Oh Say Can You See- When a Judge Hoists His Flag(s)
The Ultimate Betrayal of the Position of Justice- Imposing a Personal Desire for Coup and Theocracy
My Takeaways
This post immediately follows another on the threat to the integrity of our American judiciary. In that post, we presented the danger from a Tyrant and his blind followers when they turn on our courts. Now we present a danger from within our judiciary, a threat from the very top of the system. A Justice of the United States Supreme Court had a flag declaring his allegiance to an insurrection to overthrow the United States boldly flying in his front yard, within days of that insurrection and while sitting on cases to judge the insurrection. And just this week, we learn he hoisted another flag on his second home, a flag declaring his allegiance to the imposition of a radical theocracy on all Americans.
These flags declare to the world that Samuel Alito has taken sides. And in doing so has betrayed the essential purpose of being a judge, and helped empower the overthrow of the purpose of all judges in America. His actions tell us he no longer judges cases on behalf of our Democracy, but rather, to impose his will on us, to help usher in a theocratic Tyranny.
What flags would you choose to declare your deepest allegiances? Clearly, no one would wave a flag that did not declare an allegiance. And who would you expect to give deep thought to the flag one waves? Until recently, one had to assume a Justice of the United Supreme Court would think carefully before waving any flag on their front lawn or atop their vacation home. One would expect any declarations of allegiance to a political stance would be considered very deeply by a Supreme Court Justice before hoising the flags and making his declarations.
And yet we recently learned that one of our 9 Supreme Court Justices, Sam Alito, has raised not just one, but two flags at two of his homes. The first flag we learned he raised, was the flag of the insurrection- hoisted on his front yard on January 17, 2021. The story broke in The New York Times on May 16, 2024. As any good court would expect, the story presented definitive proof, a photo of the flag of insurrection flying in his front yard that day:
This photograph, taken by neighbors, sent a shock wave across the United States, and even across the world.
Before the nation could respond to this act of betrayal, we learned the Justice raised a second flag that announced his intentions to betray our Democracy. This story was reported in The New York Times on May 22, 2024. This flag was photographed flying over the Justice’s beach home in July and September of 2023. So the first flag turns out to not have been an isolated incident. Here is the photograph of this second flag, flying over the beach home:
The Movements Each Flag Represents, and To Which Justice Alito has Pledged His Allegiance To
The upside down American flag is of course available to fly to anyone with an American flag. The United States has a code in place that forbids flying the flag in this position unless one is signalling an emergency, a call for help in distress.
After the November election of 2020, when it was certified that the winner was President Joe Biden, the losing candidate announced that he would refuse to accept the results and initiated a movement to keep him from leaving office as the laws of our nation expect from every one of his predecessors. That movement he created, Stop the Steal, persuaded millions of Americans of an event that never happened- a stolen election. Followers of Stop the Steal signal their commitment to repudiate the Election of 2024 by flying the American flag upside down.
The most dramatic action of the Stop the Steal movement created and provoked by Trump, was the invasion of our Capitol with the aim to overthrow the government by blocking its ability to certify an American election and impose the permanent rise to power of an unelected person Trump. The upside down American flag was adopted by the coup mob and flown expressly to say the coup is on and we rise up to make it happen, to overthrow the elected President of the United States.
