The Fake Flag Controversy is a Reminder to Teach Your Children Well

Especially about America's revolutionary pride

May 24, 2024

This morning I did my usual Friday radio hit with Hugh Hewitt and after discussing Israel and the Trump trials, he asked me to stay an extra segment to talk more about the absolutely ridiculous smear of Samuel Alito (and Leonard Leo) for their flying of the famous “An Appeal to Heaven” flag, which idiotic entities like Joy Reid, Rolling Stone, and Sheldon Whitehouse have used to smear both men as raising symbols of “Christian nationalism”.

The flag is, of course, extremely common in the Northeast and particularly at houses near the water since it is the flag of the first American navy, raised by George Washington in 1775. The “Appeal” line is a reference to John Locke’s Second Treatise: “And where the Body of the People, or any single Man, is deprived of their Right, or is under the Exercise of a power without right, and have no Appeal on Earth, there they have a liberty to appeal to Heaven, whenever they judge the Cause of sufficient moment.”

The deeply wretched people who are advancing this absurd line of attack come from two categories:

The first are genuinely dumb, ignorant people who have been brainwashed to seize on anything remotely associated with America’s revolutionary heritage as belonging forever to a racist past of slavery and patriarchy (see Colin Kaepernick and the Betsy Ross flag).

The second are the truly evil, despicable people who know exactly what they are doing and are counting on the American ignorance the left has engineered about the symbols our glorious revolutionary heroes fought under and even more ignorance about who someone as obscure as John Locke (imagine such a statement a hundred years ago) to advance their political goals.

Now, to be clear, Sheldon Whitehouse is quite dumb. But he’s definitely in the second category — he’s from Rhode Island for crying out loud, what does he think Roger Williams would say about this? And yet there he is, fomenting a “controversy” that does not exist, aided at each turn by dull-witted journalists who Whitehouse knows will dutifully follow his lead.

Just because some people with extreme views attempt to co-opt an American symbol doesn’t change the real history. Driving today near my home, I counted more than half a dozen Betsy Ross flags and more Gadsden license plates — sold by the state! — than I can count, and that’s in the bluest part of Virginia. But teaching Americans from a young age what these symbols mean is all the more important when the iconoclastic left comes for them.

Charles C.W. Cooke, by birth an Englishman, weighs in:

Bill Kristol, who has apparently decided to spend his 70s publishing every single half-baked thought that pops into his head, has come overnight to consider the “Appeal to Heaven” flag to be a terrible symbol “whose spirit is hostile to the constitutional order and the rule of law that the Supreme Court is to uphold.” Which — here’s another one — is absolutely ludicrous. The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, as Dan McLaughlin notes, was commissioned by George Washington, the man who, among many other things, presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and then served two terms as the first president of the United States. Insofar as that flag makes any intrinsic comment on America’s “constitutional order and the rule of law,” it serves as a resounding affirmation of it — which is why it was used so prominently in HBO’s wonderful 2008 historical drama, John Adams. Having been designed in 1775, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag has existed for 249 years — for longer than America has been an independent nation. Justice Alito, a known history buff, is 74 years old. To believe that his motivation in flying it was to indicate public support for the events of January 6, 2021, is presentism of the worst and dippiest kind.
It is also unimaginably cynical. The purpose of the Times‘ flag story is to discredit Justice Alito, along with the Supreme Court more broadly, and thereby to make it easier for the Court to be manipulated, bullied, or packed by “living constitutionalists.” I know this. You know this. The people who are echoing this stupidity know this, too. This is a game, a ploy, a ruse. It is the latest move in a scheme that was hatched right about the time that progressives started losing cases, and will continue right up to the point at which they start winning them again. That none of the allegations have had any substance beneath them is beside the point; what matters is that they can be added to over time, referred back to as if they are part of some meaningful whole, and then used, as the New York Times dutifully does, to suggest that “the justice recuse himself.” The answer must be no — and that sound you can hear in the distance, at the border where politics meets real life, is the contemptuous laughter of the crowd.

