The small city of Winooski, Vermont, raised a Somali flag for one week to comfort frightened students.
Within days, the school district was buried under racist phone calls, violent voicemails, and an online pile-on from national right-wing accounts.
Police are now reviewing what the district describes as “racist, hateful” messages, and the flag has become a symbol of something much bigger than a piece of cloth on a second flagpole.
A Flag Raised To Support Somali Students
Reporter Alison Novak of Seven Days explains that the Winooski School District raised the light-blue Somali flag outside its pre-K–12 campus on Friday.
The flag was placed on a pole that already flies the U.S. flag, and it was flanked by the Vermont state flag on the other side.
Novak reports that the display was meant to run for a week as a concrete gesture telling Somali students they are seen, valued, and supported.
Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria, himself an immigrant from Nicaragua, told Novak the flag-raising was a direct response to new comments by former president Donald Trump.
At a recent event, Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said he did not want them in the United States.
For a district that educates many refugee and immigrant children, those remarks landed like a punch.
Chavarria and his team decided they were not going to stay silent and hope the kids just “got over it.”
They planned not just the flag-raising, Novak writes, but also a celebration with Somali food and a civil-rights workshop to reinforce the message that Somali students belong in Winooski.
In a normal world, that might have been the end of the story.
But we’re not living in a normal world.
How One Video Turned Into a National Pile-On
According to Novak, the backlash began after conservative social media accounts reposted a video of the flag-raising.
Libs of TikTok shared the clip on X along with the Winooski School District’s phone number.
Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson amplified it too, adding the comment, “I’ve got a suggestion for ICE’s next stop.”
Those posts drew hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments.
Novak notes that many of the replies attacked the district for flying a “foreign flag,” and some falsely claimed the Somali flag had replaced the American flag altogether.
That lie is easy to debunk.
Both Novak and NBC5 reporter James Maloney describe the setup the same way: the U.S. flag remains at the top of its pole, with the Vermont flag and the Somali flag flying at the same lower height on either side.
But online outrage doesn’t slow down for facts.
Once the phone number was blasted out to a national audience, the harassment began.
Phones Flooded, Website Taken Down
Chavarria told Novak that the calls started around 9:30 a.m. Monday, mostly from out-of-state numbers.
Callers yelled at staff, used the N-word, and accused the district of being un-American.
Some voicemails contained violent threats.
Novak reports that the volume was so overwhelming that staff began routing all calls straight to voicemail to protect front-office workers.
The district also took the unusual step of taking down its entire website.
WCAX’s news team reports that the homepage was replaced with a message citing an “unprecedented volume of illegitimate traffic targeting our services.”
In plain language, district officials believed the online backlash had morphed into something close to a coordinated harassment and disruption campaign.
WCAX notes that the school is now working with city and state law enforcement to track the messages and make sure students and staff are safe.
It’s a revealing snapshot of how quickly a small local school system can become the main character in a national culture-war story.
Police Say Messages Are ‘Racist, Hateful’ – But Not Yet Credible Threats
James Maloney of MyNBC5-WPTZ reports that Vermont State Police and the Winooski Police Department are reviewing the wave of messages.
State police told Maloney that as of Monday, the district had received more than 200 messages.
Investigators believe the calls and messages appear to be part of a national campaign, not an organic local dispute.
For now, state police say none of the messages has risen to the level of a “credible threat of violence.”
That doesn’t mean the impact is harmless.
The district itself has publicly labeled many of the messages “hateful and racist,” a description Novak also echoes in Seven Days based on Chavarria’s review of the voicemails.
A Winooski parent who spoke to Maloney off camera said she’s worried about her children’s safety in the middle of all this.
Even if no direct, actionable threat has been confirmed, the sense of being targeted by strangers across the country is very real for families on the ground.
To their credit, Winooski officials have not downplayed the situation.
They’ve brought in extra police presence, taken down vulnerable systems, and openly told staff and students what’s happening, according to Novak.
You can hear in Chavarria’s comments that he expects the backlash to intensify before it fades.
“I believe this is going to get worse before it gets better,” he told Novak, calling the situation the most extreme he has faced as superintendent.
Lawmakers Defend the Flag – And Call Out ‘Dog Whistles’
Not everyone in Vermont is treating the flag as controversial.
