Symbols are important, not for themselves, but for what they represent. Any flag is just a piece of cloth, but the flag of Spain, the flag of the United States, or the flag of Italy is much more than that. These banners hold within them nothing less than the history of a nation: all its past and present citizens, its struggles, its sorrows, the joys of the families that have built it, its culture, its victories, its sovereignty, its faith, its hard-won independence, its great enterprises and inventions, its laws, its books and songs, its freedoms and its lands, its great national deeds and its small local stories.
The American flag represents all Americans — the living and the dead, those who remained at home and those who traveled the world, those born on U.S. soil and those who later found refuge there. And here’s a crucial point that liberals should understand once and for all: the flag is a national symbol before it is a government emblem.
Burning the flag is dumb. Burning the flag means burning everything I just listed and much more. Burning the flag should be a crime — just like burning down the Capitol or tearing down the Statue of Liberty. Burning the flag is what the enemies of the United States do. And enemies of the United States are not welcomed, not excused, not loved — they are fought. A nation that does not fight its enemies is a dead nation. (RELATED: The Two Americas)
Russell Kirk embraced T.S. Eliot’s idea of what endures through time. “By ‘the Permanent Things,’ [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish,” Kirk wrote. “They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.”
The flag is one of those unchanging symbols, one of those permanent things. It represents that continued and shared belief that unites cultures and generations under a single homeland.
If freedom of expression protects burning flags, then it protects everything — and therefore, it protects nothing.
Donald Trump wants the American flag to be respected. The majority of American citizens want the flag to be respected. In Europe, there are nations that pioneered allowing attacks on their own flags, symbols, and institutions. Sadly, my country is one of them — and we are still paying the price. The left, allied with foolish secessionists, is the main enemy of the Spanish nation, and together they have allowed — or even encouraged — outrages against the flag. And I fear that the progressives now pretending to defend freedom of expression in order to oppose Trump’s plan to protect the flag are, in truth, only one step away from declaring themselves enemies of the United States. (RELATED: Spain’s Far‑Left Dictatorship Has Become a Reality)
No flag should ever be burned — neither your own, out of gratitude, nor those of other nations, out of the basic respect owed to the history and people they represent. I’ve read about the legal controversy over the flag and the 1989 Supreme Court ruling. I am the first to defend freedom of expression. But burning the flag cannot, in any sense, be considered freedom of expression. It strikes me as a dumb and self-destructive twisting of words. If freedom of expression protects burning flags, then it protects everything — and therefore, it protects nothing.
I find it ironic that liberals now try to present themselves as the great defenders of free speech, when for years they have practiced the most atrocious censorship through their totalitarian cancellation tactics. It’s as if they take an almost perverse pleasure in always finding themselves on the wrong side of history. The flag is untouchable. (RELATED: The Global Censorship Cancer)
The worst president Spain ever had was José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. His great international gesture was to remain seated while the U.S. flag passed during the Columbus Day military parade, in protest of the Iraq War. It was an international disgrace, something that still pains me today, because that clown wasn’t there as Zapatero, but as prime minister, representing all Spaniards. That attempt to insult the flag of one of our greatest allies was simply appalling — intellectually shallow and strategically suicidal. The guy didn’t realize that the flag did not represent Bush, but the United States of America, one of the most beloved and respected nations in the world.
That is why it is important to understand what the flag really is before engaging in absurd debates about whether it should be burned or not. In fact, I see nothing there worth debating. If we allow that debate, I could just as well raise another: should we pull Kamala Harris’s ears every time we see her?
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