{"id":732802,"date":"2026-06-29T12:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T12:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/732802\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T12:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T12:18:10","slug":"as-america-turns-250-some-say-the-stars-and-stripes-is-now-a-red-flag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/732802\/","title":{"rendered":"As America turns 250, some say the Stars and Stripes is now a red flag"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI just want to say I love our flag, I love our country and I want people to realize this is not about one party or one person,\u201d said Dyer, 38. \u201cYes, the last few years have been hard, and sometimes it feels like our flag has been taken over. But I\u2019m flying the flag because I\u2019m still proud of our country, even if it\u2019s not where I think it should be 250 years after it was founded.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Red, white and blue wave <\/p>\n

National pride may be on the decline, but flagmakers have seen a boost in business this year, with government agencies, private businesses and individuals placing orders for new banners to mark the semiquincentennial.<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness is up for sure,\u201d said Carter Beard, president of Annin Flagmakers, a sixth-generation family firm based in New Jersey that has sewn flags for events ranging from Abraham Lincoln\u2019s funeral to the Apollo moon landing. \u201cNot like 50%, but in the 20% range. This being the anniversary, we\u2019re definitely seeing a surge of patriotism with people wanting to fly the flag.\u201d<\/p>\n

The country may be 250 years old, but until the mid- to late-19th century, flags were displayed mainly on government buildings, historians say. It wasn\u2019t until after the Civil War and the 1876 centennial celebration that Americans started flying their own<\/a> in earnest.<\/p>\n

\"BruceBruce Watson at his home in Montague, Mass.Hannah Beier for NBC News<\/p>\n

The battle over who can lay claim to America\u2019s flag, historians say, has been raging since at least the Vietnam War, when both Democrats and Republicans waved it at demonstrations for or against the conflict that divided the nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe right used it to make the point that patriotism meant that the U.S. could do no wrong even when it did,\u201d said Alex Wagner, an adjunct professor at Syracuse University\u2019s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs. \u201cPeople on the left used it to make the point that we as Americans shouldn\u2019t be fighting a war that\u2019s at odds with our national principles, like that of self-determination.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was the hard right that \u201cseized the flag\u201d and began smearing all liberals as unpatriotic, said Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University.<\/p>\n

\u201cConservative and right-wing politicians went along with this, exploited it, and the dialectic of disaffection worsened,\u201d Wilentz said, adding that Trump has amplified that brand of patriotism.<\/p>\n

Even so, Wagner said, Americans should be embracing the Stars and Stripes.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur flag is ever-evolving, like our country,\u201d he said. \u201cThe United States has evolved from 13 colonies to the 50-state union that it is now, and the flag has changed along with it. It\u2019s not MAGA\u2019s flag. It\u2019s not Trump\u2019s flag. It\u2019s the American flag, and it belongs to all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI just want to say I love our flag, I love our country and I want people to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-732802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}