old Glory – a clear indication of his administration’s priorities and loyalties. In the days following Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration, the State Department rightly rejected this practice and issued a “One Flag Policy” barring government offices from flying any flag other than the Stars and Stripes, which represents our “principles of justice, liberty, and democracy… shared by all American citizens, past and present.”

Patriots, this Flag Day let’s reclaim taking our nation’s symbol seriously. And let the Democrats and the foreign invaders they so vigorously defend show, by contrast, just where their true allegiance lies.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior