The progressive establishment’s revanchist campaign against the United States Supreme Court continues apace.

Last week, The New York Times published a story about an upside-down American flag — apparently a symbol of former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement following his loss in the 2020 presidential election as well as a well-established form of more generalized protest  — flying outside of Justice Samuel Alito’s home in January 2021.

Alito told the Times that his wife was responsible for the gesture, which came as part of a dispute between her and a neighbor who was displaying a “Fuck Trump” yard sign near a school bus stop and used the “c-word” during an exchange with her.

To summarize: Justice Alito’s wife did something she shouldn’t have amidst a neighborhood feud to express her distress. Maybe she believed in the conspiracy theories being peddled by Trump, maybe she didn’t. But there is no evidence — either in the fact pattern surrounding this incident or in his record on the Court — to suggest that the justice himself believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

In spite of the story’s nonexistent implications, the story was blown completely out of proportion by the press.

And once the media’s smear train starts rolling, it doesn’t stop. That’s why on Wednesday, the Times published a second story about the Alitos and their flags.

This time the charge is that in 2023, another “Jan. 6 Symbol” was flown outside of the Alitos’ beach house in New Jersey.

NEW: Last summer, the Alito beach home in New Jersey flew the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which like the upside down US flag, is linked to Jan. 6. We have photos from July, August and September as well as eyewitnesses. https://t.co/uOjZcaUvk9 pic.twitter.com/yUCqbvdT2A

— Jodi Kantor (@jodikantor) May 22, 2024

You almost certainly don’t recognize the flag pictured in the tweet above, but if you do, it is, again, almost certainly not as a “Jan. 6 symbol.”

The Appeal to Heaven flag was designed by George Washington’s private secretary Joseph Reed and flown by Washington during the American Revolution. Pine trees like the one depicted on the flag were a symbol of resistance in revolutionary-era New England, and the phrase “Appeal to Heaven” comes from John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.

According to the Times, the flag — which was was the official naval flag for the state of Massachusetts until 1971 — “largely fell into obscurity until recent years and is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.”

Let’s stipulate that some small number of people do use the Appeal to Heaven flag to signal support for Trump’s conspiracy theories. The question remains: How is anyone supposed to know that? I’ve written hundreds of articles about the events of January 6 and lies that led to them and had no idea that the Appeal to Heaven flag was at all associated with that day, much less to the extent that it can be described, principally, as a “Jan. 6 Symbol.”

And even if one did know that a few freakshows had co-opted the flag for this nefarious purpose, why is it the intuition of the Left that this piece of American history must be immediately surrendered to the bad actors in question?

The whole incident reminds me of how a few years ago, every newsroom across these United States suddenly decided that the gesture that humans had previously made with their fingers to mean “OK” was actually an expression of support for white supremacy with no other conceivable meaning. It’s the kind of unintelligible nonsense that can only be produced by a monoculture as stultifying as the one that pervades American political media.

No one at the Times raised their hand to ask if it was fair to call the flag a “Jan. 6 symbol” in the same way that you could identify a swastika as a Nazi symbol? No one wondered aloud if it was more likely that Alito is a student of American history, rather than of obscure, far-right message boards?

Of course not, because everyone who works at the Gray Lady operates from the same assumptions (conservatives of all stripes are prima facie bad) and has the same motivations (to undermine the legitimacy of the Republican-appointee majority on the Supreme Court). Perhaps if they hired a few independent thinkers to run this kind of thing by, the Times could still lay claim to its long-treasured moniker “paper of record.”

Then again, it’s already run those guys out of town.

The post The New York Times’ Slimy, Conspiratorial Hit Job on Justice Alito Is an Indictment of Itself first appeared on Mediaite.

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