Buffalo canceled its Fourth of July fireworks for America's 250th birthday.
The next day the city raised the Somali flag over City Hall instead.
Victor Davis Hanson says he's traced the real cause back decades and conservatives won't like the answer.
Buffalo Mayor Cancels Fireworks Then Hosts Flag Ceremony
Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan pulled the plug on his city's Fourth of July fireworks show.
He blamed a fireworks vendor and safety concerns over falling canisters.
He also admitted Buffalo hadn't hosted a real fireworks show in a generation.
One day later his administration held a different kind of ceremony.
City Hall raised the flag of Somalia to mark Somali Independence Day.
Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney did not let it slide.
"Last I checked, THIS IS AMERICA, not Somalia," she posted.
She said there was no excuse for scrapping a downtown Fourth of July celebration during the nation's 250th year while running up a foreign flag at City Hall.
Someone else apparently agreed with her.
Ryan's office says vandals tore the Somali flag down overnight and damaged the flagpole.
Buffalo was not alone.
https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2072423629061550161“>https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/2072423629061550161
Columbus, Ohio celebrated too, announcing plans to raise the Somali flag at its own City Hall.
The Columbus Recreation and Parks Department quickly deleted the post.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was already screenshotting it.
"Columbus, Ohio raising the flag of Somalia for America 250," Miller wrote.
Ohio state Rep. Brian Stewart said it made little sense to celebrate Somali independence when the United States had taken in tens of thousands of refugees from that same failed state.
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar spent the same week dancing in Somali flag colors to mark Somali Independence Day.
None of it happened in a vacuum.
https://x.com/TheSCIF/status/2072685539531043253“>https://x.com/TheSCIF/status/2072685539531043253
Victor Davis Hanson Connects the Flag to the Fraud
Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson what he thought John Adams would make of it all.
Hanson said the founding generation would not be pleased.
Hanson pointed straight at Minnesota's Somali welfare fraud scandal.
Federal investigators have charged dozens of people, mostly Somali, in a scheme that started with a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future.
Ringleader Aimee Bock is now serving more than 41 years in prison.
Investigators say the scheme diverted more than 250 million taxpayer dollars meant to feed children.
Hanson says the Left's answer to that exposure is not accountability.
It's celebration.
He says Democrats want to shield that community from any blame for what happened.
Then Hanson went further back for the root cause.
He traced the entire mindset to the Obama administration and its DEI machine.
Hanson says Obama officials institutionalized a binary that split the country into two camps.
Thirty percent non white and oppressed.
Seventy percent white and oppressor.
Hanson says every new arrival gets sorted onto the oppressed side the moment they arrive, no matter what they've done since.
Agree with the negative verdict on America and the rewards follow.
Scholarships.
Affirmative action.
A permanent excuse card.
Hanson calls the result a "Frankensteinian monster" of Democratic socialism that is really socialism dash communism wearing a nicer name.
The Ideology Behind the Flagpole
This is not really about a flagpole in Buffalo.
It's about a governing class that built an entire ideology out of dividing Americans into oppressors and oppressed, then handed the oppressed label to newcomers on arrival, no questions asked.
That's how a city government cancels its own 250th birthday fireworks over "safety" one day and finds the budget and the will to run a foreign flag ceremony the next.
That's how a fraud case involving nearly 90 convictions and hundreds of millions in stolen taxpayer money gets answered with a dance video instead of a reckoning.
Hanson's 50 years of university self-flagellation didn't stay on campus.
It moved into city halls, into HHS grant approvals, into the instinct to defend the group before the facts are even in.
Add in 53 million immigrants over the last decade and a political class that treats assimilation as a dirty word, and Hanson's "perfect storm" stops sounding like a metaphor.
Buffalo's flagpole got fixed overnight.
The rot behind why it went up in the first place doesn't fix itself with a wrench and a new rope.
It gets fixed at the ballot box, or it doesn't get fixed at all.
Sources:
- Andrew Mark Miller, "Red-state capital city sparks conservative fire over Somali flag-raising at city hall," Fox News, July 1, 2026.
- Daily Caller News Foundation, "City Officials Raise Somali Flag After Cancelling Independence Day Fireworks," The Daily Caller, July 2, 2026.
- Dmitri Bolt, "Another US City Is Raising the Somali Flag Ahead of America's 250th Birthday," Townhall, July 2, 2026.
- American Thinker, "Blue cities celebrate Somali independence, dis American independence," American Thinker, July 2026.
- RealClearPolitics, "Victor Davis Hanson: Democratic Socialism Is The Result Of The Obama-Era Idea Of White Oppressors And The Oppressed," RealClearPolitics, July 3, 2026.
- NewsNation, "Minnesota fraud: Key questions answered as FBI investigates," NewsNation, December 29, 2025.
- Brett T., "Columbus, Buffalo Raise the Somali Flag Over City Hall to Celebrate Somali Independence Day," Twitchy, July 1, 2026.