The Appeal to Heaven flag dates back to 1775, when it was created as a flag of the new nation in formation and flown by parts of its emerging military. But in 2015, a major leader of a movement to crush Democracy in America and replace it with a strident, militant, extremist Christian theocracy adopted this flag as his movement’s banner. The leader was Mr. Dutch Sheets and he embraced this flag as it represented to him an emblem of a time when America was being born but not yet fully formed. He had his movement, the New Apostolic Reformation, adopt this flag to say, their agenda to impose a tyrannical theocracy on all of us harked back to the real roots of our nation. Those who fly this flag today are signalling that the true America is not our cherished Democracy, but rather a nation whose only religion is Christianity, and whose only laws are those of an extreme, right-wing, vision of Christian nationalism. The movement seeks power to force the nation to follow their extreme religious commands. This flag first came to national attention when the United States House of Representatives elected a devotee of the New Apostolic Reformation, Mike Johnson, to be our Speaker of the House. Speaker Johnson features three flags outside the office of the Speaker: his state of Louisiana, the American flag, and the Appeal to Heaven Flag. He explicitly does so to declare his allegiance to his State, his Nation, and the goal of ending Democracy and imposing a Theocracy on us all:
As we take a moment to see our Speaker of our House not only declare his devotion and allegiance to the State he represents and the nation he serves, but also to the New Apostolic Reformation, it is important to be aware of what this movement demands of its followers and the vision for our nation it intends to impose on all of us. Here are some key features of this movement:
America is a result of a very real, very direct creation Act by God.
His intent in creating America was to create the world’s greatest power to usher in the Kingdom of God here at home and around the world.
America’s purpose and obligation is to be that most powerful nation that uses its immense powers to force all to obey the laws of the specific type of Christianity the movement defines as authoritative.
Anyone who opposes the mission and purpose of the New Apostolic Reformation reveals themselves to be devoted to, even possessed, by the forces of the Devil.
The mission of the movement will be fulfilled when all seven domains of human thinking and activity come under the absolute dominion of the religious laws the movement knows reflect the Voice of God.
Those seven domains the movement will achieve complete control over are explicitly spelled out as these:
Family
Religion
Education
Media
Arts and entertainment
Business
Government
As one can see, the vision of the New Apostolic Reformation is a classic form of absolute Tyranny. In this version of a total, absolute Tyranny, the Tyrant is set forth to force everyone in the nation to follow his dictates in essentially every dimension of life. We have already tasted just the beginning of the vision of the New Apostolic Reformation in the domain of family, where followers in positions of leadership, including Speaker Johnson and Justice Alito, have forced a fairly sizable chunk of America to bend to a world where a woman pregnant now only serves the needs of the movement. She can no longer simply seek health care when a miscarriage causes life-threatening bleeding or infection. Once the Tyranny can dictate their desires to millions, others of course surely follow, as we saw when IVF was banned in Alabama, and Trump slipped and revealed the New Apostolic Reformation commitment to control access to contraception.
What did Sam Do?
And what did one of the only 9 Justices of the United States Supreme Court say in response to being exposed to have flown these two flags on his two homes. To date he has offered no response to us finding out he flew the flag of the New Apostolic Reformation over his beach home in 2023. But he did offer this defence of flying the flag of the insurrection on the front yard of his main home:
I had nothing to do with it. My wife did it. It was her fault.
I had nothing to do with it. My neighbors provoked my wife to hoist the flag. It was their fault.
Both of his responses to the nation learning he flew the flag on insurrection on his front yard days after the insurrection and days before the threatened Inauguration say the same thing- the flag only got there because of other people, he was not involved.
The trouble with that defence is that the flag flew on the front yard of his home, the home he lives in.
Let us consider what this Justice did, and how he defended what he did, and how this betrayal of our American judiciary has deep roots that have worked for decades to turn our high courts away from being places of impartial weighing of opposing views, into tools of imposing pre-determined goals on all Americans.
The heart of the shock of these now historic photographs derives from what the flags pledges allegiance to.
The upside down American flag announces that those who fly it have bound their allegiance to the overthrow of the American government. Those who display it announce that our President is not elected, but rather imposed. He is chosen by a violent mob, not the voters. And those who display it are working to help the mob rule, and end the rule of the voters.
The Appeal to Heaven flag announces that those who fly it have bound their allegiance to crushing our Democracy and using all the vast powers of the United States to force everyone here to obey the religious commands of an extreme right wing militant vision of Christianity called the New Apostolic Reformation.
Once the first President in American history to lose an election announced he would defy the election, overthrow the peaceful transition of power, attempt to seize power permanently, the upside down flag of America became a key symbol at the heart of his movement and claims to permanent power. And it excited those longing to impose their vision of a militant theocracy on us all to rise up and help the movement overthrow the election. The expectation was that once forced into power, Trump would never leave and would help them impose their theocracy.
