Vilifying Patriotism: Today The Betsy Ross Flag, Tomorrow The 4th of July

I&I Editorial

Did you enjoy the fireworks, the baseball, the hot dogs, the apple pie, and of course all the flags that were everywhere yesterday? Savor the memory, because if the left are allowed into full power and have their way it will all move from reality to the realm of nostalgia.

Think we’re exaggerating?

Mayor Bill de Blasio, reviled in New York City yet shamelessly running for president, is gleefully taking the first steps toward banning the frankfurters Gotham is famed for. And you probably didn’t know that apple pie makes you angry, which is one of the reasons President Obama’s Food and Drug Administration banned trans fat, a common ingredient in the prepared pie crust you buy at the supermarket.

Of course, as usual when Big Government “solves” a problem, it inadvertently makes the problem worse, so banning trans fat has led to a return to increased saturated fats in consumer products, like coconut oil and palm kernel oil — ingredients associated just as much with cardiovascular disease as trans fats are, but lack in flavor, don’t last as long on the shelf, and cost more.

As Bake Magazine reported in 2017, “The pie crust industry has struggled to find a drop-in solution to replace PHO [transfat] products over the decades … Replacing trans fats in the pie industry disrupts” the manufacturing process “in terms of stability, performance and higher costs.”

You still have to cut down on the formerly-trans fat foods; they just don’t taste good anymore, you’ll too often find. Which means instead of subjecting yourself to a lousy sliver of apple pie you’ll substitute a dessert that’s even less heart-healthy.

Parents who let their children shoot off firecrackers and roman candles on or near Independence Day know the risks, just as they know the risks of letting their children play stickball unsupervised around the corner where they might get hit by a car, or swim in a crowded pool where they might drown, or contract a waterborne disease.

Life is filled with everyday risks. Choking is the fourth leading cause of unintentional injurious death in young children, and each year in America 80,000 kids swallow foreign objects, the cause of 100 kids a day arriving at emergency rooms. Should someone from the government be watching your toddler 24/7 via surveillance camera?

The nanny state sees the absence of heaven on earth and pounces into action, the solution always being new restrictions on your freedom. And so in some communities, in this case, northern California’s Bay Area, “M-80s or cherry bombs constitute a felony. Offenders arrested on felony charges may face prison time and fines of up to $5,000.”

Today’s 50-Star Flag Is The Real Target

These are all matters of physical safety or well-being. But on top of future 4th of Julys featuring fake versions of the foods you love, and bans even on sparklers because some nitwits manage to light their own clothes on fire, you can be sure that the left will ultimately rule the flag to be hazardous to our health too.

I&I yesterday showed how “Nike pulled sneakers back from retailers that contained a small image of the famous Betsy Ross flag on the back” apparently because it offended Nike’s celebrity endorser “Colin Kaepernick, the reprehensible leftist former football player who protested the national anthem, whose idea of appropriate footwear is socks depicting police officers as pigs, and who prefers shirts honoring Cuba’s murderous dictator Fidel Castro.”

Kaepernick had reportedly “whined to Nike that Betsy Ross had stitched the flag while slavery was still in force in America, and so shouldn’t be displayed in public” — but the American flag is the American flag; the only difference between the flag then and the flag now is the addition of stars, from 13 for the original colonies to 50 for the current number of states.

Sure, there are white supremacist outfits who’ve taken a liking to the 1777 flag. But the hatemongers have adopted our modern flag too.

If we ban the colonial-era flag, the logic is ineluctable that we must ban today’s flag, on which it is based. And you can be sure that the left — with its (if you will) unflagging love for incrementalism, be it in the waging of war to lose in Vietnam or social transformation here at home — will eventually arrive at the conclusion that Old Glory itself has got to go.

And so will our National Anthem, of course, which the California NAACP demanded be abolished the year before last, its president declaring it “racist; it doesn’t represent our community; it’s anti-black.” This was based on a wild misinterpretation of a line in the Anthem’s rarely-sung third stanza: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave …”

The 4th of July will ultimately have to go too. What are we doing celebrating a supposed “liberation” when for nearly 90 years afterward we had black servitude? What are we doing celebrating a Declaration of Independence written by a slave owner named Thomas Jefferson? What are we doing celebrating Framers of a Constitution that counted each slave as “three fifths” a human being?

(The historical fact, of course, is that the Southern slave-holding states wanted slaves fully counted the same as free citizens to give more power to protecting the institution of slavery; the non-slave states didn’t want the slaves counted at all, so as to lessen the pro-slavery South’s political representation. The “three-fifths” clause was the compromise.)

USA Or AOC?

Ripping down Confederate military statues in the South is, likewise, more prelude to an iconoclasm to which there will be no end if it is not stopped. Just as banning hot dogs, policing desserts, governmental surrogate-parenting of kids having fun on the Fourth, and attacking older versions of the Flag all seemed unthinkable a couple of decades ago, the horrors of tomorrow seem unlikely today.

Abolishing the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with whatever a 40-something then-Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her comrades concoct, perhaps?

Or would you like to know what the U.S.A.’s new non-divisive flag might look like? It will probably be something along the lines of what Public Radio International proposed to replace the Confederate battle flag, which looks a lot like a picnic tablecloth you’d find at the Dollar Store.

As far as baseball goes, too bad if you object to your kids being forcibly exposed to homosexual activism at the ballpark. And how long will it be before anyone objecting to women players in the Major Leagues gets branded a misogynist? Or, for that matter, fake women players. (Or if you really want to be ostracized as a reactionary, suggest getting rid of the Designated Hitter.)

These mid-summer enjoyments we take for granted are under threat, albeit some only subtly today. But as with this week’s attacks on the flag of 13 stars, when the threats finally emerge from gestation they usually find us off-mark and unprepared to oppose them. The only way to fight them is by simply not backing off on the cherished, traditional practices of patriotism. Because as much as liberty consists of freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, it also means the freedom to celebrate the 4th of July the same way your parents and grandparents did, and not have it replaced at some future date by some absurd “Inclusivity Day” or whatever tomorrow’s politicians come up with.

— Written by Thomas McArdle

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