Founder of ‘Your American Flag Store’ Details Censorship Battle with Big Tech

Your American Flag Store

Founder and CEO of Your American Flag Store James Staake recounted his censorship battle with Facebook, Shopify, and PayPal, revealing how the tech giants targeted his patriotic business the day after January 6, 2021.

Staake’s business, which started as a side job involving him building wooden American flag pieces featuring patriotic artwork created by his wife, grew from a small local operation in 2018 to a full-time gig once the products were available to purchase online.

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General Assembly Bill Permits Flying Only U.S., Tennessee Flag in Classrooms

US-TN Flags

A bill introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly in November would prevent teachers from allow teachers only to hang the Tennessee and United States flags in their classrooms. 

HB 1605 “prohibits [Local Education Associations] and public charter schools from displaying in public schools flags other than the official United States flag and the official Tennessee state flag,” according to the summary of the bill’s text. 

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Senate Democrats Shoot Down GOP Amendment to Fly Only the American Flag over Government Buildings

On Thursday, Senate Democrats voted against a Republican-introduced measure that would have forbidden the federal government from flying any flag other than the American flag over government buildings.

As Fox News reports, the measure in question was introduced by Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) as an amendment to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which would have instituted the ban for all public buildings, from federal office buildings and courthouses to post offices.

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College Professor in Wisconsin Says American Flag Causes Him ‘Anxiety’

A Marquette University professor said the American flag makes him “anxious” in a National Public Radio interview Wednesday.

Philosophy Professor Grant Silva told an interviewer with WUWM, an NPR affiliate station in Milwaukee, that he feels “anxious” when he sees an American flag. In the interview, Silva described how “excessive imagery” of American flags is borderline “nationalism.”

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Commentary: Younger Parents Say Their Kids Are Indifferent to the Flag

A new survey suggests that younger parents don’t share the same values or priorities for civics education as their older peers. According to the survey, conducted by RealClear Opinion Research and funded by the conservative Jack Miller Center, nearly nine out of ten Americans agree that teaching children about our nation’s founding principles is “very important.” But seven out of ten don’t think schools are doing a good job of it.

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Minnesota Man Brutally Beat, Stabbed Woman for Wearing American Flag Shirt, Charges Say

A Mankato, Minn., man is facing several charges after he allegedly beat a woman so severely that police officers “couldn’t see her eyes.”

The suspect, 23-year-old Paul Peter Jal, was “upset” because the victim was “wearing an American flag shirt,” a criminal complaint says. Jal is facing charges of second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, third-degree assault, threats of violence, disrupting a 911 call, and damage to property.

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Commentary: That Star-Spangled Banner Yet Waves

Tennessee Star

by Ashley Hamilton   To fly the flag is to honor the mystic chords of memory. It is to hear not a harmonious hymn of battle but the disharmony of peaceful dissent. It is to record the jangling discords of the march of freedom, not a symphony of complacency nor an orchestration of complicity in the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. To fly the flag—to raise it on this day, Flag Day—is to celebrate the greatness of America. We are a great nation, not because we have always been good, but because we have never failed to try to do good; to right the wrongs of America as God gives us the firmness to see the right; to see to it that we are true to what we said on paper, so every American will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood; to see a sea of flags—from sea to shining sea—where liberty is our birthright and life itself is an unalienable right. To see our flag is to feel what no other flag…

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Commentary: A.G. Garland’s Use of Police Power Against Parents Could Be His Undoing

Destruction of the family has always been at the center of the collectivist project. In chapter two of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels point out that the destruction of private property will never be complete until the “abolition [Aufhebung] of the family” is accomplished. The dream is perennial among snarling misanthropists. A couple of years ago, an interview in The Nation with a radical feminist explained that if you “want to dismantle capitalism” then you have to “abolish the family.”

It is worth keeping that in mind as the little drama of Merrick Garland versus the parents of America unfolds. I wrote about the attorney general’s absurd but troubling memorandum shortly after it was released on October 4. As all the world knows (but only some precincts of the world admit), Garland threatened to mobilize the entire police power of the state against parents. Why?

