The thing I didn’t expect to make me emotional during last weekend’s No Kings Rally was all the American flags. Rows of red, white, and blue rippling in the fall breeze – ordinary enough, except that for years I’ve flinched at the sight of them.
Because let’s be honest: that flag, our flag, has been hijacked.
Top Three Takeaways from the Article:
Reclaiming Patriotism from Extremism – The American flag has been misused as a symbol of division and domination by extremist movements, but many Americans are now reclaiming it as a banner of inclusion, justice, and democracy.
True Love of Country Means Accountability – Real patriotism isn’t blind loyalty or cult-like devotion to leaders—it’s the courage to challenge power, demand equality, and push America to live up to its founding ideals.
Unity Through Shared Ownership of Symbols – The flag belongs to everyone, immigrants, progressives, veterans, believers, and skeptics alike, and reclaiming it represents a collective stand for freedom, not fear.
America’s flag has been plastered on lifted trucks and wrapped around shoulders at rallies where people chant for deportations, book bans, and the destruction of political opponents. It’s been waved as a weapon, turned into a partisan logo, rebranded as the banner of a movement that mistakes cruelty for patriotism and the pursuit of power for Christianity.
And for a long time, I let them have it.
I stopped putting flags out on the Fourth of July. I stopped buying T-shirts with stars and stripes. I couldn’t look at it without feeling disgust – at what it had come to represent, at what had been done in its name. The flag no longer meant freedom or unity. It took on a more sinister message of you’re either with us or you’re un-American.
But at the No Kings Rally, a protest against creeping authoritarianism and the cult of personality politics that’s poisoning our country, I saw something different.
I saw military veterans carrying flags and chanting “Country Over Cult.” I saw activists waving them next to pride banners. I saw parents holding flags in one hand and their kids’ hands in the other. I saw ordinary people – brown, white, Black, immigrant, atheist, devout – all claiming a symbol that once belonged to all of us.
And for the first time in a long time, I felt something about the American flag that surprised me: pride.
Because I really do love my country, and I always have. I love that we can march in the streets and shout at our leaders. I love that dissent is part of our national DNA. I love that this imperfect and sometimes infuriating experiment in democracy still gives us the right to say, “No kings!”
But loving your country doesn’t mean joining a cult. It doesn’t mean blind obedience or worshipping wannabe strongmen. It means wanting it to live up to its promises – liberty, equality, justice for all.
The American flag represents those promises.
Right-wingers don’t have a monopoly on patriotism. Christian nationalists don’t own the flag. And the people who rioted at the US Capitol, beat police officers, and tried to overturn an election sure as hell don’t get to define what America means.
That flag is mine too. It’s ours – the immigrants, the progressives, the workers, the dreamers, the ones who still believe that democracy, flawed as it is, is absolutely something worth saving.
So yeah. I want my flag back.
Not because I want to stand under it alone, but because it belongs to all of us – not just the loudest, angriest few who’ve mistaken domination for patriotism.
At the rally, surrounded by people who love this country enough to fight for it, I remembered what the flag once stood for – and what it still does today.
Freedom doesn’t wear a red hat.
Freedom belongs to everyone in America who believes in it.
And I’m done letting anyone tell me otherwise.