The United States is undergoing an attempted regime change, and the pride flag is its emblem.
This regime change has been more than a century in the making. Initially, it flew under the Stars and Bars while hollowing out its meaning. Now it has its own emblem, the pride flag.
This year we witnessed the American government’s elevation of that pride flag to a place of competition and sometimes dominance over the American flag. Notoriously, the White House participated earlier this month.
Barack Obama also put pride imagery atop the White House. Hours after Neil Gorsuch’s vote cemented the falsehood that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was meant to protect transsexual behavior, Obama tweeted this image:
U.S. military installations have been doing this for years. According to The U.K. Independent, U.S. embassies have “been raising the rainbow banner during Pride Month since 2011. In 2019, [when Trump’s administration allowed pride flags but not on the same pole as the U.S. flag], many US embassies defied or found a way around the new policy, something one anonymous diplomat called a ‘category one insurrection.’”
This year, U.S. embassies flew pride flags in places where it’s obvious that would offend and repulse the local populace, including in Vatican City, multiple Muslim nations, Russia, and Singapore. This year the U.S. ambassador to Poland marched in Warsaw’s pride parade to make a statement against the Polish government, a NATO ally. Damaging foreign relations is apparently a price U.S. military leaders are willing to pay for flying the flag that stands for erasing the constitutional rights that members of the military swear to protect.
Formerly this flag was a symbol of American occupation abroad. Now it is a symbol of domestic occupation as well.
Identity Politics Is Regime Change
The pride flag is not merely a symbol of sexual license. It is also a symbol for using identity politics to erase the original U.S. Constitution.
That is clear because the pride legal agenda includes erasing key constitutional protections that are meant to apply to all equally, meaning without regard to private sexual behavior. It requires enforcement by a bureaucracy that in its very existence violates the constitutional division of powers between legislative, judicial, and executive. Uniting these, Father of the Constitution James Madison said, is tyranny.
The legal, activist, and cultural entities forwarding the pride agenda seek nothing less than the erasure of free speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press, republican checks and balances, the nuclear family, the parent-child bond, the marital bond, and legal protections for minors based on their incapacity for self-governance. This is clear from their legislative activity, which includes “hate speech” laws that gag people from speaking about their ideas even in private, and stripping kids from their parents’ protection.
Very quickly displacing homosexuals, the current tip of this spear is the transgender movement. Before that, it was the other identity politics groups: every ancestry except for European, and — what seems like forever ago — feminism. Who knows what next entity will be used to groom Americans into accepting the further erasure of our natural rights; perhaps it’s furries.
The pride flag is now the flag of identity politics. The version the White House flew expresses this directly, with the additional stripes representing every ethnicity except one. Identity politics is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Enshrining it in American law is in fact a tacit regime change.
They Erased Civil Rights in the Name of Civil Rights
Numerous works of scholarship verify this. Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger’s work, perhaps especially Is Administrative Law Unlawful, illuminates how the bureaucracy that identity politics requires turns the Constitution on its head.
So does Hillsdale professor Thomas G. West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding and Vindicating the Founders, and the multi-volume scholarly work of his colleague Ronald Pestritto. Perhaps the most recent scholarly work demonstrating this is War on the American Republic, by Hillsdale professor Kevin Slack (review forthcoming).
Another is Age of Entitlement, by writer and scholar Christopher Caldwell. He explains how well-intentioned 1960s civil rights laws immediately turned into a body of law and institutions that work to overthrow the Constitution.
“The legitimacy of civil rights legislation rested on the belief that it would be a transitional measure, leading to a stable, racially mixed society,” Caldwell writes on page 278. “Professing to oppose racial distinctions in the South, while introducing them on a nationwide basis via affirmative action and other programs, would have been illogical, hypocritical, and unjust if done on a permanent basis. The extra rights of protection and redress that minorities enjoyed were admissible as stopgaps — not as permanent parts of the Constitution. Permanent, though, is what they became.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, he notes, ultimately comprised “a legislative repeal of the First Amendment’s implied right to freedom of association.” It also created the possibility for the Democratic Party to become a permanent majority by selling Americans’ universal legal protections for the votes of incompatible identity blocs repaid with entitlements.
They sold Americans’ birthright for power. Republicans agreed to this because they didn’t want to be called racists for offering people of all races the exact same natural rights and responsibilities at the core of our historic social compact.
Pride as a Substitute Form of Government
This month, the incisive writer Chris Bray noted California Democrats are all over pride displays while their state erodes: “Why is the alleged governor of a state with a $32 billion budget deficit obsessed with a supposed plan, elsewhere, to erase LBGTQ existence?” He essentially argues pride is a diversion to obscure politicians’ gross mismanagement of conditions that affect citizens’ daily lives.
There’s definitely something to that, but also something missing. What’s missing is this: For today’s left, identity politics is not a distraction from government; it’s the purpose of government.
The old conception was that government exists to protect our natural rights, first among them our lives and liberties with local police, strong borders, and a strong national defense. The new conception is that government exists to provide spiritual direction and affirmation amid a culture that no longer seeks spiritual direction in their private lives from its original source (i.e., Jesus Christ).
Pride is not a distraction from basic government, it’s a replacement. It’s morphed into not only a new legal regime, but a new spiritual regime. It’s the attempt to replace our original Constitution with a pagan theocracy.
A Pagan Theocracy
Paganism doesn’t keep the trains running or un-looted, but it does keep people involved in rituals that distract from their own dysfunction. Some religious rites resolve dysfunction — penitence and forgiveness, for a key example. Others, such as scapegoating, perpetuate dysfunction.
Through repentance, people take responsibility for their actions and promise to improve. Through scapegoating, people transfer responsibility for their actions to uncontrollable entities like the rain god, white supremacy, and global warming. You should be able to see why a society based on the former would have more functioning infrastructure and why a society based on the latter would have less.
It’s no accident that cancel culture mushroomed as a ritual in the age of identity politics. Its entire cycle of repeat public shaming without resolution is a pagan religious ritual.
Identity politics unites pagan religious impulses with legal structures for enforcement and validation. This intertwined religious and political system — a theocracy — is displacing basic American rights like being assumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and being legally protected from public slander and libel.
Now our own government endorses this religious impulse and elevates its symbols atop the symbols of our former constitutional order. It’s an occupation flag signifying regime change.
It’s ultimately not suprising, because every government has to operate upon a widely accepted code of morality. Every government is informed and affected by the religion of its people. The basis of culture, as Russell Kirk noted, is the cult: a religion. From that religion’s philosophical underpinnings flow government, the arts, and all the rest.
So, one wonders: What is the god of this new religion undergirding an attempted American regime change? Some of its adherents have a very honest answer.
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