Should you be concerned by that flag?

THURSDAY, MAY 23, 2024

Now for the rest of the story: Should you be concerned about that second flag—the flag which flew above Justice Alito's seaside home in New Jersey? 

That second flag said, "Appeal to Heaven." It featured a very large tree. Our analysts were calling it "Palo Alito," but then we told them to stop.

Should you be concerned about those flags? The upside-down American flag, followed by this second flag, the one with the very large tree?

We'll go with a maybe yes, but also a maybe no. Also, we'll compliment Jamelle Bouie for doing something very unusual in his new column for the New York Times.

Below, you see the passage in question, headline included:

Justice Alito Is a True Believer

[...]

All of this brings us to the most recent controversy surrounding Justice Samuel Alito. Not long after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, my colleague Jodi Kantor reported last week, someone in the Alito household flew an inverted American flag in the front yard. The upside-down flag, a sign of naval distress, was one of the preferred symbols of the movement to “stop the steal”—a statement of solidarity with those who disbelieved the results of the 2020 presidential election and fought to return Trump to office against the rule of law and the verdict of the Constitution.

Alito says he did not put up the flag. He says his wife did, “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” There is no evidence to say otherwise...

For the moment, we're stopping right there. In our view, Bouie deserves a lot of credit for acknowledging the things he doesn't know about the flag in question.

He acknowledges that he doesn't know who raised the inverted flag. He acknowledges that Justice Alito's statement about his wife may in fact be accurate.

Bouie deserves a lot of credit for this! Elsewhere, the New York Times, and Blue America in general, have been awash in silly statements in which Justice Alito is criticized or doubted for saying that it was his wife who unfurled the inverted flag.

Childishly, our lizard brains tell us to criticize Justice Alito for saying something which, for all we know, is the unvarnished truth. So it goes when we humans split into tribes and spend our days happily planning for war as we assail The Others.

In our view, Bouie deserves a lot of credit for acknowledging the limits of his knowledge about this most recent exciting incident. In our view, he undercuts the strength of the passage we've posted as he continues along from there. 

We'll show you what we mean down below. For now, let's consider this:

There's a fair amount of material which New York Times readers may not know about the inverted flag incident.

That additional material may not cause you to change your mind about either one of these incidents. That said, it might be interesting as a critique of the way information flows to members of the two Americas in this highly tribal journalistic age.

Below, you see the rest of Bouie's thumbnail account of the inverted flag incident. There's nothing "wrong" with what he writes, although we think what he writes isn't wise:

Alito says he did not put up the flag. He says his wife did, “in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” There is no evidence to say otherwise although it is a strange coincidence that Mrs. Alito would deploy this particular flag to retaliate against a neighbor within weeks of the moment that it became a fraught symbol of violent opposition to the constitutional order. The initial provocation, as Fox News reported, was that the neighbor in question had put up a sign directly blaming Mrs. Alito for the Jan. 6 attack.

Having said that he doesn't know what caused the inverted flag to fly, Bouie says it seems strange to think that Mrs. Alito would do such a thing at that particular time.

Maybe yes, maybe no. But in Bouie's account of "the initial provocation," which he attributes to a Fox News report, he falls far short of telling his readers what Fox News has actually reported.

For whatever reason, Bouie's link to what "Fox News reported" led us to the second of Shannon Bream's four X posts, in which she reported what Justice Alito told her about the inverted flag incident.

As with Stormy Daniels' colorful story, so too with Justice Alito's! We have no way of knowing whether his account is accurate. But here's the full text of Bream's four posts, the second and least troubling of which Bouie's link led to:

Shannon's Bream's four-tweet account of her interview with Justice Alito:

I spoke directly with Justice #Alito about the flag story in the NYT.  In addition to what's in the story, he told me a neighbor on their street had a "F--- Trump" sign that was within 50 feet of where children await the school bus on Jan 21.  Mrs. Alito brought this up with the neighbor.  1/

According to Justice Alito, things escalated and the neighbor put up a sign personally addressing Mrs. Alito and blaming her for the Jan 6th attacks. 2/

“Justice Alito says he and his wife were walking in the neighborhood and there were words between Mrs. Alito and a male at the home with the sign,” wrote Bream. “Alito says the man engaged in vulgar language, ‘including the c-word.'” 3/

Following that exchange, Mrs. Alito was distraught and hung the flag upside down "for a short time." Justice Alito says some neighbors on his street are "very political" and acknowledges it was very heated time in January 2021. 4/4

That's Shannon Bream's four-tweet account of what Justice Alito told her. One immediately thinks of Woody Guthrie's explanation of Pretty Boy Floyd's first killing. (For the relevant text, see below.)

That's Bream's account of what Justice Alito said. You can read all about it at Mediaite, in a report by Colby Hall which carries this unvarnished headline:

Justice Alito Claims His Wife Hung Coup Flag Because Neighbor Called Her a C***

You can also read about it at the Fox News site, in a news report which carries this more circumspect dual headline:

Alito says wife displayed upside-down flag after argument with insulting neighbor:
Alito tells Fox News neighbor put up sign that read ‘F--- Trump,’ insulted his wife

That Fox News report mentions the F-word and the C-word. For whatever reason, for good or for ill, those parts of the story have been withheld from accounts at the New York Times.

As with Daniels, so too here—we have no way of confirming, or of refuting, any of these assertions. That said:

Is it possible that someone on the Alitos' block placed a F*ck Trump sign within sight of a school bus stop? Is it possible that Mrs. Alito complained about this, and the neighbor then dropped a C-bomb on her?

Yes, of course it's possible! It's also possible that the actual story is different.

That said, that isn't our point. Our actual point would be this:

People in Red America are hearing this fuller story about what allegedly happened. It seems that we who live in Blue America are perhaps being shielded from such accounts.

Bouie's column offered a tapioca version of the "Fox News report" to which he supplied a link. We attribute that to Bouie's column, not to Bouie himself, because that may have been an editorial decision concerning which he had no control.

Questions:

Did Mrs. Alito become distraught when a neighbor called her a c***? 

We can't answer that question.

If that's an accurate account of what happened, does that make the flying of the inverted flag a more understandable offense?

Maybe yes, maybe no. That's up to the judgment of the individual. But we can tell you this:

People in Red America are hearing the fuller story. Those of us in Blue America are being shielded from that fuller account.

This sort of things transpires all day long as we in our two Americas cling to the Storylines propagated by our segregated corporate news orgs. The corporations rake in the dough as they pleasure our tribes in such ways.

For ourselves, we're less concerned about the inverted flag than we are about our own Blue America's devolving political culture. Our thought leaders like to stir our small-bore partisan fury. We regard this as dumb and perhaps disingenuous. We'll also offer this sad thought:

Purely as a political matter, it looks like it may not be working. 

That said, how about it? Should you be concerned about the inverted flag? 

For ourselves, we aren't hugely concerned by either one of those flags. We're more concerned about the unhelpful political culture to which our flailing Blue America increasingly seems to be drawn.

Pretty Boy Floyd and his wife: As told by Woody Guthrie:

It was in the town of Shawnee,
On a Saturday afternoon,
His wife beside him in his wagon
As into town they rode.

There a deputy sheriff approached him
In a manner rather rude,
Using vulgar words of anger,
And his wife she overheard.
Pretty Boy grabbed a log chain,
And the deputy grabbed his gun,
And in the fight that followed
He laid that deputy down.

Guthrie's anthem continues from there. People, we're just saying.