Peggy Noonan, an American, has more general thoughts on love of country:

We live in an age—I’ll say this part quickly as we all know it—in which children are instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice. And we never meant it about the Declaration.
Ideology and idiocy imposed this view, shallowness too. It began some decades ago but has speeded up and became more extreme the past 10 years.
What does this atmosphere of unlove for America do to kids? To little ones 5 and 10 but also 15—what is its impact on them?
To kids from difficult circumstances it means there is no hope; you won’t escape a violent or unhappy family into a better place, the world outside, because it isn’t better. The world outside is America, which brutalizes the minority, the woman, the different. Inside is scary, outside is scarier. What a thing to do to vulnerable kids.
To kids from easier circumstances it does nothing good and carries a subtle bad effect. It means the thing you’re part of is, at its heart, corrupt, so you might as well be corrupt. The ugliness of America becomes a permission structure: We are amoral and you can be, too.
Kids live on dreams. Have the adults who’ve created this atmosphere forgotten that as they pursue their own resentments and make their accusations?
To kids in all circumstances, it denies a dream of a good thing you can make better. It undercuts the idea the people you came from were brave and hardy and did marvelous things. It robs you of a sense you’ve got this within you, and can go on and be a marvel too.
It denies kids a secure sense that they’re part of something sound and healthy. It subtly discourages them from trying to make things better—you can’t right something whose sicknesses are so structural. This isn’t a good way to bring up the future.
You have to start kids out with love. Irony and detachment will come soon enough, but start with love, if only to give them a memory of how that felt.
I’ve spent the past few days reading an old book, one that couldn’t possibly be published today because it’s so full of respect for America. “Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York,” runs 461 pages of text and was published in 1900. The flag that illustrates this column is from its frontispiece.
The manual was written after the Legislature passed an 1898 law requiring public schools to display the American flag and “encourage patriotic exercises.” Organized veterans of the Civil War and of the Women’s Relief Corps, who were nurses on the battlefield, pushed for it to “awaken in the minds and hearts of the young” an “appreciation” for “the great deeds” of their nation.
Memorial Day meant a lot to those old veterans, but more was needed. Their generation was passing; they’d given everything to hold the nation together; they wanted the young to understand why.
Unsaid but between the lines: America at the turn of the 20th century was being engulfed by waves of immigrants; they too needed to understand what America is and means to be, so they would love it too.
What a book the manual is, what a flag-waving old classic.
How do you encourage love of country among schoolchildren? You let them have fun. You hold pageants and parades, have them read poems and learn songs. Let them dress up as figures in history and enact great events. This need not be costly: “An old-time coat or dress found in a garrett or unused drawer at home may serve all needful purposes.”
Tell the story of the American flag. The Continental Congress in 1777 said we need a national banner. Here enters the heroic Mrs. Elizabeth Ross of Philadelphia, known as Betsy, who, on the personal request of General Washington, started sewing. The stars and stripes from her hand, “were unfurled at the battle of Brandywine, in 1777. . . . They sang their song of triumph over defeated Burgoyne at Saratoga. . . . They saw the surrender of the enemy at Yorktown; they fluttered their ‘Goodbye’ to the British evacuating New York.”
Have children memorize and recite Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Have them enact the battle of Lexington and Concord and read aloud Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

And I’ll leave you with James Donald Forbes McCann, an Australian on a road trip from the Midwest to Texas:

