Critics say seditious Alito flags expose his ‘Christian nationalism’
When Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was caught raising an upside down American flag outside his Virginia home, the conservative jurist found a woman to blame: his wife. It was she who decided to wave the chosen banner of election deniers in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, he said, after she became righteously furious at an allegedly profane display of anti-Trump sentiment in her neighborhood. Alito, innocent, just happened to live there — with no input on the seditious décor.
Everything about this is normal, okay?
It took just over a week for The New York Times to find out there was another flag, at another home, also associated with the fringes of the American right. This one, known as the “Appeal to Heaven” flag for the words printed on it, above a depiction of a pine tree, was displayed outside Alito’s beach house in New Jersey during the summer of 2023.
This time Alito did not blame his wife; per the Times, he had nothing to say at all.
The same banner flies outside the home of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., an open believer in using the government to impose his form of right-wing Christianity. As Rolling Stone reported, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag has its roots in the Revolutionary War, but in recent years “it has come to symbolize a die-hard vision of hegemonically Christian America” — that is, a society where laws are written based on narrow-minded interpretations of the Bible under the belief that one religion, and one particular, Americanized interpretation of that religion, should enjoy government-sanctioned supremacy over all others.
It also means a country where Donald Trump rules without regard to certified election results: the flag of Christian nationalism was flown, literally, by the same extremists who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
“There is an apparent pattern of Justice Alito publicly displaying symbols featured in the January 6th attack on the Capitol and associated with Donald Trump’s false claim of having won the 2020 election,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement. “Flying a flag carried at the insurrection in the days immediately following the insurrection is tremendously alarming. Doing so again, years later and on multiple occasions, as even more high stakes insurrection-related cases came before the Court, simply cannot be explained away.” [Continue reading…]