Ugh. The old “public officials are responsible for keeping their wives in line” canard, which for some reason is only applied to conservatives by the mainstream news media. Or we could file this under “Hail Mary attempts to get the Supreme Court’s conservative Justices to recuse themselves so SCOTUS won’t strike down the totalitarian Left’s conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump by any means necessary, and law, ethics and democracy be damned.”

A New York Times headline yesterday shouted, “At Justice Alito’s House, a ‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol on Display.” Wow, what symbol was that? It was an upside-down American flag, seen flying over (much reviled, almost as much as Clarence Thomas) Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s house for a few days in January 2021. Because the flag was up in the period between the January 6 riot at the Capitol Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Times infers that the flag meant that Alito thinks the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.

Of course the Times dredged up some unethical ethics experts to deceive their readers about the seriousness of this. “Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot,” writes the Times, ostentatiously avoiding mentioning the names of the experts who said, as I would have, “What? This is nothing!”

“It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Professor Amanda Frost at the University of Virginia law school. This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.

Uh, no it’s not, but that analysis is the equivalent of the professor wearing an “I am a partisan hack!” sign on her forehead.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito told The Times yesterday regarding the four-year-old incident. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Over at Reason, Liz Wolf compares the Times theory (endorsed by some previously esteemed members of my legal ethics expert listserv, which shows again how bias makes ethicists and lawyers stupid) to media outlets and the Anti-Defamation League claiming the “OK” symbol was a white supremacist “dog whistle.”. I concur: the analogy puts the story in appropriately gutter-level company.

Also:

1. An upside-down flag means distress, and a distress symbol in connection with the Capitol riot and the 2020 election could mean anything. The Times logic is that because some of Trump’s supporters used the symbol ( I wasn’t aware of that, and maybe Mrs. Alito wasn’t either), the Alitos were announcing their fealty to the same cause. Oh yeah? Prove it.

2. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! Alito has been in the Left’s crosshairs ever since he dared to author the Dobbs opinion correctly pointing out that the Constitution never included a right to kill the unborn, and that Roe v. Wade was ideology-driven hooey that should have been reversed decades and millions of dead babies ago. Talk about desperate: now the tale of an ambiguous flag flying over a conservative Justices house is being dredged up to impugn the Court’s conservative majority? The Times must be terrified.

3. The reporting of this story in the Times and elsewhere inexcusably suggested (as in the Times headline) that the flag was flying recently rather than four years ago.

4. The official position that spouses are not to be held responsible for the views and conduct of each other is a necessary standard without which women particularly would be constrained in their professional activities as well as in their freedom of association and speech. The women’s movement made that clear; “Control your woman!” was no longer a culturally acceptable exhortation.

Except when the Left is trying to take down a conservative Supreme Court Justice….