U.S. Flag Rises on Chapel Hill after Activists Tore the Ensign Down

“USA! USA! USA!” These patriotic chants swelled as the American flag ascended once again to fly over the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This episode only became necessary after anti-Israel protesters, that morning routed from the grounds, returned to strike the red, white, and blue and raised the Palestinian flag in its stead. The activists then surrounded the base of the flagpole, fighting off any who tried to rescue Old Glory and return it to its place. It took the interim chancellor and a guard of campus police (the local police chief, who seems more concerned with decarceration and hiring women than protecting the public, decided against sending town police to assist university officers) marching out and securing a perimeter around the pole to put right the activists’ wrong.

The Raleigh News & Observer describes the officers and chancellor preparing to restore the American flag:

As police prepared to leave from Gerrard Hall to march onto the quad, one officer asked if the others remembered which team they were on. Roberts, the interim chancellor, responded: “USA.”

Some students cheered as the American flag was being raised, and sang the national anthem once it was up. Roberts, speaking to reporters after the American flag had been reattached, said the university belongs to the people of North Carolina, not a “small minority” of protesters.

The American flag would remain hanging as long as he remains chancellor, he vowed.

The activists would later drop the American flag a second time, returning it to the police. This prompted the university officers and staff to fence off the flagpole and raise, again, the only flag that should reside there.

These activists are wrong. So completely and utterly in error. These activists supplanted our colors with those of a fundamentalist terror state, the like of which we sailed across half a world to thrash in our infancy. God bless those cops, chancellor, and young students who raised and cheered restoring the flag on Chapel Hill — in abstract, it sounds like an event from 1864 rather than 2024.

The First Amendment exists for Americans to say and worship as they please. The beliefs that begot that amendment are represented in the flag. It has an umbrella effect. Flags matter, symbols matter — Catholics have this right when they emphasize the necessity of imagery in faith. There’s a reason men at Antietam kept grasping for their unit’s flag as yet another of their peers fell in the cornfield — we parcel our ideals and passions into cloth and bear it with us. What these protesters raised today was anathema to American beliefs concerning the equality of men before God. It was an offensive act.

That men, student and middle-aged alike, took it upon themselves to celebrate the restoration of normalcy is worth remembering.

USA! USA! USA!