“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”Ray Bradbury
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.
Hellbound and Down 