Flying The Alito Flag, Part 2
After defending Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito over flying an upside-down American flag, the Media Research Center then had to defend him over his flying a flag linked of late to insurrectionists.
The Media Research Center was just about done defending right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito over his wife flying an upside-down American flag outside their house in a dispute with neighbors when a related controversy popped up: A flag labeled “An Appeal to Heaven” — a historic flag that has been associated in recent years with Christian nationalism in general and the Capitol riot in particular — was spotted flying outside Alito’s vacation home. Nicholas Fondacaro was in full defend-and-distract mode in a May 23 post:
The liberal media seem determined to declare anything a “symbol” of January 6 if they could use it to smear a conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice and manipulate upcoming rulings involving former President Trump. That much was clear during the Thursday morning newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC when they rallied to try to run a new conspiracy theory about Justice Samuel Alito up the flagpole to force him to recuse himself.
All three networks leaned heavily on a The New York Times report that Alito’s vacation home sported the Revolutionary War-era “An Appeal to Heaven” flag. But since two of the flags were seen during the riot at the Capitol, suddenly it was the “symbol” every “insurrectionist” was rallied behind. It was the second such “symbol” the media had declared to have discovered in as many weeks amid their effort to remove Alito.
NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie gave away the game during her lead into the segment. “Also this morning, the calls are growing louder for Supreme Court Justice Alito to recuse himself from any cases related to January 6. This comes after another image has surfaced showing a second controversial flag on display at one of his properties,” she declared.
Senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson boasted: “We are seeing a fresh chorus of criticism from Democrats this morning…” She quoted Senator Dick Durban (D-IL), who claimed said the flag was, “Yet another example of apparent ethical misconduct.”
“The flag, rooted in the Revolutionary War, has more recently become a symbol of support for Christian nationalism and for Donald Trump,” she added, without evidence.
Interestingly, the “insurrectionist” Appeal to Heaven flag could be seen on the desk of the Libertarian character Ron Swanson on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation. Swanson was certainly not a “Christian nationalist.”
[…]
If an indisputable “symbol” of the “insurrection” was being flown by the Speaker of the House all this time, why was this the first time it was mentioned? And why didn’t the other networks mention it? It appears they’re taking swings without being educated on the matter.
In fact, ConWebWatch caught the MRC’s Clay Waters complaining back in February that Johnson’s flag was called out, so it has, in fact, been brought up before.
Michael Wnek similarly played the Ron Johnson card in defending Alito and the flag in another post that day:
Joy Reid, host of MSNBC’s The ReidOut, seized the opportunity to smear Justice Samuel Alito for flying what The New York Times classified as a “provocative flag” at his vacation home in New Jersey. At the end of her Wednesday conversation with Maya Wiley, a New York lawyer, and Tim Miller, self-proclaimed Never Trumper, Reid came to the ludicrous conclusion that Alito was a “lawless individual.”
The flag in question was “An Appeal to Heaven” flag, whose origins date back to before the Revolutionary War. The New York Times re-branded the historic flag as “a symbol of support for former President Donald Trump, for a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake the government in Christian terms.”
In fact, the flag serves as a reminder of the fundamental principles of justice and a relentless pursuit of liberty, on which the United States was founded and built. To Reid, however, the flag meant nothing more than a “Christian nationalist pro-Trump flag” representative of rabid insurrectionists.
Ironically enough and perhaps unbeknownst to Reid, the flag was actually featured on Ron Swanson’s desk in NBC’s very own “Parks and Recreation.”
In one more post that day, Curtis Houck invoked one of the MRC’s favorite right-wingers, Ted Cruz, dismissing the “flags kerfuffle” as “‘greatly overstated’ and part of ‘a concerted effort…driven by Democrats in the Senate, to try to delegitimize the court, and to try to demonize” conservative justices. Collins stubbornly stuck to her left talking points: ‘Do you not worry that it undercuts his credibility, as a justice, when he does something like this?'” There was apparently not mention of how right-wingers like Cruz are undercutting the credibility of the criminal justice system by lashing out at Donald Trump’s prosecution on various crimes.
Sarah Butler took her own crack at defending Alito and the flag in a May 24 post that also tried to dismiss the flag’s link to the Capitol riot:
On Wednesday, CNN’s Laura Coates referred to the “Appeal to Heaven” flag flown outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito as controversial and questioned his legitimacy in overseeing important election cases. Despite the fact that the “Appeal to Heaven” flag symbolized the unyielding pursuit of liberty and justice, Coates asks former FBI attorney Andrew Weissmann if Alito should be involved in cases such as Trump’s presidential immunity claim or other January 6th cases.
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Although this flag stands for many American values, Coates rather associated this flag with rioters. She downplayed the history of the flag she states “But it has been carried by rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.”
The Appeal to Heaven flag was carried in the protest that occurred but was among other flags such as the American flag. The American flag, flown by many Americans including Alito, should also be associated with the January 6 protest.
Comedy cop Alex Christy complained the new flag controversy was discussed on late-night TV, somehow working in a Nazi analogy:
CBS’s Stephen Colbert and Comedy Central’s Michael Kosta and Troy Iwata continued the left-wing efforts to smear Justice Samuel Alito as some sort of insurrectionist or theocrat on their respective Thursday installments of The Late Show and The Daily Show for flying a Revolution-era Appeal to Heaven flag at his home.
Colbert was especially bad because, while he admitted the flag’s original purpose had nothing to do with January 6, he just doesn’t care, “The Appeal to Heaven flag is not a new flag. It was first carried during the American Revolution, but it’s more recently been co-opted by Christian nationalists, specifically championed by a right-wing Christian author named Dutch Sheets.”
After some jokes about Sheets’s name, Colbert got back on track and threw Speaker Mike Johnson into the conversation as well, “Mr. Sheets made it his mission to promote this flag among right-wing nutjobulists, and it’s working because Speaker Johnson has also hung the flag outside his office. When asked about it, Johnson said, ‘It’s George Washington’s flag… It has nothing to do with stop the steal.’”
Colbert was not happy, “Yes, it does! When a nearly forgotten symbol is brought back and widely co-opted, you don’t get to use it in the old way. If a guy named Brandon says, ‘Actually, this swastika above my bed is referring to the ancient sanskrit symbol for good luck,’ he’s a Nazi, Cheryl!”
Despite his loathing of the January 6 rioters and the Stop the Steal movement, Colbert sure is willing to give them a lot of power to redefine Revolution-era symbols. Furthermore, mature people can differentiate between actual Nazis and people from South Asia using the swastika in its traditional context, just like mature people can differentiate between Revolutionary War and Founding-era history buffs and Stop the Steal followers.
Curits Houck subbed for Tim Graham on the MRC’s May 24 podcast, much of which he spent trying to insist that the flag controversy was manufactured:
Alongside Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro for this Friday edition of the show, we dove into the wholly manufactured liberal media storyline (courtesy of The New York Times) of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and flags outside his homes as a sign he’s ethically and morally compromised as a jurist and – gasp – a far-right extremist!
Simply put, the obsession over this story and the double standard created illustrates how far too many liberals need to grow up and touch some grass. It’s a genuinely disturbing to see in real time neighbor turning against neighbor, putting one’s petty political grudges over basic social cohesion.
Yet, somehow, Houck apparently doesn’t want to hold the Alitos responsible for their part on escalating those petty political grudges.
The defense continued in a May 25 post by 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.”
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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 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 playing 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.
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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.
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.