CARTOON: True Patriotism Is To Be Found In The Smoke Of A Burning Flag
"In a culture where the flag is already plastered on bikinis, beer koozies, and billboards— with little outcry — it’s not reverence that’s driving this crackdown. It’s control."
“The First Amendment is being whittled down not just by government decree but by a culture that rewards conformity and punishes divergence.
“In such an environment, burning a flag is not the real danger. The real danger is a society that no longer tolerates free thought at all.”
— John & Nisha Whitehead, Burning the Flag or Torching the Constitution: Only One Destroys Freedom
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
For more free-use Trump cartoons check here.
Your Burning Questions On Flag Burning
FIRE Editor’s Note: President Trump has signed an executive order proposing one year in jail for desecrating the flag. The following explainer was originally published on FIRE’s website.
FIRE
In July 2024, protesters on Capitol Hill pulled American flags from government flagpoles and burned them to protest the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. FIRE’s own First Amendment reporter was on the scene covering the protests.
The right to burn the American flag sparks heated debate. Those debates become complicated when protesters engage in behavior that is not protected by the First Amendment, like destroying public property.
In response to the images from Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump called for one-year jail sentences for anyone who burns the American flag. "Now, people will say, ‘Oh, it’s unconstitutional,’" Trump added. "Those are stupid people that say that." Vice President Kamala Harris jumped into the conversation too, commenting that the flag "should never be desecrated" like that.
But the First Amendment protects flag burning in most cases, and rightly so. Let us explain why that’s not stupid at all.
Is it legal to burn the American flag?
Yes. It’s a question Americans continue to spar over, even though the Supreme Court settled it decades ago. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that the government cannot punish flag burning in service of protecting national symbols. Put simply, our rights are more important than a flag.
So the protesters are protected by the First Amendment?
Well, not in this case. No one has the right to steal and vandalize a flag they don’t own — which is what we saw on Wednesday. People who engage in this behavior are subject to punishment under the law.
People can just burn a flag anywhere?
You probably know the answer to this: Nope. Many public spaces have rules against burning anything due to fire concerns. But this is more a safety issue than a civil liberties issue.
I’m offended when people burn the American flag. What can I do
While you don’t have the right to infringe on others’ expressive rights, that shouldn’t stop you from expressing your own beliefs. The answer to speech you may hate is more speech. Criticize flag burning. Debate folks who engage in it. Better yet, hoist your own flag high into the air.
The fact that flag burning is allowed is a sign of the wisdom of our First Amendment, not its stupidity. It suggests a confidence that critics of the United States and its symbols can be moved to change their minds through persuasion, not force.
FIRE’s Sarah McLaughlin wrote a piece over at MSNBC explaining why flag burning is and should be protected by the Constitution. She put it nicely:
Our speech rights may not be as tangible as a flag, but they are in far greater need of protection than our symbols. New flags can and will be sewn and raised, but a desecrated First Amendment would be much more difficult to repair.
Link to story and 4-minute audio
Free speech makes free people! / Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression
In Defiance Of Trump
Army Combat Vet Burns Flag Across Street From White House
Fox5 (8/25/25)
…Protester Jay Carey, a retired Army combat veteran and Bronze Star recipient who served for 22 years, joined a demonstration outside the White House.
Carey is seen on video in front of an American flag doused with an accelerant, preparing to light the flag on fire. He argued that Trump's order is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which guarantees the right to free exercise of speech, assembly and petition.
"It's your First Amendment right to burn the American Flag!" Carey said, speaking on a megaphone. "No president can make a law. Period! No Congress can make a law infringing on First Amendment rights."
"I'm burning this flag as a protest of that illegal, fascist president that sits in that house," Carey said, lighter in hand, while pointing at the White House.
Carey then lit the flag on fire.
"I'm doing it for every single one of you American citizens," he went on to say. "We burn this flag in protest of that president, who thinks he can do whatever he wants, make whatever law he wants!"
The video then shows Carey being led away from the scene and then detained by Secret Service agents.
Link to story and 30-second video
The First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty.
Burning The Flag Or Torching The Constitution: Only One Destroys Freedom
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury
By John & Nisha Whitehead
Rutherford Institute (8/25/25)
Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than President Trump’s latest executive order calling for criminal charges for anyone who burns the American flag—a symbolic act long upheld by the Supreme Court as protected political expression.
This push is not about patriotism—it is political theater.
For an administration under fire—from the Epstein cover-up to tanking approval ratings and mounting constitutional crises—flag burning serves as symbolic outrage staged as political cover, a culture-war diversion to distract from more serious abuses of power.
Consider the timing: on the very same day Trump announced penalties for flag burning, he also signed an executive order establishing “specialized” National Guard units to patrol American cities under the guise of addressing crime.
This is the real bait-and-switch: cloak military policing in patriotic theater and hope no one notices the deeper constitutional violations taking root.
In other words, Trump’s flag fight is a decoy.
Yet in today’s climate, where mobs on the left and censors on the right compete to silence speech they dislike, even this form of protest is under fire.
