The Sam Alito Flag Excuses Keep Getting Dumber
Sam Alito's flag excuse was bad... his defenders' excuses are even worse.
Sam Alito next to a flag he doesn’t remember. Taking an oath he doesn’t seem to remember. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The New York Times reported that, in the aftermath of the January 6 riot, Justice Sam Alito’s house flew its United States flag upside-down. While everyone wondered why a Supreme Court justice decided to post the internet’s favorite “Down to Insurrect” sign outside his house in 2021, Alito just blamed his wife.
Because obviously the job of hoisting the flag at the Alito home belongs to Mrs. Alito, a law librarian by training, and not Sam, A FORMER CAPTAIN IN THE U.S. ARMY. Specifically, a Captain in the Signal Corps… the flag symbol people.
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Anyway, it seems as though Captain Wrongway Flagfuzz over here has managed to nick himself with Occam’s Razor yet again. Just like when he denies involvement in the Dobbs leak despite being tied to past leaks by a former right-wing activist or claims he didn’t really know the billionaire who gave him free private plane rides even though ABOVE THE LAW WROTE A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF THEM PALLING AROUND IN 2009.
But at least Alito’s decided to quit while he’s behind and just let his wife sit under the bus he backed over her. His defenders aren’t quite as satisfied and have decided that Alito’s official explanations are so bad that they’re going to go ahead and invent new ones:
“Zillow Ed,” of course, refers to Ed Whelan. Whelan regales readers with the history of judicial nominations over at his Confirmation Tales Substack. You know my personal favorite “Confirmation Tale” is the time Whelan used Zillow floorplans to try to Sherlock his way to debunking Christine Blasey Ford’s story and failing that took Brett Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook and suggested some other random guy committed sexual assault. It’s the gold standard of unhinged conspiracy mongering.
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While the official Alito line is that Mrs. Alito got mad at her anti-Trump neighbors and decided to retaliate with a Trump election fight symbol that she somehow knew, Bernstein decided to argue… what if Alito had a completely different defense? Bernstein, an ASS Law professor, decided to party like it’s 1999 and perform a Google boolean search to prove that no one was talking about upside-down flags in January of 2021 and the flag was put up wrong for who knows what reason. Case closed!
Except… from the original Times article:
A flood of social media posts exhorted Trump supporters to flip over their flags or purchase new ones to display upside down.
“If Jan. 6 rolls around and Biden is confirmed by the Electoral College our nation is in distress!!” a poster wrote on Patriots.win, a forum for Trump supporters, garnering over a thousand “up” votes. “If you cannot go to the DC rally then you must do your duty and show your support for our president by flying the flag upside down!!!!”
Twitter? Never heard of her. Are you talking about X?
As an encapsulation of the originalist mind virus, it doesn’t get much better than “here is a search I’ve tailored that produced zero results and therefore I need not acknowledge any of the actual, specific historical artifacts the rest of you found.” Alito’s defense rests on the idea that his wife knew what she was doing but that he wasn’t involved! If she did not know what she was doing, then Alito would have said that. This just makes Alito seem like an even more sniveling coward for blaming his wife for being a hot head when he could’ve said — if not convincingly — “it was an accident.”
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Bernstein’s not alone in making up nonsense to defend Alito, even if he is taking the outlier step of trying to rewrite the original public meaning of January 6. Josh Blackman’s Volokh Conspiracy post tried to swap out the meaning of the gesture:
Is there any evidence, whatsoever, that Justice Alito or Martha-Ann Alito, intended to fly the flag upside-down as some sort of secret signal to overturn the election? Of course not. My guess? Mrs. Alito used the upside-down flag as a symbol of distress to clap back at her neighbors. Justice Alito indicated that the attacks were “personal,” and his wife felt helpless to respond.
Hm….
Putting aside the goose’s valid question, Blackman is leaning on the popular “oh, it’s just a symbol of distress” explanation, which is both (a) question begging because the whole reason it became a symbol of the stop the steal folks is that it is about “distress” and (b) a devastating blow to Alito’s “take my wife, please” defense because the sort of person who knew that this symbolized “distress” absent the stop the steal chatter is the sort of person who SERVED IN THE SIGNAL CORPS.
We can goof on these tweebs all day, but the real question is why are these folks so quick to beclown themselves to make up excuses for their judges? Even if the contrived excuse undermines the judge’s official excuse? Because I’m looking at their arguments and… well, they’re the ones in distress.
Earlier: Samuel Alito Throws Wife Under The Bus Over ‘Stop The Steal’ Flag
Kavanaugh Truther Outlines Pet Conspiracy Theory For Ford’s Attempted Rape
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
