The Supreme Court’s latest term is ending, and the justices are about to hand down their remaining decisions. The court already unanimously slapped down a coordinated Democrat effort to remove the top Republican from the ballot. Other issues related to Democrats’ unprecedented lawfare against Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump and his supporters will also be handed down by the court in the next few weeks.
Many left-wing activists are furious with the court, the last functioning institution in America and the only one they do not control. They have launched a scorched-earth attempt to destroy the court ahead of the end of the term.
One such left-wing activist is Jodi Kantor of The New York Times. Unable to critique the court for any legitimate reason, Kantor has taken to writing numerous obsessive hit pieces not just about the wife of a Supreme Court justice, but about her flag choices.
Really.
Kantor is currently spreading an absolutely delusional conspiracy theory that the Appeal To Heaven flag that was commissioned for Gen. George Washington is actually a secret symbol of insurrectionists. Kantor’s claim is that Samuel Alito must recuse from cases because his wife, Martha-Ann, flew a popular and patriotic flag that has been flown for hundreds of years by Americans including possibly by some on Jan. 6, 2021.
It’s an absolutely absurd and laughably illogical claim. The flag is in such wide use that left-wing city San Francisco famously flew it for 60 years in Civic Center Plaza until last week. When The New York Times began pushing its propaganda against the flag, San Francisco quickly removed it to help the left’s efforts against the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. What’s more, The New York Times and other left-wing media outlets never once claimed the flag was one of the flags seen inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, until Kantor published her conspiracy theory last month. In fact, the Times published a detailed “Visual Investigation” of the events of Jan. 6 headlined, “Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot” — and neither of the supposedly controversial flags flown by Martha-Ann Alito were included in the article.
Kantor has stayed resolutely on the flag beat, even though there’s no substance and her subsequent reporting on the matter only undermines the claims that the Alitos were in the wrong. Martha-Ann Alito maintains it was a conflict with her neighbors that prompted her to fly an American flag upside down, and Kantor’s follow-up reporting makes it clear that the neighbors are thoroughly obnoxious people who upset Mrs. Alito by displaying political signs with profanity in their yard in front of children.
Even the mother of the woman who put up the sign Mrs. Alito found offensive “said she hesitated over the sign at her home, because she feared it looked ‘tacky.’” Most reasonable Americans of all political stripes would find such behavior inappropriate, to say nothing of the fact that they called Mrs. Alito the c-word and otherwise treated her disrespectfully when she tried to talk to them about the sign.
The absurdity of the claims against the court has been no barrier to the media and other Democrats. A coalition of Arabella-funded left-wing groups petitioned Democrat allies on the Senate Judiciary Committee to “launch an investigation” into Martha-Ann Alito’s lawn decorations.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who stood on the steps of the Supreme Court in 2020 and threatened violence against Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh if they didn’t change their rulings to match his political preferences, histrionically condemned the court for not forcing recusals over the patriotic flags of the wife of a Supreme Court justice. While corporate media have tried to bury the results of calls for violence, Kavanaugh and his wife and children would later be the target of an armed would-be assassin who was arrested outside their home.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., used the information fed to Kantor to claim that the wife of a Supreme Court justice flying a patriotic flag meant the court had ethics problems. Whitehouse, incidentally, is known for being a member of a whites-only beach club and is facing an ethics complaint for steering legislation to advantage his wife. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also pushed Kantor’s conspiracy theory.
The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin said the quiet part out loud and promised that if Democrats win in 2024, they will remove the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, and impeach Alito because his wife flew George Washington’s flag.
In any case, this is not the first time Kantor has been used by Democrat activists to push false stories about the Alito family.
Kantor also pushed fake news about the Alitos in 2022. She and fellow New York Times activist Jo Becker pushed the completely invented and unsubstantiated claim that the Alitos had violated court procedure by telling another couple about the outcome of Hobby Lobby, a landmark Supreme Court decision authored by Alito. The Alitos vehemently and unequivocally denied the story, as did the supposed recipient of the leak. Yet Kantor treated the person making the allegation, a politically motivated individual who was known for lying about the court in various ways, as if he were a legitimate source.
Kantor’s story was an obvious attempt to deflect from the malicious leak of the Dobbs decision by a court insider who was upset by the ruling. But that didn’t keep the corporate media and other Democrats from amplifying the false claim to damage the court.
The left is engaged in an obvious political effort to intimidate Justice Alito and influence the Supreme Court’s work. Naturally, the media are doing everything they can to aid in that effort by pretending Kantor’s reporting is something more substantive than it is: a manufactured controversy divorced from the facts of what happened and common sense.
Thankfully, there seems to be some recognition that this is the case. A recent article in Politico is headlined, “Alito flag flap could have short shelf life in Washington.” However, that article by Josh Gerstein — one of the reporters who published the leak of Alito’s Dobbs decision — still manages to pretend Kantor’s story is a cause for legitimate concern.
“The New York Times became the latest in a string of incidents that have further tarnished the image of the Supreme Court at a time of extreme polarization in American politics,” writes Gerstein.
However, if you approach this story honestly, the only thing tarnished here is The New York Times and Jodi Kantor’s already suspect reputation for pushing delusional conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims.