And we saw both of these flags, the upside down American flag and the flag of theocracy, brandished with violent pride on January 6, 2021. These were not the only two flags to signal allegiance to overthrowing America. Right by their side was another flag of insurrection, the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. That flag, back when it was the flag of armies called up to overthrow America, yearned to fly in the halls of our Capitol, but Lincoln and the Union kept that flag out. And that flag was kept out of our Capitol from the days of the Civil War, until forces called up by Trump to overthrow the government succeeded in invading our hallowed halls of the seat of our Democracy.
The upside down flag of America and the flag of the New Apostolic Reformation had other companion flags flying together with it during the insurrection of January 6. Many flags brandished that day celebrated the Nazis with swastika like symbols. Many flags brandished that day declared the rise of white supremacy in the vanguard of the uprising. These flags called on the followers of the Ku Klux Klan, of American neo-Nazis, and other movements organized to violently impose white supremacy with all the violence that comes in their hatred of all people of color, and all people of various religions they hate. These were the movements that the upside down flag of America helped unite that day when they all came out of the shadows to conquer the nation. Put it all together, and it means those who hoist the upside down flag and the flag of theocracy are announcing they have pledged their allegiance to not only the overthrow of the American government, but to the forces that would take over, namely the forces of white supremacy.
And so the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did something rather extraordinary on January 17, 2021 and in July and September of 2023.
January 17, 2021 was just 11 days after the attempt to overthrow the American government. He had this very flag hoisted on his front lawn, for all the world to see flying. And when you hoist a flag, you are do indeed declare your allegiance to what it stands for. Just think about how so many of us have pledged allegiance to our flag: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands…” In other words, when you raise a flag on your front yard, you are pledging allegiance not only to that flag, but for the movement(s) for which it stands.
And then, over two years later, the Justice made clear his declaration of allegiance to movements involving millions of Americans was not just of one moment, he raised a second flag making clear he not only stood with those who would overthrow the government, but would do so with the express purpose to replace it with an extreme, militant theocracy headed by a Tyrant.
Did Sam do Something?
The Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has tried to claim he had nothing to do with this flag flying on his front lawn in the shadow of the insurrection. As we always should, let us take the words of a Justice of the United Supreme Court seriously, and like any fair judge, weigh the evidence.
Let us accept that his wife raised the one flag, the upside down one on his front lawn. The problem, as noted above, is that he lives there too, it is his home too, it is his flagpole too. He has a lot of power to take it down. More than enough in fact, to make sure it does not fly on his very public front yard. And yet proudly it waved, long enough for neighbors to snap photos. The Justice never told us that the moment he saw the flag flying in his front yard, he took it down and repudiated it. In fact, he has never said a word about condemning all that the flag stands for. Perhaps his wife was the one to hoist the flag. But Supreme Court Justice Alito could have been the one to remove it, and he had all the power in the world to let the world know he condemns it. He never did, and still has not done so. And so his allegiance to a flag his closest companion in life hoisted remains more than plausible, it rises, like the flag to a compelling demonstration of allegiance to that cause.
Let us accept his neighbors provoked the Justice and his wife. I would hope that if my neighbors mocked my politics, I would not respond by flying a flag calling for the overthrow of the American government and the impostion of a tyranny of white supremacy. But that is what Justice Alito has stated he did.
As we weigh what the Justice did and his attempts to claim innocence, one can only wonder what this Justice would do if someone else did this and presented their claims of innocence in one of his courts. It is hard to imagine this Justice would be persuaded by these incredibly weak defences. Justice Alito does not present himself as a quiet, timid persona. It is easy to imagine the condemnations ringing down from his seat high up on the Supreme Court if someone tried to slip around his actions by blaming his wife and neighbors.
