The Nation columnist Elie Mystal wasn’t buying Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s explanation that his wife responded to a neighborhood dispute by flying an upside down American flag, a symbol that has been used by Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

The New York Times first reported on the controversy that led Democratic lawmakers to introduce a resolution to censure Alito, and to call on him to recuse himself from hearing any cases involving the insurrection.

Saturday, a spokesperson for The Washington Post said they declined to run with the story in 2021 “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.”

Mystal told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, “I am a Black man on television. When I go out on the street, I’ve got some neighbors who have some things to say to me, all right? I’m really sorry if Samuel Alito and his wife had a bad walk around the neighborhood, but that’s just part of the society we live in.” He continued:

And I’m sorry that they can’t handle what I have to handle every Tuesday when they walk around their street. But they have to understand that they are public officials, Alito’s a public official, imbued with extreme, supreme, unaccountable power, and when he uses that power to, oh, I don’t know, take away the rights, reproductive health care rights, for half of the American people, right? When they do things like outlaw affirmative action. When they do things like put guns on our streets, their neighbors might have something to say to them, right? Their neighbors might have, might have a word they would like to say to them. And as a public official, as a public person, you just kind of have to take it. This disproportional craziness doesn’t hold water. You know, people are mean to me — I don’t have, like, a Nazi flag flying outside my house, right? I just go, “Oh, Ok, thanks a lot, sir.”

Velshi interjected, “That wouldn’t be a normal response. Yes, that’s the part I was getting at. I’m sorry your neighbors are not nice to you. I think people should be nice when they can, but I don’t see why that results in you putting up a symbol of some weird, anti-democratic political activity.”

This week, The New York Times reported on a second insurrection-linked flag that was flown outside the Alito’s beach house in 2023.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.

The post Elie Mystal Decries The ‘Disproportional Craziness’ Of Alito’s Claim Wife Responded To Nasty Neighbors With Anti-Democratic Symbol first appeared on Mediaite.

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