The Media Research Center spent the latter half of May in a Samuel Alito flag fest, first defending him over an upside-down American flag flown over his house, quickly followed by defending him over a “An Appeal To Heaven” flag — historic but associated most recently with Christian nationalists and Capitol rioters — flown outside his vacation house. Defense on the latter continued in a May 25 post by Alex Christy, who purported to be amazed that the Washington Post didn’t do a story on the flag when it first learned about it a couple years ago:
The conservative reaction to the freakout over Justice Samuel Alito’s flags has been to argue that this is a phony scandal ginned up by liberals and journalists (but we repeat ourselves) to delegitimize the Supreme Court. A Saturday report from the Washington Post appears to confirm those beliefs, as Justin Jouvenal and Ann Marimow reported that the Post passed on the story in 2021.
The duo began, “The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was ‘an international signal of distress’ and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute.”
They also report that the Post, at the time, saw no reason to view the upside flag as being connected to sympathy for the January 6 rioters and the belief that Samuel and Martha-Ann are different people, “The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.”
[…]In 2021, the Post saw nothing newsworthy in the case of the Alitos’ upside down flag, but in 2024, they threw themselves under the bus in order to fall in line with the rest of the media trying to make something into a bigger deal than it is.
I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that a second flag issue made the original one relevant and newsworthy.
A May 28 post by Clay Waters kept up the performative annoyance that this was being covered at all:
Before it compared Trump to Hitler, Thursday’s edition of the PBS NewsHour made the Justice Alito flag controversy an all-encompassing scandal. First, the network’s Supreme Court expert Marcia Coyle discussed the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a Republican-drawn congressional district in South Carolina to stand but segued into the controversy over two flags being flown over two of Justice Alito’s homes – an American flag hung upside down at his residence and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag hung outside his beach home in New Jersey.
On those feeble grounds, the New York Times Jodi Kantor, who broke the story in the paper and previously appeared on the NewsHour to suggest Alito had “insurrectionist” January 6 views, since the upside-down U.S. flag and the Appeal to Heaven flag (featuring a pine tree below the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven”) were allegedly symbols of the “Stop the Steal” movement in support of Donald Trump having won the 2020 election.
On Thursday, Coyle said that when she saw the flags, “I wanted to call Justice Alito up and say, what were you thinking? Because it’s just something — it’s incomprehensible.” From there, host Geoff Bennett moved onto Flag-gate Part II: “Appeal to Heaven,” with slanted report from the show’s most biased correspondent, White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez.
Barron-Lopez explained the flag dated back to the Revolutionary War but was recently popularized by pastor Dutch Sheets of the New Apostolic Reformation. She ran a clip from scholar Matthew Taylor, who said the “Appeal” flag had “become a symbol of right-wing Christian extremism, of Christian supremacy, of aggressive Christian nationalism” and support for Donald Trump. “So, as Taylor says, the flag was popularized by the New Apostolic Reformation. but it has become much bigger to represent the 2020 election lies,” she added.
PBS used the flag and its “undercurrent of violence” as a gateway to talk more about “right-wing extremism,” via a bad video that the Trump team posted and later removed from social media:
Yes, Waters thinks that a video Trump posted on his Truth Social account that referenced a “unified Reich” is merely “bad” — not offensive enough for him to question Trump’s fitness for the presidency — and he further tried to dismiss it by huffing, “Evidently any odd thing Trump says could conceivably herald the dawning of fascism.”
Later that day, Waters was pleased to find a more right-wing-friendly story on the flags at, of all places, PBS:
During a segment entitled “Alito Under Fire,” the latest episode of PBS’s Friday political roundtable Washington Week with The Atlantic aired some less-collegial-than-usual exchanges between CBS News senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe and Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, concerning the flag controversies the media was wrapping around conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, with Democrats pouncing to demand Alito recuse himself from upcoming January 6 related cases.
Liasson, public radio’s representative on the panel, was the most vituperative and historically ignorant regarding the second shoe to drop (or flag to unfurl) in this so-called scandal, so lame the Washington Post passed on the scoop when it was offered in 2021 — the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that flew outside Alito’s beach house in New Jersey.
“[Alito] was so quick to blame his wife on the upside-down flag, he hasn`t said anything about this other flag, which is also a symbol of the insurrection.” she falsely proclaimed. “So, you’d think if he had a handy excuse, he would have used it.”
Liasson had to be gently reminded by host Jeffrey Goldberg that “One handy excuse is that it is an actual Revolutionary War flag.”
Christy insisted in a May 30 post on an interview with Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin that Alito’s excuse of blaming his wife for the flag controversies should be good enough for everybody (with bonus playint of the Ron Swanson card):
The media doesn’t seem to appreciate the difference between blaming and explaining. Alito is simply explaining that his wife is her own person and that the upside-down and Appeal to Heaven flags were her ideas.
[…]The Supreme Court is under attack from Democrats like Raskin because it is possible it will not rule the way they want. Therefore, they’ve concocted a conspiracy theory that alleges Mrs. Alito’s response to nasty neighborly abuse or flying a flag that was in the title credits of HBO’s John Adams miniseries and a desktop prop in NBC’s Parks and Recreation shows bias in favor of January 6 rioters. Burnett’s great solution to this is for Alito to cave, which would only encourage Raskin and his supporters to come up with even dumber allegations.
Christy doesn’t admit it, but he wants Alito not to recuse from any case precisely because he knows he will rule the way right-wingers want.
Michael Wnek complained in a May 30 post that Alito was called out by MSNBC’s Joy Reid for throwing his wife under the bus on the flag issue:
Later in the segment, Reid referred to the Washington Post’s decision to not report on the flag incident which occurred in 2021, labeling it a “mini-scandal.” In fact, the Post simply had the discernment to deem the story not newsworthy, understanding that it stemmed from a squabble with liberal neighbors, looking to uncover dirt on a conservative justice.
The two continued to caricature Alito and “these conservative justices” as completely unable to “control their own wives.” Reid and Murray reasoned that justices like Alito and Clarence Thomas compensated for lack of authority in their marriages by enacting policies that control all other women. As Reid so eloquently summarized it, “It is remarkable that what they’re saying is, they want every woman to be under 19th century-style control of the state but in their house, those women are in charge.”
You can bet that Wnek and other MRC employees would not be so sanguine about it if a spouse of a liberal justice did what Alito’s wife did.