Notre Dame is not an Ivy League university and, in what I assume is some sort of intentional point, its buildings tend to be ivy-free. Perhaps it is the absence of ivy, perhaps I am just flat after a long day’s drive across Ohio and Indiana, perhaps it’s just winter, but the campus seems more sterile than I had expected. It’s Good Friday, and my friend Margot is studying classical architecture here. She’s showing me around the grounds. I don’t really know what I’d hoped to see. Amy Coney Barrett? Multiracial friendship groups, skipping across the green?
As soon as I see the stadium, though, I am transfixed. Margot is visibly disappointed when I say that I adore the stadium above all the other buildings. I can tell, with every word, I am lowering myself in her estimation. But it has such vitality, Margot! That stadium exudes love and respect! Just look at it! What that stadium says about the infinite dignity of man! Even the stadium car park is a triumph. It sings of a tailgate to come. I immediately text friends of mine who are Notre Dame football fans, and ask to come to a game with them next season. Margot will be gone by then, studying in Italy, where there are, tragically, no gridiron stadiums whatsoever. The Colosseum is but a pale shadow compared to this arena, here, in sweet Notre Dame. Margot or no Margot, ivy or no ivy, I will return. Later, Margot takes me to see the university’s grotto and the basilica. These, too, admittedly, are beautiful. I make confession, lest I die on the drive tomorrow.
We say goodbye to Margot in South Bend, and drive toward Austin on Easter Sunday morning. There is no time for an Easter egg hunt, but thankfully my three children are too young to expect one. We will begin that tradition next year, which is what I say every year. Our 2005 Toyota Sienna is loaded up with all our worldly possessions, said children, my wife and our traveling companion, Anna, who has very charitably decided to spend her Easter holidays helping us move across the country. Usually, Anna lives in Switzerland, where she is studying to be a classical violinist. Indeed, an unusually large number of my friends are mastering classical disciplines in far-flung locations. Getting to see these two women over Easter is a great blessing. Anna is more passionate about music than anybody I know. We share the drive and take turns playing songs across America. We listen to all the upcoming Eurovision entrants. None are great. We listen to them all again, just to make sure. Then Anna plays “Andrew in Drag” by the Magnetic Fields. My three-year-old son, back in the third row of our car, is a fan. He will spend the next few weeks demanding to listen to “Andrew in Drag.” I make a point of not reflecting on that.
I am a genius. I have discovered a new, exciting, affordable way to travel across America. The trick is to fix upon a final destination, several days away, and drive in that general direction without planning where you’ll stop along the way. Then, in the late afternoon, you estimate how much further you’re willing to drive and open up Airbnb. Verily, the chances of finding a good, cheap, interesting Airbnb in any given town are slim. But with my new, ingenious method, you can survey potential properties across thousands of square miles and hundreds of towns. Surely at least one of them will offer value for money.
It works, and we end up in Branson, Missouri, in someone’s opulent three-story timeshare. It has an elevator, a fridge that makes ice, and only costs about a hundred dollars per night. It’s in the Ozarks, which I have only ever seen on the television program Ozark, and I spend the first night somewhat suspicious that I will be killed in my bed by drug manufacturers. But so outstanding is the Airbnb, so comfortable is my bed, and so recently have I made confession, it might not be such a bad time to die.
I’ve never heard of Branson before — or, rather, that’s what I think at the time. Later, I discover that Branson has been a punchline in several well-known episodes of The Simpsons, which jest that it is Walt Disney World for elderly hillbillies. This is true, and it is even better than it sounds.
Branson is a revelation. At breakfast I eat a Monte Cristo, a kind of deep-fried sandwich I’ve never had before, and drink a cocktail that is only slightly smaller than my head. Immediately afterwards I ride a high-speed roller coaster with my daughter and, miraculously, do not vomit. I ride the Ferris wheel with my boy, and look out over Branson’s mighty mountains, its spaghetti house, its Titanic replica. Our party is so besotted by Branson that we decide to spend another night, even though that will necessitate a thoroughly long and unpleasant drive the next day. Behold, Branson’s upside-down house, Branson’s disco-ball/octopus statue, Branson’s wax museum and the crown jewel, Yakov Smirnoff’s comedy theater. Uncanny, yet familiar; unexpected, yet welcome; humble, yet glorious — Branson rather reminds me of Easter itself.