President Trump issued an executive order Monday to prosecute flag desecration.  It’s already been attacked as another step toward “authoritarianism,” “fascism,” and the suppression of “protest.”

It’s none of those things.  It was, however, serendipity, inasmuch as I published a critique of flag-hatred just hours before that executive order, an essay in which I argued the problems lie deeper: in alienation of the elites from their country and twisted ideas about “speech” and “protest.”

America’s elites and its opinion-makers are in many ways alienated from their country.  There is a bizarre notion abroad that America is at best an “ideal” of which the actual, current country is but a tawdry reflection.

The America we live in is the product of lots of bad things.  It originated from the “colonialism” of dead white European males “stealing” land from peacefully indigenous peoples while infecting them with deadly diseases.  Over the centuries, it was corrupted by money and capitalism.  Its “original sin” is slavery.  As some “historians” would like to have it, America began not in 1776, but in 1619 — not with independence, but with slavery. 

The “true America” is still coming but not quite here.  The “real America” will arrive when we all denounce Columbus, mutter “land acknowledgments” wherever we go, pay reparations for slavery, and promote DIE to make up for “unconscious bias” and “systemic racism,” while beating our breasts over “white privilege,” “misogyny,” and “1,001-gender phobias.”  Of course, since the woke goal posts constantly move, by the time we do all that “atonement,” it’s likely more “American sins” will be identified.

Since “America” remains to be born from this malignant clump of tissue, its symbols are best honored by...rejecting them.  Burn the flag.  Take the knee for the National Anthem (and invent a substitute tribal one).  Promise (but never quite deliver) to leave the country.  That’s how incineration of the American flag becomes “patriotism” but burning a Pride flag would be a “hate crime.” 

Europeans suffer a similar woke-ism: The British Union Jack and the English St. George cross are both triggers to lots of people.  In Europe, there’s an additional factor in play.  The European Union deems nationalism a “threat” to Europe, so it promotes its artificial patriotism about “European values” (complete with its own ersatz flag and hijacked “anthem”) to replace national pride and loyalty.

In this world, “patriotism” is alienation from one’s native land in favor of some artificial construct — an “ideal” America that exists nowhere except a liberal’s mind, an “ever closer Union” that’s something like Hotel California: You can never leave.

This inverted notion of “patriotism” is often paired with distorted caricatures of “protest” and “speech.”  In this topsy-turvy world, “free speech” is burning your flag as a mark of “protest.”

It’s none of those things.

Once upon a time, a “protest” was a lawful and orderly act.  I’ve attended the March for Life in Washington for decades.  It involves a rally, speakers addressing the crowd, and marchers proceeding up an authorized route along Constitution Avenue and dispersing into the Senate and House to engage with our representatives. 

What the left wants to call “protest” is not a lawful, orderly march.  It’s obstruction.  It’s blocking you.  It’s forcing you to engage with the leftist agenda, to convert or reprove you.  It’s interfering with your ability to go to class, enter a university building, or drive to work.  It’s throwing things (preferably non-lethal) at others — e.g., submarine sandwiches at federal law enforcement.  It’s obstruction of law officers.

Reread the last paragraph.  None of those things is “speech.”  They are all actions.  They don’t say; they do.  They interfere, obstruct, disrupt, throw, and hurl.  The problem is we have allowed ourselves to be confused into imagining they are “speech” just because their perpetrators want to play that verbal shell game.

Burning a flag is not “speech.”  It is an act of “desecration.”  That term, used by the president in his executive order, is not novel.  We used to use that term for disrespect of the flag because Americans had a sense that there was something “sacred” about that symbol, something that elevated it above a scandal-inducing prop for jejune temper tantrums.

Yes, the Flag Code envisioned flag burning...as a way of showing respect for a flag that by wear and tear or for other reasons no longer embodied the dignity that the national banner of the United States should express.  It’s a quite different ethic from the ethic of the Generation of ’68, which inverted that meaning and sold Americans a bill of goods about what constitutes “protest” and “speech.”

No doubt critics will retort that the Supreme Court (Texas v. Johnson) in 1989 held that flag-burning is protected.  It did, by a 5-4 vote.  Two observations: First, nobody claims that the Court is infallible, and second, such a closely divided Court might be ripe to revisit the error of its ways. 

In 2006, Congress almost overturned Johnson: The Senate came within one vote of passing a constitutional amendment reversing it.  If some senators still sitting in that body (or who moved on elsewhere) had voted differently, the flag would have been protected.  I specifically think of pro-flag-burners who voted “no” like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Dick Durbin (Ill.), Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Patty Murray (Wash.), Jack Reed (R.I.), and Chuck Schumer (N.Y.).

Let’s restore the plain sense meanings of “protest” respecting law and order; “speech” that is not action, but persuasion; and “patriotism” that is not anti-patriotism.

Image: Pashi via Pixabay, Pixabay License.