The Deeper Roots and Implictions of Justice Alito’s Betrayal of Justice
But both flags also represent deeper dangers than simply one Justice deciding to side with the white supremacists overthrowing our government. I recently observed how central an impartial judiciary is to the very concept and functioning of a Democracy. Democracies are defined as systems that allow every voice to be heard, every problem brought to the community for consideration, and where all the problems presented and their proposed solutions are weighed and priorities discussed, debated, and resolved. This is certainly a recipe for conflict. Democracy not only invites conflict, it demands it. The full range of problems must be heard, or the Democracy will never solve them. And in deciding which to solve and with what resources, conflicts must happen.
This is where the judiciary in a Democracy comes in. When a Democracy resolves a conflict, everyone must be assured it was a fair fight. The winners must know they cannot always win, the losers must know the process at least was fair, that they will have another chance, or the reasons they were denied earned their respect. Courts are vital in many such instances, and when functioning well, they provide judgements that could be widely seen as fairly rendered.
But that requires the judges to come to each case with no prior decision in mind. In courts of Democracy, the judge comes to each case with an open mind, prepared to be swayed only by evidence, ready to rule for any side of the argument that prevails in a fair contest of the arguments at hand.
Alito’s flags are a clear signal that another sort of court is in the Justice’s mind. The flags tell us that this judge has made up his mind on this specific conflict. Some Americans think Trump should have been inaugurated in January, 2021, no matter what the vote was. Others think only the candidate who received 270 electoral votes or more should be inaugurated. A court of Democracy would hear these arguments and judge according to the evidence and the laws the Democracy has established. Right when that flag was flying, Alito was hearing cases claiming the election of 2020 was stolen and the results should not be certified. The Supreme Court came down on the side of rejecting such claims and allowed the voters to speak in the Election of 2020. But Alito did not agree with the Supreme Court, he would have denied the result of the vote, just as the flags flying on his front yard and beach home declares he would.
In other words, the flags tell us which side this Justice of the Supreme Court is on, and that he took sides in this conflict outside of the processes our courts of our Democracy have established to make sure courts’ decisions are fair.
This threat to Democracy has very deep roots. There are many, many such examples of judges in high courts in America taking sides before weighing the evidence, hearing the case, and following the law and the Constitution. The one that jumps out as most harmful and dramatic was the one made by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and his majority (7-2) in 1857. The case was Dred Scott v. Sandford, and the Chief Justice who crafted the opinion was Roger Taney. The question was whether a slave of Missouri when brought to live in the Wisconin Territory where slavery was prohibited, was therefore freed. The Court could have kept him enslaved by simply saying moving around did not change his status, but it went to an extreme. It stated that people of his ethnicity could never be citizens of the United States, nowhere in the nation, and never, because black Americans were not really people. The extremity of this decision is widely believed to been a major spark provoking the Civil War. The historic record is also very, very clear that Chief Justice Taney came to the case already quite enthusiastic about slavery. To foreshadow a Southern governor from about 100 years after this decision, for Taney, it was slavery now, slavery tomorrow, slavery forever. The denial of the voice of people by slavery is of course the greatest betrayal of Democracy in our history. But the actions of a Chief Justice in 1857 reveal how a Justice can come to the Court with judgements already in hand, before any case is heard, and by doing so, come awfully close to ending the American Democracy altogether. By imposing a decision, rather then weighing a decision, Taney denied the voice of millions of Americans, and the force of Democracy that demanded they be heard was challenged.
The Alitos’ Flag, the Threat of Ending Fair Courts, and Today
Today, few would deny that when Chief Justice Taney imposed the Dred Scott decision on America, it was a direct attack on our Democracy, and today the catastrophe of slavery is long past. But what the Chief Justice did in 1857 and the Associate Justice did in 2021 have perilous parallels. In both instances, we have a Justice of the Supreme Court coming to Court to impose his opinions on the nation. In both instances, the Justices had no interest in weighing any evidence, considering any laws, bending to our Constitution. No, both Taney and Alito came to our Supreme Court clearly committed to using their power to interpret our Constitution and our laws by bending them all to their will. And in doing so, they became historic examples of the forces of Tyranny that do indeed hold sway in America at times. Taney put in place the permanent denial of the very humanity of millions of Americans. Alito tried to impose a denial of a free and fair election, and to further impose his preferred candidate into the highest office in the land. The only difference is that in 1857, nearly all the Justices did the same thing as Taney; while in 2021, a majority of our Supreme Court denied the imposition of a Justice’s already made up mind on the nation.