Act of protected free speech
In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Texas v. Johnson that burning the flag of the United States in protest is an act of protected free speech under the First Amendment.
Today, that ruling matters more than ever, yet there is an important distinction: the First Amendment protects the right to burn your own flag as political expression but not to vandalize public property in the process.
That distinction matters: the Constitution protects dissent, not destruction.
And it’s exactly that distinction—between lawful protest and punished expression—that makes the flag-burning debate so important.
Although the courts have held that symbolic acts of protest deserve the highest protection, the culture wars have turned those protections into battlegrounds. For decades, mobs, politicians, and bureaucrats alike have worked to silence unpopular or politically incorrect opinions.
Whether it’s a student disciplined for refusing to recite the Pledge, an athlete demonized for kneeling during the National Anthem, or a dissenter deplatformed for expressing views outside the mainstream, the message is the same: toe the line or be punished.
This new Age of Intolerance is not limited to the cultural left.
Trump’s cancel culture
President Trump has been waging his own right-wing brand of cancel culture: sanitizing museums, scrubbing exhibits of “unpatriotic” narratives, renaming anything that doesn’t fit his preferred version of history, and punishing dissenters with executive orders and loyalty oaths.
What the left enforces with trigger warnings and deplatforming, Trump enforces with prosecutions, cultural re-branding and militarization.
They are snowflakes of a different political persuasion, but the result is the same: dissent is silenced, history is rewritten, and only the approved narrative remains.
And here’s the danger: when symbolic outrage is used as a political smokescreen for militarization and constitutional erosion, it distracts Americans from the machinery of control being built in real time. The fight over flags and museums is not just about culture—it is the smokescreen for expanding surveillance, militarization, and police-state powers.
That is why the sudden outrage over disrespect for the country’s patriotic symbols rings so hollow. In a culture where the flag is already plastered on bikinis, beer koozies, and billboards—with little outcry—it’s not reverence that’s driving this crackdown. It’s control.
Worse, it divides the nation and distracts us from the steady rise of the police state.
So, what do the courts actually say about patriotic symbols and protest?
As the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear, Americans have a right to abstain from patriotic demonstrations (West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette, 1943) and/or actively protest that demonstration, for example, by raising one’s fist during the Pledge of Allegiance (Holloman ex rel. Holloman v. Harland, 2004). These First Amendment protections also extend to military uniforms (worn to criticize the military) and military funeral protests (Snyder v. Phelps, 2011).
Right of symbolic protest speech
Likewise, Americans have a First Amendment right to display, alter or destroy the U.S. flag as acts of symbolic protest speech.
In fact, in Street v. New York (1969), the Supreme Court held that the government may not punish a person for uttering words critical of the flag, writing that “the constitutionally guaranteed ‘freedom to be intellectually . . . diverse or even contrary,’ and the ‘right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order,’ encompass the freedom to express publicly one’s opinions about our flag, including those opinions which are defiant or contemptuous.”
The case arose after Sidney Street, hearing about the attempted murder of civil rights leader James Meredith in Mississippi, burned a 48-star American flag on a New York City street corner to protest what he saw as the government’s failure to protect Meredith. Upon being questioned about the flag, Street responded, “Yes; that is my flag; I burned it. If they let that happen to Meredith, we don’t need an American flag.”
In Spence v. Washington (1974), the Court ruled that the right to display the American flag with any mark or design upon it is a protected act of expression. The case involved a college student who had placed a peace symbol on a three by five foot American flag using removable black tape and displayed it upside down from his apartment window.
Police thin blue line flag.
Finally, in Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Court held that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment. The case arose from a demonstration near the site of the Republican National Convention in Dallas during which protesters marched through the streets, chanted political slogans, staged “die-ins” in front of several corporate offices to dramatize the consequences of nuclear war, and burned the flag as a means of political protest.
In other words, it is precisely the unpopular, controversial, and even offensive expression that the First Amendment exists to protect. As Justice William Brennan wrote in Texas v. Johnson, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.”
Censorship on the right & left
More three decades later, that principle is constantly betrayed in practice.
In today’s climate, both political tribes are eager to wield censorship as a weapon. One side shouts down speakers; the other side bans books, rewrites curricula, and prosecutes symbolic dissent like flag burning.
The battlegrounds may differ—college campuses versus classrooms, corporate platforms versus government edicts—but the impulse is the same: to punish those who dare to disagree.
It’s all part of the same authoritarian playbook.
Seen in this light, censorship creep in the name of tolerance becomes even more dangerous.
Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive—provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.
This is why unpopular political protests such as flag burning matter so much: they are the test case for whether we still believe in freedom “for the thought that we hate.”
If freedom means anything, it means that those exercising their right to protest are showing the greatest respect for the principles on which this nation was founded: the right to free speech and the right to dissent.
Frankly, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty.
Let’s not confuse patriotism (love for or devotion to one’s country) with blind obedience to the government’s dictates. That is the first step towards creating an authoritarian regime.
