Patriot Brief

  • What Happened: Leftist activists in Minnesota staged a photo mimicking the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising using the state’s Somali-inspired flag.
  • Why It Matters: The image appropriates one of America’s most sacred wartime symbols for modern political activism.
  • Bottom Line: Critics say the stunt disrespects U.S. military sacrifice and reduces history to cheap performance art.

Some images are sacred in American history. The flag-raising at Iwo Jima is one of them. Woke leftist activists in Minnesota apparently decided that meant it was fair game.

Photos circulating online show activists attempting to “recreate” the iconic World War II image using Minnesota’s Somali-inspired state flag. The original Iwo Jima photograph captured U.S. Marines raising the American flag after one of the bloodiest battles in U.S. military history. Nearly 7,000 Americans were killed on that island. Thousands more were wounded.

What happened in Minnesota was not homage. It was cosplay.

The activists posed theatrically, draped in winter gear, hoisting a political symbol while stripping the original image of its meaning. The comparison is jarring. The original represented victory, sacrifice, and national unity forged through unimaginable loss. The recreation appears designed to provoke, not honor.

Reaction online was swift and brutal. Critics accused the activists of mocking American military history and reducing genuine sacrifice to a left-wing performance piece. Others noted the growing trend of activists hijacking historic imagery to force modern political narratives onto moments that predate their ideology by decades.

This is not art. It is not protest. It is appropriation.

The Iwo Jima image was not about identity politics, immigration debates, or state branding. It was about Americans fighting and dying under one flag. Recasting it as a contemporary activist statement says less about the past and more about the present obsession with erasing national meaning.

For many Americans, this was not edgy or clever. It was insulting. Another reminder that for today’s left, nothing is sacred and everything is a stage.