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Commentary: Can We Recover American Nobility, Piety, and Humanity?

There was a time when a kind of nobility still existed among our leaders. In Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered March 4, 1865, while the nation was still riven by a bloody Civil War, he envisioned a future of national healing. In words now carved in the marble of the Lincoln Memorial, he pledged, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,” to go on “to bind up the nation’s wounds,” and to “do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves . . .”

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Judge Michael Warren Commentary: 2020 Flag Day

As the tumult of the trifecta of COVID-19, protests/riots, and economic distress grip our country, we are, of all things, supposed to celebrate the flag on June 14. Once an innocuous display of patriotism, you can no doubt envision the histrionic divides that celebrating our national emblem will likely bring.

Before those who might desire to exercise their First Amendment right tear up or burn the flag do so, they might consider how Flag Day came to be. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress approved a resolution establishing a uniform national flag. The Betsy Ross Flag was born. Although it no doubts generated warm feelings of patriotism, it was not particularly revered.

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Commentary: The Flag Protection Amendment and American Greatness

by Stephen B. Presser   One of the great characteristics of Americans is their candor. Among the reasons we declared independence from what we believed to be the excesses of a corrupt British monarchy and aristocracy was our contempt for pretense, deference, and pomposity. We believed, instead, in simple virtue and simple values such as truth, decency, honesty, temperance, and humility. Democrats and their increasingly dominant progressive wing fail to understand that Donald Trump has been an extraordinary champion of these traditional virtues, and he proved it again with his warm embrace of the Flag Protection Amendment, which has recently been reintroduced into Congress by Senators Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.). The text of the amendment is simple and succinct: “Congress shall have the power to prevent the physical desecration of the flag of the United States,” but it strikes at the heart of contemporary progressivism, with its belief in what psychologists are wont to call “self-actualization,” but more astute observers have always known to be “unbridled license.” Somehow our culture became so twisted that by 1989, a majority of the Supreme Court in Texas v. Johnson declared that burning the flag (or shredding it, or defecating or…

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Commentary: That Star-Spangled Banner Yet Waves

Tennessee Star

by Ashley Hamilton   To fly the flag is to honor the mystic chords of memory. It is to hear not a harmonious hymn of battle but the disharmony of peaceful dissent. It is to record the jangling discords of the march of freedom, not a symphony of complacency nor an orchestration of complicity in the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. To fly the flag—to raise it on this day, Flag Day—is to celebrate the greatness of America. We are a great nation, not because we have always been good, but because we have never failed to try to do good; to right the wrongs of America as God gives us the firmness to see the right; to see to it that we are true to what we said on paper, so every American will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood; to see a sea of flags—from sea to shining sea—where liberty is our birthright and life itself is an unalienable right. To see our flag is to feel what no other flag…

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Cleveland Agrees to $225,000 Settlement With Communist Who Believes ‘America Was Never Great’

  Cleveland has agreed to pay $225,000 in a settlement with a second protester who was arrested outside of the 2016 Republican National Convention for burning the American flag. As The Ohio Star reported in April, the city agreed to a $50,000 settlement with Steven Fridley, who was also arrested for partaking in the protest. This time the money is going to Gregory “Joey” Johnson, the same Gregory Johnson who was the defendant in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision. That case found that burning the American flag was protected by the First Amendment. Johnson and Fridley both had their criminal charges dismissed by the Cleveland Municipal Court, and sued the City of Cleveland for violating their First Amendment rights. “Instead of protecting RNC protesters’ constitutional rights, Cleveland police stalked them, literally extinguished their speech rights, and then arrested and prosecuted them—violating 30-year-old Supreme Court precedent taught to schoolchildren,” said Subodh Chandra of Chandra Law Firm, which represented both Johnson and Fridley. Chandra criticized city leaders for failing to “hold officers accountable for lying” about Johnson, whom police officers claimed was on fire and setting others on fire during the protest. Video of the incident, however, contradicts…

