Why Is the Left Really Melting Down over the Alito Flag Controversy?

Last week I wrote dismissively about the flag controversy surrounding Justice Samuel Alito and his wife and did so almost in passing, thinking it would be the last time I had to address such an obviously phony, media-created controversy designed to further the desire of a known left-wing activist clique within Washington to alter or debase the structure of the Supreme Court in the face of its current conservative composition. I remember feeling fairly confident when I brushed the whole thing off with the following:

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 . . . 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.

And here we are now, a week and a half later. Hey — look at us. Who would have thought? Not me! A week later, Alito has (1) been accused of flying a Revolutionary War battle flag at his summer home so appallingly racist it had to be removed from the San Francisco Civic Center, where January 6 truthers stealthily placed it 60 years ago; (2) had all the major particulars of his original defense — “It was related to an ugly neighborhood dispute with an aggressively unpleasant political neighbor, and it was my wife anyway who does the flag thing, not me” — confirmed by multiple outlets; (3) been nevertheless called upon by throngs of deranged leftist commentators to immediately recuse himself from all cases relating to Trump if not from the Supreme Court itself.

Forget that there is literally no case whatsoever there, that the entire thing is bootstrapped faux outrage ginned up from a dust cloud. Legal lefties — the inside men and women, reporters, activists, and think-tank types — are reading from a very familiar hymnal, one I have written about many times. They are players participating in both a “short” and a “long” game. The short game is to delegitimize what they fear may be an adverse opinion in Trump v. United States, which is due this term and directly addresses the ability to prosecute the president for crimes committed while in office. The long game, of course, is to delegitimize the Court overall as prelude to radically altering its structure.

So the “throw a bunch of mud and then accuse your enemy of being covered in mud” playbook is nothing new, and it has been in use basically since the beginning of the Trump administration — that is to say, the moment Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss priced in the permanence of a conservative Supreme Court for distraught progressives who expected to accomplish their ideological cramdown via the federal judiciary instead of having to navigate actual politics. I find it tiresome but also unremarkable at this point; these people are strictly professional operatives — they care about “legal ethics” only as a memetic bludgeon to wield against their political enemies for concrete legal gains. (As Natan Ehrenreich points out, none of these people would have called for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan to recuse themselves from Obergefell v. Hodges, taking a 5–4 majority legalizing gay marriage to a 4–3 majority keeping it a state matter, and are freely on the record about it.) Let them hammer on fruitlessly.

But it’s impossible not to notice just how splenetically the online Left — always voluble, always unrepresentative — has adopted this issue as the Most Important Matter of Our Times as well. I understand it when paid operatives spin up faux outrage as the job requires, but this is something altogether different: You’d need a heart of stone to not laugh at the Vizzini-like nervous energy of left-wing media right now as it spins paranoid fantasias. It’s an all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm America Under Fire event; everywhere I turn on social media I see an MSNBC talking head telling a New York magazine writer that unless Alito is not immediately reined in like a mad dog then we are witnessing the end of the First American Republic. (Or at least the prelude to it; there’s always November.) It is hard to imagine a more sodden display of whining, mewling, puking babies fouling the sandbox and their clothes alike as they spin themselves dizzy in a series of red-faced tantrums. In other words, it’s been marvelous entertainment, if you’re into the whole schadenfreude trip.

A cynic might accuse the Left of trying to intentionally gaslight us into believing that Alito is a January 6 truther who must be removed from cases involving Trump — merely because they’ve made such a claim. I do not. I believe that they are, in fact, gaslighting themselves, like someone trying to kill a rival with a carbon monoxide leak and accidentally inhaling too much and putting his own lights out instead. Far too many of these people have been huffing fumes from a toxic political bubble increasingly governed by a sense of displaced rage.

Whence the true source of that rage? I doubt this is about Alito at all for most of people on the Left who are fixated on it. Rather, the media’s fixation on this — and the commentariat’s amusingly hopeless attempt to inflate it into a scandal — is a frustrated act of psychological transference; this is really about four more years of Donald Trump. The Left feels powerless at Joe Biden’s continued softness in the polls, and since saying “Guys, we’re losing” is socially frowned upon, the energy is eagerly being directed elsewhere, at a target of seeming opportunity, however slim the actual pickings. The fervor with which the Alito story — about his wife hanging a flag, I remind you — is being inflated into a judicial crisis marks it out as a moment of seriocomic desperation when you can visibly see the Democrats sweating, sweating while they work out their anxieties over the November race on a punching bag they can forever whack at but never truly hurt.