American identity is under an outright assault. Walk through our once-proud American cities and you’ll see it clear as day with Mexican flags waving high on American soil, mobs shutting down streets, rioters clashing with police all because our so-called “leaders” are too cowardly to enforce the simplest law of the land: national sovereignty. The result? Broken windows, smashed businesses, crime out of control and whole neighborhoods lost to chaos while the regime-media expects us to sit back and shut up.
Meanwhile, drive through the plush, virtue-signaling suburbs, and what do you find? Acres of Ukrainian flags and “Black Lives Matter” yard signs waving right alongside each other, like a trophy case of other people’s causes. These people have time to plaster their lawns with imported sympathy, but when’s the last time you saw them care about their own neighbors’ safety, about the fentanyl scourge, or about the foreign invaders tearing our communities apart? Instead, the narrative-pushers tell us—on every screen—that we’re supposed to care more about a border halfway across the world than our own. They want us to believe that pouring our tax dollars and our moral energy into Ukraine, Israel, any nation under the sun except our own, is the true expression of “democracy.”
Don’t question it, just conform.
In the halls of Congress, the story repeats yet again. Our elected officials, who arguably should be the greatest champions for the American people, seem consumed by distant wars and the flags of far-off lands. Scroll through their social media, walk past their offices, and listen to their speeches: endless references to Israel, endless condemnation and cheers about what is happening in a small country halfway around the world. American issues like crime, the cost of living, infrastructure, the opioid crisis seem to slide further down the agenda, buried behind the day’s international drama.
Is the American flag not enough? Do the American people still have a banner that waves for us, that we can rally around? Or have we, through distraction and division, ceded the symbols of our own nation to the causes of others?
For decades, Americans have lived with the assumption that their government, their leaders, and their civic culture exist to secure their interests. Yet we the people have become afterthoughts in our own story. What happens when we collectively wake up to the reality that, for all the talk of democracy, neither party, no figure, no institution seems fundamentally interested in representing our struggles, hopes, and needs? No one is coming to save us because our most influential voices are perpetually turned outward. They look over our needs, fixated on conflicts oceans away.
Civilizations rarely collapse in a cinematic rush; they fray, fiber by fiber, as the shared story that once bound them loses its grip. Symbols become the early warning lights. If the American flag now competes with an array of foreign standards for pride of place on American soil, that signals a creeping estrangement from our own national narrative. It is easier to virtue-signal for strangers than to renovate crumbling schools down the block. It is easier to tweet outrage at a war thousands of miles away than to face the homegrown cartel that has made your neighbor’s kid an addict. Politicians know this. They ride the wave of exported concern because it offers moral highs without the messy follow-through that domestic reform demands.
Every institution that was supposed to serve us is captured by people who dream about global empires, not local communities. They want you exhausted and atomized, desperate for crumbs, too distracted by foreign flags to notice they’ve sold your birthright out from under you.
Look around: when your children see more foreign flags on TV than their own, when our own anthem barely gets played at school events, you are witnessing a nation being hollowed out—one allegiance at a time. The first sign of civilizational decline is when it becomes easier to “support” something safe and distant than to fight for your own block, your own kin, your own future.
This is why I say: Reclaim your faith, your family, your flag. Teach your kids what the American flag actually means ordered liberty, opportunity, a nation under God where we love our own first. Stand your ground. Put the stars and stripes on your porch and your profile. Remind the next generation what was built here and by whom—because if we don’t, no one will. A nation that forgets to honor itself is a nation that won’t last long.
The time for polite hand-wringing is over. The hour is late, but it’s not too late. It’s up to us—ordinary Americans—to decide if the star-spangled banner still waves not just as a piece of cloth, but as a living promise to ourselves and our descendants. Let them fly their colors. I say we fly ours higher. America First—now and always.
The stakes are not just about the symbolism of flags. A country that forgets to love itself eventually forgets how to govern itself. If the Star-Spangled Banner fades into background decoration, the republic it represents will follow. Patriotism is not a sentimental reflex. It is a disciplined commitment to maintain the house our ancestors built. We need to repair the roof, replace the wiring, and keep the furnace running so our children inherit shelter, not ruins. That maintenance begins with memory: remembering that our flag once signified a promise of ordered liberty, upward mobility, and local solidarity. It can do so again, but only if we raise it with the same ardor we now lavish on flags from thousands of miles away.
The question is no longer rhetorical: O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave? It will on courthouse lawns, classroom walls, and front porches only if we decide that the republic it symbolizes is still worthy of our first and only allegiance.
