Hello and welcome to Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2026 — smack in the middle of the week, which means we're all just running out the clock until Friday at this point.
My calendar says it's IT Professionals Day, Double Cheeseburger Day, Cheese Toast Day, Online Learning Day, Linguine Day, Felt Hat Day, Dot Day, and the Day of Democracy. So thank an IT guy, eat a double cheeseburger on cheese toast while you do it, then log on to an online class about democracy and doodle a dot on your felt hat to commemorate the occasion.
Today in History:
1789: Congress renames the newly formed Department of Foreign Affairs the Department of State.
1821: Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua jointly declare independence from Spain.
1835: Charles Darwin, aboard the HMS Beagle, reaches San Cristóbal in the Galápagos Islands.
1862: Confederate forces capture Harpers Ferry, Virginia, days before the Battle of Antietam.
1916: Tanks see combat for the first time in history at the Battle of the Somme.
1935: Nazi Germany enacts the Nuremberg Laws, stripping German Jews of citizenship, and adopts the swastika as its national flag on the same day.
1942: Japanese torpedoes sink the U.S. Navy carrier USS Wasp off Guadalcanal.
1954: Marilyn Monroe films the famous subway-grate skirt scene for The Seven Year Itch on a Lexington Avenue set.
1971: A dozen-plus activists sail from Vancouver aboard the Phyllis Cormack to protest U.S. nuclear testing, founding what becomes Greenpeace.
2008: Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy, triggering the worst phase of the global financial crisis.
Birthdays Today include: Agatha Christie, mystery writer (Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None); Oliver Stone, director (Platoon, JFK); Tommy Lee Jones, actor (No Country for Old Men, Men in Black); Dan Marino, former NFL quarterback; Tom Hardy, actor (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dark Knight Rises); Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author (Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun).
If today's your birthday too, you're in the company of one royal, one financial-crisis anniversary, and a whole lot of Hollywood, and I'm not touching any of that. Good luck.
Before I begin, and without checking to confirm what Alexa just told me, it is one year since I started writing for PJ Media again. That's 365 daily columns. 730,000 words, give or take. I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't be making a book out of all of that. I sometimes picture the faces of my English Teachers from High school when I tell them that 50 years on, I became a writer. Frankly, I'm as surprised as they would have been (So, too, no doubt, my editors here). Onward.
* * *
While driving to a doctor's appointment, I got to thinking yesterday about the American flag. I was passing a rather large example of our banner, one big enough to be seen from miles away. The flagpole was equally massive, about the size of one of those poles you see holding up an electric-generating windmill.
After a quick little salute because apparently I still do that, unlike a growing number of what I reluctantly call my countrymen, well, it got me to thinking. The stray thought that surfaced was one I think I’ve not noted in this column previously:
It's interesting how one can tell who one will be voting for by way of noting the existence of an American flag on the front lawn.
Not the huge and impressive example that got me started down this thought path, and not the porch flag everyone flies on the Fourth and takes down by Labor Day, either. I mean the one that's been up since spring, a little sun-bleached, and which will be snapping in the wind in February when nobody else's is. The one with the light on it at night. That flag tells you something. It tells you the owner still believes, without irony, that the country is worth the fabric. It also labels that person an enemy of certain among us.
Compare that to the yard two doors down with the yard-sign forest. You know the kind: the "In This House We Believe" placard, the Black Lives Matter placard (looking rather weathered these days), the pronoun sticker on the mailbox, the "Coexist" bumper sticker peeling off a Subaru in the driveway, and the sticky rectangular-shaped bit of goo on the other end of the bumper where the Biden '24 sticker used to live before somebody quietly peeled it off.
You almost at once notice what's missing from that yard: the Stars and Stripes. What isn't missing is the rainbow flag, which gets flown with considerably more enthusiasm. It's not universal — I'll grant that much, before the terse mailnotes and comments start arriving — but there are enough of these cues clustered together that it stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern worth naming.
While I fully admit being more than a little cranky as a rule, it turns out I'm not just noticing this because I'm cranky. The polling backs it up, and not from some outfit I made up over coffee.
Observe: An AP-NORC survey conducted this spring found roughly seven in 10 Republicans fly the flag at least on holidays, versus about six in 10 Democrats and independents who say they never fly it at all — and that number climbs to a genuinely startling 75% among Democrats under 45. Pew Research found the same lopsided pattern nearly two decades ago, so this isn't some fresh Trump-era phenomenon; it's a trend line that's been running one direction for a very long time. And YouGov's polling on symbolic flags shows the mirror image on the other end: Democrats view the rainbow flag and the Black Lives Matter flag more favorably, Republicans favor the Gadsden flag and the Thin Blue Line. Everybody's got a banner. But above it all, comes the detail that only one side still seems to like the original.
Somewhere along the way, for a certain, all-too-large slice of the country, Old Glory itself became a loaded symbol that means something other than the intended meaning. Something you'd fly ironically, perhaps upside down, or perhaps even not at all, because flying it sincerely might get you mistaken for someone who thinks America has actually done some things right. And about that upside-down business: what used to be an actual maritime distress signal has become a preferred protest prop, from Yosemite park employees hanging one over El Capitan to a Chicago pastor running one up a pole outside his church to declare the country "in distress." To be fair, the right has used the same trick.
I recall Justice Samuel Alito's household got famous for it, so I suppose nobody gets to claim clean hands here. The point, however, is the direction of travel: what was once a rare, genuinely dramatic gesture has become a routine one, on both sides, which tells you something about how comfortable everyone's gotten with treating the flag as a prop instead of a symbol.
