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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
