It’s not about flags or beer.
Dear Reader, please allow me to talk to you for a moment about the stupidest nonsense I’ve yet written about. (I promise there is a reason.) For I have bad news: Justice Alito stands accused of joining the “Bud Light boycott” — he sold some stock, apparently — and is therefore likely a black-robed transphobe. Once again, the dignity of the high court is at stake; when will these corrupt conservative justices stop pelting us with coded messages of bigotry?
Yes, the Bud Light boycott. Remember that ridiculous circus? The purportedly alcoholic beverage marketed under the deceptive name of “beer” did a bizarre March Madness promotion last year where they featured recently buzzy (as well as recently transgender) internet celebrity Dylan Mulvaney on a can. As you all remember well, the heavens then instantly parted, and down came Pestilence, first of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as Johnny Cash’s voice began to intone, “And I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying — Come and see. And I saw.”
Nah, a bunch of people got really angry online, and Anheuser-Busch InBev (which owns Bud Light) took a temporary hit on its stock prices as people began to wonder just exactly how badly the execs tanked one of their flagship brands. And so somewhere around mid August of 2023, Alito sold some shares of the stock and substituted them with those of a different one with a less fraught brand equity. Bigot or day-trader? You be the judge.
I wouldn’t dream of judging myself. I thought it was all a bit ridiculous because, when all is said and done, Bud Light is urine-colored hog-swill, and anyway it’s easy enough to avoid, as I imagine I will continue to do. (Really, now, it just amuses me to think of each one of us — unimportant and powerless individuals alone, but mighty when united — working together to achieve a lasting victory: marginally denting the industry reputation of a now-forgotten advertising executive.)
Yet Chris Geidner — formerly of BuzzFeed News, now plying his own influential Substack — has judged for himself, and the answer is clearly “bigot.” As stupid as it sounds, Geidner attempts to tie this all to an August 13, 2023, Twitter post by the woman behind the Libs of TikTok account, in which she took one of her many, many shots at Mulvaney. Since Alito sold his stock the next afternoon, well all the pieces add up and stop looking at me like that people. (Left unaddressed: This had been an utterly massive online controversy dating all the way back to April of that year.)
To be clear, no violation of judicial ethics is alleged; the allegation is merely that Alito “joined an anti-trans boycott,” whatever the heck this sort of impossibly vague formulation is supposed to mean. The proof of Alito’s bigotry is supplied by mere mind-reading and supposition, with Geidner able to demonstrate little more than that he personally believes that Justice Alito’s favorite television show isn’t RuPaul’s Drag Race. This makes the justice (and by extension the entire conservative wing of the Supreme Court) morally illegitimate. As far as “reasoned arguments” go, it’s completely missing the primary element and long instead on desperate insinuation, misdirection, and guilt-by-association.
Which, though it is almost not worth it, is the reason I’m responding: because Geidner himself gives the game away by trying — invoking some mysterious power of transference and kremlinological interpretation — to tie this to another recent attack on Justice Alito, or rather his wife, for briefly flying the American flag upside down at his house during a vehement political dispute with the couple’s neighbors in the days after the January 6 debacle. I thought it was a gauche way to treat Old Glory myself, even when you feel attacked by neighbors who won’t stop putting up obnoxious signs targeting you personally. Hanging a U.S. flag upside down is bad form as a matter of standard practice unless you are genuinely in distress. (If you’re dead in the water at sea or there are hostage-taking terrorists in your house, this is a great way to let people know.)
Now, I lived through January 6 as an extremely online Never Trumper deeply familiar with the alt-right. And yet I have only just heard the claim, much to my surprise, that in January 2021, flying a flag upside-down was immediately known as the universal MAGA signal for “stop the steal,” in much the same way that everyone who flashes you an “OK” sign is secretly a Groyper. As law professor David Bernstein points out on Twitter, the concept didn’t gain currency until much later (if at all, honestly). No, I’m pretty sure Mrs. Alito instead felt powerless to respond to obstreperous neighbors by shouting at them (being an associate justice’s wife, after all), and this was her mute cry of frustration.
And it all means . . . what, exactly? Even if we were to credit any of this ridiculous, pathetically grasping nonsense as the truth, what of it? What follows from this? “We think Justice Alito’s wife is a conspiracy theorist, and Alito might not love the transgender agenda as much we want him to, therefore . . . ” — what?
Therefore nothing. The people lobbing these pellets of manure at the conservative wing of the Court understand full well that, much like the city of Oakland, there’s no “there” there when it comes to the accusations. Nobody is going to recuse himself or be forced to. But that’s not the goal. The goal in the short term is to “pre-spin” impending Supreme Court decisions, including one about Trump’s immunity from prosecution or lack thereof; the longer-term goal has always been to “soften the ground” in advance of a major legislative push to pack or otherwise curb the independence of the judicial branch, when and if such a possibility should electorally arise. (This is comically short-sighted, yes, but such accusations are easily batted away by people who want to institute immediate and radical social changes without any counterforce to stop them.) And all because the Left lost its own ideological and strategic game and currently faces a 6–3 conservative court.
So every time you see one of these stories about how this justice is certainly a secret racist, while that one is personally corrupt, and that one has a crazy wife who needs to be kept under control — I want you to remember that this is the real motive behind them, one ginned up by a network of progressive DC think-tankers in coordination with friendly journalists/publicists. There’s not much to be done about it except to maintain constant skepticism. As I mentioned long ago, if the ghost of Abe Fortas ever comes back to haunt the halls of the Supreme Court, I’ll stand up and call out corruption or moral decrepitude when I see it. (I went to bat last year for Sonia Sotomayor in this regard, and I almost enjoyed it.) But until then, these sorts of attempted hit pieces deserve far less attention than I just gave one of them — except as an object lesson in how the opponents of constitutional government operate.