That's not a small shift. A flag on a lawn used to be about as politically neutral a gesture as a wave to a neighbor. Now it's a political tell, and everybody on both sides of that divide quietly knows it. Indeed, it's enough of a thing that the Republican National Committee felt the need to put out an actual press release this summer titled "Democrats Don't Fly the American Flag," which tells you the phenomenon has gotten obvious enough to be worth a party's time to exploit it.
I'm not saying you can run a scientific poll off porches in a subdivision. But drive through any neighborhood in this country, count the flags, then look up how the precincts voted. You'll be surprised how rarely the two disagree.
And what's causing this shift?
Some perspective here is needful. I’ve recently moved to Mount Morris, New York, which is the birthplace of Francis Bellamy, who wrote the pledge back in 1892. It's a place where Brian's USA Diner is. Stores named "Allegiance" and "Pledge," the "Allegiance Bed and Breakfast," and so on. The imagery is all here. The pride.
I grew up in a time when every morning, we faced one of those red, white, and blue symbols of "oppression" and pledged our allegiance to the country and the ideals that flag actually stands for. All the years I was in school, that was the first lesson of the day, and the message of its importance was unmistakable: Our country is worth that pledge, that dedication. Never mind that the pledge itself has been rewritten more than once since — the "under God" that so exercises the professionally offended didn't even arrive until 1954, tacked on by Eisenhower specifically to distinguish us from Godless communism and to acknowledge the source of the ideas from which our freedoms flow. Even the original Bellamy, who was a socialist in the Christian sense (a distinction lost on the DSA malcontents) and a Christian minister, might not recognize what his 22-word civics exercise has since become: a cultural Rorschach test.
The lesson about those values isn't being taught nearly as fervently anymore. On paper, 46 or 47 states still require schools to set aside time for it. In practice, whether it happens every single morning depends less on the statute books and more on whether the local school board still thinks it matters — which is precisely how you get a bipartisan Ohio bill introduced this year just to force districts to pick a "specific time and manner" for something that used to just happen, without anybody needing a law to make it so.
You don't need a law to cause people to love their country, and a law won't do it anyway. You need people who still believe it's worth loving. Increasingly, we're raising generations that were never handed the reason to have or express that love. We’re simply not teaching those values anymore.
I see that as an effect of turning the education of our young over to government and teachers' union-backed leftists, the Randi Weingarten crowd, which is a major reason why I’ve called for the education process to be taken from government and turned over to private education again. As I often reflect (and I think I’ve remarked on it in a recent column), do we really expect a taxpayer-funded, government-run education system to properly teach the young minds full of mush about the founders' vision of limited government and individual freedoms?
And by the way, that’s what has the Left so incensed about “Gulf of America” and “Lake America.” It isn’t the mere act of changing a name that bothers them. Democrats and progressives have been renaming things for years, often with considerably less concern for history, tradition, or the preferences of the people who actually live there. Streets, schools, buildings, military installations, holidays, monuments, and even the names of entire institutions have been fair game whenever the old name offended the latest iteration of "progressive" sensibilities. Nobody on the Left seemed particularly troubled by the principle of renaming things when the change served their purposes. Take the long list of such matters I put in this column a few weeks ago.
What bothers them is what the new names are intended to say. “America” is not merely a geographic designation to these people. It represents something they have spent years teaching themselves — and anyone else who will listen — to regard with suspicion: national pride, patriotism, Western civilization, American exceptionalism, and the proposition that this country is something worth admiring rather than apologizing for. Their objection isn't to value signaling. They have practically turned value signaling into an Olympic sport. Their objection is to what they consider the wrong values being signaled.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (Boy, it feels good to say that!) told us our country "was never that great." Remember that? And the guy wondered why that proverbial neon circle showed up on his back. The man couldn't even make a decent showing in New York City in the most recent election for mayor. OK, the embarrassing sex scandal and the number of deaths in Nursing homes from his decision to put COVID patients there might have had something to do with it, too, but I digress. Then, too, he's another example, having unilaterally renamed the Tappan Zee Bridge after his father.
Cuomo's attitude, as it shows up in our daily lives, is why something as utterly mundane as calling a body of water the “Gulf of America” can provoke such theatrical outrage. The name itself isn't dangerous. The idea behind it is. It puts the word America where everyone can see it, say it, and hear it without an accompanying apology. It suggests that there is nothing inherently embarrassing about identifying with this country. It is a tiny linguistic assertion of national pride — and apparently that is enough to send some people into orbit.
Gaia forefend that anyone should hold America high in their mind, speak of it with affection, or treat patriotism as something other than a pathology requiring immediate diagnosis. For the people I’ve been describing, America is acceptable only when the word is followed by a lecture about its sins. Pride must be replaced with penance, patriotism with perpetual self-criticism, and admiration with an endless accounting of historical grievances. They don't object to changing names. They object to changing the direction of the cultural signal. And when the signal points toward pride in America rather than contempt for it, suddenly the renaming of a few words becomes a five-alarm cultural emergency. And the symbol of that pride, the American Flag, must be excised.
You know, it occurred to me about halfway through writing this that I should have written it back on July fourth. Then again, perhaps not. Showing respect for our country and promoting its values is something we should do every day, without hesitation. Not just on high holidays. And that, perhaps, is the point of this piece.
Salute the Stars and Stripes today, people. Our country is still worth it.
Thought of the Day: “The essence of America — that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion — it is an idea — and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things.” —Condoleezza Rice
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