You Must Fly the Somali Flag or Else

Minnesota’s leftists threaten cities flying the state’s old flag

For 131 years, the state of Minnesota had a flag that paid tribute to its history of settlement, its American Indian tribes, the role of its fallen boys in the Civil War, its farmers and its fields. The flag underwent minor redesigns, but remained the same flag until radical leftists complained that it was racist and colonialist and replaced it with the Somali flag of its new racist colonists.

Officially that’s a conspiracy theory, there are just some suspicious ‘somaliarities’ between them.

That’s despite the fact that the new state flag was mandated by law to be maximally diverse and “reflect Minnesota’s shared history, resources, and diverse cultural communities” and that “symbols, emblems, or likenesses that represent only a single community or person, regardless of whether real or stylized, may not be included”. Except for just one ‘diverse’ community.

The one responsible for billions in diverse fraud, diverse terrorism and diverse extremism.

Still usually nobody cares very much about state flags or can even pick them out of a 50 state flag lineup. Anyone who doesn’t spend a lot of time around government buildings may have never even seen one. So why should the design of the Somali or Minnesota flag even matter?

After all the leftists who pushed the new flag never even allowed the public to vote on it.

But it matters enough that radical leftists in the Democrat-Farmer Labor party introduced HF 5077: ‘You Must Fly the Somali Flag or Else Act’* mandating 10% cuts to any area that flies the old flag instead of the new state flag. The problem is that the new flag that looks like a Temu beach towel isn’t very popular and much of the state outside the capitol still flies the old one.

Last week, Inver Grove Heights voted to fly the traditional flag. The city of 35,801 people, like Champlin, Elk River, Zumbrota, Plainview and other places still flying Minnesota’s traditional flag, is one of those traditional American places with minimal fake Somali daycares.

And so they must be punished.

HF 5077, whose listed authors include Somali State Rep. Samakab Hussein, a teenage immigrant who became St Paul’s first DFL Somali pol, is a brutal solution to something most people don’t even know or think is a problem. When the new flag debuted, Hussein celebrated, “we are overjoyed to have a new state flag that truly represents all Minnesotans.” How two shades of blue celebrate ‘all Minnesotans’ was never properly explained. Neither was how the flag “truly represents all Minnesotans” when they weren’t even given the chance to vote on it.

But Hussein’s previous legislative forays included a slavery reparations bill with a formal apology and $100 million in grants. Minnesota was not a slave state, Somalia however was and its brutal Muslim overlords engaged in castrating and selling Christians men into slavery and raping and selling Christian woman into slavery and no Somali apology has been forthcoming.

Other listed ‘authors’ of the ‘You Must Fly the Somali Flag or Else Act’ (not its actual name, but it might as well be) include Rep. Xp Lee (health equity analyst), Rep. Jay Xiong (community organizer), Rep. Bianca Virnig (health and safety consultant), Rep. María Isa Perez-Vega (artist), Rep. Alex Falconer (nonprofit manager), Rep. Kristi Pursell (nonprofit executive director), Rep. Mike Freiberg (public health attorney), Rep. Heather Keeler (assistant director of multicultural recruitment), Rep. Peter Fischer (retired, but not really), and Rep. Liish Kozlowski She/They (two spirit trans non-binary they) (community relations officer).

The Minnesota State Capitol boasts some beautiful artwork including ‘Civilization of the Northwest’ and ‘Discoverers and Civilizers Led to the Source of the Mississippi’, which wokes have been lusting to purge after the state flag, and they will now be able to replace them with a mural of ‘Utterly Useless Non-Profit Executives, Community Organizers, Directors of Multicultural Recruitment and Non-Binary Community Relations Officers Destroying Civilization’.

Forget the explorers, hunters and farmers depicted in the legislative chambers. The current state of affairs is health equity analysts, non-profit consultants and multicultural transgenders punishing you if you recall a time in Minnesota history before they took over the state.

Flying the old flag, Minnesotans are told, is racist. And the best evidence of that is a poem written by the wife of the man who designed the territorial seal that would later be partly incorporated into the traditional state flag. And who can argue with that? Surely if the wife of the man who helped design the seal that went into the flag was racist then the flag must be racist?

I’ll let Jennifer Brooks of the Minnesota Star-Tribune tell it best. “The image on Minnesota’s former flag, drawn from the old territorial seal, was designed to emphasize that this is white man’s land now… A point that Mary Eastman, whose husband sketched the original design, emphasized with a poem. ‘The Red Man’s course is onward,’ she wrote. ‘And Minnesota’s land/Must pass with all its untold wealth/To the white man’s grasping hand.’”

If Brooks were even marginally literate (not a requirement when writing for the Minnesota Star-Tribune) she might have picked up on the fact that a “grasping hand” is not a good thing.

Mary Eastman spent a good deal of time writing about American Indians, mourning their plight and, as she does in the misquoted poem, accusing the government of mistreating them. Both husband and wife were early ethnologists who collected legends of the Dakota peoples.

Seth Eastman, the man who first produced that seal, was an army artist whose first wife was Indian. His grandson became one of the first Indian doctors and helped found the Boy Scouts.

But why should DFL’s wokesters bother to tell the truth when a pack of lies will do?

The pressure to replace the flag had nothing to do with honoring Minnesota’s Indian population. Indeed the law mandating the flag replacement specifically barred any such Indian symbols that had existed on the old flag. The ugly new flag is the banner of a conquering new regime.

And the new regime can’t coherently explain why everyone must fly its woke new flag.

“They’re kind of manufacturing this culture war,” State Rep. Freiberg, who is pushing the ‘You Must Fly the Somali Flag or Else Act’*. “I felt like it was important just for there to be a legislative response to what’s been going on” and then bafflingly argued that “cities should be focused on real issues.” Cities should, the Minnesota legislature apparently shouldn’t

Accusing conservatives of “manufacturing a culture war” while fighting an actual war, claiming that it’s not an issue and that anyone who opposes it must be punished is so structurally incoherent that it makes all too obvious that there is a whole other agenda at work here.

*Satire. The bill is not actually called the ‘You Must Fly the Somali Flag or Else Act’.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.