Democratic state senator Martine Gulick, who represents Winooski, told Maloney that flying the Somali flag should not be viewed as a problem at all.
“This is not a problem,” Gulick said. “This is about a community coming together to support its community members.”
She added that this kind of support is “what America is all about.”
Then she went further.
Gulick argued that the people stirring up outrage are “responding to the dog whistle coming out of the White House,” a clear reference to Trump’s remarks about Somali immigrants.
Her comments line up with the broader context Novak describes.
In neighboring Burlington, superintendent Tom Flanagan also wrote to his school community condemning Trump’s “overtly hateful and racist remarks” and reassuring Somali families that they are loved and supported.
If anything, local leaders seem to be drawing a line: they are not going to let national politicians insult their students without an answer.
From that perspective, the Somali flag is less a provocation and more a quiet act of defiance against dehumanizing rhetoric.
Clarifying the Basics: The U.S. Flag Never Moved
One persistent false claim in the social media firestorm is that the Somali flag replaced the U.S. flag.
Novak directly knocks this down by quoting a Facebook post from the Winooski School District itself.
“First, we want to assure everyone that the United States flag remains in its proper place at the highest point, in full compliance with the U.S. Flag Code,” the district wrote.
A photo posted alongside that statement showed the U.S. flag at the top, with the Vermont and Somali flags below.
Maloney’s on-scene reporting for NBC5 backs that up.
He says the Somali flag is on a second pole at the same height as the Vermont flag and slightly lower than the American flag flying next to it.
Despite this, hundreds of online commenters simply repeated the claim that the Somali flag had replaced Old Glory.
This is a familiar pattern now.
A symbolic gesture gets taken out of context, a dramatic but false claim is added, and then the outrage machine does the rest.
By the time anyone has a chance to correct the record, the attack campaign is already in full swing.
A District Already Under Immigration Pressure
Maloney also points out that this isn’t the first time Winooski has been caught in the middle of a national immigration fight this year.
He reminds viewers that a second-grade student and his mother from the district were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection over Thanksgiving and held in Texas.
Earlier in the year, superintendent Chavarria himself was detained when returning from Nicaragua.
On the same day Maloney filed his report, Chavarria was in Washington, D.C., testifying before Congress about that experience.
Novak notes that Winooski had publicly announced its efforts to support the detained second-grader earlier this month.
So when Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage,” this wasn’t an abstract political comment to the people in that district.
It was layered on top of a year where students, families, and even the superintendent had already felt the sharp edge of federal enforcement.
Seen in that light, the Somali flag isn’t just about symbolism or diversity branding.
It’s a school district telling its most vulnerable kids, “We’re not going to pretend nothing is happening to you.”
What This Fight Really Shows
If you strip away the noise, this story is not actually about a flag displacing the United States.
The reporting by Alison Novak, the WCAX news team, and James Maloney makes that clear.
The American flag never moved.
The Somali flag is temporary.
The goal was to support a refugee community targeted by ugly national rhetoric.
What the story really shows is how fragile local efforts at inclusion can be once they get sucked into the national culture war.
A decision made by a Vermont school board for its own students turns into content for Libs of TikTok and Benny Johnson.
Phone numbers are blasted out. The district is flooded with slurs and threats from people who have never set foot in Winooski.
Police have to step in not because anything dangerous is happening at the school itself, but because the outrage pipeline has made it a target.
And yet, despite all this, the flag is still flying.
As of Maloney’s latest report, the district plans to keep the Somali flag up until the end of the week, just as originally intended.
Chavarria told Novak the district will keep “visibly standing up for students with actual actions.”
For a small, diverse city in Vermont, that might be the most important part of the story.
In a moment when shouting from far away can feel louder than anything a community does for itself, Winooski’s schools are quietly choosing their side – with their students, not with the threats coming down the phone line.
A former park ranger and wildlife conservationist, Lisa’s passion for survival started with her deep connection to nature. Raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, she learned how to grow her own food, raise livestock, and live off the land. Lisa is our dedicated Second Amendment news writer and also focuses on homesteading, natural remedies, and survival strategies. Lisa aims to help others live more sustainably and prepare for the unexpected.
