“The Star-Spangled Banner” has been our official national anthem since 1931, but it had been a popular patriotic song since Francis Scott Key wrote it on September 14, 1814. The attorney and amateur poet watched the British bombard Baltimore’s Fort McHenry and U.S. soldiers raise a large American flag in defiance. “The land of the free and the home of the brave” has been America’s calling card for centuries. Naturally, some say it’s time to replace it.

So-called “social-justice warriors” denigrate America at every opportunity. They insist that we are not, in fact, an exceptional nation worthy of celebration or patriotism but a racist and imperialist country of haters and oppressors. They’re tearing down monuments across the country, including those to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A benched quarterback led a drive to kneel for the national anthem in protest, and leftists around the country began insisting that this music and lyrics, which had united Americans for so long, was suddenly divisive.

Thus it’s no surprise to see the latest dumber-than-parody proposal from “activist and journalist Kevin Powell”: He wants to cancel “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written by a wealthy slave owner, and replace it with John Lennon’s paean to communism, “Imagine.”

Why “Imagine”? Because, Powell insists, it’s “the most beautiful, unifying, all-people, all-backgrounds-together kind of song you could have.” It’s also a song written by an Englishman who dreams of a world with “no countries,” “no religion,” and “nothing to kill or die for.” Lennon himself described the lyrics as “virtually the Communist Manifesto.”

Given that well over a million Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom were religious, found our country worth dying for, it’s insulting to suggest that it could ever be America’s national anthem.

But Powell’s not the first to suggest it as a national anthem. No less than Jimmy Carter once declared, “In many countries around the world — my wife and I have visited about 125 countries — you hear John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ used almost equally with national anthems.”

Leftists would indeed prefer that there was no “America.” They’d prefer to destroy what our Founding Fathers built — the greatest nation the world has ever seen — and replace it with a godless, borderless, socialist slum that they think will be a utopia. Powell’s insane proposal is just another part of the Left’s desired “fundamental transformation” of our nation. They might kneel, but we’ll keep standing for Liberty.