The trouble is that right now the Justice flying the flag of insurrection and the flag of an extremist theocracy, both at one of his homes, and both flown during an insurrection with flags of extreme white supremacy, is in a position to perhaps impose his will with a majority of our Supreme Court on two questions central to the Democracy continuing. Both decisions will be announced by the end of next month at the latest. The first asks if people waving these flags during an invasion of our Capitol to overthrow the government on January 6, duly arrested, given a fair trial, convicted, and sentenced in bona fide courts of our Democracy, should have the Supreme Court overturn their convictions. The second asks if a President can ever be held accountable for any crime committed while in office, specifically in this case the crime of trying to overthrow our Democracy.
We know that at least two of our Supreme Court Justices come to these cases with their minds already made up. Both Alito and Thomas’ wives have helped us understand that they are seeking to impose their support to break our Democracy. Let us hope that this time, as in 2021, these two fail to find three more to join them in their desire to impose, not judge.
My Takeaways
A neighbor took a photo of a flag flown on the front lawn of a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito on January 17, 2021. It was 11 days after an invasion of our Capitol meant to overthrow our Democracy and just a few days before the new term of the President of the United States was set to begin according to our Constitution, which was still in force.
Another neighbor took a photo of a flag flown over the beach home of the same Justice of the United States Supreme Court, in July and September of 2023.
The photos came to public attention this month, making headline news around the world. The first flag was our American flag, but the Alitos had chosen to hoist it upside down, and keep it that way. The second flag was the Appeal to Heaven flag.
The upside down American flag is an established symbol. It declares those who fly it support the overthrow of our Democracy be ending the power of our elections to place the President in office. It was flown for that express purpose on January 6, 2021 by the insurrectionists. It was flown, and welcomed to be flown, by many flags of extreme and violent white supremacist movements from across the nation.
The Appeal to Heaven flag is an established symbol, too. It declares the allegiance of those who fly it with the New Apostolic Reformation movement. This movement has the explicit agenda to end American Democracy and to impose a militant, extreme, religious theocracy on all America. This flag also was flown on January 6, 2021 by those who invaded our Capitol to overthrow our government and end our Democracy.
Justice Sam Alito of our United States Supreme Court has chosen to pledge his allegiance to the insurrection of January 6, to the repudation of a duly enacted Presidential election, and the establishment of a rigid, militant, extremist theocracy.
We now face the extraordinary reality, and profound challenge of having a person vested with the awesome powers of sitting as a Justice of our United States Supreme Court revealing his commitment to destroy the Democracy the Supreme Court was created to defend. We now know this Justice comes to work, not to weigh cases and evidence in the spirit of what a Democracy requires from its courts, but with the purpose of ending this Democracy and imposing his will on us all.
Most posts in Oh Say Can You See end with the observation that the only way we can preserve our Democracy, and spare us all from succumbing to a Tyranny, is to make sure Joe Biden is re-elected, to register, to make sure everyone you know is registered. To work now to ensure that the vote turns out and it turns out for Democracy. With the win, the re-election of President Joe Biden would secure our Democracy once again.
But now we face an imminent threat. We now know a Justice, one of only 9 such people, will be imposing his will on our Supreme Court. Our Founders crafted three branches of government, for the express purpose of making sure if one of them went off the rails and turned on our Democracy, the other two could stop the threat and prevent the harm. So today, we need to all call on the White House, and the US Senate to take actions to hold this Justice to account for standing against our nation and its Democracy.
Justice Alito has pledged his allegiance, and is taking actions to fulfill his pledge. The only question now is whether we will as well. I hope all will join me in calling on our President and our Senators to act now to preserve this threat to our Democracy.