Trumpstein flag desecration.
One can be patriotic and love one’s country while at the same time disagreeing with the government or protesting government misconduct. As journalist Barbara Ehrenreich recognizes, “Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.”
“Free speech for me but not for thee.”
That spirit is disappearing. Instead, Americans now rush to silence those they dislike.
This selective tolerance—the essence of cancel culture—is exactly what my late friend and First Amendment champion Nat Hentoff used to denounce as “Free speech for me but not for thee.”
Once that mindset takes root, the First Amendment is already half-lost.
That double standard lies at the heart of our present crisis.
Indeed, I would venture to say that if you’re not speaking out or taking a stand against government wrongdoing—if you’re marching in lockstep with anything the government and its agents dole out—and if you’re prioritizing partisan politics over the principles enshrined in the Constitution, then you’re not a true patriot.
Real patriots care enough to take a stand, speak out, protest and challenge the government whenever it steps out of line.
There is nothing patriotic about the lengths to which Americans have allowed the government to go in its efforts to dismantle our constitutional republic and shift the country into a police state.
The irony is this: it’s not anti-American to be anti-war or anti-police misconduct or anti-racial discrimination—but it is anti-American to be anti-freedom.
What we are witnessing, in the flag-burning debate and far beyond, is a culture war in which political tribes police thought, speech, and even symbolic protest. Those who refuse to conform—whether they burn a flag, take a knee, question authority, or simply refuse to parrot the official line—are demonized, deplatformed, and sometimes even criminalized.
The upshot of all this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state. Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.
And while Orwell imagined it as dystopian fiction, we are living its early chapters now.
The First Amendment is being whittled down not just by government decree but by a culture that rewards conformity and punishes divergence.
In such an environment, burning a flag is not the real danger. The real danger is a society that no longer tolerates free thought at all.
The First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to speak their minds, air their grievances and contribute to a larger dialogue that hopefully results in a more just world. When there is no steam valve to release the pressure, frustration builds, anger grows, and people become more volatile and desperate to force a conversation.
False patriotism
The lesson is clear: America requires more than voters inclined to pay lip service to a false sense of patriotism. It requires doers—a well-informed and very active group of doers—if we are to have any chance of holding the government accountable and maintaining our freedoms.
We need to stop acting as if showing “respect” for the country, flag and national anthem is more important than the freedoms they represent.
Listen: I served in the Army. I lived through the Civil Rights era. I came of age during the Sixties, when activists took to the streets to protest war and economic and racial injustice. As a constitutional lawyer, I defend people daily whose civil liberties are being violated, including high school students prohibited from wearing American flag t-shirts to school, allegedly out of a fear that it might be disruptive.
I understand the price that must be paid for freedom.
None of the people I served with or marched with or represented put our lives or our liberties on the line for a piece of star-spangled cloth: we took our stands and made our sacrifices because we believed we were fighting to maintain our freedoms and bring about justice for all Americans.
Responsible citizenship means being outraged at the loss of others’ freedoms, even when our own are not directly threatened.
True patriotism
The Framers of the Constitution knew very well that whenever and wherever democratic governments had failed, it was because the people had abdicated their responsibility as guardians of freedom. They also knew that whenever in history the people denied this responsibility, an authoritarian regime arose which eventually denied the people the right to govern themselves.
Citizens must be willing to stand and fight to protect their freedoms. And if need be, it will entail criticizing the government.
This is true patriotism in action.
Love of country will sometimes entail carrying a picket sign or going to jail or taking a knee or burning a flag, if necessary, to challenge injustice.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the real danger isn’t someone burning the flag.
The greatest danger we face is the U.S. government torching the Constitution.
How An X-Rated 1970s Mickey Mouse Comic Preserved Your First Amendment Right To Parody & Satire
3-minute video
EXCLUSIVE: Trump Admin FIRED ME for Israel Dissent
[Editor’s Note: Great insight on the spinning of lies and propaganda from within the US/Israeli genocide machine. Take away conclusion? US messaging is at the “total deference to Israel.” — M. Taylor]
Breaking Points (8/25/25)
Krystal and Saagar are joined by Shahed Ghoreshi to discuss his sudden firing from the State Department by the Trump administration.
20-minute video
I remember when the came out with very sexy American flag gym and short shorts back in the 1970s. There was quite an outcry about the disrespect shown, but corporations were making money, so what could you do? Sit on the flag, I suppose.
I also remember Ronald Reagan proposing a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning, which went as far as Trump's executive order is going to go, and is one reason why Trump wrote it in the first place. Everything he does is recycled Ronnie, from MAGA on.
He's just replaying the greatest hits in a futile effort to distract attention from the Epstein Files.
Besides, most American flags are imported from China. Why is Donald Trump protecting a Chinese export?
As a European, I keep toying with the thought to get people to rally for a global day of action - burning American flags in front of embassy's in a support for the first amendment.
I feel like the world should make it much clearer how much it hates Trump and his cronies.