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Elks, VFW to Place 500 American Flags on Service Members’ Graves at Williamson Memorial Garden

  For the eighth year in a row, two organizations will place 500 American flags on the graves of service men and women at Williamson Memorial Garden. The Nashville-Franklin Lodge No. 72 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE) in conjunction with the Veterans’ of Foreign Wars Franklin Post No. 4892 will place the flags on the graves at 5 p.m. on Friday, the BPOE said in a press release. Williamson Memorial Garden is located at 3009 Columbia Ave., Franklin, TN, 37064. These two groups, because of their love and support of those who have served, want to ensure that the meaning of Memorial Day is not forgotten, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks said. Memorial Day is the day we set aside to remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of the United States of America. Memorial Day is one of three days set aside each year to honor the military; the other two are Military Appreciation Day and Veterans’ Day. Since 1897, the Nashville-Franklin Lodge No. 72 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks has remembered the children and veterans of Nashville and the surrounding area. Richard Gardiner, Associate Professor…

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Cleveland Must Pay $50,000 to Communist Flag Burner Arrested Outside of 2016 RNC

  The City of Cleveland agreed to a $50,000 settlement Wednesday in a lawsuit filed by Steven Fridley, who was arrested outside of the 2016 Republican National Convention for burning the American flag. Fridley was charged with obstructing official business, aggravated disturbance of peace, and disobeying a lawful order, but those charges were dropped by Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Charles Patton in October 2017. In his ruling, Patton cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision, which found that burning the American flag was protected by the First Amendment. A year later, in October 2018, Fridley filed suit against the City of Cleveland in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on the grounds that the city, its police chief, and police officers unlawfully prosecuted him for exercising his First Amendment rights. Fridley’s lawsuit, according to a Wednesday press release from his attorneys, also claimed that city officials manufactured false reports and evidence in an effort to pursue “sham charges” intended to “create plausible deniability” and “conceal their politically motivated censorship of a lawful protest.” The City of Cleveland settled Fridley’s claims Wednesday for $50,000. “The case is a timely reminder that respect for dissent…

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FLOP: ‘First Man’ Movie Fails To Top Box Office Amid Flag Controversy

"First Man"

by Nick Givas   Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” failed to secure the top spot at the box office this weekend and came in third behind Marvel’s “Venom” and Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born.” The film received backlash and criticism, for failing to include a scene of Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the surface of the moon. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, played by ‘House Of Cards’ actor Corey Stoll, appeared to voice his displeasure with the film’s omission back in September, when he posted a photo of he and Armstrong plating the flag on Twitter. #proudtobeanAmerican #freedom #honor #onenation #Apollo11 #July1969 #roadtoApollo50 pic.twitter.com/gApIwLzaJw — Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) September 3, 2018 Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong and hails from Canada, defended leaving out the flag scene and took a different view of America’s moon landing. “I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement [and] that’s how we chose to view it,” he told reporters at the Venice film festival. “I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.” ‘First Man’ failed to recoup even half of it’s…

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Commentary: ‘First Man’ – Let’s Just Skip This Movie

"First Man"

by CHQ Staff   Universal Pictures’ chose Oscar-winning French director Damien Chazelle and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling to lead “First Man,” the story of the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s quest to land a man on the moon. The story line focuses on astronaut Neil Armstrong and the years 1961 to 1969 when the taxpayers of the United States spent billions of dollars to send Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin to the Moon. What was the most photographed moment of the first two and a half hours man spent on the Moon was when Armstrong and Aldrin planted the American flag at Tranquility Base and saluted it. The problem with First Man is, America, and the American flag, get left entirely out of Chazelle and Gosling’s movie. Ryan Gaydos of Fox News reports Ryan Gosling, the Canadian actor who portrays Armstrong in the movie, defended the decision to not show the flag in an interview with the UK’s Telegraph. Gosling was asked at the Venice Film Festival whether omitting the scene was deliberate and the actor attempted to sidestep the question by responding that the moon landing “transcended countries and borders.” “I think this was widely regarded in the end as…

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